Spike's Cartoons and Whinging

Music Appreciation: The Rub - George Bush is an Islamic Fundamentalist.

Featuring Bill Clinton on sax.

Really.

Really!

Okay, no, not really. But still. Break out the tinfoil hats and enjoy. This one's in .wma format, but Winamp shouldn't have too much trouble with it. As always, Right-Click, Save As.

The Rub - George Bush is an Islamic Fundamentalist

No lyrics. Sorry. Busy days.

Minor Adjustments.

New friend links, because I've just got SO DAMN MANY. KThor, Kim, and Jason this time. I forgot them before, on account I'm stupid. They are each lovely and amazing in their own unique way, none of which involves pouting into webcams and and pawing the headstones at the local boneyard while straining to look complex and misunderstood. So give them love, okay? They don't get enough.

And now, Living with Zombies.

I saw these guys a couple weeks ago, at the local con. They do an autobio comic, kind of. Well, I mean, it stars them and everything, but they live in a world where everyone's a zombie. Suddenly. For no reason. Everyone but them. Oh, and their dog.

Fortunately, these guys love zombies. And the bald one shits his pants on the very first page, so what more could you ask for? Click away.

Also, approximately two weeks until the new Sparkneedle. Happy dancing.

Lucas and Odessa Will Be A Day Late This Week.

Ten bucks says nobody notices.

The Only Marvel Comic I Would Ever Read.

I want a monthly from Marvel about an early-middle-aged housewife who turns out the be a serious late-bloomer in the mutant power department.

Her name should be something common and normal, like... I dunno, Caitlyn or Lindsay. And Lindsay will have given up a career in advertising a few years ago to stay home and raise two kids, a boy and a girl, twelve and ten, and be financially dependent on her husband. Let's call him Nate.

Nate and Lindsay's marriage isn't really working, but not in a glamourous, crockery-throwing, on-a-first-name-basis-with-the-local-cops sort of way. They just don't have much to say to each other anymore. You know those couples who never hang out together, never kiss, and never talk about one another? Yeah. That's Nate and Lindsay. It's a quiet kinda dissatisfaction. They'll probably get divorced, but not soon. Not until the kids are out of the house.

Speaking of the kids, the son's a blossoming jock. Soccer on Tuesdays, lacrosse on Thursdays, softball on Saturdays. Not a genius, but a Bs-and-Cs sort of mediocre. Nothing his folks can see getting bent out of shape over enough to form a united front against. The daughter's probably odd, but not in a trendy way. Maybe she sews her own dolls. Probably wears Coke-bottle glasses. Insists on making complicated vegetable garnishes for all the family dinners.

Anyway.

Set the scene in Suburbia, USA. And Lindsay's suddenly kind of achey and pukey and whatnot. Up three times in one night, hugging the bowl, sayin' good-to-see-you-again to yesterday's supper.

Shit, thinks Lindsay. I am pregnant, panics Lindsay. I can't do this again. Not with things the way they are now.

She pulls it together, acts borderline-normal for two or three days, and heads downtown on Wednesday to her friendly neighborhood vag doctor... who promply informs her that no, she is not pregnant. But her bloodwork is... odd. I'm going to give you the number of a specialist.

Specialist? OH SHIT I HAVE CANCER DON'T I WELL THAT JUST FIGURES

No Lindsay, cancer would be about a billion times more socially acceptable.

And the specialist... well, we can guess what he says.

But my name isn't Bendis, so... yeah. Never mind.

I <3 MY E-FRIENDS

Con season's over, and it's time to plump that link list off on the left up from merely bloated to full-out unwieldy.

I've added a bunch of people, Like Erika, Clio, Derek, Roger, BMAN and Brion. And take note, the new Matthew is not my Matthew, but a Canadian variety of Matthew who writes the comic book Black Bastard and suggested I check out the band Tea Party. A totally different Matthew, but a swell guy all the same. I'll be moving into his crawlspace if Bush wins the election this year.

Many, many irons in the fire these days, few of which I feel like elaborating on until they're less theoretical and more actual. But I will say this: Comic conventions? Sound investment. If you have any aspirations to make a lifestyle out of your funnybook doodles, go. Selling crap is literally secondary to the contacts you make.

New Blikada Page.

The last one, knowing me.

Gettin' sloppy. My conscience would probably make me redo this one, if I wasn't so lazy.

Radio Done Right.

I once mentioned Roc Party Internet radio in a previous post, ages and ages ago, when it was just getting off the ground. Well, Roc Party's evolved into GBS-FM, a somethingawful.com-associated, user-run station. And it is awesome.

Sign up, upload an unlimited number of songs, and add them to the playlist. (You only get to have one song on the playlist at a time, so no one person can flood the station with four hours of Japanese pop or Inuit throat-singing.) Listen to a ridiculous variety of music that you would otherwise never hear: try some Guns N' Roses, which follows the Hebrew version of the Pokemon theme song, which follows Ween, which follows some band you've never heard of, which follows Roy Orbison, which follows Los Lobos covering La Bamba.

Better yet, GBS-FM allows sign-ups to host weekend hour-long blocks. Wanna be a DJ? Get a microphone.

Tell me this isn't beautiful.

Tune in. Enjoy.

Rumor Control.

Via The Marvelous Patric, who was at this weekends' Chicago Wizard Con. Patric himself got it from someone who heard it from someone who was actually there, so this is now, officially, fourth-hand information. Take that however you will.

