What Lies Beneath

UPDATE: ONE(ish) WEEKS LEFT! THEN THEY’RE GONE GONE GONE!!!

For the month of January 2015, both of my books are only $5 each. Buy 2 of them and I’ll give you a free mystery mini print. After January they are GONE FOREVER.

I am selling them at or below cost so they can go to Fancy Bastards that will appreciate them, rather than a bonfire. Grab them HERE.

POTTER AND DAUGHTER IS NIGH! The Harry Potter podcast I’ve been recording with my daughter is dangerously close to getting released (when my Patreon reaches $1750). Read more about it here.

COMMENTERS: Why do some of you pretend all cats are not evil? Why do you lie? Does your cat have information on you that you don’t want getting out? Does it have a member of your family hidden beneath the floor boards or trapped inside its cat tree? Do you need help? If you need help, blink three times. If the cat has already chewed off your eyelids to prevent blinking, try screaming hysterically, “OH GOD OH FUCK OH NO THE CAT OHHHH GAAAAAAAHD MY EYES THE CAT HAS OH NOOOOOOOOOOOO WHAT HAS IT DONNNNNNE?!?! WHAT WILL BECOME OF MEEEEEEE?!?! OH GAHHHGHGHGHGLLLLLNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?!?!”

Bubblegum, Bubblegum, Toil and Troublegum

UPDATE: THIS WEEK! NEXT WEEK! THEN THEY’RE GONE GONE GONE!!!

For the month of January 2015, both of my books are only $5 each. Buy 2 of them and I’ll give you a free mystery mini print. After January they are GONE FOREVER.

I am selling them at or below cost so they can go to Fancy Bastards that will appreciate them, rather than a bonfire. Grab them HERE.

HEY HEY HEY, did I mention that I have a Patreon? I do.

I went back and forth on whether or not to do this comic about a dozen times. One of my main goals when rebooting HijiNKS ENSUE was to have the comics NOT be so inside my own head, NOT so insistent that you be on the same page with me on every TV show, movie, Internet thing, etc. that the average HE reader couldn’t relate to the subject matter. Still, the more and more I thought about NOT doing this comic, the more it kept creeping in my brain because this is very close to an actual conversation that my daughter and I had and I really wanted to share it.

I’ll get more into it in the next comic’s blog post, but my kid has “cuteness blinders” for all things insidious and evil. For those of you that don’t watch Adventure Time, Peppermint Butler is… wait for it… a peppermint who is also a butler, specifically butling for the ruler of the Candy Kingdom, Princess Bubblegum. At least, that’s his day job. In recent seasons they’ve shown that Peppermint Butler is also an upside down bloody pentagram on the wall type sorcerer. I mentioned this to Kiddo at some point as in, “But of course we all know he’s actually evil,” and she was all, “WHA-HUUUUUUUUHHH?!” She demanded evidence, and I pointed out that in the episode we had just watched he was torturing another candy fellow in his cave, while reciting dark incantations to summon and bind a demon in order to force it to do his mellifluous bidding. To which she replied, “Well… yeah… but… HE’S MADE OF CANDY!” Cuteness blinders, man. I’m telling you.

COMMENTERS: Have your kids (or did YOU as a kid) ever completely missed the true intended nature of a character because of their cuteness? What about the lack there of? Anything that was supposed to be cute and cuddly that totally freaked a kid out?

May Not Be Suitable For All Audiences

UPDATE: ONLY 2 WEEKS LEFT!!!

For the month of January 2015, both of my books are only $5 each. Buy 2 of them and I’ll give you a free mystery mini print. After January they are GONE FOREVER.

I am selling them at or below cost so they can go to Fancy Bastards that will appreciate them, rather than a bonfire. Grab them HERE.

HEY HEY HEY, did I mention that I have a Patreon? I do, and because my Fancy Patrons blew past the $1500 Milestone Goal, I was able to completely redesign the website.

Everything my kid watches on the television falls into one of two categories. Pretty OK and UNWATCHABLE CUTESY SHOUTING CONTEST. The pretty ok stuff comes, as the comic above suggests, mainly from PBS Kids. Shows like Word Girl, Martha Speaks, Wild Kratts, and Curious George actually do a commendable job of blending entertainment and education while simultaneously not being obnoxious to parents.

The rest come from all over. Nick, Disney, Cartoon Network, probably the channel where they sell knives at night, maybe a ditch with half a snake in a Coke can… just all over. I can’t really pin down the source of the annoyance other than a seemingly universal opinion among children’s television producers that kids always want to hear character screaming, shouting, shrieking, shrilly cackling or singing makeshift autotuned pop songs that are vaguely about friendship and mostly about “being yourself” and “dancing” and “dancing yourself” and “self esteem achieved through dancing” and “dance esteem.”

Adventure Time is the outlier, because it is truly phenomenal genre fiction cleverly disguised as a show for tiny children and adult stoners. Not even Game Of Thrones can match the world building going on in Adventure Time. It’s FUCKING vast. AT is also unique in the way that it has created a framework within itself where the writers are free to completely abandon the established characters and locales (even the typical time and space dimensions in which the show takes place) and just expand outward in every creative direction to tell some incredibly complex and often times bizarre stories that still manage to stay grounded in the world from which they spring. Vast, man. I am telling you. Vast.

It also doesn’t hurt that it is expertly written and voice acted. It’s genuinely funny for adults. The most interesting thing I notice while watching it with Kiddo is what makes me laugh, but not her. What makes her laugh, but only makes me smile, and what makes us both laugh heartily at the same time. SPOILERS: It’s the farts.

