welcome to stop and shop

It is being reorganized; the one nearer to my previous location went through the same screwy phase last year, but this temporary sign is showing the obsolete 2008-2018 logo from when Stop and Shop was merged with the Mid-Atlantic supermarket chain “Giant,” which it no longer is, so I don’t understand why it is considered preferable to the logoless, proper sign that had been here two weeks ago.

it is a dinstinctily nonsensical logo, reminiscent of the incoherent mass of shapes beside the “L” in the dangelogo, so i noticed immediately when it stopped being used, and again with it reused.

I am getting mixed messages at this store. Or maybe just a mixed mess.

Despite the arrows, or perhaps to spite the arrows, people would blatantly walk the wrong way into the narrowest aisles and then just stand there like The Zax until *I* turned around and go out the opposite way I came in because I want to avoid a fight, which is the only reason I follow the arrows to begin with. I will obey a rule that makes no sense in order to prevent hypothetical conflict but I won’t hold up such a rule when conflict picks a fight with it. I will walk the wrong way over an arrow to get something at the end of the aisle and if nobody is facing me. Overall I want to not do anything that will get me faced.
Yes I drew that stupid header picture for this one bit. I initially intended to put the drawing with this section but I also don’t want a boring photograph of a shoddy storefront at the top of the website I provide to people who ask about my art drawings since somebody did recently and I would prefer such a person to be put off by an actual shoddy art piece.
I postponed finishing this for 2 weeks since other stuff kept happening and the store went and got rid of the stupid arrows and mask policy but the aisles are still a mess, and people are just as inclined to go full speed in a one-cart-wide space and not care if someone is in front of them facing the opposite direction. AND with the mask mandate lifted it did turn out that the person opposed to me was masked and I wasn’t, though I also wasn’t wearing an ugly baseball hat with a stupid slogan on it. Additionally I was not naked, sticking my posterior end out needlessly nor standing in a Charlie Chaplin pose, so disregard the rumors.

What kind of loser would drink this?
I couldn’t tell if twitter people who saw this a few weeks ago thought I was legitimately accusing seltzer drinkers of being losers or they simply don’t think napoleon jokes are funny. I do share a home with two seltzer drinkers and I greatly prefer when they DRINK the overpriced, fouled bubble water rather than pour a little bit into another drink and leave the cans all over the place.

Charmin is great toilet paper if you buy that for companionship
and for bad math but that seems to come standard at this point.

dumb fact: I have had charmin toilet paper in my house approximately one time, last april, at the height of the bogus toilet paper shortage when that was the only brand left in the store because everybody in town recognizes it is inferior at its primary stated purpose and also thoroughly incompatible with all the septic tanks common in a seaside locale that used to be all farms. Supposedly it was “septic safe” and my guess is they determined that by flushing one square and observing that the house didn’t explode. I likely used most of it for blowing my nose and diverted my strategic toilet paper for nose blowing reserve to active restroom duty.

apparently plumbers have particularly heavy excrement which makes them ideal test subjects

hey you want chips? you’ve come to the right six different places

two of which even say “chips” on the aisle markers

you want 50 percent discounts that don’t register when scanned, that the service desk will say will register at checkout, which don’t, which the attendant will key in an exception for but that the actual store manager won’t see the big deal about leaving mislabeled and having less-attentive customers pay full price for? apparently I do because I still shop here and simply took two and unscanned one the last time this happened because I didn’t want to need to show anyone that I was buying hamburger helper, much less making a fuss about not saving one dollar on it. It usually happens on stupid products, like 2 pound bags of york peppermint patricias or cans of cat food. The latter of which isn’t inherently embarrassing but I don’t want anyone thinking that I personally approve of the cat’s actions.

this discount was also fake but fortunately the math still worked out.

there are occasional “random” audits triggered when attempting to check out, which prompt an employee to approach your purchases and rescan them until the computer says they can stop which fortunately hasn’t bumped up against my personal manual override of their broken pricing system yet.
at the TIME i was buying these in single serve containers because I kept making the 64 ounce size go bad prematurely by chopping up bits of lemon and dropping them into the bottle to improve the flavor which I didn’t immediately realize was responsible for spoiling the fluid early. I have a great many personal tricks that don’t actually work because I do not know how to do proper research. For example, I have on occasion considered that the creature nemitz, while an inexcusable crumbum, might be compatible with the concept of plush toys, but imagined mits possession of horns would be a problem. However some time in 2019 my then four year old neice violet showed up with a stuffed animal that appeared to be a mixture between unicorn and octopus and it had a horn which looked rigid but was collapsible and i tried to poke my own eye with it and it didn’t hurt, and was difficult enough to seem like it wouldn’t happen by accident, which would presumably not-hurt slightly less, which meant an accurate doll nemitz was perhaps feasible, if not at all justifiable. I am inclined to believe there was a better way I could have determined how safe it was to jab my own eye without actually doing that.
Also the reason I didn’t post this two weeks ago was because I meant to find that unicorn octopus doll in this house so I could photograph it, and I didn’t, and then I forgot. Absolutely nemitz’s fault.

