Of Tooth And Claw. Of Blood And Stone.

Strange things happen to me when I travel. I basically suspend the need for regular sleep and go into a sort of survival mode fueled by adrenaline, alcohol and copious amounts of meat. I become a creature not of reason, but of instinct. I become… a BLOODWOLF! Also sometimes I am chased by them through airports. I am alternately one OF them or tormented BY them. It depends on how long my flight is delayed or when the last time I had any coffee was. Anyway, the underlying condition that brings on the Bloodwolves is called Plane Madness, and I promise that you do not wish it on your worst enemy (my worst enemies are the rival pack to the north known as Cave Wolf Clan).

“George Hurt You” shirts are in the store!!!

Plane Madness, scientists believe, stems from the unbelievable amount of horseshit you have to deal with in modern day air travel. Pat downs, porno scanners, oversold flights, lost checked bags, lost CARRY ON bags (seriously this happened to me once), missed connections, confusing terminals, other passengers, people in general… it’s all just maddening. Since I am traveling A LOT these days in order to peddle my wares and sundries at various comic’ed book type conventions, I am subject to the throws of Plane Madness more often than the average ~~Bloodwolf~~ human person.

The incredibly odd thing about my condition, and you may know this if you follow me on Twitter, is that in order to keep my tenuous grip on reality during the onset of Plane Madness I have to immerse myself in fictional scenarios that are somehow less terrible than the chaos that is actually happening all around me. Obviously a pack of blood-hungry wolves terrorizing the terminal is preferable to the realities of air travel, so The Bloodwolves were born.

I feel like I’ve over-explained this concept in a big, confusing mobius strip now, but I am still recovering from C2E2 in Chicago last weekend and my brain is not yet fully de-wolfed and re-brained yet. I had a lot of fun at the con. Thanks to all that came out and said hi, got a sketch or bought a thing. The guys from Explosm and I wrote a musical at a few different bars over the course of the weekend. Who knows if we’ll remember it all and actually write it down before the Bloodwolves devour our memories with their bone-magics in order to conceal their existence. Oh, you didn’t know they did that? Of course you didn’t. That’s how you know it worked.

COMMENTERS: Have you ever suffered from Plane Madness? What about Road Trip Tripping or Train Dementia? What about just general Travel Insanity? Only in sharing your experiences can you begin to understand the Bloodwolves’ plan for you.

I wrote this comic on my iPhone at 30,000 feet, and subsequently drew it on my iPad using Paper by 53 and an Adonit Jot Pro stylus. I pieced it together and added text in Photoshop when I got home. Other than that, I have no explanation for what the hell it’s all about. The Bloodwolves were guiding my hand.

A Lincoln Log Through The Heart

Did you know my books have 1000’s of words (many of them quite funny) that you haven’t read? I don’t just put the comics you’ve already seen on the pages. I write NEW COMMENTARY for each and every comic. There’s also funny character pages, forewords, stories, random nonsense and embarrassing crap I drew in middle school. What I’m trying to say is BUY MY BOOKS! I worked really hard to make them special and I think they’re great.

I always heard that Abe Lincoln was a bit of a cyclops opthamologist, if you know what I mean. You know, a hunchback pediatrist? A swamp creature manicurist? A Blackula chriopracula? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Cool, can you explain it to me? Because I have NO IDEA.

COMMENTERS: Please make up your own 1850’s euphemisms and slang. And gay Fancy Bastards, PLEASE work “vampire hunter” into your daily vocabulary. We can make this a thing! A terribly stupid thing!

C2E2 in Chicago is this weekend! I’ll be with Blind Ferret at Booth 432. More details HERE.
If you are coming to C2E2, you really don’t want to miss our panel:

Panel: Webcomics Roundtable With Blind Ferret and Explosm!
Date: 4/14/2012
Time: 4:00PM – 5:00PM
Location: N426c

You Chicago FB’s saw how well Seattle did in the cookies, coffee, and booze gift department right? Are you going to let them show you up? I’m not sayin’ but I’m just sayin’. [iced or hot soy latte, Starbucks Doubleshots, rum, vodka, tequila, pretty much any kind of chocolate, no nut allergies]

The Itty Bitty Symphony

“Winter Is Coming” shirts are now IN THE STORE!!! [based on this comic]

