part one
part two (sort of)
And now a third Shop Rite post! You only get one Star Wars movie this year but I have provided a whole trilogy. Unfortunately I got it at Shop Rite.

Good old African-American Friday. I actually meant to post this that day, but while you were taking a luxurious trip between now and midnight to save $800 on an ex-box, me, I was camping outside Shop Rite to “beat” the rush to save 30 cents on beets and pork and beans.

I commented on this situation previously but neglected to link to the video, which I think is very important.
The Shop Rite Can Can sale happens every year, sometimes twice, and people swear by it. The same recording of the song and the same animation have likewise been recycled, in increasingly edited form, as modern regulations for showing anything outside shoddily edited snippet form require it. According to recently declassified documents, my parents were once invited to spend a week with some let’s call them friends in a cabin in let’s say Maine. One, I will call him Pol, since his name was Paul and I am changing his name to protect his identity, learned that my mother was a vegetarian, but assured her not to worry, since Pol was going to do all the cooking, to “give the ladies a break,” having stocked up at the Shop Rite can-can sale. It should be a heartwarming story but it isn’t because I thought it was the funniest thing I ever heard once I heard it. Shop Rite made me laugh at kindness!

Also, the unseen announcer in this ad from 198x is the same person who still does it. I can only conclude that just IS Shop Rite talking. We do not need to get into the most recent advertising because the latest ends with the on-camera actor proclaiming “now that deserves a happy dance,” one of an ever-increasing number of recent ads inexplicably invoking “happy dance,” and many of them are not even for Shop Rite, possibly indicating a deeper conspiracy that is outside my present jurisdiction.

The “rite” in the name may not merely be “right” misspelled and misapplied… what a fool I have been! The answer is much simpler: Shop Rite refers to an aspect of a ceremony for a religion based on shopping. Without proper shop rites, we will be denied shop salvation.

Shop Rite is so cheap that it doesn’t even give you a chance to call bow tie pasta by its proper name, farfalle.

Shop Rite assumes if it calls the pasta farfalle, none of its intended customers will know the pasta is bow-tie shaped.

Consider that shoprite crumpetitor Shop & Shop has a rinkity dinkity store brand of pasta and a “fancy” brand that is exactly the same but costs more and has a picture of string on it so I’m supposed to think somebody actually giftwrapped this cardboard box of overpriced rinkity dinkety pasta. Imagine if it was your birthday and somebody gave this to you. Anyway, neither of these calls the stuff “bowties.” Also, even though almost everything at Shop Rite is denoted as being marked down, it is often more expensive than the same item at another store. The cheapo Shop Rite bow ties from my trip in 2012 cost 40 cents more than the same quantity box of cheapo Stop & Shop bowties with a less cheap name from this month, and the Stop & Shop is in Madison, the town where my neighbors react with disbelief when I answer no to “this is just your summer house, right?”

Back to bow ties, even knowing that, of course, we are supposed to associate bow ties with classiness, and shop rite is the LAST store you would want claiming responsibility for yours, it is worth observing that- oh deben, something awful just occurred to me. Would you let me see that sign again?

AW NAW! Get it away! Before…

There seems to be a deeper Shop Rite-Bow Tie connection than I ever suspected. I have lost the will to scream. One screams because one wants help and I think none can be forthcoming. This is most worrisome. I may have to go into hiding until next year.

Dessert Island
I think you may be digging in the wrong place.

I acknowledge that I was raised to deal with christ-mas, that today IS the christmas day and that the picture I posted has nothing to do with christmas.

However, neither does this.

I hope you will find this informative.

I contacted expert voiceover artist Gewk Gilkengramen for the narration. Gewk refused in disgust, so I had to bring in this bozo instead from off the street. With that in mind I have also provided moderately readable text that says for the most part the same things.

I will provide more painful details at an ideally hypothetical point in the future.

I posted this on my secret personal facebook page last night.

And when it refers to that night and the night before, it therefore actually means the night before this one and the night before that one. I hope this has been minimally deformative. The personal facebook page is “secret” because I primarily use it to manage my non-secret bimshwel page, and my last personal page got shut down for having a stupid name. Since this one has an even stupider name I seek to minimize awareness of it.

