Spike's Cartoons and Whinging

Templar Crapola.

Let's take peek at a few sketches while we wait for Templar to go live, shall we?

For those of you that missed the ten page preview that went up in place of Lucas & Odessa during the holidays, Templar's gonna be one of those comics that's just as much about the setting as about its inhabitants. Templar itself is a fictional city in Arizona, on a river that doesn't exist, and while the world Templar exists in is modern day, it's an "alternate history" sort of modern day.

The best (dorkiest) way I can explain it is that it's a little like that one episode of Sliders where the world is almost exactly the same, except the Golden Gate Bridge is the Azure Gate Bridge, and painted blue. Weird, but not totally foreign. Just not familiar.

Anyway, the fun part of shit like that is all the details. Like these.

Warren Ellis, Quentin Tarantino, and Chris Carter all agree: An alternate reality just isn't sufficiently alternate without its own brand of cigarettes. Templars smoke Buzz Bombs. They're unfiltered, come in chocolate, vanilla bean, citrus, mint, banana, and cognac, and are sold in little, refillable tins. Almost all the smokes sold in Templar are. That never went out of style, there.

As the cut-off text in the corner says, Bolivian food is to Templar what curry is to London. It's just everywhere, and everyone eats it. The Sassy Cavy is a chain. It sells cheese-n-corn wraps, meat patties with boiled eggs in the middle, peanut soup, and, thanks to Templar's weird, overly-specific liquor laws, illegally brewed corn beer.

I had a little too much fun making restaurants for Templar, most of which are shameless wish-fufillment.

The Sassy Cavy's mascot is, sensibly enough, The Sassy Cavy, and one of those creepy food-item-that's-thrilled-to-be-eaten mascots besides. It's a bowl of guinea pig soup. Not a guinea pig; guinea pig soup. It never gets out of the bowl.

A samson... which is a large, finger-to-shoulder piece of plastic armor, and not, despite all appearances, a cybernetic arm... is a required piece of of equipment for Templar's unofficial official sport. Official, becuase everyone plays it or watches it; unofficial, because a while back, in a fit of moralizing, the city banned its play and decreed that players be charged with misdemeanor assault.

It's kinda violent, y'see.

Of course, considering how many teams are made up entirely of sheriff's deputies and highway patrolmen and cops, the law isn't exactly enforced.

The teams have names like Unusually Aggressive Beggar, The Fetus Theives, Souljacker, Inevitable Brady Bunch Incest, and every other vaguely interesting phrase I've ever heard or come up with but couldn't use for anything else. Fun.

Anyway, that's it for now. More later, I guess.

Oh, and be sure to check out the links page, which is once more fit to be seen in public, thanks to del.icio.us and Feedsplitter. Yay!

Del.icio.us is Yummy.

"del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others."

There. The site just put it better than I could.

I've only had a del.icio.us account for a day or so, so it's a little anemic. But I've already found a few decent new sites I didn't know about, so it must be worth the effort. Also, I have a pompous preoccupation with looking for sites no one else has posted yet. Yay, elitism.

Check me out here.

Illustration Friday: Gluttony.

My very first thought when I read this weeks theme: Wow. Specific. There's no way in hell I'm going to do something about food, though. That's exactly what everyone else will be doing.

My second thought: Nothing with politics or a globe, either. Especially a globe being eaten.

Then I remembered something.

So off in the wilds of Alaska and Canada, there's this nasty little mountain predator called a wolverine. You've probably heard of it. But an alternate name for it, due to its repulsive hunting and eating habits, is glutton.

So this guy here, he's playing at being a glutton.

It's gluttony.

Ah. Another week, another I.F. just barely on topic.

You can view the rest of this week's entries, as usual, here.

Atrocity Tourism: Eye Talk.

Eye Talk! Because you're Asian, and you hate every fucking second of it!

A Japanese language instructional video for branded eyelid glue, to eliminate the appearance of those nasty, awful epicanthic folds. Jab yourself dangerously close to vital sensory organs with pink, plastic forks! Learn the secrets of glue distribution and master the quiet, desperate lie that is your glamourous new look! Note the excessive blinking of the Eye Talk model! Mmmm, burn-y.

This is bad. Almost as bad as those South African women buying fifteen tubes of fade cream at once and giving themselves full-body daily treatments. Yep. Almost. But not quite.

Abraham Todd: Now Appearing in Third Coast Press!

Those of you already familiar with Abe's exploits from the pages of Noxious Minutiae might be pleased to learn he has a new outlet for his exclusive brand of resigned suffering!

Third Coast Press, an awesome Chicago area newspaper, has picked up the strip! Look for it monthly in coffee shops, tea houses, comic book stores, college dorms, and anywhere else one might find free papers neatly stacked and bundled. Score!

And by the by, Rik Adamski, the editor-in-chief of TCP, has dreams of a full TWO PAGES of comics in his newspaper, preferably by local talent. Hint hint. Why not drop him a line? His contact information can be found in the paper.

The Man with the Smallest Penis in Existence and the Electron Microscope Technician who Loved Him.

Oh, yeah. You heard.

This is one of those flash animations you kinda suspect started out as a stupid joke between the animators. Not to say that's a bad thing. Anything involving Aaron Augenblick is okay by me.

I'd still like someone to explain that flying maxipad, though.

Atrocity Tourism: Paul Frecker's 19th Century Photography.

Memorial photography, that is.

This is easily one of the largest collections of memorial photographs I've ever seen online.

Memorial photography... photographing the deceased in their coffins or on their deathbeads as a final portrait of sorts.... was actually a fairly mainstream practice in America and some parts of Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (But despite what the movie The Others may have intimated, it never really caught on in Britain.)