ALSO even that iced tea purchase is also outdated, because I have lately been so inclined to augment the iced tea I buy with additional lemon or additional tea I decided to just make my own full pot of it, today. Eh my concoction needs some tweaking, and I don’t think i saved any money yet either because it meant I had to buy a pitcher, I found one here, for $14. When I went to remove the internal components to wash it before using it, I discovered they were broken. When I went back to return and replace the item, knowing that the longer I put off doing that the more it seemed like I broke it, I found the four of the remaining pitchers ALSO had the same part broken.

However Stop and Shop is still a better store than Shop Rite, a substantially better store than Price Chopper, has very good deli meats and self-scanning machines that greatly improve the overall experience. I just like to complain.

There is always someone to blame.

ah ha 18 hours later I thought of a purpose for this scene while sketching out the next nemitz-lope-elpse page, as it helps set up something else “story”wise that I was not certain how to set up, so I likely will include it or a piece of it. Kumquat WAS the original main character, and it seems to me now bizarre that I would consider omitting a scene containing that character when they are already in short supply simply because it contained no action, but I don’t like when people in fictional media stand around talking for prolonged periods, even if it has some amount of relevance, . i prefer for information to be delivered while something else is happening. This was hardly kevin smith “characters in movie talking about another movie” level unnecessary but if I were close to that I would quit making this comic strip and simply go partake of whatever commercial item i was having the characters talk about, because it would mean my passion lay elsewhere and passion is what keeps a slow, free, silly project like this going.

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The past year ish, apart from the dumb virus and dumb trump club has preferred me to spend time on things other than the bimshwellian comicoid, which itself is sending me mixed messages about how to complete the next section. Sometimes i have characters theoretically argue with each other and that gives me clues but this one doesn’t seem to be reaching a conclusion. at first I thought it was a needless exchange that didn’t necessarily need to be included, then it seemed like it might go somewhere, then it didn’t. I definitely don’t want to draw 40 consecutive panels of just kumquat and yibric talking about nothing, but also sometimes additional details that come to me while drawing the panels help point me toward a more meaningful version of the exchange. I can postpone this part since it is separate from what other characters are doing, but I am also postponing the next part with the gnomes in the lizard’s apartment, because I am not sure which or how many to draw in there, and if there should be a neutral page of them in there before what I want to happen to them in there occurs, and that can’t happen until after the next dumb things that the lizard does.

I colored yibric’s lines but not kumquat’s because the html code is tedious and if you had difficulty visually distinguishing colors there is no way you would have been able to follow my pictures-in-boxes mess up to this point.

1 Hey kay kay, the stuff’s not here. I found the darts but no glob.
I warned you never to call me that!
2 is that your prime concern about this?
should I be concerned?
3 you said to deal with “the rest,” I figured the absence of the rest would mean something
it may mean that elpse has reabsorbed the material
4 and…?
we therefore need not clean it up
5 i think you are being deliberately silly in an attempt to antagonize me
hm hm hm the tables have turned!
6 if elpse reabsorbs the material then your antidote failed!
OR you sabotaged my antidote!
7 why would I do that?
I do not know why you would do that
8 there fore, lacking evidence, you have no foundation to accuse me of having done that
I did not accuse, I merely supposed
9 well suppose you hurt my feelings, would you like that?
I have feelings! You have schemings! And you brought this up anyway!
10 fine then I drop it! let’s go!
FINE then! We will go!
11 then we are harmonious!
then why do I feel so sad?
12 (because I actually DID sabotage the antidote! Tee hee heap!)
you had better not be think-laughing at me!
13 hey look it’s the dope
indeed
14 don’t you think it is strange to find the dope out here?
not exactly. It probably climbed out of the goop pool on my partially submerged chair and followed elpse thinking elpse was a dope because I injected elpse with with the same material from which dopes were made.
15 you have a strange perception of what isn’t strange
AND as I also inject myself with dope material I much prefer it to follow elpse, which it should continue to do following your meddling.
16 you COULD just blast it with its yellow antidope. why were you keeping it?
I was keeping it away from me!
17 OKAY BUDDY then why bother trying to uncurse elpse if you don’t care that you failed?
I was testing my creation, and that concluded the test! Your deed has foiled elpse, not me.
18 pog would see it differently
pog is ignorant of the specifics and will see what I show.
19 pog’s judgement matters to you! Why not my own?
because YOU relish it! Pog suffers from compassion.
20 I may tell pog
to spite me?
21 pog will regard me as morally superior to you
you are not
22 hence why I can do that without any psychological consequence. What is your excuse?
I do not need to explain myself to you!
23 how do you explain you to you?
I avoid doing so.

