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[09 Jul 2009|12:39pm] |
Rami Efal's "SEVEN LIES"...
...it's so wonderfully put together it gives me chills!
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| parts... |
[03 Jul 2009|11:21pm] |
I have jumbles of odd parts like this, doodles that often never get used, though most do...I’ve been doing more recently..keeping them loaded into heavy, layered photoshop work files..work01, work02, work03 and on.
My photoshop work file is like a drafting floor roughly 10 x 10 feet, and I work small and in the center of it, hodging and podging often 30, 60 layers of oddments that get scattered or else turned invisible while I work on layers above or below them. It’s the nimble work of a spider and it must look a bit strange to someone walking in on me with only the light from my monitor…heh
I received a letter today from the editorial administration at DC Comics…they’re launching a new database system and certain changes will go on to effect those ‘other people’ who do what I do, but do it for a living…heh…the cute thing though, was that they sent along this curious and thorough phone list of hundreds of people; Senior Vice Presidents/executive Editors, Art Directors, all manner of Editors…the Associate Editors, the Assistant Editors, the Senior Story Editors, the Group Editors, Editoral Director Editors, Editorial Accountants, …assistants, receptionists, and it goes on like that for DC, Vertigo, Wildstorm…it’s a whose who of people currently not without toilet paper or coffee and I dig that…heh
I need to get my ass to Chicago this August for the comic convention..it’s a hop-skip away.
Funny, the last time I was there I slept in the hotel lobby for two nights…thje guy with the sweeper finally corralled me into a seat by the pool…no carpet there see…heh…some guest of the hotel came down to the lobby in the wee hours and played Beatles tunes on that big tiger shark of a piano. He played well, but that piano could’ve thrown him if it wanted to.
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| COMICS! |
[03 Jul 2009|08:17am] |
Fridays at ACT-I-VATE just got a little more peculiar and a whole lot colder.:)
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[01 Jul 2009|03:47am] |
…I feel like I aught to explain myself a bit after that last entry…
you see, my housemate, “the Duder” is an alcoholic. Also, he’s a dear sweet friend and has more or less fallen five or six stories in the last couple of months. He and I are both recovering shut-ins, pretty much astronauts living as if crash landed on Madison’s Isthmus, so we see a lot of each other and I’m a pretty alert housemate. I explore the Island and now and then I get the Duder to explore it with me, but it seems as though almost nothing I’ve done or said in the last year has really helped him, but of course for the present moments themselves, and those are great…I adore the guy…I even get a kick out of all of his tall tales.
The Duder is not only happy to fatten up an otherwise real account with all manner of extra bullshitery, but often he’ll simply start from bullshit and work his way earnestly towards a state of ’absolute bullshit’. More often than not I’ll just grin and wave them off, already neck deep by then…with the Duder ducking gunfire somewhere on the dark continent, or watching people being shot in South Vietnam, and with his bachelors degree in quantum physics, or writing freelance political articles under a non-deplume and with a typewriter that for the better part of a year has been covered with empty beer cans, with ashtrays, booze-soaked playing cards and a variety of random chunder…most recently, not quite noon yet and into a second, maybe third vodka concoction and let’n me have it with some story about having some deadline to meet with regards to a closing page in the Smithsonian magazine he was hired to write…follows me out on the porch with his laptop, and after less than twenty minutes and three ’bummed’ cigarettes worth of poking around on the keys, he sets the laptop aside and announces, “I hate writing.”
Another funny thing about the Duder is his appetite.
Imagine a ten year old kid who happens to be a heavy drinker…or maybe better yet, just imagine the appetite of a typical fairgrounds rat. I’ve seen him make a dish out of spaghetti noodles with teriyaki sauce and boiled pre-fried eggs, spike it all off with hot sauce and steak seasoning, and following that with subhuman grunts, face glazed in it’s holding pattern just above his plate…heh
Some nights it’ll be getting a bit late, the day spent and gone, and the gaggle of neighbors lift their camp and go celebrate somewhere else…the Duder will shuffle in and sink into the couch, and in no time at all he’ll fall asleep with his thin arms wrapped about his chest and he’ll be hardly there at all.
