I absolutely had no idea what this page was going to look like when I started drawing. I basically just had the plan "they put on funny outfits" and whatever was gonna happen happened. This explains a LOT, don't it?
2022-05-25 15:13:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Truly, the work of science and magic at their most dark and depraved... though if Eris had been creating DIGIMON, that'd clearly be a different story, since we all know there's not a single Digimon design that's in any way creepy or unsettling whatsoever.
By the way, has the music cue played during the first half of episode 18's fight scene been used in the show before this? I dunno if I just never noticed it before, but it's SUPER Mega Man-sounding. I approve.
2022-05-25 09:17:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, this whole blog is gonna be full of qualifying statements and strained rationalizations and desperate attempts to justify some really half-baked concepts. More than usual, I mean. For one thing, I’ve gotta sell an audience of otaku on an example of Contemporary Christian Music. I know, believe me, I know. The two worst things any art form can do is (1) strain to be as unobjectionably palettable to the mass audience as possible and (2) have some moralizing point that it values over bei...
2022-05-24 13:26:29 +0000 UTC View Post
My ninja skills are SLIGHTLY exaggerated for comedic effect here... but only slightly. I really did spoil their plans to get a bigfoot sighting on me my just wandering right up as soon as they got the idea. It's hardly the first time I've ruined everybody's fun by my very presence.
Oh, but just for the record: there is very rarely a direct correlation between the pictures I post and where I actually am at the moment I post them. That's ninja rule no. 1.
2022-05-24 08:41:52 +0000 UTC View Post
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
~Mel Brooks
And this is the toned down version. My initial idea was some form of cross-referencing episodes 15 and 17 and drawing the conclusion that unwanted sexual advances are always funny. Another entry in The Big Book Of Terrible Lessons From Anime. And honestly, part of me still wishes I'd gone with that, because I feel like version goes too soft of people to try to overlook this stuff. 2022-05-19 17:39:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I tried to imagine the most generic, all-purpose "anime director" character possible, and it turned out looking like Hayao Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno got combined in a transporter accident. Man, there's a freaky thought...
Also, serious grown up animation at work.
2022-05-11 07:41:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Technically speaking, the "repeatedly" part of Step 2 is untrue, but only because Step 3 prevented me from actually getting into the other parking deck. I really wasn't the one I was supposed to be looking for, though, which I probably would have been able to figure out a lot quicker if the touchscreen would actually switch languages when I told it to. For the record, all this crap only happened on Friday. I parked in the right spot Saturday and Sunday because I'd managed to...
2022-05-11 05:46:04 +0000 UTC View Post
I know it's a pretty big cheat to use copy/paste screencaps for half the comic, but I do NOT trust my ability to draw a spot-on Marlon Brando caricature enough to make this joke land. Hey, at least I'm the one person who would look at this subtitle and make an Island of Dr. Moreau joke rather than immediately thinking Dio Brando and making the 478,041,590,134,584,609th JoJo joke on The Internet.
Incidentally, I really need to find more excuses to make Mega Man references in my com...
2022-05-04 17:42:30 +0000 UTC View Post
...and the worst thing is, I totally relapsed AGAIN over Triad weekend. I've been pretty good about keeping that poison out of my body most of the time, but then the con madness hits, bad choices are made. Also, enjoy the REALLY obscure Homestar Runner reference!
So yeah, that's the ACTUAL last comic from Ichibancon 2022... just in time for me to nearly be done with the main Triad comics, so get ready for the Patreon exclusives from THAT con to start up next!
2022-05-03 19:54:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Yes, you read that title right. I’m doing another set of these anime theme blogs but with songs that *gasp* AREN’T FROM JAPAN! How dare I call myself a weeb? Well, first of all, I don’t. Second, we live in a world where “Roundabout” by Yes can officially call itself an “anime song.” Everybody from Duran Duran to Frank Sinatra can technically claim a spot on your anime theme playlist if you feel like it. If the creators are wacky enough to really fight for it (or, more importantl...
2022-04-29 21:40:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Cue snarky jokes about how you didn't even realize I spent more than FIVE minutes on these things.