I don’t much know why I bother counting because it is the amount of dialog and the complexity of the drawings that dictate how many panels should [reasonably] be on one page, not simply how many times I require myself to draw each set of characters. In the past I have mentioned that planning for 16 frames consistently fails because I always want to cram in more than I initially expected and planning for 12 is safer. And also I have had to re-edit plenty of too-cramped pages into slightly larger numbers of slightly less cramped pages already. And ALSOer when reviewing other RECENT pages, to try and re-determine where I was in this and which lines from the terribly disorganized script document i had already made use of, the ease with which I could read the dialog varied considerably, despite my belief that I had greatly increased the clarity over what was acceptable to me back when I had the first comic book made. These pages were made fresh AFTER I had broken up earlier crowded pages, meaning I carried the awareness that such a situation should be avoided going forward, and I plainly have failed to avoid it! I shall need to break up and re-compile many more. 16 may simply be too many panels for one page, even a well-planned page, if I insist on hand-lettering them, and obviously I do. I could stand to fuss less over varying the letter styles because I lack proficiency in that despite nearly 20 years of experience. I may need to limit how many strange things that nobody else does that I do in order to have any hope of making this production coherent outside my mind. And once in while I even do break some of the obsessive compulsive habits that drive this forward without sending it off the road to its death. Instead it comes to a solid halt in the street. Nobody else drives on this street. It is lonely but it means I have time to fix this atrocious metaphor.

I was stabbed in the left shoulder today and so far all I have to show for it is this shoddy video of the shoddy video on display at the place where it occurred.

The only good thing about this is that since it is government and local whoever made this was probably paid little to nothing for it. OR some money laundering firm was paid way, way too much for it.

there is a belief among some highly dubious people that the only thing stopping us regular folk from getting vaccinated in larger numbers is a lack of empty, cutesy encouragement from casual acquaintances and commercial entities.

A frame isn’t going to ‘inspire’ anybody. They either want to be vaccinated and are waiting or don’t want to be vaccinated and would need a chain of miracles endorsed by current US president and alt-right pope Trump to change their minds and still might not if they hear George Soros got a vaccination too. In fact this sort of wimpy-appeal peer pressure is much of the reason they are so obstinately anti-everything courteous. You need to employ sarcastic macho bully smirkle-jerk peer pressure to convince them to get vaccinated, and you won’t, because those are the people with a financial stake in sowing distrust for science and or social decency.
If the latest center for disease control guidelines stating that masks are no longer necessary after vaccination aren’t in error then that is all but validating anti-vaccine, anti-mask advocates who said it wasn’t necessary to begin with since the plandemic was started on purpose by China and also a hoax and imaginary. Just because the new mask rules only apply to people who have been vaccinated and only two weeks afterward mean nothing because you can’t distinguish those who have from who haven’t without enacting the sort of measures that Trumpian sorts have been warning their congregants about “liberals” imposing ever since ever. Even if there was a vaccine to help prevent further ideological disease you would never get anyone who needs it to take it. I suppose that gets a bit into the same sort of realm as people with autism objecting to it being called a disease and not wanting it to be “cured.” Which is ironic because anti-vaccinators believe it would be totally eradicated by not vaccinating anyone against it.

Also, my profile picture has a dope in it and at best will only ever inspire any friends to re-evaluate our friendship. I would approve of framing this only in the sense of blaming the dope for someone else’s crime but there are few crimes it is smart enough to plausibly be accused of doing, apart from possibly acting as a consultant for the decision to implement animated anthropomorphic vaccine bottles, in the form of not saying “no” when asked if it was a good idea.
I other newts I have yet to experience any negative side-effects from either vaccination dose, even though I have seen remarks and memery bordering on fetishization of the idea of experiencing such effects. And I certainly had people worrying on my behalf about the immediate consequences of my second dose. Having to drive to, from and in Old Saybrook on multiple occasions has been the worst of it, and was so before I even got the shot. I think a lot of this is like msg-paranoia, in that the more people fear it the more susceptible they become to it. Which is preferable to fearing the vaccine entirely I suppose. Being afraid of dumb things and expressing those fears makes people feel important and helpful, I suppose.

I do not at this time require the assistance of cowboy birdmen.

I do have a bit of a headache, which IS one of the stated side-effects, but headache is also a side-effect for everything else, among them typing in a bright white text window in an otherwise unlit room for several hours. I also have more vaccine-related remarks and pictures to show and hopefully won’t.