As last Sunday approached I really did start to get desperate. Without adding HBO to my already bloated television package, how was I going to watch Game of Thrones? I was lucky enough to shotgun all of season one during a weekend long HBO free preview last June, but no such serendipity presented itself this time around. I assumed that, this being a non-insane world, I would be able to purchase HBO Go on my iPad and hook it up to my TV for the weekly viewings of beheadings and blood fountains and wolf maulings and such. Turns out this is in fact a TOTALLY INSANE WORLD, where HBO only offers it’s mobile service to those that ALREADY pay for HBO through their cable or satellite provider. You would think they would want, let’s say, $6-10 a month from all of the people who want to watch their content but don’t want 275 other channels of bullshit. It is one of those “shut up and take my money!” situations where the other party REFUSES to A) shut up and B) take the aforementioned monies.

I know this frustration is the result of existing deals the premium channels have with the cable companies that stipulate they not offer their content a la carte. The reason for these deals is to keep you paying $100 a month to get the 10 channels you watch instead of paying $2 or $3 a month per channel for those same 10 channels. Cable companies essentially operate under a model of prolonged denial of their own obsolescence enforced via content providers acting against their own best interests out of fear of change. It’s really a great system where everyone wins, only the prize is sadness. The concept of a cable company is broken. They know it and they also know that they are no longer necessary. Channels will be apps in less than 5 years. If you embrace that idea now, you might not end up like the record industry, you stupid dummies.

Luckily, my television provider just so happened to be offering 3 months of free HBO right when Game Of Thrones was about to premiere. I assumed the two events must be connected, but I couldn’t figure out how it benefitted AT&T (the provider in question). The only thing I could think of was that they are hoping to stifle anyone that might leave for another company offering new subscribers a billion free channels (including HBO) for the first 6 months, or that HBO requested the deal to get new users hooked on that sweet, sticky GoT. The first season’s free, as it were.

Speaking of Game Of Thrones, I did finally see the premiere last night and DAMN if it didn’t remind me what I was so excited about 9 months ago. Every single second Peter Dinklage is on screen I am essentially giggling with excitement. He absolutely owns every line and steals every scene. Even those he isn’t in, because I am still thinking about him. He’s like Poochie. Every time he’s off screen the other characters should be saying “Where’s Tyrion?” He puts the “IMP” in PIMP. My only criticism (and this is more George R. R. We There Yet‘s fault) is that with SO MANY new characters, new plot threads and new claims to the throne, it is difficult to see any one plot line or character arch progress during a single hour long episode. Alright, I have to get going. This three-eyed crow isn’t going to have nightmares about itself!

COMMENTERS: What did you think of the GoT premiere? If you are posting SPOILERS, please tag you comments appropriately. What’s the most complicated or expensive thing you’ve ever done to get to watch any one show? When I was a teenager, my home town stopped carrying Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I had a girlfriend that lived out in the sticks and she was able to pick up Houston’s paramount affiliate on her 30 foot tall arial antenna. I would drive a tape to her house, she would record a month or so worth of episodes and I would watch them all in a sitting. DS9 was one of the primary reasons I was not able to break up with her LONG after I realized we had nothing in common.

The Code

HOLY CRAPBASTARDS! ME AND WIL MADE “THE CODE” INTO A SHIRT!!!
Get it now @ Sharksplode! People will be scanning your chest like freaking crazy!

Seattle Fancy Bastards! I am probably getting rained on by your clouds right now! ECCC starts Friday! Read more HERE.

Can you decipher the ancient wisdom of THE CODE? Can you unlock the secrets of this relic that predates humanity by 100 millennia, and was likely left for us by ancient aliens or somebody important like Hammurabi? I don’t know. Does your phone have one of those QR code scanner apps? Well then, sure. You probably can.

So go ahead and attempt to unlock the secrets hewn from a fragment of the shin bone of a 900 foot tall robot, scribed by a laser a billion light years away in ink made of dark matter. I bet you’ll be delighted when you do.