COMMENTERS: What things do your kids or just kids in general enjoy that you can’t stand? What gives you common entertainment ground?

Pavlovazon Prime

UPDATE: ONLY 2 WEEKS LEFT!!!

For the month of January 2015, both of my books are only $5 each. Buy 2 of them and I’ll give you a free mystery mini print. After January they are GONE FOREVER.

I am selling them at or below cost so they can go to Fancy Bastards that will appreciate them, rather than a bonfire. Grab them HERE.

HEY HEY HEY, did I mention that I have a Patreon? I do, and because my Fancy Patrons blew past the $1500 Milestone Goal, I was able to completely redesign the website. The comics are about 15-20% larger as well. So far I’ve uploaded embiggened versions of all the comics from 2014. BIG BIG thanks to Fancy Bastard Frank Fenton for helping me fix some of my CSS screw ups that were breaking the site on mobile browsers, and to Fancy Bastard Dan Herman for fixing the mobile alt-text button yet again.

I get upset… or rather upsettingly confused whenever anyone starts to talk about the “reason for the season” to the “ONE TRUE ONLY MEANING OF A CERTAIN TIME A YEAR!” when it concerns a hodgepodge set of rituals, superstitions and traditions appropriated from a dozen different cultures on 3 continents over 2000ish years and duct taped together into a Frankenstein’s monster of long forgotten reasons for doing things a certain way for a certain while. I celebrate Christmas because it’s fun for me and my family. I know it’s an arbitrary conglomeration of disparate traditions, but I like putting a tree in my house sometimes. The lights are pretty. The gifts are nice. It’s an excuse to have fun with and be nice to your friends and family. I enjoy pie.

Santa is even weirder and more nonsensically cobbled together than Christmas. Geez, just Google that weird dude sometime. Read that jolly ol’ abomination’s Wiki page. Santa is like when ever studio makes a giant meteor movie the same year. It’s hard to say who did it first, and it’s debatable who did it better (Deep Impact was better), but all of the sudden we have like 4 meteor movies and they’re all pretty much the same. Somehow nearly every culture that ever got cold decided on their own that a weird guy with probably a beard and most likely a sled or a horse would go around some time toward the end of the Solar year and separate the child wheat from the child chaff, bestow gifts on one set and shun the other. A Millenia or two later, and we just have the one guy. In 1000 years are we just going to remember every meteor movie as ONE BIG meteor movie? Will is star Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis, or just Morguce Weeman?

I used to try to stay at least tangentially aware of things that didn’t particularly interest me enough to experience them directly. I watched a lot of stand up comedy as a kid, and through that I got a sort of crash course in “these are the things people know about in general.” It’s like hearing an impression so many times that it takes on it’s own life separate from the actual person who was being impersonated. I say “used to” because about a decade ago I stopped looking at or listening to things I didn’t specifically enjoy. I’ve basically entered a state of knowing the names of current pop stars or young celebrities, and MAYBE knowing what they are famous for without ever actually experiencing them or their work in any way. For instance, I do not know who Arianna Grande is or what she sings, but I know that she exists and THAT she sings. Does that make sense? It is through this lens of “meh” that I experience most of what young America considers pop culture. I got a lawn, get off of it, etc, etc.

We honestly never told our daughter about Santa. He just WAS. He permeated the social atmosphere of the world so effectively that we never had to tell her who he was supposed to be or what he was supposed to do. Because of this, we always took a “I don’t know, what do you think?” approach when she’d ask questions about his seemingly magical exploits in a decidedly non-magical word.

COMMENTERS: Of what things or people are you just casually culturally aware (enough to keep up a conversation at work*, but not enough to explore on your own time for your own enjoyment)? Any particular experience with faking knowledge about something all the kids are into these days, what with their hair and the clothes and something about the hips hops? Oh, and how great is it to come home on Amazon delivery day and just sit there like a puppy waiting for a treat until the doorbell rings? What a wholly satisfying human experience.

[*I just realized that the main reason I am able to divorce myself from things I don’t have any interest in is because I am not surrounded by coworkers every day. It’s easy to stay in a bubble of your own interests when there’s no one nearby to break it.]

Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, Krampusnacht

UPDATE: ONLY 2 WEEKS LEFT!!!

For the month of January 2015, both of my books are only $5 each. Buy 2 of them and I’ll give you a free mystery mini print. After January they are GONE FOREVER.

I am selling them at or below cost so they can go to Fancy Bastards that will appreciate them, rather than a bonfire. Grab them HERE.

Sing along if you know the words:
“He’s making a list, He’s sharpening sticks.
The list is irrelevant, You all go in the sack.
Krampus comes to take you, that’s alllllll.
Yes, Kraaaampus coooomes to taaaaake youuuuuuu NO NO AHHHHHGHGHG! NO KRAMPUS NOOOOOOO!”

HEY HEY HEY, did I mention that I have a Patreon? I do, and because my Fancy Patrons blew past the $1500 Milestone Goal, I was able to redesign the website and clean things up. The comics are about 15-20% larger as well. So far I’ve uploaded embiggened versions of all the comics from 2014. I’ll keep embiggening until all are cromulently embiggened. The downside, is some of the things I had to fit in to the new design completely break the site on mobile browsers. I’ll be working on fixing that over the next couple of weeks. I’ll also be adding in some of the things that are currently missing, like the mobile alt-text button.