A lot of the subjects of memorial photography were children. Cameras weren't always the commonplace family possession that they are now, and having oneself photographed was considered a special occasion. However, child mortality was much higher a hundred years ago, especially in infancy. Many never made it to see their first formal family portrait. Memorial photography was, in a way, necessary to preserve the reality of their short lives; years into the future, a photograph might be the only evidence that the child had existed at all. In other words, it wasn't considered morbid, but a legitmate expression of grief and an attempt to ease the finality of the loss.

Paul's collection is especially well-stocked with the corpses of infants and kids, trussed up in frills and bows and bonnets and posed on couches or in permabulators. One exqusitely creepy photo features a pair of children standing rigidly by the corpse of their recently expired sibling. I guess mom and dad wanted one last picture of the kids all together. Not to be outdone, other bereaved parents insisted on photographing their dead children with open eyes, and some quick thinkers managed to beat the clock by several days, commissioning "Dying in His Mother's Arms" portraits when the child's death became utterly inevitable. Gotta wonder if the kids invovled were lucid enough to figure out what was happening.

Memorial photography fell out of fashion when tragic and premature deaths became more preventable with the advancement of modern medicine, vaccines, pediatrics, hygiene, and a general improvement in the sciences of health and longevity. Modern people, much less familiar and comfortable with death and dying, tend to regard these photographs as pretty gruesome. That was never their intention. They're well and truly a reflection of their times, and that's exactly what makes them so damn interesting.

Winter Cleaning?

Two new comic banners, a new camshot, and a revamped bio page.

Jesus, look at all those guys squashed together up there. Is anyone else humming the Brady Bunch theme?

I Have Succumbed.

LIVEJOURNAL LIVEJOURNAL LOL

I'll be cutting Dashboard Confessional lyrics into my forearms and upping the contrast on wistful webcam self-portraits until my nostrils disappear into the glare of my forehead any day now.

So yes, I now have a Livejournal. A real one, not my nifty syndication account Dylan got me so LJ-ers can read my blog on their friends pages. All the bleach and steel wool in the world cannot wash away my shame, but at least now I can read Friends Only posts and own my comments.

It won't update, though. So you'll still have to come here. WHERE I CAN SEE YOU, PRECIOUS.

If you'd like for me to violate your privacy on a serial basis, friend me, add me, do whatever it is you crazy kids do. There's fun to be had, I'm sure.

Illustration Friday: The Seasons.

My very first Illustration Friday submission. This week's topic was "The Seasons."

...

See, it's, uhm... Persephone. And Hades. You remember that legend, right?

So yes, it's on topic. In its own special way.

I couldn't bring myself to take the topic too literally, honestly. Too easy to make it into the cover of a Hallmark card or a coffee mug illustration.

Wish I'd had time to paint this...

Illustration Friday!

Ooo. Now here's an idea. I'll have to try it out this Monday. I need this sort of flexibility in my creative life, I do so many comics that are planned out umpteen pages ahead already.

This might be a good chance to get a little more familiar with ArtRage, too.

Yet MORE Blikada!

Wow, I'm just crankin' 'em out, aren't I?

Page 14. Comics section.

BODY WORLDS!

Oh sweet merciful pink bouncing baby Jesus Körperwelten is coming to Chicago in February.

In case you didn't know, Körperwelten ("Body Worlds" in English) is an exhibition of partially flayed and plastinated corpses by awesome German doctor, teacher, and nutjob Gunter von Hagen. And I've literally been wanting to see this show for years. So excited. I'll have to sneak in a sketchbook.

New Blikada!

Lucky page number 13. Click on over to comics to see.

God Damn It.

Cooler than we'll ever be. Believe that.

I'm glad I got to see him present his last Eisner Awards this summer, and meet him the summer before that.

And he never got to finish his comic adaptation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Death needs a nutpunch.

OnlineComics.Net: Once again, I am officially the last to know.

Lisa turned me on to this.

OnlineComics.Net is sort of a self-promotional type deal for any cartoonist with at least ten pages of work viewable online. I stuck Blikada up there, and it's already seen a jump in readers, so the thing obviously works.

I know Spookable is hip, along with Eric Millikin from Fetus-X. Anybody else? Let's get a cabal going, already.

Also, don't forget: Five more preview pages of Templar are up where Lucas & Odessa should be, this week. Exciting!

Happy New Year! List ten people who won't live to see 2006.

NO WADING IN THE DEAD POOL YOU GUYS OK

Sure Things:

- Pope John Paul II. C'mon.

- Rosa Parks. C'mon.

- Kurt Vonnegut. Sorry, nerds. Check the birthdate.

- H. R. Geiger. Don't ask me why, I just feel it coming.

- Richard Pryor. We've been seeing less and less of him. And you know what that means.

- Michael Jackson, after he's found guilty. And he will be. Suicide.

- Courtney Love. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that little hand. (Cough.)

- Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Thyroid cancer? Never caught early. Never.

- King Fahd. Born in 1923. Diabetic. Living in Saudi Arabia. UHM.

- Jerry Lewis. Falling apart.

Honorable Mentions:

Fidel Castro.
Bob Barker.
George Carlin.

Wild Card:

Kelly Osbourne. Please.

Story Time!

Stolen from the "Jobs That Take Over Your Life" episode of the best reason to own a radio ever, the NPR show This American Life.

I love this story. Anyone who's ever had an office job for three seconds loves this story. You will love this story.

I'm probably not supposed to be doing this. Don't tell anyone.

Daniel Orozco - Orientation (Read by Matt Malloy)

I need to read more short stories. Problem is, there aren't enough of 'em like this.