And another illustration that didn’t make it into the final version, depicting a character who bears scars from many adventures:

The running gag in the whole thing involves a character called Bellephant, who also appeared in a comic I did for Unwinnable some time ago. Bellephant works well enough as a stand-in character in situations where using a whole-assed character would seem like a vulgar display of power, but would you believe Bellephant has an origin story?

Well, sort of. You see, back in elementary school when my creativity wasn’t hobbled by self-consciousness or a sense of shame, I didn’t encounter any of the problems I describe in that Unwinnable article. I just blasted out characters and went with them, never stopping to consider the possibility that these characters were very dumb or that they were  clearly stolen from Berkeley Breathed. But I did have one character that seemed incredibly stupid even to a young Bee Tee Dee, a minor player in a series about adorable talking dinosaurs called Dumbbell Dinosaur. Yes,  Dumbbell Dinosaur, who lived his life inside a bell, and who was a very stupid dinosaur. I don’t remember a lot of specifics about the comics in which he appeared, but I think he’d usually show up on the scene, knock some stuff over, and irritate everyone. And of course, he even looked kind of irritating! Unfortunately, I don’t have any old drawings of him from back in the day, but here is a pretty accurate depiction of what he looked like:

Of course, as a clear-thinking adult, I was able to look at this character, say “hey, those kinda look like elephant feet”, and change his name to Bellephant.

Now THAT, my friends, is an origin story!

And you can do the same! My gift to you, a desktop background!  At least you got something out of that comic! Looking back on it, I think I did a decent job concocting screenshots for an imaginary NES game based on the Replacements album Tim, essentially imagining a “Kiss Me On The Bus” level as something akin to the weird mini-games from the deplorable Back To The Future NES game and a speaker-kicking mini-game based on the “Bastards of Young” music video.

But I think a lot of that got lost in the cramped layout of the comic, and besides, it all seems kind of paltry when indie game designers are making actual playable games based on similarly inane concepts! Maybe it’s not quite as exciting as new desktop wallpaper, but a fully fleshed-out game is nothing to sneeze at!

Presentation is really important! A vanishingly small idea works best when it’s presented on a grotesque large scale (like 1280 x 1024!), some might say. At any rate, I need to figure out a way to make web resolution work FOR me, not against me. I should also write things that will appeal to other human beings!

For a brief period during my junior year of high school, after the skit comedy show I worked on  (unfortunately named Pure Swank) fizzled due to lack of interest/lack of talent/interference from teachers with no sense of humor, I was set on making a comedy horror movie with zombies. Wow! What a visionary I was, right? I had the idea of making a funny zombie movie years before Shaun of the Dead!

I could probably go on believing that I coulda been Edgar Wright but unfortunately I have a vague recollection of the script I wrote, and I’m pretty sure my zombie movie – which was called The Dead Ones, because I was a Young Ones fan (ugh) – would’ve sucked. But the world is safe from ever having to view this idiocy thanks to my poor casting choices!

I’m not speaking of Zegen here. I’m sure he would’ve been hilarious if I actually wound up taping the scenes he was supposed to be in. The problem was I cast an UNKNOWN as the lead!

In the mildly-embarrassing graphic novel I wrote about my participation in Ridgewood High School’s public access TV station, I said that the freshmen kids who were trying to get involved with the TV studio looked up to us and it’s sort of TRUE! There were 3 or 4 kids who thought it was cool that we were making comedy skits to air on the high school’s Thursday night public access share. Nobody else in the school gave a flying fuck about it, but these kids ate it up! These were youngsters who still had the ability to get enthused about stuff.

They were a little annoying at times, but when it came time to try and make my zombie movie, I definitely wanted those kids involved! The script, as dumb as it was, was extremely ambitious and called for luma key shots, make-up, and a lot of other pain-in-the-ass bullshit that weary high school juniors probably would’ve blown off in favor of huffing Carbona at the FuncoLand or something.

So I cast a freshman who seemed enthusiastic about the project as the main character, and on our one and only day of shooting I discovered that he was indeed enthusiastic. Way too enthusiastic! In retrospect, maybe I should have tried to at least get him to read something for me before I dragged him and a couple of people out to the woods with a borrowed VHS camera to tape his giddy, awkward performance.

The raw footage was annoying,  the project was doomed! I mean, I didn’t know much about directing or whatever, but having an actor who didn’t act very well appear in every single scene just seemed like a very bad idea,  you know? So that was that. I considered getting someone else in for part, but the kid was just SO EXCITED about the project that I couldn’t imagine telling him that he was going to be replaced. Anyway, who the hell else wanted to be involved with this nonsense? Most people probably knew I was in over my head.

It drives me crazy; if only I’d had that much trouble getting all of my projects off the ground in high school! I’d have so much less to be embarrassed about.

Adorable! Here’s the hutt couple sharing a milkshake:Nice table, eh? Next up, the Hutt couple in a hot tub. Or, sure, a hutt tub:

Water displacement humor! Now, a real treat for you! The same dumb see-saw gag from 2 angles!

Well, that’s about all for now. Mee jewz ku to you!