//an addendor, I have had a steadily increasing ache in the targeted arm, and did also the first time, but I consider that less of a side than a direct effect of having a metal spike plunged directly into a muscle.

///addenorior: almost immediately after disabling the computer and going to my bed (an actual bed as of early march and I am yet uncertain if I prefer it to the mattress lump) I developed fever-like symptoms, but nothing I would have mentioned under ordinary circumstances. Including vague, uncomfortable body temperature and dreaming about lying in place precisely where I was while thinking about lying there, at best, and otherwise believing I was in an incredibly tedious factory facility dedicated to endlessly sorting the contents of my nasal passages. I was several times jolted awake by the imagined sound of non-existent text messages. Now six hours after the initial illness I feel relatively un-ill, and my arm doesn’t even ache anymore. However I am re-experiencing a general difficulty sleeping that was occurring months prior to the latest shenanigorps and is closer to being a matter of personal concern. Now I just want to eat until I get tired enough to fall asleep again and ideally do so properly. I won’t but I sure could.

I personally liked it better in a square layout but then i had too much extra space to fill, and social media websites are lamentably kinder to vertically elongated images. i initially planned it with two additional frames that i realized were irrelevant, and then thought of a new one to add in, but that still messed with the negative space. in fact i could probably still eliminate three more to aid in clarity for anyone, probably most people, who have not had this particular problem.

I found that when i tried to invent a car suitable to the creature’s proportions i lacked the skill to make individual parts of the control mechanisms apparent as what they were intended to represent, and so used direct photograph references. the more realistic car may produce an amusing contrast relative to the blatantly fake driver, anyhow.

a commission drawing of a fancy phoenix for twitter.com/spongbros, because I have nothing special to say about it which means I can post it much faster than what I was trying to do otherwise.

no no no, I already did THAT last week! That took even longer!

I do not talk about “commission” much around these parts because I have surmised that the people who want to see what typically comprises that don’t want to see things other than that from me, so there would be little purpose to advertising or placing most of them here where I primarily do things other than that! Most of them are fairly stupid and it would be imprudent to say that about them until a few months or years later when the buyer realizes how much stuff I think is stupid and would be less alarmed by my saying as much about their own drawing had they not ceased all awareness of my deeds before or on account of that. But I think this one here is largely lacking in aspects that I would feel inclined to pass remark upon and so I can display it without issue or deliberate delay.

still friday, and I should have put a dope in there. even with peter the phoenik bird fulfilling a dope-like role I think that would help me feel better about it. it would mean one more dope that is there and not here.
I keep forgetting i put that dumb texas belt buckle there. I feel reassured whenever somebody acknowledges it. There is a tendency for fan-art to be very reverent and homagey without having anything to say beyond “hey! a popular thing exists! and I have tied myself to it!” The Texas isn’t making a point at all but it is distracting enough to keep the piece from drowning in self-indulgence. I indulge myself to include Texas belts but most people don’t konw that.
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Friday now! The picture is “finished” enough to post on websites where I cannot replace the image but I still think I have better avoid looking at it since there is definitely stuff still wrong with it. There will always be stuff wrong with it but I have dealt with all the wrong stuff that is at my level and within the range of what I can tolerate without taking a prolonged break from it, but I already put off dealing with the sketch for several years and I most certainly do not want to be putting this away until 2024 and having nothing at all to show for whatever the heap I was doing the past four weeks.
I cannot help thinking that the real value was forcing myself to learn a faster way of changing layers and controlling transparency because ultimately this doesn’t look a whole lot better than the awkward garbage I was doing 10 years ago. Individual bits are more skillfully done but the whole looks like an inorganic mess. Spending weeks making pictures like this will not get me closer to out of the hole! It was not supposed to take weeks or have hole-rank-improvement as a goal, but anything that does take that long needs to pay off in some way that a product this irregular cannot. However the RELATIVE payoff of not working on it any further should be fairly pleasant.
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I forgot to put out the trash for wednesday but I did poke away at this picture some more. It still needs help but less help than it previously needed.
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not really complete but the areas in massive trouble are by now largely localized to the lower right corner and I can fiddle with that some more and probably update this before anyone apart from me is realistically likely to see it.
It is based on a scene in the video game “Shining Force II: Ancient Ceiling” with an attempt at analyzing and adhering to the concept art far in excess of my organic capabilities or what anybody else would notice or care about.

i should have a drawing to post on tuesday. I should also have had it on sunday but it is a tricky drawing. everything is tricky these days! even that nemitz picture which was simple became very tricky and unpleasant once I attempted to talk about it so ideally i will say very little on tuesday.
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a needlessly nemity variation on a widely circulated image of uncertain origin

I am fascinated by this image, and plainly a lot of other people also are, often altering it to suit their needs. The envelope is apparently from 1895! I found this using the tineye reverse image search. Once in a while that actually works, yes. So I presume the picture is from before then, though how much before then I am unaware.