And this breaks my heart, right? It does. It’s here and gone, but it’s lays me low as hell.
That, and it makes me miss my eldest brother Michael, and I worry after him.
anyhoo...enough of that stuff...I've got comics come'n.
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[29 Jun 2009|11:06am] |
It’s disquieting, even ‘objectionable’, just how much alcohol gets swigged down and swallowed here in Madison…the sounds of bottle caps plinking and so many, many beer cans snapping are only two of the many scores of expressions that ‘time’ makes just prior to being wasted here…
”nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia”…
I know, that’s painting in broad strokes, and sure enough, “nothing is a waste that makes a memory”…but it’s late, and the feeling, the itch, it’s raw and red here - you see, there is a famine here, a famine of both sense and purpose…nearly every night, or every other night, this house, that house, the other house, they’re all playing host to a cognitive surplus, as if everyone present were immortal and bored, everyone lax to experience anything if not while intoxicated…watching the same movies, having the same conversations, as if a lullaby is what they’re really after.
Seemed as though there was the promise of “sense & purpose” when I moved here, but it was just a mirage created by the sweet air from off the lake...
I sit on the porch drawing the portrait of a nude woman reclining on a pillow. Her lips are a full bow of dozy smiles. She’s just made love. Some unnamable need was left unsatisfied, but she smiles for her lover who she adores but secretly wishes would leave her now so that she could cry herself to sleep with her unnamable need flirting just out of the reach of her drowsy thoughts.
A neighbor from across the street; a young man I’ve never seen before has stepped out the second story window and sits on the chin of his roof to catch the breeze. We wave at one another and grin.
Just below me are three rabbits jooking and darting about…
To my back is our house, and just the other side of the wall is a living room that is almost criminally disordered and just as hot. Duder is passed out on the couch, floating listlessly amid a stale sea of chunder - I’d have to pay a chunder-accountant more money than I make in a year to poke around and audit the chunder in that room. Just a glance, merely passing through and stealing a look about the room is to suffer a vulgar blow of depression…to sleep in it, I can scarcely imagine the danger to one’s heart…heh…and yet the Duder drifts on, near a half a full day brought to a halt after some derisory wave of the white flag.
I’ve felt this week as though behind my eyes and deep behind my brow there is a grave and persuasive pressure, like some teetering kettle of tears tottering back and forth to bawl over a great many somethings that have appealed over their warrant of weariness…to wake up in this place with another mouth full of blood, squeezing my face over the bathroom sink, forcing the dribble of filth from a grateful exit in my gums…to wake up in this place again, lapsing off again from yet another night-before where people have and will spend the afternoon, the evening and wee hours celebrating a whole lot of ’nothing’…raising their glasses to toast the famine of sense and purpose, over and over again…and I’m reminded of that terrible experiment where a living frog is slow-cooked, where the temperature is progressively raised just slowly enough that the frog never realizes it’s being grilled alive.
In their defense I should say that their giggles are sincere enough giggles…it’s for something else that I brood.
I know it’s only melancholy...and that life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. "Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I." So I walk it off like a twisted ankle…
A few blocks from here, just up East Washington is a spot I always linger at, if just to marvel through the fence where someone has caged the remnants of a clock tower’s spire that had been otherwise lost to a fire. The remains look every bit like the fallen crown of a child’s toy castle, or some steam-punk vision of a rocketship-apartment…and this broken marvel simply sits there, roasting in the sun and bathing in the moon behind a tall chain-linked fence, where it’s Roman numeral clock’s face waits on with a plucky persistence for something ‘unnamable’…
...
As I mentioned before, I've submitted another story to the Zuda competition...still no word on that just yet, but I thought I'd share an odd "page one" that I wound up excising from my submission to make room for a wee more story...it was fun to piece together, but I suppose it really doesn't quite belong.