This mostly summarizes what I months earlier shoved not completely relevantly into a long boring post about being tired of watching television that I forced myself to watch. Oddly enough this summary of that paragraph is longer and boringer than it. Although that is consistent with my past behavior and therefore not very odd at all.

Another debate pageant tonight. You do not need to read this, I just need to post it!

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, was a guest on the Late Colbert Show last night, remarking on the fact that Mr. D Trump has not been overtaken by “mainstream” presidential candidates yet. What makes Trump not “mainstream?” I hate to accept that somebody who studies this stuff as a lifestyle can look at the non-Trump candidates and think “it is the natural and correct order of things that one of these buffoons be one step away from the national presidency.”
To summarize what I have been squawking elsewhere the past few months, the modern republican party needs to die, good and dead. For the values it espouses, and allows the democratic party to also espouse in an effort to draw support away from republicans, and worse, still look good in comparison to. The worse the republicans get standing for the worst things, the better our wimpy, principle-devoid democrat party looks standing for nothing at all. We should not be forced to see that as the good choice.

I dislike Bernard Sanders less than the other candidates, but first of all that is based on the same kind of internet hype that made me prObama, which ultimately let me down. And also, running as a democrat forces Uncle Bernie into the democrats’ box, which wants its candidates to drop any topic that does not meet that box’s terms of service, and also agree not to oppose Hillary Clinton after a certain point. Indeed, that box wanted everyone to stop opposing Hillary Clinton after November 2011. That ending was written before the story started. We’re living in a perpetual frustrating prequel, like Smallville or Gotham or whatever. Nothing can happen to disrupt something in the future whose status is totally arbitrary, no matter how long the prequel goes on, and how many details develop that we didn’t have in mind when we wrote the ending. Ha ha ha, let’s laugh at Lincoln Chafee for having a funny name and wanting a measurement system with more order and less random numbers to memorize, regardless of how many other countries use it (most of them). And we can laugh at Dennis Kucinich for looking like a character from a Fievel movie. But please don’t dismiss them entirely for that.

What I think we need is a legitimate force to oppose these two parties, even a force with “no chance” to win. I think a lot of us do. And we could use a major news organization, with infrastructure behind it, to not tacitly back the policies of any party. Not just sporadic obscure advocacy that can be ignored for 20 years and later presented with “look at who predicted our garbage present!” Imagine if ABC news worked as hard at digging for facts behind the terrorism threat threats they get from the government as they did at digging for new Star Wars trailers. You’ll have to!

Sanders himself was an obscure advocate. You can look up video of him, in 1991, when he was a US representative, predicting prolonged US entanglement in Mesopotamia if it invaded Iraq, (Dick Cheney, as well). Why wasn’t that a story THEN? Or in 2003? Why can somebody offering an informed reason to not do something that cannot be undone be taken seriously? Because our major news organizations, funded by corporations, would have lost sponsors if they gave weight to anti-war arguments. Anyone found guilty would be forced out, like Phil Donahue. I would say Dan Rather as well but you could point to sloppy inability to defend or back up his own story about George Wuh Bush that lost him his CBS news boatholder job.

Anyway, what I want at this point is for Donald Trump to be nominated by his party and then have the “mainstream” republican candidates refuse to support him. I do not want any of them to be president, but this would undermine the whole convention process, and reveal more publicly how dumb this all is. Reveal that “the people” don’t really decide who they vote for, or even who they are allowed to vote for. Trump represents horrible things, but he is the most sincere reflection of actual American voters in his party, apart from having loads more money. The other candidates present no basis for denying that. If they really believe in telling people what is “right,” they’ll stop pretending we don’t have a gun problem, a bank problem, a pharmaceutical problem, a meat problem, a pollution problem, a pumpkin problem, a church problem, a surveillance problem and on and on. We need to stop pretending persecution, misdirected aggression and divinity of the famous are not core American values going back to the country’s founding so we can actually do something about them.
I do not share the Isis standpoint of “hurry up and destroy the world,” but I also do not believe in condoning mediocrity. Condoning mediocrity, doing something just because a lot of visible, impatient loudmouths demanded it done allowed Isis to exist!