At my home from 1985 to 2001 this game was in a bathroom closet that never seemed to be closed, maybe it couldn’t be closed. I never saw the game be played, in fact I don’t believe I even saw the back of the box until I found it for sale on e-bay, but I always remembered the drawing.

I see now that Word Of Mouth’s is the only version to have a hat and non-clenched hands, and after comparing them I saw that its hands indeed had a more casual 1960s low budget school house rock animation sort of style to them than the rest of the drawing.

It was only years later, some time after the feature film was released, that I became aware of Sweeney Todd using a very similar drawing. I was only able to compare them recently, and saw that Todd’s is drawn by a different hand. I appreciate that Frank Verlizzo’s Sweeney Todd version redrew it outright to make the alterations less out of place and to match the Angela “Murder She Not-Yet Wrote/Did” Lansbury mutant that had to be drawn fresh. Also back in the 1970s fewer people assumed you could just change something on another person’s drawing or song and copyright it exclusively for yourself forever.

Another odd bit is that the one on the left was drawn to resemble Angela Lansbury but obviously the one on the right just is that same guy it was before. He does VAGUELY resemble the drawing but only as much as any other large 19th century man with his hair parted in the middle would, and yet that was enough. Verlizzo didn’t even incorporate the suspenders and nobody ever thought to ask: does this drawing actually look like the character?

Ironically, the Johnny Depp Todd DOES look like the drawing, wearing a vest and striped pants with messier side hair but the film never used that artwork in promotion. Presumably there was concern that Helena Bonham Carter looked less realistic than the cartoon Angela Lansbury.

unlike Todd’s, the collective soul version of the very angry man edits the ah imprint directly and poorly and it is obvious (and the print itself is somewhat shoddy, as if somebody scanned a t-shirt that it had already been printed on). The whitish glow and white (or actually green)-tinted shadow against an inappropriate-colored backdrop resembles a vintage geocities gif and the mouth looks like somebody drew it with a mouse in GIMP. However, gimp and geocities didn’t exist then. Somebody had to work much harder to make an edit this bad in those days.
My older brother Colberon had this album and I had to ask him what album it was that had the Word of Mouth man on the cover, and fortunately he remembered. I don’t know what the MUSIC sounds like; it probably isn’t good if they think this cover looks good.

ohhhhhh it’s THAT song, the heaven let your light shine down band.

neh nehneh nehnehneh nehnehneh nehneh neh

yeah

I forgot Colberon used to listen to slightly more palatable garbage off the radio before he was actually in bands. I figured it was some mopey cheaply produced garbage like I used to find in our shared Kazaa folder years afterward. “Sparta’s” singer sounds like a sick puppy and the music sounds like what I hear while passed out when I am sick myself.

ehhhnyway, wikehhhpedia sez:

The title is claimed to be just lines lifted from that annoying Paul Simon song about wanting me to be his body guard. Why name your entire debut album after irrelevant lines in somebody else’s song? How can you have any respect for a band about which you believe that? That would mean the bums weren’t even trying. And the “fact” has been on the page so long that obviously loads of folks are quite willing to believe it is true, while I seeing that statement for the second time knew I needed to look it up. AND the actual Simony lyrics, apart from being fairly strangleworthy, don’t include the “and things left unsaid part.”

I am tired of garbage like this. I used to think it was funny when I found dumb lies on wikipedia but now it just makes me mad because people who know nothing will paraphrase those lies to prove they are smarter than and dismiss someone like me when they don’t know a ding dang thing, and then hundreds of other fandom wikis and automatically generated clickbait landfills will copy all the same junk and then after being established long enough each can be cited as sources by any other.
I don’t even care about this album and I easily proved both these statements to not be provable. I went there because I was angry about one thing and then became angry about something else in the same paragraph.
I don’t need my edits to be permanent, but I like knowing that anybody who goes to revert them will have to become aware of how annoyed I was. I was in a bad enough state to not realize I derisively used the word “bit” twice. I haven’t been that angry since somebody claimed [adventures of] Lomax was voiced by Kath Soucie, even though Lomax has the exact same voice as every other character in the game and only says things like “oh no!” and “let’s go” that sound like the same pitch-shifted probably sound-effect guy voice samples used in Lemmings 2.

I was kidding, sort of, with the manner in which I present these objections, yet this sort of thing really is a problem.