( SNEAK-PEEK )
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[28 Jun 2009|10:59am] |
My confession...:)
It’s been hot recently. The backdoor is just to the left of my ‘bedding’, just a slice of memory-foam atop a mattress so small my feet hang over, and I’m only like 5.9. I’ve been keeping the door peeled open, though it isn’t doing too much to keep the sweat beading on me until it’s an unbroken membrane of perspired percolation, a full-body leotard of roasted corn syrup…and I’m laying ‘thusly’ late last night when all of a sudden I hear a woman’s moaning and squealing from just next door. She’s no more than fifteen feet away and separated by no more than two flimsy window screens, and suddenly, no porn I’ve ever seen, nor sex I’ve ever had sounded so marvelous, so bewitching. My cock was entirely disposed to cutting it’s way through my pants unless I gave it some air…a full half an hour later and she’s still squealing…I’m practically tied in knots…my calf’s, the both of them are charley-horsing like mad, my lips are dry from a sprang jaw fixed forever in locked astonishment, my eyes are watering, and this woman suddenly falls silent………………perhaps ten minutes tick by…I’ve started to pilot my submersible down, down, beginning to drift off just when I hear her again…a short but powerful flurry of yips and whines, and this goes on for another few minutes…I’m nearly hypnotized, unable to move, my ears have become like radar dishes, my own heartbeat is like a jazz tom being struck with marshmallows…I’m soaked, sweat bleeding through to the carpet……
Suddenly the woman’s house is erupt with shouts, with conflict…two, three, four women yelling at one another. The bars have closed and the street is alive with people strolling drunkenly home, singing, laughing, shouting, stuttering, shuffling…
It’s hot as I’ve said, and so I’ve taken to tossing my sock hat in the freezer, and after it’s good and frozen I doff it on for a short bliss of the blessed…amen. I grab the frozen clop of hat and stuff the thing down the front of my pants…this is good, in fact it’s grand, but just then it’s not enough. I strip down and slide into a cold, cold shower and eventually slip into another fevered doze…amen.
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| Zuda #2 |
[26 Jun 2009|12:58am] |
I emailed Zuda my second contest submission yesterday morning.
“It’s A Good Thing That Bees Aren’t The Size Of Barn Owls”
So far as I know, the housefly above isn't in the story. :)
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[30 May 2009|02:52pm] |
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music |
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Just=Cause - Broken Social Scene |
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I read this sterling review of FLOWING WELLS just a bit ago:)
"Every so often there comes along a webcomic that's just so fucking incredibly bad I wanna beat the shit out of a bus load of Nuns. Whoever gave this son-of-a-bitch a pencil and paper should be ashamed of themselves." - another goob with a gob...heh
Good Christ...heh
...
unrelated ( more or less )...
If I had any reason to doubt it before, I'm certain of it now...I'm worn down to the fuck'n bone. I don't know what a "rope-dick-dog" is honestly, but I feel like one, that's no shit.
All the same, life has a sort'a "take it or leave it" atmosphere that's none to sympathetic to quitters whether they're fools or not, so...
( SNEAK-PEEK )
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[27 May 2009|07:22am] |
Well kids, this May's Zuda contest is near about wrapped up, and in the surge that generally occurs in the final days of the month "Flowing Wells" has been booted back down to the eighth spot.
I left the lion's share of my success in the hands of chance this time around, and so I can't honestly worry over much about the results...heh...it was sweet just for kicks. Be that as it may, I'm going to be submitting another comic with the hopes of getting in the July competition and the bells & whistles I'm currently piling onto this thing are more or less obnoxious! :)
I was pondering on just what sort'a comic to submit next and tinkering on a few ideas when this 1966 vintage monster movie revisited my memory with a dear flood of thundering effluvia:)
It's going to be a monsterous atomic hubbub!!!
See ya soon!
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[25 May 2009|05:34pm] |
I pretty much have every intention of dying of old age, so the very likely future as represented by this particular Ted Talks video may well be the most depressing window into the September of my years as I've ever sat through...for a wealth of reasons, the very least having anything to do with Science fiction.
I'm hereby welcoming any sympathetic Alien passerbys to please give me and my friends a lift of this sinking rock.
