How much is a plane ticket to Baltimore again? (Expedia says it starts at $559 for a round trip. O_o Think I’ll just wait for it to hit the online store.)

Did you hear? Dirty people rarely pay rent on time. Just to make a point, I’ve been late with my rent once in my life. And by “late” I mean “one day after it was due with a five day grace period.” Then again, a week’s worth of dishes for me is two bowls at most, plus a couple bowls on those rare occasions that I cook, and I’ve known the cleansing touch of soap in the last month, so she probably wasn’t talking about me.

And seriously, what the fuck was up with that chick? Some people should not breed.

Not much to say. Did Jenn, inked. As usual, my lineart loses a lot without any colors behind it. I need to take notes on this kinda shit for my black and white stuff. Like SEP, strangely enough.

I’m getting over the “but what if I’m pissing this person off?” phase* regarding Karen Healey, so I didn’t go to any extra trouble making Jenn all gender friendly or whatever they call it. Though the pose is every bit as good as Amy’s, and fits Jenn’s character fairly well (as does Amy’s, by the way), I’m sure this would lose points because she’s leaning backwards. I’m sorry, because she’s “bending over backwards to make her breasts more prominent.” >_> (I also notice that I drew her head at the proper height compared to Amy’s, but drew her shorter than Amy, which is factually inaccurate.)

*This happens pretty often, but after a few days I always come to my senses and ask myself “just who’s holding the pencil here?” While a lot of ideas will end up sticking with me and influencing my work, for the most part I realize that I don’t actually give a fuck what a complete stranger would think of me if they even knew I existed. If by some act of masochism they read my comics, they’ll either like them, or they won’t, and I’ll keep drawing either way because I’m not doing this for their benefit. (Matter of fact, I’m being pretty fucking generous giving this stuff to them for free.)

(And by the way, she’s not bending backward to make her breasts more prominent. She’s looking upwards. If I’d wanted to make her breasts prominent I probably would’ve designed her with larger breasts in the first place.)

I’m getting the impression that the more I talk on this topic, the more phallic my titles will become, until I end up with “penis-oriented title.”

I’ve been reading more on Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed) (I love that title), and I’ve been thinking more on the stuff I said last time. Today I’m going to go over a future plot point from Brimzero. I have a few more, but this is the only one I have in mind which wouldn’t massively spoil the plot.

In the first draft of Brimzero, Tracy starts out the comic wearing a skirt. The two times I drew her below the waist in chapter one of the current draft, I drew her wearing pants, but I’m calling it a continuity error brought on by my poor memory. Anyhow, Tracy is taking up what boils down to a martial art, so Morgin loans her a pair of baggy jeans to replace the skirt. This has always been in the script, because A) it’s common sense, a skirt is useless for anything except sitting or standing, and B) I detest skirts for the aforementioned reason. Although I agree with Karen Healey’s criticism of a flying superheroine wearing a skirt, I did not write that scene in response to her.

I also would like to register my discontent with Supergirl, I Choo-Choo-Choose You. Now, I’m familiar with the joke from the Simpsons, and I realize it fits the content of the article, but when I see “Choo Choo” and a bunch of pink, my mind immediately goes to one place and one place only, and not even a mention of Something Positive in this post is bordering on blasphemy. Though I’m willing to bet that although S*P seems like something she’d like, she never got past the first strip, for the obvious reasons.

Ah well, something to think about while I’m staring at a blank sheet of paper and weeping gently at the thought of yet another night without anything drawn.

So I’m reading Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed). And it’s good. Well thought out, and not once have I been accused of being inferior on the basis of my gender. I’ve not read a whole lot of the archives yet, but so far I recommend checking it out.

But…

So here I am thinking about what Karen Healey would think of my comics. Now, there’s a lot of women in my comics. None of them are that simple “sex object” so prevalent in society. But if you look at what I’ve done so far, you start to notice things. Like Amy or Morgin in various states of undress, independent of the plot of the scene. I could go on and on with reason after reason of proof that my comics are misogynistic. But at the end of the day, I write and draw what I like. I think it’s the only way to do any sort of creative project, especially one that will take the better part of a decade to complete. You’re going to be spending a lot of time on this, so you’d better like it, right? (It also guarantees that you have a mutual interest with any fans you have.) And likewise, I write my comics to be compelling to me. Let’s take page 24 of SEP. One could easily argue that I’m setting Amy up as a weak person. Now, if you read the pages leading up to it, you’ll see that she was having a fairly traumatic dream. What hasn’t been mentioned, but will if I ever get around to the next page, is that she’s been living on the streets for weeks, possibly months, and that she has similar dreams nightly. But justifying it within the story isn’t the same as justifying the way I wrote and drew it, right? Well, we’re brought back to my point. When I look at her, I feel bad for her. I empathize, and I want to do what I can to help her, and that’s the reaction I wanted. Not everyone will react the same way to the scene, of course, but that’s what I was going for, and it works for me. The same is true of all the partial nudity. I can give you a convincing reason as to why Jenn and Amy were sleeping nude (or just topless, we don’t really see and I neither know or plan to tell), and I can tell you how and why it fits into the overall plot, and it does, but the bottom line is that I’m a straight man, and I like the way the female body looks. No misogynist conspiracy, I’m just drawing what I like. (This is also why I draw women in loose jeans and t-shirts. I find that more attractive than spandex-clad G-cup pinups.)

