Spike's Cartoons and Whinging

New Vermin!

Neil, my surviving rat, is quite old and frail. He spent most of his life with Beavis, but Beavis has been dead for almost two months, now. (If you visit this page with any regularity, you probably already know what I'm doing to him.) Nothing's more depressing than spending your twilight years alone. In a cage. On a coffee table. So I went out today, and I got Neil some friends.

Here they are.

I set the closed carrier in the center of the cage to let them all get used to each other's smells, first. Also, to keep Neil from eating his new playmates, which I sincerely believed he was totally capable of. When I opened the carrier door, Neil climbed in and fell asleep on top of them. I hope that's a good sign.

This rat was extremely energetic on the trip home. Crawling and jumping around the carrier, pawing through the bedding, nibbling on the complimentary dog biscuits I swiped at the pet store checkout line. I think I'll call him Busy.

This rat fell asleep immediately, and stayed asleep for the entire train ride. He seems a bit a lazy, more than a bit slow, and completely devoid of any sense of adventure or experimentation. Also, he steals.

His name is Fanfic.

MAILING LIST AHOY

Yeah, so I've got a mailing list, now. It's kind of a custom job, since Yahoo Groups annoy me with the ads and the spam and everything. I'm still working the bugs out, so watch your step and all that.

Stuff I'll be posting to the list: The mandatory "cool links." Works-in-progress. Giveaways of free stuff. Plugs. Discussions concerning anything you guys might want to talk about. Blatant, borderline-cheating attempts to get us all free ice cream. (No, really.)

Stuff I WON'T be posting to the list: Boring crap. Pointless daily updates that don't really go anywhere, but that I expect you to read anyway. Poetry. Personal minutae. Lavish descriptions of what I had for breakfast. Pictures of myself on the toilet.

You get the idea. In short: I'll try to amuse you, not annoy you.

Click the link to subscribe. I stuck a permanent link in the nav bar on the left, too.

It'll be keen. Promise.

Karmic Bitchslap: Averted.

Remember those pricey Winsor & Newton paintbrushes that were stolen from me on the 23rd?

Matt nearly tripped over 'em on his way out the door this afternoon.

Someone left them on the ground just outside the apartment.

It wasn't the mail carrier; the mail carrier knocks. It also wasn't the building handyman. He knocks, too. This was done silently.

The box wasn't opened.

So... someone randomly snatched up the box from the mailroom, held it for three days without taking a peek inside, and then dropped it outside my door and snuck away. I think.

Now I REALLY don't know what the hell's going on.

But hey, no complaints here.

Well, THAT sort of sucks.

Had a Fed-Ex package stolen out of the mailroom, today.

I know it was there, because I got a call from the mail carrier, asking if I wanted her to bring it up to my apartment, or just leave it by the boxes. As usual, and as not to be a bother, I said leave it. I'd come get it.

It's gone now.

$50.00 worth of Winsor & Newton Series 7 watercolor paintbrushes. Poof.

I will be a bother from now on.

Fuck.

Irritating Comics, Now Up for Grabs!

In an effort to ease myself into promoting my comics more aggressively (and encouraged in doing so in no small way by fellow GAM-ete Marilyn Scott-Waters), I've signed Lucas and Odessa and Sparkneedle up to Tooncast, the Modern Tales webcomic syndication service. Copy and paste a couple of snippets of code, and you can have the most current pages of each comic automatically updating on your very own site. Seriously neat.

I'll be looking into getting a mailing list and the like together, too. I'd consider a forum, but since my blog already has a comment feature, that might be a little redundant. We'll see.

Miscellany

Oh yeah, I was gonna post here, wasn't I? Sorry, I've been busy. I've got a couple photos to show off, though.

The first is a page from a children's picture book version of King Kong. We saw it at the gigantic, awesome book fair that they hold right on our doorstep for two days every year, and this abominable sun glare I caught in my photo makes me wish I went and bought the book. Just for this page. I'm that juvenile.

The second photo is similarly primate-related, but it's from our previously-mentioned trip to the zoo. We saw MENNONITES IN THE MONKEY HOUSE. Or Amish. I'm not sure how to tell them apart.

I tried to photograph them secretly, but it looks like the dude caught me. It doesn't matter, though, because now their souls are mine.

Found on a Bus Stop Shelter on State Street.

Across from one of those hideous artcrime Mickey Mouse "sculptures."

All-righty, then.

Thanks for sharing.

Someone wanna send this guy grocery money? Or a curbstomp? He's down for either, apparently.

Lecture time!

The rat mummification pictures are back up. EW!

Hey, you know who you have to thank for that? Joey. And Webcomics Nation. Yup.

I'll have a comic on WCN when it launches, in addition to my two comics on Girlamatic. If you're grateful for being exposed to filthy little rat organs, you really should show it.

How?

Well, you could always read/subscribe to Girlamatic. That would be cool, since I get a cut. Or you could wait until my WCN site launches, and subscribe to that. Or you could read/subscribe to Serializer, Modern Tales, Graphic Smash, or MT's independent creator sites, like Rumble Girls or Whimville or Jazz Age Comics or American Elf.

None of these comics suck, and you get loads on each site for less than the price of a Happy Meal. That is so awesome. And you shouldn't be eating that crap anyway.

(Er, if you do subscribe to GAM, make sure to put either me or one of my comics down as a referrer, 'kay? I HAVE TO EAT, DAMMIT.)

Anyways, enjoy. More harmful imagery later.

The Rat Returns Tomorrow.

That's right. Mark it on your calendars, I've found some hosting and bandwidth, hopefully of the permanent variety. So the mummficiation pictures will be back up soon.

Vultures.