I feel it is owed to my state, Connecticut, personally, after Joe “Mortal Kombat will turn our children into homicidal palette-swapped ninjas” Lieberman refused to back Ned Lamont, who won their democrat senate primary, and ran instead as an “independent” and ultimately got re-elected to the senate by harnessing the collective ignorance and dumb fear of both permitted sides. If we can do that to keep boneheads in office, we can certainly do it to keep boneheads out of office.

Hardly a collection of complete thoughts; I hate being “topical” because there is not time to think about things at length. There is not even time or space to finish or scan that terrible drawing I put on this just so somebody would notice it. But if this was my JOB, I would make certain I did so. I wish we had not created a world that demanded immediate uninformed emotional responses all the time. “Why hasn’t the president condemned Joe Bones’ outrageous remarks yet?” Because outrage doesn’t accomplish anything!

Howdy.

I will have a terrible story to tell you soon.

Excuse me shouldn’t there be a spoiler alert in that ad? You have already told me that Frosty survives the first movie! Imagine watching Star Wars if you knew in advance that the Empire was going to Strike Back.

Everyone’s favorite snowman. I think that’s supposed to be Frosty also. But now that you mention it, I don’t know a whole lot of snow-men.

Ones that are eligible to be my favorite, I mean. Between this and the

creepy cartoon frog “Kandoo” that wipes itself in front of your children we as a nation have enough uninvited smilers sharing this space with us.

Okay buddy the facial expression was actually beside the point and in fact you are making this worse.

Back to snow-men, I used to not like them at all, but then I found out that Battletoads hated them and I decided they might be doing something right. Kandoo of course grew up to be a battle toad.
For favorite snowman I did consider Parson Brown, but I remembered I was only pretending that was who it was.

The only other one that comes immediately to my mind is Bad Mr. Frosty, presumably of no relation to regular “Mr. Frosty is my father” Frosty. But he is no good and is not my favorite. He is almost as bad as a bad-tle toad, despite them declaring genocide on his species. He is a traitor through and through. My source informs me that Bad Mr. Frosty’s buttons and facial features are made not from coal but from leftover Shop Rite logo pieces.

You know, those old stories about Santa Claus giving coal to naughty children are a lie. Coal was a valuable commodity in days of yore. You couldn’t heat your cold Victorian hovel without it. Shop Rite pieces are only good for bad. They will burn your house down without generating any warmth. Fire is a neutral force of nature, but the Shop Rite logo means to harm you, have no doubt. Consider that only the “hop ri” part of the logo is underlined. It deliberately omits S t and e just as an affront to notorious video game artist Ste Pickford. When Shop Rite is around nobody else is allowed to spell their name weird.

Or perhaps it holds a grudge since Ste-drawn Kuros was, historically, the first person to ever get kicked out of a Shop Rite.

part 1 of this investigative series on shop rite
part 3 and I’m not saying that twice

page 41 and 42 of re-drawings of that.

I forgot to change the first frame to explain how the door shut without kumquat being near it like I said I ought to at the previous pertinent posting, and by the time I thought of it I was inclined to leave it as it was and just give an excuse. Consider that the control object has at least three buttons, and two other sections that I have not determined the purpose of. It is possible that a delayed shut was activated with the button pressing I did show on the previous page.
Page 42 is here as well since I did not have occasion to make a separate update for both of these and was interested in trying a slightly different method of rehabilitating the old pages, without switching to another matter before making the next page like I usually do. This way was not an improvement either! And now it has a different visual style than page 41. But page 41 does not look like page 40, which does not look like page 39. Perhaps my signature style is the absence of one.
By this point, the pictures I am redrawing, from 2006 or thereabouts, are scanned at a printable resolution, so I really only need to make them over slightly. When I started redrawing, I looked forward to this point. But now I find the character proportions so unsightly and backgrounds so boxy and empty that I wish I had fully redrawn the thing, so it might have potential to look more interesting. Which is ironic because at the time of the original version, I felt as if I was finally doing things properly for the first time! In fact, I almost like the originals better since they were exactly what I meant them to be at the time. Nonetheless, layout consistency takes precedence, and it is likely that when printed the new versions’ less scratchy outlines and better regulated frame-stuffing will be favorable.

