Spike's Cartoons and Whinging

Masturbator Across the Street #2.

There's another guy standing bare-ass naked in a room in the hotel across the street.

Another.

He is most definitely jerking off.

I know he sees me. He waved.

This keeps happening.

I GUESS I'M JUST IRRESISTIBLE HUH GUYZ AM I RITE.

You!, Yes, You! With the THING! I DARE You to Take the Mary-Sue Challenge!

You know what a Mary-Sue is, right?

Well, ya should. And there's a lot I could say about 'em, but I won't bother. Let's just remember the important thing: they suck. They're masturbatory, obnoxious, and worst of all, they're no fun to read.

Well, no fun for anyone but the author.

And possibly the author's giggling cheerleader fan-horde.

And, uh, the occasional atrocity tourist what drops in for a laugh.

But this is getting more complicated than it needs to be, so back to Mary-Sues just plain sucking, okay? Hang on to that. Them sucking. Them sucking hard.

Got it? Super. Here.

Interestingly enough, this is probably the first time I've ever seen anyone apply the rules of Sueism to original fiction. And whaddya know, they work pretty good.

So take it, already. C'mon. C'mon c'mon c'mon. Doesn't hurt or nuthin'. Look, I'll even go first!

Lucas, from Lucas and Odessa: 3 points. Surly bastard came in first, good for him.

He's not in his twenties. He's not cute. And he's not really very good at anything. SCORE. He does play the violin, but he ended up losing most of his Sue-points for chain-smoking and drinking. Lucky! Except, uh, kind of not.

Odessa, from Lucas and Odessa: 6 points. Odessa lost Sue-points, too, mostly for being fat. But not enough. She's an appalling teenaged angst-bomb. You can't really make up for that. But hey, at least she doesn't have lavender eyes or amnesia.

Maira, from Sparkneedle: 13 points. Horrifying. At first, it looked like she was neck-and-neck with Lucas, and even pulled ahead halfway through.
Fat, ugly, generally unpleasant, it was in the bag. But she never really recovered after the ten-point OMG I HAV WINGZ penalty. Crap.

Drimmer, from Sparkneedle: 16 points. Mock-demon, pulling up the rear. Drimmer loses. He loses big. He's still an "Anti-Sue," according to the site ratings, but he's the Sue-i-est thing I draw. I'm not surprised, not really. I knew that. I went in knowing that. He's cute as a button. I knew that would cost me.

...

I REGRET NOTHING.

Atrocity Tourism: 50 Reasons to Stop Sketching at Conventions.

Or should this go under comics? Eh. Don't matter.

Seein' as how I've been sorta, kinda wrangled into heading out to Ohio for Fallcon this year with m'buddies Dirk and The Marvelous Patric, this tends to resonate. Link stolen from Lea's Livejournal, on account she always finds the good stuff first.

Tomorrow: All my characters are Mary-Sues. And I have proof.

Blikada A-Go-Go!

Yup. Page seven, now. Gotta keep the pace up. Check the comics section.

Sorry about the lack of updates, recently. But... You know. The Sims 2. I'm amazed I've gotten even this much done, I've been spending all my time on custom clothes for electronic dolls these days.

I've discovered turning up the contrast makes the Blikada files a few kilobytes smaller, so expect me to keep that up. I lose detail that way, but it's better than having these pages swell even more grotesquely in the future, once the scenery becomes more complicated.

T-minus two pages until actual dialogue. Who's excited?

Good Bye.

Playing with my dolls. Distracted until further notice.

See you guys after the initial overdose.

(PS: NUDE PATCH, PLZ. )

Why, What's This? It's A Brand New Blikada Page!

Yup. Page number 6. That's about five-and-a-half pages farther than I thought I'd get! Keen!

It's not a PNG. I'm still uploading 'em as GIFs. Nothing I could do would make the potential PNG under 200 kb, so.... yeah. I guess 180-ish is better than nothing.

Head over to the comics section and read!

Two or three more pages and I think I'll let myself put a "Now Playing!" banner at the top of the index page and everything. MOVIN' ON UP.

Atrocity Tourism: "apachearrow" Vs. Nintendo.

Been a while since we went gawping, hasn't it? Let's fix that.

You might already know about Snopes.com, urban legend debunking site of choice for intarweb skeptics and killjoys everywhere. But maybe you didn't know about their forums, such as the "We've Got Mail!" messageboard, dedicated to some of the more unusual emails that show up in the site's mailbox.

The site recently began getting emails from an anonymous man claiming to be the true creator of Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Donkey Kong, The Mushroom Kingdom, Kirby, and pretty much every other major Nintendo icon of the past twenty years. It turns out that Mario is based on a friend of his from the Navy who died of brain cancer, but then some art students stole all the drawings and sold them to the Japanese, who changed Mario's name to "Jumpman" for the original Donkey Kong game, but then changed it back to Mario and added Luigi and the rest of it in follow-up games just to mock him in his powerlessness. Oh, and they've been slowly strip-mining his 30-year-old sketchbook for concept art for the past three decades, bilking him out of millions.

I think. Or something. I dunno, he's not a big fan of punctuation.

It goes on for thirteen glorious pages, and it starts right here. The artist in question is posting as "apachearrow," and he really starts losing his shit around page four.

Also, he blames the Navy for causing him "mental problems."

Shocking.

Super Jumbo Economy-Sized Fan Art Premiere!

Yup. I've actually gotten enough of this stuff to justify posting it! Tell me that's not a reason to smile. Well, for me, anyway.

