Getting Things Done

CRUISE FUNDRAISER UPDATE: 96/100 prints are sold which certainly means the print drive was a total success! It would be great to sell that last few remaining prints before the the cruise, but at this point I am all booked for the boat and will be shoving off in a month. Thank you to everyone that participated in the fundraiser. Prints are being ordered now and will hopefully start shipping by mid to late January.

Hey, go see the shirts me and Wil made at Sharksplode.

Let’s start the year off REALLY weird, why not? I was thinking about how the Space Jam movie website had been unearthed, totally preserved a while back and wondered if there might be enthusiastic groups of Internet dudes that have bitter rivalries over 90’s sports figure movie vehicle fandoms. Sounds too crazy? Did you see the part where I said, “Internet dudes?” I thought not. I’ve also been thinking about how I’ve been adding quite literally dozens of seemingly fascinating documentaries to my Netflix streaming queue with not so much as an iota of intent to ever actually watch them. Seriously, it’s at least a week’s worth of non stop potential infortainmention. I keep adding them because I feel like Netflix is judging me. Every time my daughter watches Disney Faerie Adventures or whatever, I know that it’s counting against MY RECOMMENDATIONS. What kind of personality profile is Netflix building for me? As far as the robot in my TV knows, I 5-starred Se7en, The Usual Suspects and Angelina Ballerina?! That’s evidence that will hold up in court should anyone on my street ever go missing and turn up in various boxes.

[Holy crap, I found a 1996 review of Kazaam from a local Tuscon paper.]

COMMENTERS: Two Questions! What’s your favorite 90’s movie to hate? Don’t you dare say Drop Dead Fred. That cinematic masterwork belongs in the National Film Registry. OR! Have you ever liked, faved, pinned or otherwise told the Internet you were into something you weren’t THAT into in order to appear cooler, smarter, etc? It’s confession time. Unburden your digital delusions. Or is it more analog? Do you have certain books on your shelf that you want people to see? Shame on you.

The Day After Yesterday

CRUISE FUNDRAISER [UPDATE 01/04/13]: 96/100 prints are sold and it would be great to sell that last few remaining prints before the the cruise. I am also going to leave up the additional prints and print packs for sale until probably February in case you want to get in on that action.

Prints are being ordered now and will hopefully start shipping by mid January.

What Eli doesn’t realize is how thoughtful Josh was actually being with his power saw tossing experiment. Had Eli’s extra fingers been severed and had they grown back, everyone would be satisfied in the knowledge that they could go out and (at least for a couple of hours) pull some pretty sweet “fingers got chopped off” pranks. If they didn’t grow back, then Eli would have no fewer fingers than he had the day before. And trust me, he wasn’t stomping around yesterday all in a huff, lamenting his lack of additional digits.

For guys like Joel and Josh who play guitar or piano, I bet the extra fingers are really filling in some gaps in the ol’ musical skill sets. Before man had five fingers, I’m sure the piano seemed like a cruel test left on Earth by ancient aliens in the late 80’s to frustrate humanity into early extinction. Dumb ancient aliens. Always leaving shit on planets for people to have incredibly stupid ideas about.

I wonder if Juan Q. Zach survived. I mean he WAS at the epicenter of a worldwide BLOODQUAKE, and that’s not really the sort of thing you just shake off. Still, he seemed a resilient beast, and the most likely HE character to eventually be made into a plush doll, so… I bet we see him again.

Well, this comic ends the current storyline, all of the comics for 2012 and what will eventually become HE book 5. I hope you’ve enjoyed this indulgence of continuity as much as I enjoyed creating it. Hell, I hope you enjoyed this entire year of comics, and perhaps even a select few of the years preceding it.

Thanks for letting me do this amazing job for another year. How about we make a deal to keep up our individual ends of this bargain (I make stuff, give it away for free and sometimes you buy stuff or give me money or send me a nice email or whatever) for at least another year? Cool? Cool.

