Werewolf, Knight, Elf, Tree

This month I learned that you can treat a goldfish with swim bladder/buoyancy issues by feeding it a single pea. I'm still not sure why.


This month I learned that camels have "reversed genitals". They do not, however, have extra knees in their hind legs.


This month I learned that one of the reasons King James instituted his English translation of the Bible was because the Geneva Bible, which was the previous most popular translation, was seen as containing too much anti-royal sentiment. The "Bishops Bible" was decidedly pro-royal, but nobody liked it.


This month I learned that if you fell into lava, you wouldn't sink. Although lava is more or less a liquid, it's still much denser than a person, so you would just hit the top and burn.



Bonus:

"Werewolf, Knight, Tree" doesn't sound as good as "Werewolf, Knight, Elf, Tree", so that's why the elf is there. I also have this bonus elf:



Merry Christmas, see you in the New Year.

Hey, here's some things to look at in a hurry

Whoops, quickly now, down this way, wotcherstep, here's one:


Bonus: Also this.

My Daughter is Nonplussed by Modok

I made a Modok costume for Halloween. That is all.

A Boy And His Lizard

The grease and salt at the bottom of the bag.

Hey diddle diddle
I seem to lack spittle
I thus cannot blow my horn
I tried this here fiddle
But it ain't beer and skittles
As my rotator cuff is torn



He kept to himself
Ne'er a curse, cuss, nor holler
'Till the day he decided
To wear a ruffed collar



There were seven to start
But seven's too many
She got carried away
Now she hasn't got any

When you got way too much
You go through 'em to fast
When you had it was Now
But Now it's all Past

One got lost in a crowd
One got caught in a breeze
One was trapped, one was drowned
One was bled out by fleas

The last two left together
They ran for their lives
To escape the cruel fate
Of the unfortunate five

Under the sofa, behind the monopoly shoe

Look, here it is again for the first time.



Back when I drew this, I said "She should have worn a shirt." It's as true now as it ever was, but the passage of time has revealed more layers, including the ones I can't remember.

I've started watching some old Johnny Quest episodes my brother-in-law gave to me along with a stack of other cartoons (again, many thanks Scott, if you're reading this, or even if you're not, in which case does my gratitude even exist? Is it like Schrodinger's Thank-you note?), and I noticed something that I never noticed before. You probably have, as it's pretty obvious: there's no women in that cartoon. Not one. Not even in the background. Now, it could be that it's because boys were the target audience. But it could also be that Joe and Bill just don't know how to make girl characters.
And once you start walking down that road, you kinda notice that most cartoons don't usually have a lot of women characters in them. And when they're there, they just kind of seem tacked on, with the same two or three personality types recycled through them. "This girl's SPUNKY! Such a thing has never been done before!"
It happened to me once in animation school. Both me and one of my classmates came up with two very different pitch ideas for cartoons independently. However, what the two pitches had in common was that they both had exactly ONE girl character, and they both had EXACTLY the same personality description. It was kinda sad.
Could I do better now? Am I older, wiser, with a more mature outlook? I dunno. I doubt that picture I just posted is helping my case very much, in any event.
Plus, we're making cartoons here. If someone describes a cartoon to you as "older, wiser, with a more mature outlook," they usually aren't going to add in "hilarious".
Fact is, most cartoons usually rely on stock character types for both genders. You don't need to know someone's deep dark character background to hit 'em with a hammer fer a laff. Still, I think it's worth thinking about, if only to recognize the limitations we place on ourselves because "That's how we've always done it."

Well, this post got way out of hand and wandered all over the landscape. I was originally going to bring up Johnny Quest because the other thing that struck me about the show was how it was parodied in Venture Brothers over forty years after it was on TV, and how everyone was giving Space Knights a hard time about being a parody of fifteen year old property.

Of course, those folks who cared about Space Knights at all stopped caring about it two years ago.

Man, I'm behind the times. Like, in cubesville, Daddio.

Traditional trraditionalist practices tradition

Animating with actual paper and pencil, like granpa didn't. Look, actual wrinkles in the pages from flipping!



I've found that "CTRL Z" and "Q" have made me very lazy about keeping track of volumes and things. It makes me feel shame. Then remorse. Then a little hungry. So I had a snack, and now it's all OK again.

One drawing is all you get, because I'm also lazy about doing a line test. And lazy about figuring out how to set up a line tester. And lazy about posting more than once a month at the last second.

Or, I mean, I've been busy! Yes, that will do.

Pouring out my pain, my hopes, my fears.