Hey! Did I forget to mention my Home Alone fan fiction in this space? Shame on me! Also, shame on me for writing Home Alone fan fiction!
The piece of shit you see above will not be my last comic of 2011! As Yoda once said, there is another…

CLEARLY this dude was using teh Street View!

My approach to drawing comics is a little too literal, and I feel like I always feel like need some kind of reference. Consequently, I now have a hard drive filled with pictures like this:

In the documentary Crumb, Crumb says he had a friend drive him around some city, taking pictures of mundane city sights so he could better capture the utilitarian clutter of an urban landscape; it usually turns out looking too tidy and organized if you just try to guess what some typical American shithole might look like.  I get out even less often than R. Crumb, so I had to rely on Google Street View to make the landscape authentically hideous in a panel from the graphic novel I’ve been working on for the last 100 years!

And it’s not even the first time I’ve used Street View for a reference! While I was sketching out a panel for that silly comic I did about ED-209 from Robocop, the sort of background I kept envisioning was very similar to an intersection I used to walk by every day on my way home from school. Since I was gonna wind up drawing it anyway, I figured I might as well get some reference:

It doesn’t look very impressive, but I think I threw in enough little details to satisfy anyone who’s a fan of the intersection of East Glen and Sheffield!

Then there are people who are actually doing interesting things based on images from Google Street View, like the painter Bill Guffey, who’s done some great Hopper-ish paintings.

Oh AND I just ran across this extremely impressive short film about some sort of desk ornanment going on an adventure in Google Earth.

As for me, I’m still holding out for that web application that allows you to play Final Fight in your own neighborhood!

First off, my dual muses Jake and Anne. The world has probably forgotten by now, but a while back they made some sort of romantic comedy/softcore, and Entertainment Weekly took naked pictures of them to promote it. The pictures were SO AWESOME that Entertainment Weekly did a split run, as if some Love and Other Drugs megafan was going to collect all of ‘em.

They published thumbnails of the different variations and I was looking at them one day, wondering if there was some weird stuff  going on outside of the frame… Maybe something like this:

Or this:

I’m not sure how many of those I set out to do originally, but I crapped out after 2. Sorry folks!

What else do we got? Well, there’s this one, inspired by Mötley Crüe:

Get it? Whew. Then we have this thing, inspired by the Goofus and Gallant cartoons in Highlights magazine:

Looks Delicious! Well, I’ll leave you with Norman Mailer and Norris Church. Is she related to that guy from MTV News?

That reminds me, I need to brush off my scanner sometime…

I also made this:

I figure I’ll try and post a short strip like this or some such silly crap every once in a while. But I sure won’t be posting one next week, ’cause I’m gettin’ married! For more details on this, become one of my close personal friends!

So apparently Eric Fournier, the man who was apparently behind the internet phenomenon Shaye St. John has died, and though I’m not sure that he’s really dead or that he really was Shaye, apparently I’m gonna blog it. This ain’t Newsweek!

I wish I had a little bit of journalistic acumen or something and could at least give you a bit of concrete info about Fournier and maybe how he came up with the character or some such bullshit, but, according to an article on the prestigious wikibin, “No commentary or insight about Shaye Saint John has ever been presented to the public by her creators.” All I know is that Fournier was a presence in the Bloomington, IN punk scene of the 80′s as a member of hardcore band Blood Farmers, and someone named Eric Fournier is listed as the director of 2004′s Shaye and Kiki, the only commercially-available piece of Shayeanna.

The only background that I could find is Shaye St. John’s fictional backstory, which was summed up well enough in an article on some site called lollipop.com:

The idea/story/mythos behind Shaye Saint John is that she was a hot woman who was horribly disfigured in a car accident. As a result, she appears in public wearing this weird-ass, creepy as fuck mask, and hobbles along with clunky prosthetic legs and hands. Her mind appears to have sustained a bit of damage as well, as the numerous short films, bits of wisdom, and assorted clickables on her website can attest.

I would say that Shaye St. John represented a bold new strain of alternative comedy, but I have no idea what those words mean. I just think that anyone who can find the yuks in Neil Hamburger’s shtick should be able to appreciate this finely-crafted nightmare fuel/comedy.

I’m not sure what makes Shaye so disturbing. Is it the hacked-up mannequin parts, including a mask that bears a frightening resemblance to Carl von Cosel’s girlfriend? The burned-up baby doll she sometimes talks to? The disembodied chipmunk voice spewing gibberish about “modeling sesh-ons” and “kitty candy”? The whiplash editing and random use of video filters and sound effects? The honky-tonk website with Progeria-victim wallpaper and annoying autoplay sound?  I don’t fucking know. Whatever the case, don’t worry – it’s only disturbing until it becomes HILARIOUS.

It’s particularly hilarious to watch it with a group of people and observe their reactions, and when I watch it alone it is, OK, ever so slightly terrifying. But I’ll tell ya, this is great date movie material! And it is on Netflix!

We can only hope that Fournier pulled a ‘Zmuda and had someone lined up to don the mannequin parts and play Shaye for the rest of eternity… Right, gang? We’re hoping for that, aren’t we?