No, but seriously, until you actually try to stitch some anime frames together yourself, you don't realize how often these scrolling shots change in a single second. Maybe the shot zooms in slightly, or the cells shift around independent ...
2022-04-27 05:08:07 +0000 UTC View Post
While working on the April Fools comic for 2022, I found myself looking back over the previous joke pages, and was reminded once again of how much I just LOVE the 2021 page. For those of you too busy/lazy to click on the link and read the whole comic for yourself, the 2021 April Fools was an ext...
2022-04-26 13:31:48 +0000 UTC View Post
IT'S NOT DEAD! See? It's still happening! Sorry, sorry, stuff piled up onto other stuff and I lost track of how long it'd been since the last page went up. And for the record, I haven't forgotten about the next Far Out There MadLib series either! I've got the rough drafts of that whole set of comics penciled out, so it really is happening too!
2022-04-26 07:58:08 +0000 UTC View Post
I mean, this sort of thing comes up a LOT when you need to balance the practical need of the bars to restrain a character with the artistic need to actually SEE the character clearly. For some reason, though, the added wrinkle of the shoulder pads just makes it that much funnier to me. Like, now I have to go from wondering why she doesn't squeeze through the cage to thinking about why she doesn't get stuck in MORE things.
Also, just for the record, this was the alternative t...
2022-04-21 00:45:45 +0000 UTC View Post
I seriously contemplated drawing myself with a fake Jay Leno chin here, but that just seemed like it'd unnecessarily complicate the joke. I ALSO contemplated referencing that thing where China tried to fix a city's smog problem by dynamiting a mountain so more wind would come through, which just gave the city MORE dust and smoke... but I might actually be owned by a Chinese conglomerate and nobody told me, so I'd better not.
Also, just how far are the towns in episode 12 from Seyr...
2022-04-13 19:40:56 +0000 UTC View Post
It's kinda weird that I wound up finishing this comic the same day that I ALSO wound up dragging a lot of furniture around my room and unpacking boxes and boxes of old books and magazines. Clearly, I'm not ALWAYS as lazy as the first panel suggests... but it's still a rare thing outside of convention weekends. And MAN does it hit me on convention weekends. Seriously, there's just something about having places to be and things to get done and deadlines to meet that, in small ...
2022-04-12 23:50:40 +0000 UTC View Post
I WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING QUESTIONS ON THIS TOPIC.
...though it IS kind of funny how sometimes the loud idiot can be my very LEAST favorite part of a show, and other times my MOST favorite. I think it's largely a matter of that character's placement in the broader context of the show. If the idiot is the main, central protagonist and the show bends over backwards to make things work out in spite of said idiocy, I hate that character. If the idiot is only in the sporting ...
2022-04-06 12:31:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, we covered the redhead half of this couple in the previous blog, so it only stands to reason that the green fishbowl would follow right after. Yes, just in case you missed the explanation last time, the half of Xeselgrox & Hanes that has a green tentacle face is NOT the one called "Xeselgrox", and how dare you make that assumption? Anyway, as weird, freaky alien-looking dude with green skin and tentacles for a mouth, it only stands to reason that Hanes’ musical genre of choice wou...
2022-04-01 09:27:05 +0000 UTC View Post
You have no idea how proud I am that I made it this far into the series before making an RPG joke. But seriously, this is ABSOLUTELY how I play RPGs: the slowest, boringest, most grindiest way possible. I went back and played Mario RPG for the first time in years not too long ago, and right away decided to hang out in Mushroom Way for longer than I was supposed to just to level Mario up a bit... then all of a sudden I realized I'd been been at it for hours. Next thing I knew...
2022-03-30 05:23:42 +0000 UTC View Post
I mean, for me at least, picking up on what's going on in the rest of the room is a BIT more important than just being aware when somebody else is about to walk into me. In fact, if you're following me on Twitter during a convention trip, you can roughly measure which parts of the weekend are the parts when I've got music playing, because that's when those out of context "Overheard" tweets mysteriously stop happening.
...but seriously, I don't care how bad you need to run to the b...