Why are you pouting? Did you not pay attention to what you put in your own cart? Until after you paid and walked out? Typical miply stupid animal.

NO! Do NOT act like you are doing me a favor! I did NOT ask you to buy that!
Actually, as dopey as that thing is I would not recommend walking inside a shop rite without waterproof boots since there is usually a spill in there somewhere with no employee for miles.

If you are not familiar with Shop Rite, good. It is like a Stop & Shop or a Kroger or a Food Lion except you get an uneasy feeling that you are trash when you are inside.

The drawing is of course inspired by the older shop rite logo. The one that it is impossible to find a photograph of that does not look like a crime scene. The current Shop Rite logo does not just have weird lumps floating over a coal black mine cart; it also has shards and scraps in the mix.

Also note that while they redrew the graphic they didn’t fix the glaring spelling and grammar error in the store’s title.
This Shop Rite is at the Railroad Salvage plaza, which in the absence of better data I will presume means all the groceries were illegally stolen from train wrecks that may or may not have been engineered by the

yet older logo’s sinister silhouette of Inspector Gadget beside some sort of death ray.

This person was created when the protagonist from the Apple Macintosh Trashic “Climber” bumped into the middle elevator too many times.

Ordinarily upon collision Climber will turn sideways, flop out its legs and have impotent rage while totally immobile for 5 to 40 seconds, however much time you have remaining, which was the perfect time to strike. I would like to get my own screen shot of this but emulating old macintosh games is the most arcane and arduous task on the planet. Forced, impregnable obsolescence on an Apple product is nothing new. This is harder than using an itunes gift card without installing iTunes (AND quicktime), which is impossible. It is even harder than coming out of a shop rite without crying.

What’s worse: that this isn’t enough Chef Boy ar Dee to satisfy the masses, or that they refer to this tinned glop as “supplies?”

This person is happy because the pertinent Shop Rite is clearly out of business.

the next part of this story that only mentions shop rite at the end
the part after that one which has far too much shop rite in it

Questionable, thematically-inconsistent greeting cards, $3 each. I posted about it on the facebook page, and I will post it here instead of wondering “should I post it here?”

First of all, each card is printed on to the edge on both sides. A very nice product. People who ordered them last year were impressed at how non-cheaply made the cards were compared to the usual sort of thing they bought out of pity from the half-sane offspring or associates of co-workers. I am contractually obligated to be the first, occasionally only person to say one of my art works is trash, but these cards came out splendidly.

If you for some reason want to buy some, you may communicate with me via email, ([email protected]), or the note system, or in skype (yirzod) or whatever-else-have-you that also have-I. Please say which cards you want and how many of each.

Timeframe: After the Thank-giving holiday, I will place my own order with the print joint and retrieve the cards. Therefore you would probably receive the cards in early December. If you want the cards sooner, I probably cannot accommodate that at this point. However if you want the cards later, that could potentially work very well for you.

Shipping specifics: Within the United States it should cost about $2.54 to send most orders, since sense suggests use of a rigid envelope. As I hypothetically would earn a bit over a dollar per card, it is difficult to for me to justify covering that cost for fewer than five cards. And then it looks like an extra $5 to ship out of the country, and hypothetically the “free” conditions would be adjusted accordingly. Nonetheless I WILL ship cards to you in Sevastopol if that becomes necessary. But if by some chance fate you can arrange to meet and receive cards from me or a doppelganger directly, then obviously no outside shipping will need to occur at all.

I would probably make more sales if I just said nothing about shipping and let people think they were getting something cheap until they were in too deep to want to back out, like professionals do.

Payment: It can be done through check, paypal or other internet payment system (you tell me; I can never remember what they are called). Local deliveries can also be paid for with cash, gold, certain prepared foods or by pulling a gun on me.

