No Comic Book Recommendation This Week

Unfortunately, not that much came out this week at Funny Steve's Comic Book Emporium. I got the new Invincible, the new Ultimates and Jack of Fables and American Virgin. They were all really good comics, but you already know that. You've probably read them all too. I even searched Steve's 70% Off "The Shit No One Will Buy" Shelf, but couldn't find anything good to recommend here. Except Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book 2, which surprises me because it's such an excellent book. If anything he should be charging more for it. I already have it though. If you don't, well, then I recommend you buy that, I guess. But get book one first. Otherwise it won't make any sense.

Extras this week was good, though not as good as the David Bowie episode. The Office was excellent, as always. Lost starts back up next Wednesday. I'm going to be very happy for the next six weeks.

New Artwork To Behold

I haven't had a working scanner for a while so I've been kind of sitting on these pages, not being able to put them up on the website. Tonight I drove to Kinko's and, for the hefty cost of thirty damn dollars, scanned in three pages of pencils and two pages of inks. Good thing the scan quality is so poor on these pages that they are unusable for print. The inked pages look okay on the website, but they scanned it in in color rather than in bitmap mode. So you can see the brushstrokes on the solid black areas, which is not good. And of course, you can see how horrible the pencil scans came in.

Anyway, they're in the pencils and inks galleries. Please don't let their bad scan quality taint your enjoyment of them. I really do like the way they came out. Now I'm working on finishing the pencils for page 7, starting the inks for page 6, and doing layouts for the big page 8-9 double-page spread.

Friday Night Drinking

I just bought a six-pack of the new Smirnov Ice flavor, "Artic Berry." I want to know what kind of berries grow in the arctic.

Comic Book Recommendation of the Week

NEXTWAVE: AGENTS OF H.A.T.E. #8
by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen

"I am Rorkannu, Master of the Dim Dimensions... and you cannot beat me up!"

I'd like to start doing these CBRotW's as more of a "the comic you're probably not reading" type of thing, because honestly, you can find recommendations for NextWave on every remotely comic-friendly website out there. But it was the most entertaining thing I read this week, and anyone who isn't reading it monthly is missing out. So this is the one time I'll recommend NextWave. And Warren Ellis along with it, because he writes some good stuff. If you're not reading Fell or Desolation Jones, now's the time to hop on those books, since they're both fairly early in their runs. Both are great, great comics. Also terrific this week were The Walking Dead and Strangers in Paradise.

And a brand new episode of Extras tonight. This may be the best one yet. Stephen Merchant and Barry off EastEnders are a comedic duo to rival the best. And David Bowie is a fucking genius.

Strip Jam 9/21

When I was in the Kubert School, my class used to do these strips: eight panels on an 11 x 17 page, where each participant would add a panel and continue the story of the previous panels. Sometimes we had funky rules, like you could only see the previous panel, or you added dialogue to the previous panel and left your own dialogue balloons blank. Now that we're out of school, we've just started our first online strip. I did the first panel. I'll post the rest as they become available.

Not Safe For Work

C'mon! C'mon, Toshi!

A Small Redesign

Still working out the kinks on this site. Links page is new, sketches page is coming soon, new artwork from The Sundays is coming soon. This blog should be easier to read now, hopefully.

A Pirate's Life

Just found an eight-page short story that I did for Mike Kraiger's writing class at the Kubert School. It's a little corny, but I love it so much. It's a musical starring pirates, and it makes me laugh, so I'm thinking I want to use it for something. Maybe do it up for an anthology or something. Here's the first page:


Page One

1. A seventeenth-century sailing ship on the open ocean, seen through a telescope (circular panel).

2. A pirate's face, as he lowers the telescope and squints at the ship on the horizon. He is on a pirate ship, and he is CAPTAIN BLACKMOUSTACHE. He has a black moustache.

• BLACKMOUSTACHE: Yar.

3. BLACKMOUSTACHE turns to face his crew of fearsome pirates.

• BLACKMOUSTACHE: Ahoy! Thar be booty afoot!

4. A couple of pirates glance down at their feet.

5. BLACKMOUSTACHE points out to sea.

• BLACKMOUSTACHE: Nar! Look ye fools! A ship!

Fairly soon after this the pirates break out in song.

Holy Shit!

From the list of machines that visit my website the most frequently:



I think I've found my new target demographic.

Why I Hate Microsoft, pt. I

This is the first in what I can only imagine will be a long, long line of bile-filled diatribes against the constant, malicious pebble in my damn shoe that is Microsoft. The most recent blog update on this site, concerning a comic book I enjoyed and wished to share with you, my friends, took about three minutes to type into my computer. It took about two minutes to find the picture of the cover on DC Comics' website and save it to my desktop for use in the blog. It would take me appoximately five minutes, using a relatively decent webediting program, such as Dreamweaver, to put the update together and upload it to my site. But, since I don't have Dreamweaver and decided to do all my updates in Microsoft Word, thus allowing the bother of writing the HTML code for each of these things to be taken out of my hands and placed upon Microsoft's hairy, pimply shoulder, it took an hour.

An hour! For that little review of PRIDE OF BAGHDAD. Because every time I tried placing the image on the page, it created a new version of the picture, scaled up 125% and saved to a seperate folder. I opened the HTML file in Notepad and proceeded to fix the mistakes, but opening the document in Word again meant the program deleted the picture outright from my page.

What this would have meant is that from now on, every time I wanted to update this blog and have any picture on this page remain the size and filename that I originally gave it, I would have to do all the code myself in Notepad. Which is still a goddamn Microsoft product! The irony!

So now I'm using Blogger. Which means you can post comments and talk smack about me if you want. Please feel free.

And join me tomorrow for part II of Why I Hate Microsoft, when I go after Internet Explorer, Xbox, and Minesweeper.

Comic Book Recommendation of the Week

PRIDE OF BAGHDAD
by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon.

Anyone who enjoys emotional, character-driven stories (even if they aren’t human characters) paired with amazing art should read this one. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Runner-up: THE ESCAPISTS #1, which didn’t come out this week, but I had never heard of it before yesterday. Hopefully the next two issues are just as good.