Numerology

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

[posted 10/7/11] I had this comic written and half drawn when I got the hospital to visit my friend Mikey on Wednesday night. It was about 7:30pm and I had been away from a computer or Twitter for 2 hours or so. I get into Mikey’s room we start talking about his treatment, and his projects at work. “Yeah, and now that Steve Jobs is dead…” comes out of his mouth in the middle of our conversation. That’s a weird way to get the news. Anyway, I decided to hold the comic until after I posted a tribute strip [HERE] and people had a few days to process the his passing. So here’s my snarky commentary about the hypnotic powers of numbers being added to the names of things. Enjoy.

COMMENTERS: Are you upgrading to the iPhone 4s? Are you disappointed it isn’t a completely redesigned iPhone 5? Do you think any key features are missing or that people should just be grateful for their magical future phones? Also, WTF is going on with cellular, txt and data pricing? Txt msg’ing is a completely obsolete technology that just keeps getting MORE AND MORE EXPENSIVE for LESS AND LESS service. My first phone came with 3000 minutes, unlimited nights and weekends and something like 500 txts included for $35. Now plans with under 500 minutes, no txting and a few GB of capped data run over $100. WTFFFF?

Far Beyond Driven

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

On our rare kidless night off, I took my wife to see Drive. I was completely ready to write it off as as substituted-Statham drive/murder/fuck movie [hell, one of those words IS the title of the film], but the reviews I was seeing were surprisingly positive. Given the lack of other options in the cinema we gave took Drive for a test [PUN REDACTED]. I was quite surprised. A) Because they movie we saw and the movie that had been advertised had essentially NOTHING to do with each other. They seriously took the entire trailer from the first 15 minutes of the film which contains the only “anonymous crime driver for hire” sequence in the entire movie. And B) It was actually quite good.

Drive is a very slow, very thoughtful art house film. Not at all the ACTION-SPEED-MURDER-SEXcapade I had been lead to believe. Ryan Gosling has maybe six lines in the entire thing. I imagine 110 pages of his script just said “Ok, now look at her slyly, kinda bashfully, but also a little intimidating like you got something to hide.” The other 10 pages said “STAB THAT GUY IN THE NECK AND GET BATHED IN A FOUNTAIN OF HIS ARTERIAL BLOOD!!!” You see, that’s the other thing about Drive that made it… unique? You come in expecting bullets and blood in every scene, but instead you get a beautifully shot love story, sparse dialog, all at a relaxed pace. This serves to lull you into a false sense of calm, then SKLEEEESH! It’s knife time.

The violence in Drive is so unexpected, so infrequent and so brutal that you remember each and every act for a lot longer than you want to. The killings stick with you and keep you uncomfortable for at least as long as it takes to get to the next one. Only 5 or 6 people die in this movie and all of them do so in a spectacularly unsettling fashion. One death in particular still skeeves me out.

All of that said, I highly recommend it. Just know what you’re getting into.

STORE NEWS: The “Winter Is Coming” shirt should be in the store tonight or tomorrow. I’m excited.

ANOTHER THING: After a power surge last week, my file server (the one that holds all of my HE-related files) died (despite being plugged into a heavy duty surge supressor). The drives were OK but I have to buy a new enclosure ($150) to access them over my network. The same day I found out a miscalibration of our sprinkler system made our water bill for this month $200 more than we were expecting. So $350 I don’t really have just flew out the window. If you were considering donating to support HijiNKS ENSUE, doing so now would be SUPER APPRECIATED. Donors get access to all of the desktops, audio and other goodies in The Vault. Just make a donation of any amount, or sign up for a recurring donation subscription and you’ll get access.

Thanks!
~Joel

A Slave To My Addiction

DO YOU SEE, INTERNET? MAKING COMICS FOR YOU IS KILLING ME!!!

At least that’s what a couple of trained medical professional types told me this week. I always find it odd that a chiropractor can run their fingers down your spine and go, “Oh, that’s the one. Need to pop that sucker back into place.” Seems like voodoo. I’ve had issues with a compressed disc in my lower back for a while, but now it seems I’ve hunched myself all the way over to full blown sciatica. If my posture were any worse I would be upside down.

As for my stupid eyes (or “look balls,” as they are never referred to), I assumed the constant pain, fatigue and twitching meant it was time for a new prescription. Following my standard plan, I waited 3 or 4 months after the symptoms started just to make sure. I like to be thorough. And negligent. Shockingly my scrip was the same as last year, so Dr. Eyeball (with a name like that, what other profession could he chose?) suggested I get reading glasses for making comics. I am officially falling apart bit by bit just to keep making stupid Internet butt-comics. At least I’ll die like I lived. Making stupid Internet butt-comics.

Here Lies Joel Watson
1981 – 2012
Beloved Husband, Father and Purveyor of Illustrated Dick Jokes
“OMG WTF LOL”

COMMENTERS: Please write your own tombstone eulogy, assuming you will die doing what you love (or at least what you spend most of your time doing ).