Mr. Zak Smith addresses a kobold:
"Listen, buddy, 'Kobold' is another one of those words that means something terribly specific to people who play D&D and means nothing at all to anybody else. (Except for maybe very old and very superstitious Germans.) The trouble with you people is the web of associations is very very small: I say 'kobold' and your average player thinks, at best, 'one of those usually very poorly drawn dogdragongoblinmidget things in D&D' or, at worst, (if you're new to the game) nothing at all....yes, I do have a job for you, little pike-wielding muppetmonster, though here at DnDWP Isle we're changing this fancy German name, got it?--from now on you're a Thorn Goblin or Scaled Goblin or Bastard Goblin. Welcome to America."

Saves me having to write something, and I doubt I could come up with anything better than that anyway.




Bee-Bar runs afoul of a Giant Phroyd. Get it? Sure you do.




Pull the string, the arrow spins 'round, and the muffled voice drones out, "The Grell says...Bam!"

'Cause why not?

I have the same birthday as Robert E. Howard.

But he still forgets to send me a card.


I saw the best minds of my generation slain by kobolds...

Ketchup on Lunch Tray, Numbers 3 and 7

Montague Graham, he sure loves his ham
But he finds it gets stuck in his teeth
It makes him glum, 'cause his gums become numb
From all the Ham that's crammed there underneath.




Also Starring: Galumph





And from the "This sounded better in my head before I wrote it down" department:

So there's these two guys, right? And they each have a map of France. And the first guy, he looks and he says "This doesn't make any sense. I've never seen any place with red roads. And look, the water in the rivers and stuff is way too blue. Also, a real place would have mountains and buildings. It's been translated, copied and distorted, and it's pretty obviously all nonsense. The only conclusion I can draw is that this drawing is completely useless, and that there's no such place as France."

Now the second guy, he looks at his map and he says, "Wow, France. I'm gonna go there some day. When I do, I'm gonna visit the giant 'E'."

Same mistake, right? But also opposite mistakes, somehow. These two guys are gonna argue themselves silly about it, too, I bet.

Objects on internet are in poorer taste than they appear.

There once was a fellow named Bernie
An ambulance chasing attorney
He'd race down the street
On spat-adorned feet
But was killed by a runaway gurney.

One for the Whedon-fan-type-folk-people.

A: Did you know the devil built a robot?

W: Ah, yes...El Robotico Diablo...

A: Nobody tells me anything.


I'm not exactly timely, I'm afraid, I tend to be about ten to fifteen years behind in my television viewing. It's best aged, don't you know, like fine wine. So I'm told, I just drink it, I don't compare where the grapes came from or when they were picked. Barely look at the label. Huh, look at that, it was gin all along. Explains why the room's angled that way, I suppose. Point is, old TV shows are like fine angled grapes. So get off my back.

Miss McGuffin, and Tea

Minstrel! Sing us a song!

She can't hear you
She's in her tower
She can't see you
She's across the sea
She's the one that
The Heroes strive for
Villains scheme for
Yeah, but she's with me

Chorus:
She's Miss Mcguffin
She's the Maltese Falcon
She's the Ring of Power
She's the Death Star plans
She's Princess Peach
She's the Golden Fleece
She's the Sangreal
She's the Spice Melange

She's Terrific
She's monolithic
She's full of stars
Floating deep in space
Locked in a crate
Top Men sealed her fate
'Cause she's enough to
Melt a Nazi's face

Chorus


Someday I'll be able write something without it being mainly pop culture references. But not today.

Also, sometimes people give me a hard time because I drink a lot of tea.



That'll teach you.

Toy Practice

I've read drawing your toys can be good practice. I did a pretty miserable job here, this is one of my favorite Popeye toys.

Rimshot!

In the year Twenty-eleven

2011 is off to a weird start. I have a job that may or may not last another month, I've been crazy sick, it's hard to recuperate because my new hobby is shoveling all the snow the evil sky god keeps dumping on us (and floods before that), and a nice lady from the government called the other day and told me I owe them 2 grand.

On the bright side, tho, Cindy gave me this awesome Velvet Elvis for Christmas:



Yessir, the King takes away the pain.

But with all this, I haven't really been drawing much, which puts me on edge like nothing else does. Whatever, here's some stuff that was lying around.



Never got around to posting this Ugly Baby strip with the other ones. Probably because it's kinda dumb. I mean, any idiot can tell that's not Magic Missile he's casting.





La la la happy bunny la la





Hamstoro demands cardboard tubes to run in! Caaaardboooaaard Tuuuuubes!


At least they eventually took my old fridge away. After the plow buried it 3 times.