This one should come first, on account it's already been on the blog a while. Myra drew this ages and ages ago: adorable, baby-fied versions of Maria and Drimmer from Sparkneedle. This is painful cuteness. Weaponized cuteness. You could drop these guys on bunkers in Afghanistan.

This one was a really pleasant surprise I found waiting for me one morning on the Girlamatic messageboard. Drimmer from Sparkneedle, as drawn (and lovingly manhandled) by Sarah. It literally made my day, as fan art tends to do.

Poor Drimmer. He's not really prepared for this kind of experience.

More Drimmer. Popular little monkey, isn't the? Me, I think it's the nose.

This is probably the first drawing of Drimmer in existence by anyone other than me. I gave Zack a sneak-peek at Sparkneedle back when the first chapter was a work-in-progress a long, long time ago, and he dropped this on me a couple days later: Drimmer, in the iron grip of unspeakable, gibbering terror. Which suits him, really.

I like to imagine a huge wrecking ball coming at him.

Speaking of Zack...

FIRST PIECE OF BLIKADA FAN ART EVER! Well, fan-coloring, actually. But it counts!

Zack went ahead and surprised me again much more recently, this time with a colorized version of the predator-thing from Blikada. I'm really pretty thrilled he made it all hyena-ish; I was going for a "mangy grassland scavenger" feel when I first drew it. I guess it translates. Or maybe it's all just a neat coincidence? Either way, I'm happy.

And finally, riding read guard, the only existant piece of Lucas and Odessa fan art in the whole wide world, by Ainsley Seago. Click the thumbnail to see it properly, in all its exquistely-inked hugeness, along with a bit of Ainsley's classwork. I love Lucas, especially. He looks exactly as pissy and surly as he should.

Sarah, Myra, Zack, Ainsley: Thanks. I dig you all.

Sparkneedle's Back!

I hope you've all kept your eyebrows pretty limber these past few months, because it's time once again to arch them in confused dismay and KEEP 'EM THAT WAY. Sparkneedle's here! A week later than I woulda liked, but that's okay. Shit happens.

Click here to see the first installment of chapter two, and bear witness to my newest attempt to squeeze blood from a few more stones.

Who's happy? I'm happy. Be happy with me. I love doing this comic.

Quote of the Day.

Excerpted from a Something Awful forum thread about alternative comics, and found wedged in between a gushing review of Craig Thompson's Blankets and a recommendation that we all pick up Coober Skeeber #2.

Sayeth "DonTheJeweler:"

Superhero comics kick-ass. Look most of the stuff I buy isn't superhero. However, It has its place. Who doesn't wanna see Capt. America kicking the shit out of Nazi's, who doesn't wanna see Wolverine tear someone to shreds, who doesn't wanna see Superman and Doomsday wrecking buildings left and right trying to save the world. It's people like you guys who caused the industry to crash in the eraly 90's. Get over it, you can try and be different with your choices, and granted there is some great non-superhero stuff out there. Let's face it Comics can't survive without superheros.

...

Ah. Well, I've got some work to do, haven't I?

Better find a chalkboard. Gotta scratch out I WILL NOT BRING ABOUT THE FALL OF THE COMICS INDUSTRY BY BUYING COPIES OF EIGHTBALL a hundred times!

Check Out my Interview This Month in Third Coast Press!

The September issue of the free monthly newspaper Third Coast Press should be ready for snaggin' in and around the Chicago area. I'm in it, along with a few other area doodlers (and one of the not-so-local variety). I got interviewed! I submitted a photo! I'm excited! I'll scan and post the thing when I get my hands on a copy. I'll be keeping an eye out in the local comic and coffee shops for it.

I like interviews. They make me feel lovely.

Another Blikada Page!

Last one, knowing me. Head to the Comics section for a gander.

These pages just keep getting huger, don't they? Sorry about that. Really. Those of you still on dial-up must be really feeling the burn. I'd use PNGs instead of GIFs, but I'm still not convinced they're universally supported. Ack.

To answer a few questions, though: I'm not really planning on coloring this comic. The real attraction of it for me (other than stretching my nerdy little world-building muscles) is how quickly I can get the pages done. Color would add another day to the production. Blikada's just a goofy afterthought in comparison to my other stuff, and doesn't really merit it. Not yet, anyway. Sorry, Zack.

And don't worry, I am going somewhere with this. It's not another Sparkneedle. I wouldn't do that to you guys.

Does This Mean God is an Obnoxious Vegan Hippie?

Bounced down to the local health-nut store yesterday to stock up on my preferred brand of multivitamin, and I noticed this.

"Food for Life" breads. They claim to be Bible-based, although I don't remember too many recipes squeezed in between the screeds about plagues and golden hemorrhoids and cud-chewing rabbits and what-not. Maybe my Bible is defective.

I read the copy on the back of the packaging. The bread's apparently made without flour, although I can't figure out how the hell that works. The Food for Life people think that if we all ate Biblically, we wouldn't be so goddamn fat and horrible like we are. Which is probably true, but I guess the Amazing Wandering In the Deserts of the Sinai Peninsula for Forty Years Diet was too hard a sell, so they just bake this bread instead.

This "7 Sprouted Grains" stuff was stored next to the obscenely vile vegetable protein "Skallops" and "Chik Chunks." That's not a good sign.

Is this stuff in mainstream grocery stores, yet? Are there ads on TV? I'm curious. I've seen news items referring to Bible diets before, but that's usually just and bunch of people holding hands and swaying back and forth in a church basement, beseeching God not to let them eat fifteen pies today.

New Blikada Page!

Last one for ages, too, I'm sure.

Behind again on email. I'll remedy that tomorrow.