These cards are available now. As the diagram displayed above suggests, types A, B and C are new for this year. Consequently, they have not yet been printed. The printing will occur after November 26, ideally before December 1. If you need cards earlier, then D through J are already in stock. Although only two remain of type J, the public-safety-themed “please merry responsibly.”

And if there is another rectangularly shaped picture of mine that you would like on a card instead of any of those, let me know as soon as possible and I will see about formatting it.

Thank you and good luck.

The facebook post was late, and this is VERY late. I should have posted it sooner than that, but I was not sure if I wanted to. I still am not sure. But two-to-three people have already asked, so I have to go through with it regardless of who else does. My fate is sealed.

Maybe it is sealed like this, but this actually got delivered, so legally it is permissible.

page 9 of part 3 of this
I wish more pages were this simple to arrange. 4 actions, each only needing 3 or 2 spaces.

And here comes a gripe I wrote about the layout that must be irrelevant because I forgot it even mattered until I re-read it just now. But it did matter, so I had better post it so I do not write it again.

The trouble was that I had to reverse the lower frames to make lope right-handed, because kumquat and nemitz are the only left-handed characters. Which is a stupid thing to care about, especially if the beasts aren’t supposed to be human anyway, and have no reason to have the same proportion of right-to-left-handedness as normal people, who often force right-handedness as a standard arbitrarily, if these things even NEED to be “handed” at all. And this is a stupider thing to ruin my composition over. before, the character on the left always talked first and the word spaces made sense, but now they have to be awkward. the other solution would be to switch which hand the creature used in the composition I already had, which would put the hand in front of its head, which would conceal its dumb expressions, which, while dumb, are amusing to me. Either way, the page gets worse due to something nobody would notice. And that I didn’t even notice when I drew it the first time. And I worry about stupid garbage like this instead of real garbage like drawing better or a regular completion schedule. Notice, if you like, that the drawings look looser and scrappier than ones from years ago but that I did not get them done any sooner.

And of course it does not advance the “story” at all. It just replays the “elpse is bothered/worried but forced by nemitz to get over it so that we can continue” process again. Nemitz is a scoundrel.
The next page will almost have some details, and without nemitz’ permission at last.

This notice recently accosted me on the deviant-art website. Obviously deviant-art is a silly website full of trash-marketing-vulnerable adult babies, but everything is –we have bred several generations to whom that is normal– so I can hardly be faulted for lingering there if I linger anywhere. While I do gripe at my getting coercion to become an under-compensated advertising vector for a major corporation disguised as a legitimate opportunity shoved at me, but unique to today I will gripe at the content of what I am to be advertising.

A question: How can I sincerely believe that the friendship is “unlikely” if you already told me it happens? And how can I believe that in any event, based on the past 20 years of animated cinema?

I have seen plenty of human children teaming up with, and usually riding on big misunderstood oafs, human or otherwise. These kids need to get stepped on once in a while to make it seem less likely when they do not.
And there are even more such pairings where there is a tiny little thing and a big thing but both are considered to be adults. And I have heard tell this is not even the first time a cartoon apatosaurus has taken on strange companions and journeyed forth. It is a functional setup. I grant its right to happen, but not to pretend it is profound.
I am not even here to fuss at any of these movies, specifically (least of all Totoro, whose film did not get an America hype-job until years after its production). For one thing, I haven’t seen more than promotional material for any of them.* But I doubt that any person who did watch these films would sincerely proclaim: I never expected those two to become friends! That twist took me completely by surprise!

*Actually, the book Where the Wild Things Are was in my house during the pertinent period of my development. I recall not being impressed.

And anyway, in this case, I am being instructed to evaluate the film exclusively based on its promotional material. It will not be released to theaters until November 25, five whole days after the contest entry deadline!

To be fair, dinosaurs generally are not big thinkers.

He is intimidating because I say he is. Even though I also said his scar makes it apparent visually, and I included a picture, and so I don’t need to say anything. But I have space and so I must say and say and say!

The contest page is full of character descriptions, terrible artwork and rogue plot details. Essentially I am to base my masterwork on a webcomic cast list. Many details, very little meaning. And if the event organizers believed for T seconds that any development, not necessarily restricted to friendships, were at all unlikely, they would be cautious about spoiling it for me! They would want me to be surprised. But they actually know that there is no chance I would be surprised. Go into a movie without knowing exactly what’s going to happen? Why that’s Unamerican!