Soucie is an actor popular for squeakily voicing female often animal-based cartoon characters that became the target of lascivious affections from viewers, some of them extending their taste in animated wank fodder on to soucie herself. I don’t know WHY such a person NEEDS her to be Lomax’s voice, but now it is phrased countless different ways out there, so that each is harder to identify as copied from a casual falsehood on wikipedia, and I doubt Soucie remembers every single character she has given a voice to and every name that character has been known by, and maybe eventually she will also believe she voiced something called “Lomax.” But she didn’t! True enough, real lemmings don’t voluntarily run off cliffs to kill themselves, but 70 years ago Disney’s crew filmed some lemmings being deliberately shoved off a cliff just because they thought that was interesting, and real people younger than me still believe that happens so in comparison the lomax matter perhaps seems like a relatively benign invention.
Some people just NEED trash like that to be true for their lives to have meaning. And I get angry about it because my life also has no meaning because everything is run by imbeciles who trust fiction written by nobody to dismiss real people in their own orbit. msg, gmo, qanon, nft, sjw, inherited lies and stupid abbreviations everywhere. Even over stupid inconsequential trivia. Perhaps especially over that. I am a pariah across all the lands because I don’t trust anyone who tries to tell me who to trust, and that is typically a condition for peaceful coexistence.

I of course blame nemitz.

comic strip part 3 page 52 of that
nope nope nope I am not getting any faster, even with blatant background recycling, but this page had an unusually high amount of points for me to needlessly make the process harder with. in fact I didn’t get to all of them yet but everything RELEVANT is in there, I believe, for now.

commission drawing for dookingplaza of the twitter website. Which is to say I was given money to make this, which is probably just about the silliest thing to spend money on. Imagine not being able to buy a pizza because you spent that money buying a nemitz instead, truly tragic The elpse is there also but I am more experienced blaming nemitz.

Yes indeed the scene shows this edition of these two suspicious imps resting in this manner in roughly this sort of place.
I seemed to like drawing some of the foliage here. The fooliage however is more difficult to justify.
it is frustrating to see the date on that page and realize I posted it almost five years ago and have only just inched past that section of the “story” in the 36 subsequent pages! However I have in the finished pages and the adequately legible scripted bits sorted out numerous dangling chad “plot” points so theoretically I should be able to move forward more concerned about what is going to happen than what already has, even if my speed and cultural references continue to be two or more decades behind.
I forgot to include elpse’s rope belt, but even after I noticed it I forgot it again, and Mr. Plaza didn’t seem to notice it either so it might not be important, at least not to those who are not elpse. Ordinarily I find rope belts funny and it is possible this scene was not supposed to be funny so it might be best not included anyway, apart from sparing you the unspeakable boredom of reading about how I forgot it.

I have a really great prank planned

I got this back in fourth grade, which was probably roundabout 1993, from a school book fair or something because I would buy ANY book of comic strips that appeared in a weird place, and the character looked sort of like Calvin of “and Hobbes” fame anyway, and I had all the books with actual Calvin in them. I had never seen this big Nate that is smaller than a pencil before and have not seen it since,

but apparently it found an audience somewhere eventually among influential scumbags.
I don’t know how you make a tv series about a kid who draws comic strips in his note books, or why you need to save money by making it 3d since it would probably cost 2 cents to animate the notebook sections, which easily comprised about a third of the natebook that I had, assuming the tv series doesn’t just opt for static images.

I still had the book, along with this from the same book fair, a large hard cover edition of Roald Dahl’s The Minpins, which wasn’t actually mine and I don’t know how I ended up with it, but had HAD it so long i stopped mentally being aware of it, and several Cracked Magazines in a trash bag where they’d been at least ten years as I was always weird about throwing things away, but amidst trying to get the house sold last June I finally did, and I guess this tv series being made is revenge. I don’t know anything about it except for that picture, but I don’t really need to; I am 80% assured to hate any animated series whatever it is, this just happens to be a character that I recognize.

But it does go to show, if you stick to your craft, 30 years later a soulless corporation may commission an ugly computer mockery of it while desperate for new material not spun off from stuff they’ve had on the air almost as long or produced by sexual predators they finally had to fire after too many people found out they were covering up predation.

All this is not to say I hated the comic strips; I preferred the Nate book to the Marvin book, and it was my first experience with the expletive “dang!,”

which prepared me to encounter GRAYDANG in doom some time later, but I didn’t care enough to make an effort to track down more of Nate’s biggery. Meanwhile I eventually acquired each Calvin volume, though admittedly those were more common sights in book stores and finite in number.

I remember being really bothered by the way Lincoln Peirce drew the breast zone on Nate’s sister Ellen and apparently later other characters. I do not understand how this is preferable to not detailing a character’s chest at all.