COMMENTERS: Did you know if you look at the Shroud Of Turin under a black light there’s a great recipe for garlic hummus? If you take every other letter in the Codex Gigas and the Louisiana purchase, give them numerical value and arrange them in a 9 x 9 grid you can play Sudoku with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln? You can! It’s weird, because Sudoku isn’t a competitive game, so you never know if it’s your turn or what. Please add your document/monument based Nic Cage-esque conspiracies to the comments.

CHECK IT OUT: My daughter drew another Tiny Titan and it’s up on my Tumblr. This time it was Wonder Girl. Super cute stuff.

Food Fighters

NEW SHIRT!!!
Han And Chewie “I Know” shirts are live at Sharksplode! [based on this comic]

Seattle Fancy Bastards! I am coming for you this weekend! Read more HERE.

I’m approaching The Hunger Games the same way I did Harry Potter. See and enjoy the movies first THEN read the books and find out about all of the stuff that would have pissed me off about the movies. So far it’s working, because I really liked the movie. The lead character, the archery girl, has a real cunning and agility to her. An almost feline quality. A “catness,” if you will. [pause for applause] Thank you, thank you. I’ll be encasing myself in concrete now as to preserve the look on my face when I made the most perfectly crafted joke anyone has either spoken, written, read or heard aloud. Also because it will kill me, which should satisfy those of you that think I should die for that joke. I regret nothing. Except for drowning to death in concrete.

I wasn’t a complete Hunger Games virgin going in. I knew the basic premise and I had read a bit on Wikipedia to familiarize myself with some of the more fleshed out concepts of the world that would no doubt be left out of the cinematic offering for time and pacing reasons. I felt like the end result was a nice tight narrative that did a clever job of introducing you to its world while not smothering the plot. It was obvious that many characters that certainly had larger stories in the books had drastically reduced roles or were even relegated to background glimpses (further Wiki’ing confirmed this theory). You could see little threads of plot all over the place that the film wouldn’t have time to even address, much less resolve. I think that’s a good thing, because it gets casual observers like me more interested in reading the books and getting a full view of the world building within.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD: Regarding Mr. Kravitz portrayal of Cinna the stylist, there were some fucked up allusions going on with his wardrobe creations. The clothing was supposed to represent the district the tributes hailed from. District 12 is a coal mining area, where both Katniss and Peeta’s father’s were killed in a mine explosion, so Cinna dresses them in coal black clothing and SETS IT ON FIRE!? I’d say that isn’t appropriate or sensitive in the least, but these kids are being lead to their deaths in a child murder contest for the amusement of the home viewing audience, so what do I know? I was surprised at the amount of actual child murder that they showed. I was really expecting them to pull a few more punches and gaping blade wounds. The opening “scramble for supplies” scene was actually pretty disturbing to watch. Right about then the concept of children killing each other sinks in, followed by the concept that it is essentially for entertainment (as well as propaganda, control through fear and intimidation, etc). Back to the coal fire: did anyone else get the impression that Cinna drew inspiration from Centralia, the Pennsylvania town that’s been on fire for 50 years (or 150 by his time)? Maybe district 12 isn’t far from there.

My only real gripe with the movie (knowing a bit more than the average person about the book’s plot, but not nearly enough to get all that upset), the idea that hunger was a central theme of the story just didn’t come through at all. I never got the impression that anyone was starving. Poor? Sure. Starving? Not really. These kids are pretty and plump and muscular and heathly. When presented with multiple feasts, at no point does anyone gorge themselves like a person that has been living off of rations would. I get that they are terrified and tramatized, but the word “HUNGER” is in the freaking title of the movie. It seems like one of the most important themes of the book was just kind of swept under the rug. Also, the movie basically says that Katniss is faking her love for Peeta to garner favor with the audience, but gives the impression that by the end she is actually in love with him. This seemed odd, so I looked it up and, yup, she’s a faker and she totally and in cold blood breaks his heart at the end of the book. I guess they want us to be more sympathetic to her, but honestly in the situation she was in survival is the only thing that mattered. Also, just to clarify, the three finger salute means “Hey The Capitol! Read between the lines jackwads!” right?

COMMENTERS: Did you see The Hunger Games? What did you think? Were you a fan of the books already? PLEASE MARK ALL COMMENTS WITH SPOILERS AS SUCH.

CHECK IT OUT: My daughter drew another Tiny Titan and it’s up on my Tumblr.