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[15 May 2009|03:51am] |
Well, hey, FLOWING WELLS has been bumped up to seventh place here in the last couple of nights.
So far, the reviews I've gotten have pretty much mirrored most people's general boredom with my delivery...heh
I certainly dig it, and I'm enjoying it, so I might finish it, a couple of screens a week maybe while I tinker on something else, something a lot stronger. Not to play the pity-card, but I'm gonna need a win in the coming months in order to pay for the obnoxious bill my surgery( s ) is gonna pile up. It still is a novelty-universe :)
cheers all! And special thanks to Dino for really just dive'n in and helping to spread the good word about FLOWING WELLS - you're a sweetheart :) thanks again!
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| “He said his name was Columbus, And I said, good luck.” - Bob Dylan |
[06 May 2009|07:29am] |
Jeepers! what a couple of weeks..heh
Please help a brother out a wee bit and give this kooky book a peek-see:)
...
You ever have one of those weeks, where you get accepted into a high profile competition near about the same day you lose your internet & go completely broke, followed by have'n to walk to the hospital so they can cut and gouge holes into your mouth to drain an infection that's altered the landscape of your face, and you can't afford the antibiotics much less a return visit and they send you home without any pain-killers, and for days you can't quite think straight for entertaining home-remedies that include kitchen knives and near-death-experiences...heh...all the while you can't keep a strong enough internet signal long enough to say "thank you" and get turned away from sell'n blood for a high fever? Well, it's been a curious week:)
And hell, it's kind'a cute to have to go to the library to read web comics :)
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[26 Apr 2009|07:53pm] |
An unfinished knocker.
Spring is gorgeous:)
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[19 Apr 2009|10:57pm] |
And another “UM”...that last one looked more like Lewis ( from Drockleberry )
Years ago all I really wanted to add to my comic production was a scanner, and yet I wound getting a wacom pen instead, and for the longest time after I rarely got near my paper, pens and my old beat-up drawing board. When I did, I’d find that so many things that were once so second-nature had become so unfamiliar…which scared the shit out of me, honestly…I’d get fed up, put my paper and pens away and dive back onto the computer and get sucked in by the progress I felt I was making with all of the digital tinkering. The more progress I made to that end, the more it seems like I forgot. Little by little I'm get'n back in shape though.
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| UM... |
[18 Apr 2009|04:19pm] |
...with curiously trimmed fingernails :)
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| kookyness... |
[17 Apr 2009|12:19pm] |
It’s the sort of improbable bullshit sounding story.
I’m sitting here now just below a hole in the ceiling that ( as it turns out ) a bat comes and goes by. Thankfully it seems reluctant to explore the apartment when people are about…and none of that bounding around panicked flying with this fellow. It was as cool as a hamster with a handglider.
A wiser man than me would simply patch the hole up, and I’ve considered it, but I’d rather not spoil live’n with a bat just yet.
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[11 Apr 2009|03:58pm] |
I’d like to take a moment or two to say a few kind words regarding the plasma center here in Madison, as I’ve really only mentioned them when I’ve returned home with screwed up arms...heh...truth is, they more often than not do a sterling job, and it’s likelier than not my own oddball veins that make their work all the more difficult I imagine. Most mornings I’m in and out without incident and the stroll there and back is a joy I really do look forward to. This morning’s visit wasn’t particularly special or interesting ( although the television in the waiting room was playing an unedited mid-season Cubs baseball game from the 70s for reasons I dare not fathom...heh )...the thing is ( despite being “hardcore” as my friend Ian believes me to be...heh ), I get a bit nervous during every visit, and more often than not, the attendants who look after me are sweet and professional, and they deserve a better critique than I’ve given them so far here in these terribly self-absorbed blogs of mine...heh
That’s about all I have this afternoon.
It’s a gorgeous day...I’ve seen some of it, but I bought a can of coffee and I really want for nothing but to tinker all evening. ( grin )
cheers!
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[09 Apr 2009|09:15pm] |
My housemate Josh, who is somewhere north shooting rifles and making maple syrup.
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