However the bignate fandom wiki, which exists, features graphics which indicate this specific matter was toned down at some point. Peirce still draws mouths on the fronts of the heads regardless of what way they are facing.

the wiki also features up to the minute updates about which characters’ hair is pulled too close to their faces.

you are missing the bigger picture that Gina is a living cubist painting.

I additionally learned there was a big nate novel series by the same author that is REALLY banking on one remark from Jeff Kinney, whose “ugly comic strip about dork going to school excused by being ostensibly drawn by character in the comic” work actually came out a full 13 years after Lincoln Peirce’s and made heaps more money, and I wonder if Peirce knew the publisher was putting that line there. It is on all eight of the books,

and is also on reprint editions even less subtly. He definitely knew by then, I suppose.

Ah I said I hadn’t seen “big nate” since reading that book I had, but then I remembered I looked at its syndicate website at some point because I found and saved this extremely tacky strip from 2011.

I wonder how this works; how is a perpetual 12-year old commemorating the tenth anniversary of a national disaster that occurred when he was two years old? Or does this serve to acknowledge that he is in fact much older than that and simply not aging visually, like an elf?
Perhaps every moment of Nate’s life exists in its own separate timeline where he had been two years old ten years before, and in this one he has been surrounded by stories of heart-rending tragedy about nine-eleven and, unlike my cousin Delainey, about the same age, at the 9-eleven museum in New York City, or myself, mildly older than that on the actual nine-11, experiencing disillusionment and social terror at just existing every single day, totally over with being ordered to care about the one time people older than them experienced it, and got interviewed about it, and got validated in feeling that way, Nate REALLY relates to IX-XI. Alright that bully kid is STILL going to wreck that dopey pair of mounds, because the only thing bullies hate more than you standing there looking like that is you trying to get out of what’s coming to you. The only way to make bullies respect you is to beat them in a fight or make them laugh, and Nate, as the title character of a daily syndicated comic strip, is never going to substantially alter his behavior to get tougher or become funny so obviously those are both out. The only way that sand sculpture stays up is if bigger kid has mega right wing parents/guardianship that have hammered into him how SACRED 9-11 is, and new york’s FINEST, and the MEN AND WOMEN OVERSEAS, and PEARL HARBOR, and BOOTSTRAPS, in which case he is going to murder Nate and threaten Nate’s buddies into hiding the body for daring to invoke the divine power of 9-11. He will then call the newspapers, tell them he made the sand towers, get an award from the mayor and the city will make a bronze cast of it and display replicas at every intersection.

also: who the heck does this? places the end of their tongue out one side of their mouth to show how hard they are working. It is also in the title logo and apparently numerous other nate strips even without considering the logo. I sure don’t do that. I hate the feeling of tongues on my skin, whose-ever they may belong to. I would definitely have to scrape-wipe that part of my face afterward with tissue paper. I don’t think I have ever seen somebody outside of a comic strip or my mother’s description of a Norman Rockwell painting do that. And I don’t know what it’s called and searching for pictures based on the description is getting me way too many photographs of gross mouths so I cannot research this further. But my belief is that nobody really does this.
It is like talking while pointing one finger upward.



None of them are real people! I drew nemitz (orange annoying imp) doing it because nemitz does stupid things that are annoying, and even mit doesn’t engage in side-tonguing.

actually now that i think of it, the dork from goblins 3 looks sort of like nate (but not at all like calvin). they both have weird gravity-defying black spiked hair that looks more like grass and hold both feet in the exact same direction when facing to the side but only turn one of them and all the way around to face frontward, marking a considerable, charlie chaplin-esque posture change.

well THAT is the sort of thing i notice! too late to try and change it now.

some people notice other things.

this has no relevance but it is the specific inspiration for me referring to dopes as “decadent” on one or more occasions.

the end of the rainbow seems pretty overrated these days

this is less topical than it would have been had I been able to post on march 17, but Gold Bond fortunately does come in a topical variant. I don’t actually know what it does but nemitz probably doesn’t either and the dope absolutely doesn’t.

I acknowledge that this is rather similar to the stupid sketch I added on the previous entry.

initially mit was stepping on the pot with one foot but the pose was not functional. nemitz is not functional but mitz distribution of weight usually is. The bottle mit is holding in the final version is still out of scale with the ones in the pot because it seemed too stupid to bother correcting; plainly this scene does quite enough bothering on its own!

The initial “idea” of this was to redraw legend of zelda sprites based on how i remembered interpreting them as a child looking at a blendy television screen, so they don’t all have a point, and then the idea itself got somewhat warped as I added more figures.

my elder brother used to refer to the lamnola as “the toilet flusher,” as in “here comes the usher, the ol’ toilet flusher,” and I didn’t really know what that meant but I thought it was funny and always remembered it. Years later I realized he probably meant “toilet brush,” and so I took the initiative of drawing it as one. He had also at one or more junctures declared that Rudolph the Six Gun Shooter had a very shiny gun, and that if I ever saw it, I would drop my pants and run, even though I would run far more effectively without the preceding action.