ANOTHER THING! Check out this fancy baby wearing a one of a kind HijiNKS ENSUE custom onesie. I drew this for a reader live during the last Dragon’s Lair Austin Webcomic Rampage panel.

Causality And FX

Alternate Title: Tera Novella

Before you jump up my ass, YES I know they wrote off the possibility of a paradox in the pilot of Terra Nova by saying the past they travel to is in an “alternate time stream.” More on why I think that’s bullshit later.

Ok, so I gave the Terra Nova pilot a shot. The short version is that it’s Jurassic Park meets Avatar with a little bit of Lost thrown in for good measure. There’s dinosaurs and humans juxtaposed, there’s escaping a dystopian Earth in favor of a hostile but majestic jungle environment and there’s “no matter what you were, you get a second chance ~~on the island~~ in the past” to round out the premise. There are even a group of “others” to add a little mayhem and mystery.

Let’s start with the shitty future humanity traps itself in. Fans of sci-fi will find nothing new about the present day future of Terra Nova. It’s all well trodden ground. Humanity destroys itself with greed, overpopulation and environmental devastation. The air sucks, the living quarters are tiny and only the most wealthy and connected don’t live on the brink of extinction. Through a coincidence, seemingly caused by parking two supercolliders next to each other, scientists discover a “fracture” to 85 million years in the past. A probe is sent through, assuming it will automatically show up somewhere in the present. When it doesn’t they determine this past is in a different time line, so it’s ripe for exploring, and settling and butterfly stepping on without fear of paradox… IN OUR UNIVERSE. What about the present of the parallel Earth whose past they are invading? Maybe they didn’t fuck up their planet. Maybe the first person who goes through that portal commits planetary genocide. Why is that not a concern?

Anyway, they decide the only future for humanity lies 85 million years in the past so they start sending settlers through the portal to establish a new colony. It isn’t explicitly stated, but I assume the idea is “Our Earth is fucked. Everyone on it is going to die. Screw those guys. The people in the past and their descendants are going to be the only humans to survive long term.” Seems a bit short-sighted. Why didn’t they just invest all that future know-how into a more advanced space program and work on terraforming and colonizing Mars? Oh… right. Because then they wouldn’t have a show where people get chased by dinosaurs.

The dinosaur effects are passable, but shockingly NOT up to snuff with the original Jurassic Park. How does that film keep aging so well? All in all, the 2 part pilot was rather enjoyable but rife with confusing, nit-picky plot holes and story difficulties that could prove too big to overcome without alienating the hardcore sci-fi fan (again, the “alternate time stream = go nuts, do whatever we want” thing will never stop bothering me). I will say the characters and the pacing are a DRASTIC improvement over Spielberg’s last genre TV outing Falling Skies. There was a decent dose of family drama, but it didn’t weigh the whole show down like it did on Falli… 7th Heaven + Aliens.

I will probably give Terra Nova at least a good 4-5 eps to show me what it’s got, though I find it nearly impossible to concentrate on the plot with all the Jurassic Park jokes I keep making while watching it. Every time General Avatar showed Main Character Cop/Dad a new area of the compound (especially his living quarters which looked suspiciously like a page out of the IKEA catalog), I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out “Spared no expense!”

COMMENTERS: Did you see Terra Nova? Any thoughts? [posting mine in a few minutes, check back and refresh]

Transport Me Up Into The Spaceship, Scotchy

I know you can’t really use “Swiss” as a noun, but at least I didn’t just say, “some Swede.” I have a feeling the Swiss and the Swedes have a sort of GoBots/Transformers style rivalry. Like they probably came out at roughly the same time, but one of them (I’m not saying which one, but I think you know) was clearly superior in terms of marketing and originality. I also get the impression the Prime Minister of Switzerland is an enchanted swan that occasionally takes human form to hand out pastries to good children. Or maybe that’s just Bjork. She’s from Iceland which is either near and very much like Switzerland or not at all. I think they both have ice hotels.

So it looks like physics as we know it might just be a bunch of crap. You see, these scientists at CERN have been shooting neutrinos (not to be confused with the pseudo new wave/punk rock aliens for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) at Italy for some time (which seems like an act of war), and they appeared to be arriving shortly before they left. Well, not really, but they were appearing sooner than they should have. Sooner than light, in fact. Light shows up in Italy the the neutrinos are acting all casual, stretched out on the sofa, sipping a creme soda and being all, “Oh, hey light. I guess you finally decided to show up. I’ve been waiting for you for like 60 nanoseconds. I was about to call the police and make sure you hadn’t been murdered or whatever.”

I say all of that to A) Intimidate you with my obviously superior knowledge of science, and B) to say this: I guess we don’t really know anything about anything, and I find that kind of terrifying and exciting.

COMMENTERS: Do you believe the findings will hold up to scrutiny or be replicable? Do we need to start rewriting physics? Will this discovery finally get us to a world more like Star Trek? Can it please?