And only americans can enter the contest! I knew a single person who found that Lorax movie at all endearing, and the person lives in Estonia.

My task in this adver-tunity is to donate free promotional “fan” artwork to stir up hype for the thing before it comes out. I am supposed to endorse it, and pledge to it considerable effort, based entirely on stuff I am told about it by another party, without any guarantee of payment, even if it turns out to be garbage that I would not want my name attached to.
How could I, and why should I be a fan of something that isn’t available? How could I know anything about the power of their friendship or the spirit of their adventure? I am suspicious any time somebody has to tell me an adventure happened or is happening.

In fact, another dumb movie where all the exact same stuff as before happens, that you tell me about before I am even eligible to see it: that is the OPPOSITE of adventure. Just as fan art is the opposite of original art! It isn’t even POSSIBLE to do what the contest demands.
Why should I be inspired by what some context-devoid list says each character supposedly is or does? I might as well draw fanart for the Michelin Man. At least that would be by my own inclination. And potentially less ugly. I hate those “eyes too close to each other on the front of the head” pixar character designs anyway, but ESPECIALLY on dinosaurs. “Good” is only in the title as a form of mind control because my natural inclination would be to proclaim these dinosaurs as less than adequate in quality.

The contest also encourages me to view the film’s trailer. Trailers exist to simplify, exaggerate and mislead. And to stop the music abruptly so I know what I am supposed to laugh at. I avoid the Star-Wars previews because I want to see the movie without knowing anything. I avoid the the Good Dinosaur preview because I just plain don’t want to know anything. That does not invalidate my earlier complaint; I probably would not watch the film, but I absolutely would not create a derivative work paying homage to its virtue unless I HAD watched it.

And it probably isn’t as terrible as the advertisement inevitably presents it as, but it most certainly isn’t as good as post-release praise will swear it is. Why try and force me to swallow that in advance? Apart from “because we are getting paid by Disney to hold this contest,” I mean. And that is “we” as in them, not me. Unless I win, which I wouldn’t, because I hate it. “It” as in all that has transpired this evening.

Self-Defense Portrait

They seem to work well together.

I have not had much time for image production recently! I fear it is evident. However, this one was considerably less trouble than the last evident “art-“themed picture I displayed here.

Hey ya’ll, it’s me, boo berry. so I wanna tell you about my cereal? It’s like MADE with boo berries, even though I AM Boo Berry? uh-huhhhhh… yeahhh….. just picture this, ok, like, I’m a GHOST, though, uhkay. I like, ate this stuff, for a long time? And now I’m DEAD????!?!? SOOOOOOOOO….. but trust me, it’s GOOD?????!?!? Like REALLY good????????? like better than FRANKENBERRY even??? If I EAT this stuff where does it GO idk lol XD Check it out, my body is see-through, but not my mouth, even though my mouth is a HOLE. Anyway, this is the perfect cereal for halloween, so like… no seriously that was last week? my bad lol. And these are fruit roll-ups BASED on the cereal? Blowin’ my mind, dude. I guess the fruit in question is uh cereal. Or boo berries I guess. Hey speaking of ROLLING UP… heh heh heh. You can just call me Doobie-rry heh heh. Hey where do you think boo berries come from? Are they also, like, the ghosts of berries? But if you like, made the berry ghosts come out of the berry bodies when you ate the berries, what happens when you eat the GHOST berries? Do they have like GHOST ghost berries? You’re seriously freaking me out, man! I gotta get out of here.

I will watch the newest Star Wars film, but I will not watch any trailers for it, however hard or frequently ABC World News tries to trick me into receiving promotion for it immediately before Jeopardy by pretending ads for their parent company’s other properties count as World News. And if during the film I hear the words “viceroy,” “senate” or “files,” as in “only a jedi could have erased those files,” I shall plug my ears during dialog and imagine my own story.

And above all, have FUN.

There is much more to say about this image! I will work hard to keep myself from doing so!

page 40 of this’s redrawings.