In other news, Beavis smells very much like iodine. He's no longer stinky and wet, but stinky and dry. That's a good thing. If everything checks out, I'll do the final mummification steps in the middle of next week. Cross yer fingers.

GOOD LORD. GO AWAY.

The rat mummificiation stuff's down for now, kids. I just got the yellow flag from my host, they're starting to charge by the megabyte.

I knew Beavis was popular, but GOD DAMN.

Thanks to everyone who linked it, and thanks to everyone who emailed, but I can't take this kind of traffic. My name is not Lowtax.

Wanna see the rat guts again? Help me pay for the site. Buy a commission. Kthnx.

MONEY PLZ.

I'm slowly, steadily, unofficially starting to take freelance work, again.

I need to clean out and update the Sketchbook page with more recent and relevant stuff, and more color images. I also need to get together a commission page with prices and whatnot. But yeah, whorin' it on the streetcorner again. And why not.

Early adopters, email me if you're interested. Just click my name at the end of the post. Include FREELANCE or COMMISSION in the subject line the thwart the spam filters. We can work something out before I start parading around the block banging a base drum.

Intermission: Hot Ushabti Action.

While we're waiting for Beavis to be well and truly mummified, we're making these.

Ushabtis were tiny figurines tucked into the bandages of Egyptian mummies. They were meant to be sculptures of servants that would magically come alive in the afterlife, and labor for whoever they'd been assigned to.

Matt and I were enough for Beavis in life, and to avoid being ritually murdered by any cabals of priests Old Kingdom style in order to accompany him to the fields of Osiris, we've made little clay dopplegangers of ourselves to ease the passage.

You have no idea how much it sucks trying to sculpt a rat's ushabti. "Tiny" doesn't even begin to cover it. I think my prescription just jumped to 20/80.

Damn.

Yeah, so... about Beavis... I'm going to need another few days, folks.

I know, I know. I'm disappointed, too. But on the bright side, I took some more pictures. They're here. You'll understand the delay after a quick look.

Sorry again. Don't wander off, I'll have him ready for the final steps in ten or so days.

Welcome, Asylum Eclectica's Morbid Fact du Jour Readers!

Glad everyone's getting their seats reserved early. Only twelve or so hours until Beavis comes out of the natron, and I know you're all dying to see what a rat that's spent forty days packed in salt and baking soda looks like. I know I am.

For everyone not in the know, the mummfication of Beavis, aside from being linked on a few other blogs, was recently showcased on The Asylum Eclectica, and it's pretty good timing, too. The most boring part of the mummfication's already over; from here on out, it's unguents, ointments, and incantations. And more pictures. You guys are lucky. I can't promise everything will go perfectly, but whatever happens, you'll all get to see it.

In any case, thanks for doubling my hits. And I'll get to all your emails ASAP, given that I probably won't have the time for 'em later today.

Calling All Botanists.

I seem to have a triffid.

My secret, shameful inner hippie grew an herb garden (lol 420 lol) on the windowsill when no one was looking. It was supposed to be mint, parsley, oregano, and thyme. It turned out to be mint, parsley, oregano, thyme, and Intrusive Alien Being.

This thing sprouted in the oregano pot a few weeks ago. Just for the hell of it, I transplanted it into a paper cup instead of chopping it into compost. It outgrew that, so I got it a planter. It's outgrowing that, too.

What the hell is this thing? Anybody know?

Given its rate of growth, I'm assuming it's a weed of some sort, but a tentative identification as a sunflower has kept it clear of the trash chute for over a month.

HE HATH RISEN.

FYI, kids: Beavis comes out of the natron this very Saturday evening. Mark it on your calendars.

You remember Beavis, right?

In other news, things are sort of busy around these parts. But look for a better update tomorrow. It'll be here. Promise.

Life's A Pitch.

This link's about pitching cartoon ideas to network execs, and it's categorized in my blog set-up in the "Comics" category. And that's perfectly okay.

I've never known a single comic book goofball (myself included) that didn't, somewhere in the most deluded, self-important, astonishingly attention-hungry recesses of their brain, fantasize about that pot at the end of the funnybook rainbow: Getting an animation deal from the suits. Sure, sometimes a live-action deal, yeah. But my people, the indie people? We like cartoons. We LIKE 'em. We wanna take cartoons out for dinner and give 'em massages and meet their folks. That's probably sad, but it's how we feel. And when we're we're honest with ourselves, it's what we want for what we do. But then, a lot of us want cowboy monkeys trained to ride border collies like horses, and we're not about to get our hands on those, either.

Enter Life's A Pitch. Hollywood: Kills Dreams Dead.

Reprinted from the ASIFA-East Newletter aNYmator and penned by by chapter president David B. Levy, Life's A Pitch won't tell you anything you didn't already know: Namely, gettin' a cartoon made is pretty hard. But at least now you can append that statement with "impossibly hard" for the sake of accuracy. Suits blow you off, enforce senseless rotating taboos, tell you to base your next pitch on past stuff there's no way they would accept now, and so on. Sounds like fun. But then, these are the people who've said no to Jeff Smith's Bone movie, then greenlighted a live-action version of Astroboy, so you can really only expect so much.

Con Season.

Yup. S'comin'.

I'll be doin' SDCC and Wizard Con Chicago these year, one because it's basically mandatory and the other because it's local, and it would just be stupid to skip it like I did last year. I'll have tables at both; I'll be at the GAM table in San Diego, and in Artist's Alley (hopefully next to my home-skillet Dirk) in Chicago.

I'll probably just be selling stickers, a sketchbook, and buttons. Drop by, because you are all very cool and I love you like my children. That includes you.

And in case you don't care about all that, here's a picture of some Nigerians that decided pet pit bulls just weren't badass enough.