The “gel” blobs were my favorite monsters when I originally played the game and I made up a dumb song about them. I do remember the tune and it is not worth reproducing, but the words to it were
We fat men
we like you
we bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy
you kill us
we bounce on you
cuz we fat men we like you
but you keep that between us
I didn’t see any way to misinterpret the form for this but wanted to include one anyway!
I also remember playing the game one morning and was in level 3 quest 1, with the blobs, and my father saw this going on, attempted to sing the song, and I yelled at him for it because kids are jerks, and I also recall precisely how he got the tune wrong, and I today wonder how different it would have been had he been permitted to finish. We should have collaborated on an album about stupid nintendo monsters, and then he would at least deserve to get yelled at.

I don’t know why I didn’t think to include a “peahat” in this (or 2019’s very important hat video, especially considering i inadvertently put one hat scene in there twice) because as soon as I learned what it was called, I think from a television advertisement for the game, I always thought of peahats as actual sentient, wrathful hats, possibly with bladder issues, since I didn’t see it spelled out and couldn’t read and that makes as much sense as associating them with little green vegetable balls, and that is very much in the spirit of the drawings up there, even if more mentally than visually.

And alas now this has to happen instead.
the fbi should start its own peahat club and then arrest everybody who tries to join. yes nemitz would definitely attempt to join additional peahat clubs apart from mitz own. It now occurs to me that any hat nemitz wears while posing proudly instantly becomes stupid and incarceration-justifcation.

You will possibly need to click at this in order to be able to read the words in the event you are interested in doing that.

I have told of the encounter that inspired this a few times before I went and made it. One person claimed to know what a fort night dance was but was unable to explain it, and I was uninterested in personally investigating.
The intent of this comic strip was to express frustration in relating to other people, not that I just don’t know what sort of music I like or how to find it; I have been hoarding it for decades now! Rather I think people who rely on youtube, spotify or ueck record stores to provide music for them suffer more than I do in this respect. I can hear what I want when I wish to and need not worry that I will abruptly lose access to it if stuff gets deleted, my connection goes or what have you.
obviously if I still have to type out an explanation then the comic strip has failed in some way but it still provides a foundation for an explanation that people will attempt to grasp, whereas when it is ALL text it is more likely to be completely ignored, or perhaps worse, skimmed.

I seem to have multiple versions of this image sequence; one says “energetic” and another says “Japanese” and I no longer remember which was an edit to try and be more clear. “Video game music” on its own means essentially nothing at this point, as you can put sappy acoustic guitar drear or imbeciles yelling over static into a video game and legally it qualifies as “game music” and somebody will mentally contrive a way to think I am referring to that if I say I like video game music, as if I am that arbitrary and simple. Because, in fact, I often am; there are foods that I know contain certain ingredients that I don’t want to think about, but I can eat those foods so long as the ingredients are not brought to my attention within close chronological proximity of my eating the food. And I just spent over an hour removing tags from “new” bedding material (it formerly belonged to someone else), including the inside of pillow cases where they were never at risk of coming in contact with my skin, because otherwise I will have dreams about the tags somehow getting me if I succeed in sleeping no matter how far away and rolled up into the . But about music my arbitrariness only extends to not wanting to hear anything from someone that I feel personally secretly in competition with, but nobody knows that. Nobody can guess the stupid rules that control me! I should* make a comic strip about that!
*n’t

Yes I think “Japanese” was the earlier version, because I didn’t want someone saying something like “BUT WHAT ABOUT ROB HUBBARD?” But for every Rob Hubbard that made the best use of their technology and did interesting things with it there are seven Kingsley Thurbers who banged random notes on a keyboard, painted bad electric guitar sounds and default spc kit trumpets over them and did the base minimum a job required. Apart from that early western developed video games rarely had more than a few tracks, if they had more than one, while Konami, Namco, ah ahh ahhhh-Arsys, whoever, were diapercharging games with heaps of music as soon as the technology permitted, and sometimes they even credited the people who made the music!
Anyway even having just the one word in there breaks the flow and I should prioritize entertainment attempt value over information since as noted I inevitably end up explaining everything anyway. weh

page 3-51 of that
Trying to draw every single object from the bag held this up somewhat, in part because I was not sure what all of them were. it seems like every page has several elements that make it unusually difficult to draw, which means that it is not unusual at all and i am just really terrible at dealing with a wide range of subject matters!