I am disappointed that these are not getting any easier even though the base drawings are less incomprehensible overall. There is less figuring for me to do, but just as much redrawing, alas. And still not NO refiguring, since I seem to have kept up cramming in dialog baubles wherever they would fit, and wherever they would not fit long beyond a reasonable time period. Some people can draw a whole comic book in a day, I can barely draw one old page in a month.

However, I have received the proof prints of the first book, all printed and properly bound together for the first time, and it seems like doing that in greater numbers is a viable operation. All this may amount to something, even if not a whole lot.

Minutae:
Somehow, I only noticed after I had redrawn the thing that I never explained, to myself or anyone else, how kumquat has closed the door in the last frame here. The next page certainly does not explain it; kumquat points at a control unit that was clearly not being touched when the door shut. This note is to remind me to shoe-horn in a clumsy retroactive explanation for that next.

Compared to the old version, I had to change the dialog because it was terribly out of character for elpse to not scream at or attack somebody who admitted to hurting nemitz on purpose.
The lizard’s first appearance is also out of character, but since that takes up two rows, it is hard for me at this point to think of something else that should go there. Since I inserted a page before here where elpse gets angry at someone for hurting nemitz who did not even do so, this page is harder to ignore.
Although maybe I would have made more success if I didn’t try to justify everything and just wrote an anarchy story. Nobody ever said to me: I like this comic strip but sometimes the characters have inconsistent personalities. But generally if people don’t like something they just keep quiet so I have to anticipate what they are having a problem with.

One good thing to come of the print attempt that I can apply immediately, is that it forced me to figure out exactly how much space I “have.” A long time ago I measured a comic book that I had and based my space usage on that, not considering that the book I measured might have had a reason for not printing to the page edges. And as I changed the paper I drew on, and its orientation several times, my proportions got further warped. Now I match them to a template provided by Ka-Blam, the print company, which I presume is consistent, at least, with what other north american printers are using.

The version I had here for years is either too narrow when scaled to the height of the template, leaving “live” space on the sides, or too tall when scaled to its width, entering the forbidden margin zone. Narrow is actually fine, since extra live space will be filled in exactly the same as the margin space. What is wrong with drawing in the margins? They MIGHT be cut off, due to natural shifting while printing or cutting across many documents. And the bleed WILL be cut off in any event. So why can’t the computer just choose to NOT print into the bleed since it knows exactly where that is? Don’t bother to ask anybody that question, since they will pretend you are asking something else and treat you like you are rubbing a doughnut on your face. They guard this sacred knowledge like it’s the Davinci Code. You just have to live with it, or you die for it.

So I can leave the page narrow. Except I drew way too big originally, and had to cram in the dialog awkwardly around the drawings that I could not comfortably reduce. Therefore, I ought to widen the page, and claim the live space that is rightfully mine to try and declutter the wordage, right? But I had already been widening the redrawn pages based on my latest guess at correct page proportions prior to using the template, which actually ends up being too wide or too short for proper printing!!! I went too far!

Scandal! Look at all that free live space! I long to see it captured and slaughtered. Having it be marginalized is inadequate punishment.

But too short, like too narrow, can go unnoticed. Since I arranged the words reasonably this time, nothing more needs to be done. In the printed book, therefore, most pages are too short. For once I left things alone! I only talled up a few toward the end of the process, and superficially altered a few others immediately prior to printing by increasing the size of the gaps between frames.

One of the taller pages with enhanced gaps beside one of the shortest, that you may already be acquainted with. The disparity is already not great, and since they do not actually appear together,

and a real book doesn’t lie flat, the issue is almost invisible.

Does that all make sense? It shouldn’t! Printing technology is still stuck in the 1940s. We can electronically send a sandwich into space but we can’t know exactly how a computer image is going to show up on paper right in front of us, and the machine responsible may break in one of many ways trying to do it. It took me so many years and so much rage to figure all this out and get used to it, I have no CHOICE but to keep printing books. For once I know everything that can go wrong and have prepared for them all. The books came out perfectly and I succeeded. I can not be held up further!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHFFFFFH I’VE BEEN BORDER-LINED