2022-03-28 13:56:12 +0000 UTC View Post
So, back when I was doing Giant Gorg, I was TOTALLY convinced Tominic was only in the show to tragically die at some point, seeing as how he was the only member of Team Good Guy who never showed up in the opening. I was kinda sorta completely wrong about that, but can you blame me when shows like Slayers are always pulling stunts like this? So yeah, this is basically the Giant Gorg comic...
2022-03-23 09:10:36 +0000 UTC View Post
So, I really genuinely thought I’d already written this blog at some point, to the point that I had to back through the whole list of published blogs and double check that it wasn’t already there… TWICE. I dunno, maybe I started working on it but got distracted and never finished it, or many I just thought about it so hard that it FELT like I’d written it. Or maybe I just posted this somewhere else and forgot about it. That’d be spectacularly on brand of me. If the deja vu's r...
2022-03-22 17:04:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Lina Inverse would make a terrible YouTuber. She's too reserved and drama-free. But seriously, guys, they do the "Lina eats a crapton of food" gag SOOOO much!
Also, confession time: My original idea was to also have a whole column of Slayers-centric YouTube stereotype thumbnails in the recommended section on the right. Buuuut that would have taken even longer to put together than the main picture, and this comic was already a day late as it was. Alas, you'll just...
2022-03-17 18:14:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey look, we’ve hit peak obscurity! Yes, I made Character Soundtracks for those two random nitpickers who have to constantly babysit Aunt Domino! THOSE two! Who even remembers those two exist? Did you? Don’t lie! But yeah, I did this. In fact, I kind of did it twice! It’s pretty clearly established in the comics that Xeselgrox and Hanes are a couple, and at first my plan was to buck convention and do one single soundtrack for the BOTH of them… but then I started overthinking things an...
2022-03-16 01:20:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Yep, here we go again with more of these things!
And just for the record, the only exaggeration on this page is the cliff at the end, and even then only barely. My directions really did inexplicably send me down some unfamiliar bypass one morning, and I really did nearly crash on some really sudden turns it gave me confusing instructions about. I'm used to this drive only being down the Interstate, so it really threw me off to suddenly have to make sense of intersections and...
2022-03-15 04:42:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I mean, this is what I think the first time I see ANY form of laser blade in a work of fiction.
Also, it's always nice to see Yoink getting to perform the role she was originally intended for, blatantly quoting other works, instead of being relegated to me getting all meta about recycling my own gags.
2022-03-10 02:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
This is smart, clever, satirical pop culture parody, right here. And if you think it's too obvious, well, my other idea for episode 6 was to draw Rezo and Zelgadis appearing on an episode of Jerry Springer. An obvious Star Trek joke was ABSOLUTELY the better option.
2022-03-02 08:29:03 +0000 UTC View Post
I really take pride in my ability as a writer to be VERY SUBTLE.
Fun Fact: the plan for the last panel was to be a regular, on-model drawing of Jenna... and it just didn't wanna happen. I had to erase and start over five or six times... and finally just gave up and drew a chibi Jenna out of frustration. As usual, the silly bit I did after I stopped trying wound up being way better than whatever I was working hard on.
2022-03-01 02:57:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, I had a really really REALLY long, rambling introduction for this blog that wove through everything from the repetitive themes in the films of Jess Franco to studio recordings vs. live performance in improvisational Jazz music to the nature of stand-up comedy to the fandom reactions to early Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic… but there’s a limit to how much self-indulgence I can tolerate from myself. So all those paragraphs are gone, and I’m gonna cut right to the c...
2022-02-27 01:31:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, the previous Character Soundtrack was for one half of the Xafri Twins, so I guess it’s inevitable that the next would be about the other half. And since Mahizam is a girl who runs around in tattered jeans, leather boots, studded belts and a big ol’ biker jacket, all topped off with a massive mane of long, unkempt hair, clearly her music of choice is soft orchestral easy listening… Actually, I say it as a joke, but anybody who’s read Far Out There for any meaningful leng...
2022-02-25 01:48:08 +0000 UTC View Post