And remember Rule Number One: If you find some hidden meaning in my comics, odds are I wasn’t the one who put it there. I’m just trying to tell a good story, and I’ve neither the patience nor the desire to dilute that down with various metaphors and such.

Also good to remember is Rule Number Two: Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but that doesn’t give you carte blanche to say anything without thinking beforehand. (Oh yeah, I’ve got high hopes for the comments on this one…)

For those who are curious, Rule Number Three is to stand proud and tall, get up there and dance like an idiot. (AKA, have a sense of humor about things.)

Not four days later, and Aaron A. totally outdid me. It’s actually kinda creepy, given the similarity of the poses, seeing as I’m pretty sure he hasn’t ever heard of me.

I’m not as floored as most others with the “new style Sera,” because it’s very close to the style he’s been using for Vicious Whispers, but it is really nice, and I’m stoked as hell about the prospect of another volume of Serenity Rose, even if the odds are against it.

Well, I’ve recovered my room somewhat from both the great poster jump of ‘07, and my ensuing acts of wanton destruction. What remains should be pretty easy to spackle over, and my bike tire seems to have sealed itself up nicely.

I just wanted to say that I feel like a complete asshole, griping about all that shit, after reading today’s three panel soul.

Eric Burns of Websnark needs your money, and is selling a few of his RPG books on eBay. Check it out, and send him some cash if you’re into tabletop RPGs. (Seriously, how can you not bid on a book titled “Cute & Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters?”) If you’re not into RPGs, I think he’s still got a paypal tip jar, or you could buy some ads via Project Wonderful.

Got it all good to go. Click the image for a full-size version, 1030 by 717. You can visit the site at starfyre.brimzero.net and check out TSWNN, which is an excellent sci-fi / fantasy story, and the rare time where “sci-fi / fantasy” both apply. I still don’t have any idea why those two are grouped together in bookstores and libraries, but I like both and I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyhow, drop by there, check out the story, and add yourself to the proud brotherhood of people who have threatened Starfyre’s life for a new chapter.

Had you going with that title, didn’t I? Or maybe I didn’t, does anyone notice that I just use the date for sketchblog entries? The idea being that I have a hard time thinking of titles at the best of times, and most of the stuff is either in-progress or just some random one-off sketch. Anyhow, I doubt I’ll get anything drawn tonight as I’m finishing off the starfyre website. I finally managed to get (nearly) everything squared away with Starfyre, and ended up installing Wordpress because it dawned on me that editing raw HTML for every update is a pain in the ass for me, and I’ve been doing this shit since 1998. (Holy fuck, that’s almost ten years ago. Unless I spaced which year it was. I bet that original piss-poor geocities site is still there. If Geocities still exists, that is, ten years is like a millennium in interweb time or something.) Anyhow, point being that it’ll be a pain in the ass for him as well, compounded by the fact that he doesn’t know a whole lot about raw HTML, and if I don’t set him up with a nice CMS, he’ll either end up killing me or using a WYSIWYG* editor, which would result in me killing him. So right now, I’m getting the Starfyre site design into a Wordpress template. (The man actually told me that the default theme, and therefore Wordpress as a whole, was too “Web 2.0,” and requested that I switch it back to the original, fairly old-school, design. A man after my own heart, once I assured him I could make Wordpress look just about identical to the old school design.)

This is rambling on for quite a while, ain’t it? Well, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades is on NHB, I have a “tall boy” can of Amp Overdrive (best energy drink ever, but the fucking thing refuses to ever play nice with the barcode machines because the parts that are supposed to be black are fucking reflective, what stupid fucking idiot designed that!? Form after function, you cum-guzzling contraceptive failures.† Leave it to Pepsi to take something so completely right and find a way to fuck it up. Oh shit, tangent again.) and (still in the middle of a sentence, remember? Like four hours back?) and I have a reasonable grasp of how to work around the Wordpress theme system after getting this beast up and running. I’ll post a link once I get it on it’s feet.

* “What you see is what you get,” it refers to a webdesign program where you use various tools and such to build the website, and it handles all the HTML for you. They have a (well-deserved) reputation for generating sloppy, bloated markup, and the use of one is considered the mark of a rank amateur by most designers, particularly those (like me) who write their markup by hand.
† I shouldn’t use this as an insult, as both I and my sister are the result of a failed contraceptive, and we take some weird type of indie pride in it, but there’s nothing quite so satisfying as telling someone they were never supposed to exist. I’m not a very nice person.