Back during the first Bush presidency, Barbara Bush's pet cause was literacy. Maybe you remember that. Anyway, while on the job one day, she got around to discussing her motives for advocating literacy with some campaign staffers.

"I'm interested in promoting literacy because one of my sons has a learning disability," Barb said. "He can't read above an eighth grade level."

...

Yeah.

Betcha she wasn't talking about Jeb.

Submitted for Your Approval...

I'll be the busiest little bee of them all for the better part of this weekend, since I'll be manning a table at Wizard Con Chicago in Artist's Alley. But don't worry, I've found a few babysitters to keep you folks lucid until I can once again grace you with my company. Blargh.

This appears to be a site dedicated to documenting plagiarism in advertising art and photography. I can't really be sure, it's in French. But there are plenty of pictures, and plenty of suspiscious coincidences, more pathetic than infuriating. How appallingly unimaginative do you hafta be to steal the punchline from a Hustler gag comic for your diet drink campaign?

The Order of the Stick, a webcomic by Rich Burlew, is only funny if you're freakish nerdling-spoor. Like myself. Toot toot. Self-aware, old school roleplaying humor, best taken while fondling a 20-sided die and eyeing a Monster Manual.

Mom's Cancer is another webcomic. But it's a true-life diary comic, written and drawn by the son of a woman with Stage 4 lung cancer that's metastasized in her brain. Not quite so depressing at it sounds, but then, he hasn't written the ending yet, has he?

The unspeakably awful trailer for Alone in the Dark, Uwe Boll's latest video-game-to-movie disasterpiece. Make sure to take note of the pinched end of the discharged shell whirling through the air in that close-up shot. The crumpled end means it was a blank, kids. And that little oopsie is the least if this thing's problems. OH GOOD ANOTHER BLACK UNFOLDING TONGUE ALIEN CRITTER THING. NEVER SEEN THAT BEFORE.

Gimps Gone Wild. Because someone, somwhere, is totally into this. And you damn well know it. What's your pleasure, sir? Amputees? Cerebral Palsy? Osteogenesis Imperfecta? (Warning: Loud, obnoxious music on the opening page.)

And that oughta do it. See you guys Monday.

Piping Hot New Blikada Page Up.

Click on "comics" to read it. Or look at it, rather. No words. Not yet, anyway.

I've discovered I can manage to start and finish an entire Blikada page in less than one day, which is good news. Should make things more bearable in the long run.

If there is a long run.

I'm lazy, you see.

So very, very lazy.

Blinged Victory.

I hate this.

I walk by it all the time, it's in the lobby of a new office building downtown. And I hate it more every time. It is an absolute mess.

"Oh hey, are you the sculptor? Great. I'd like something that would appear in the background of an obnoxious rap video, being frottered by bikini vixens? Really, just give me the tackiest thing you can manage. I want something Don Magic Juan would try to wrestle off the pedestal and solder to a chain. Will you accept cringes of shame and embarassment from astonished passersby, or will we be paying for this in lowriders and fuzzy purple leisure suits?"

I guess a mere reproduction of Winged Victory of Samothrace just wasn't good enough for Anonymous Glass Box #138361. Not without fifty yards of yellow foil, anyway.

Graffiti is illegal, but if I turned a sandblaster on this obscenity, I'd go to jail.

There is no justice.

Don't Get Excited. I'm Sure I'll Quit.

Flipping through ROBOTA + Browsing Dinotopia more frequently than might be recommended + Barlowe's Expedition x TOO MANY GODDAMN EUROCOMICS = this.

Let's hope I get farther than the first page, eh?

The SDCC Exquisite Corpse is Up!

Much <3 to Dirk for getting it all scanned and posted.

After the last day of this year's Comic-Con, a bunch of us stupid cartoonists got together over Thai and did load of modified exquisite corpses. It went like this.

-- The first person writes down a caption, hands the paper to the second person.

-- The second person illustrates the caption, then folds over the first person's caption before handing it to the third person.

-- The third person only sees the second person's illustration, and then writes down a caption to describe it, folds over the second person's illustration, hands it to the fourth person.

-- Repeat until you run out of paper.

Anyway, we did a lot. And they're all here. Rock out!

News Flash: New Public Art Manages not to Annoy, Pander or Condescend!

So Chicago's got a new plaza, or series of plazas. Millenium Park. And I just recently got my first look at one of the art installations there. It was described to me as "a fountain," but... wow. Super-inadequate.

This is a matching pair of giant monoliths made of glass bricks, with sheets of water cascading down the sides. There aren't any fences or signs; You're supposed to run around apeshit-style, splashing and screaming and what not. No one stops you.

The facing side of each monolith has a LED screen embedded behind the bricks, and it cycles about a thousand different images. Sometimes, it shows waterfalls or rainforest downpour scenes, or lakes. But the kids playing in the... uh, fountain... get really excited when one of a jillion random faces pops up on the screens. Because after maybe five or six minutes of staring, blinking, and smiling....

The faces do this.

Any public art that elicits screams of delight and wonder from five-year-olds every ten minutes is okay by me, no matter how creepy a three-story-tall child's face seems at first glance.

Apart from the face monoliths, there's also this giant chrome thing.

It has a classy, offical name, but most people call it The Bean. Three guesses why.

The Bean, apart from reminding entirely too many people of a certain spaceship from a certain sci-fi movie about a certain flight of a certain navigator, has a little secret. Walk into the arch, and look up, and...

Well, spend three minutes staring and jumping up and down and pointing, like everyone else around you.

Chicago rocks my ass so hard. I am never leaving.