COMMENTERS: What physical enhancement from fiction (augmented body part, extra body part, etc) do you feel you would most benefit from and why? I remember this old episode of the 90’s Outer Limits series (or it totally could have been John Carpenter’s Body Bags) where this dude gets injected with nanites and they start to interpret his inability to breath under water or see behind himself as biological deficiencies and they start growing him gills, extra eyes, etc. It’s basically The Fly without all the vomiting on donuts and Goldbluming all over the place.

The Digital Transition

CRUISE FUNDRAISER [UPDATE 12/31]: 95/100 prints are sold and it would be great to sell that last few remaining prints before the end of the year. I am also going to leave up the additional prints and print packs for sale until probably February in case you want to get in on that action.

Prints are being ordered now and will hopefully start shipping by mid January.

Throw our your gloves and stock up on pinky rings! The hands of the world are born anew in BLOOD! So that was Juan Q. Zach’s plan all along? Not to drown the world in blood in order to cleanse the disease that is man from it’s surface, but to drown the world in blood so we could all type faster. Ooh! I bet diminished 7th chords are WAY easier to play on the guitar now. Plus if you have something stuck in your ear, that new little finger’s really going to just get right in there and fish it out. I mean, sure, probably like 80 to 90% of the world’s population died in THE BLOOD WAVE, but for those that are left… bonus finger!

About halfway through planning out this storyline, I was talking to my friend, and oftentimes art mentor, Lar about how my art had progressed over the last year. He pointed out some things I was doing right, and a few areas that I needed to work on, and then gave me a Canadian tongue lashing (which is similar to an American tongue lashing, but it’s far more polite, has better public schools and is slathered in cheesy gravy) for still drawing my characters with four fingers.

I never made a conscious decision to draw them that way. Cartoons just HAD four fingers as far as I was concerned, always had and always would. Of course I HAD thought about the dozens of times I’d run into problems trying to illustrate semi-realistic human anatomy when all of my characters were missing 20% of their digits. Gesturing, the holding of things, the size of the hand coming off the wrist, all of these things were problems more often than not. That’s when Lar forced me to have an artpiphany. It’s my comic and I can do what I want. BAM! The Blood Wave forces everyone to evolve four new tiny appendages. Done and done.

…To The End

CRUISE FUNDRAISER [UPDATE 12/31]: 94/100 prints are sold and it would be great to sell that last few remaining prints before the end of the year. I am also going to leave up the additional prints and print packs for sale until probably February in case you want to get in on that action.

How about a direct follow up to this cliffhanger… er, bloodhanger… blood wave? Yes, from now on the phrase “cliffhanger” will be replaced outright with the phrase “blood wave.” Write that down in case you forget.

COMMENTERS: WHY AREN’T WE ALL DEAD?! The apocalypse just came and went, not a blood wave in sight. Did The Doctor save us? Did the Scoobies prevail yet again? STEPTO WARNING: LOST SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Are we actually all dead like in the final season of LOST (even though the producers of LOST told us from THE BEGINNING that they WEREN’T ALL DEAD [those motherfuckers])?

All Blood Things Must Come…

CRUISE FUNDRAISER [UPDATE 12/22]: 90/100 prints are sold and it would be great to sell that last 10 remaining prints before the end of the year. I am also going to leave up the additional prints and print packs for sale until probably February in case you want to get in on that action.

Bid on an auction to APPEAR IN A HIJINKS ENSUE COMIC! It’s for charity! The auction ends TODAY!!!

COMMENTERS: Meteors, polar shifts, solar flares, eaten by demon snakes with your grandmother’s face… there’s LOTS of ways to get your armagedd-on. Of all the various apocali in movies, tv, books, etc., which would you prefer for your going out in a proverbial or possibly literal blaze of glory?

If you want to support HijiNKS ENSUE’s ability to have a merry Santaween and you don’t feel like donating or buying any merch… HELL, why not just check out my Amazon Wishlist? Who’s going to stop you? Not me.