Do Not Adjust Your Monitor!

by on April 30, 2014 at 8:00 am

You are not seeing things! This isn’t where you are when the LSD kicked in. After 4 months, it’s time to see some color!

This isn’t an all the time thing. You may have noticed there are some washed out colors in our previous pages, mostly blues and some browns in the building colors, but pages like this are very deliberate. More about this will be explained in the future and you’ll start seeing more color pages as the story progresses, but that’s all we’re really saying right now. I’m super excited for you guys to see how all of this unfolds.

So we were at C2E2 this year! I was kind of terrible about updating twitter and taking pictures, but if you follow us on Facebook you saw that Kate (Jimmy’s soon-to-be-wife,) Jimmy and I went as characters from Adventure Time. Kate and I were hipster interpretations of Finn and Lady Rainicorn, and Jimmy was Marshall Lee. It was a super low-key, last minute thing. We don’t put as much time into it as some of the more hardcore cosplayers but it’s still fun! Last year I was Last-Minute Hawkeye (purple t-shirt, white tape for bandages and I said things like “Okay, this looks bad” and “Awww  [noun]!” and people actually got it. Kate, on the other hand, put a lot of time and effort into a Vince Noir costume, and nobody recognized her. Which was a damn shame.

But anywho, because we were originally going to be hipsters Finn, Rainicorn AND Jake (Jimmy changed his mind, and I can’t really blame him. Too much orange) I designed some Hipster Adventure Time tattoos! It’s really no secret that I love Adventure Time, so this was a really fun little design challenge for me.

Click through for tattoos!

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Hey did you just take his wallet? HE JUST TOOK THAT GUYS WALLET!!

by on April 23, 2014 at 9:00 am

I think he took your wallet!

And that, in a nutshell is why I’m glad Jimmy’s writing this, and not me. If I was writing this comic it would be full of esoteric, wrong-for-the-time-period pop culture references and call backs. Because I was raised by television and didn’t really discover these papery things with words and sometimes pictures until recently.

Would it be funnier? Maybe. If Abed is your favorite character on Community, probably. But would it be sincere, purposeful storytelling? No. Not at all.

Speaking of sincere, purposeful storytelling, you guys! Next week you guys! The plot thickens next week and I hope you guys are gonna love it. There’s a lot going on, and there’s a lot of mystery, and it’s going to be awhile before we start explaining things, but next week is kind of a hook and I’ll talk a little more about it next week. I just wanted you guys to know how excited I was.

So excited!!

<3

Tyler

Semi-Monthly Comic Recommendations!!

by on April 8, 2014 at 9:00 am

I wanted to take some time out from drawing stuff you guys aren’t going to see until October to talk about some more comics I’m really loving.

First up, I touched on this series in my last post about comics, but I thought I’d give it a little more elaboration: Insufferable.

Mark Waid is one of the best writers in comics. He’s been working since the late 80s and has worked on everything from the Justice League to Ka-Zar. Currently he’s pulling down two of the best runs of the recent Marvel Now relaunch with Daredevil and The Indestructible Hulk. But what many people may not know is that he’s building a small webcomic empire as well. Through his online-only imprint Thrillbent he’s brought together great artists and writers from all over comics and the internet to provide a ton of creator-owned, completely free comics of “buy-them-in-a-store-monthly” quality. Chances are pretty good there’s something for you at Thrillbent.

His own comic, Insufferable is a great series that flips that Hero/Sidekick dynamic around. Basically, what if Batman and Robin were father and son and grew up to hate each other because Batman stays vigilant and fights crime while Robin grows up to be a glory-hogging douche more interested in his public image than fighting crime. It’s very cool and I highly recommend checking it out. Chapter one, page one is here.

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One Hundred Demons

by on April 3, 2014 at 1:29 pm

I really love this chapter. It’s the first actual chapter that we sat down and planned with any sort of strategy to it. Compared to the rest of the story coming up, it’s very comic-booky, but that suits me just fine. It’s important to set the stage of any story, and I think this chapter does it pretty well.

Recently, I’ve been reading quite a bit of academic articles and research papers for school, but I’ve snuck in some time to read for pleasure too. This pleasure-reading has me thinking about stories and the inner workings of characters that drive the stories. What makes our hero tick? What are the demons that he faces?

A Buddhist monk, Hakuin Ekaku, would supposedly paint demons on a canvas as a way to exorcise his own personal demons. A few days ago, I read a graphic novel that did the same. Lynda Barry wrote a graphic novel devoted to this concept called One! Hundred! Demons! in which she addresses the traumas of her past, the anxieties of her future, and everything in between.

How does my hero exorcise his own demons? Do I vanquish my own by writing the samurai? Does Tyler defeat his by giving physical form to my writing? Are we helping the samurai overcome his own obstacles?

I like to think that the answer to all of the above, even if not as dramatically as written, is yes. We like doing this comic, and finding comfort in a simple pleasure can make all the difference on a gray day, when you’re alone with your thoughts, anxieties, and demons.

demons      one-hundred-demons

Lynda Barry’s demons, and Hakuin Ekaku’s demons, side by side. I wonder what they had in common.

I’m Not Good at Titles — Open Worlds in Video Games

by on March 26, 2014 at 9:00 am

So, that is one ugly sonofabitch. I drew that guy like 3 times before I got his face looking like it should actually belong to his body. The third of which may or may not have been 15 minutes before this page went live…

So I was going to put up reviews of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes and Infamous Second Son this week. This very quickly became a large and unwieldy post that needed to be split into two. But while I was at work today I actually thought about how both games are “Open World” games but they actually both go about this in completely different ways. While I do love to opine, I thought it might be more interesting to talk about how these games kind of compliment each other.

Also, I learned how to put things behind a little clicky “continue reading” link so that our main page isn’t super cluttered with extra-wordiness!! See below.

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