What’s In The Box?!

UPDATE! Check out this new shirt I made: THE PENTAPPLEGRAM! There will probably be stickers as well in the future.

Many of us more technologically inclined individuals have certain habbitual behaviors concerning the delivery, unboxing, first use and subsequent treatment of new toys. Josh has apparently found a way to monetize his. If you do good work, the audience will find you. If you do unspeakable things with brushed aluminum and glossy touch screens, Klaus und Deter und all der friends vil gladly pay $40 Euros per minute to vitness it.

Despite being quite the technophile, and always purchasing the newest Apple toy/game console/erotic defribulator/ etc on launch day, Josh is actually quite hard on his gadgets (NDJI – No Dick Joke Intended… oh wait… HARD! I get it. Yeah, dick joke definitely intended – YDJDI). He’s a no case, no screen protector, shit’s gonna get scratches, just freeball the phone in my pocket with my keys kind of guy. The only thing he’s treats worse than phones is cameras. He once tried to gift me his point and shoot digital camera which was barely recognizable as anything but a lump of plastic scar tissue with a couple of LEDs. It might have been a tumor removed from a robot. Robot cancer is a serious problem. Educate yourself, people.

COMMENTERS: Are you a ginger gadget grabber? Do you wear the kiddest of kid gloves with your phone/iPod/tablet/whatever or do you toss it around all caseless and willy nilly and let fate determine its… fate? Any particularly interesting stories about being too careful or not careful enough with expensive toys?

I’m a “put that shit in a case the moment it comes out of the box” kinda dude. When I got my 30gb iPod as a gift from my boss around 2003, I actually held a microfiber cloth in my hand when I used it as not to get finger prints on it. As soon as I got home with the new Ipod, mere hours after unboxing it, I pulled out my giant sheets of gadget screen protector that custom cut yourself to fit any device. I did my measurements, got one the right size, peeled back one edge and began to apply. I didn’t have a credit card handy, so I grabbed a sample of linoleum counter top left over from remodeling our kitchen and used it to squeegie on the screen protector. There must have been a chip in the sample because it gouged a trench across the entire face of that iPod deep enough to fill with enough “first world problem” tears to then drown yourself with. I hadn’t even loaded any music on it yet.

My daughter has been drawing characters from the Tiny Titans comics and I have been posting them on my Tumblr. They are, in a word, cutedorable.

A website called ComicMix is doing a webcomics March Madness with over 100 comics. I am on the list of competitors. I only know of about 10 comics on the list, and I don’t care about the outcome, but it’s neat to see your friends win stuff, even if it’s silly. Go vote or whatever.

From The Makers Of Abilomaxocilizor

1000’s of words you’ve never read! Dozens of images you’ve never seen! Embarrassing crap I drew in highschool! BUY MY BOOKS!

Pre-JocoCruiseCrazy Lo-Fi comics undulate ever floorward in a sort of heap! Which is to say it is 3:48am on the morning that I get on a plane to get on a boat to stay on a boat for a week with a bunch of my friends. Maybe I should sleep. MAYBE YOU SHOULD WATCH YOUR GOD DAMN MO… yeah, I should sleep.

Still I could not resist turning some of my late night TV viewing Tweets into one last LoFi comic for you before I left for vacation. The particular commercial that sparked my Tweeting tirade was for a stop smoking drug (I dare not name it for fear of spammers), that might cure your addiction to cigarettes and also might make you KILL YOURSELF. I also once saw an ad for a migraine medication where one of the side effects was headaches. So, yeah… there’s that.

Guest comic week starts on Monday and boy are there some doozies waiting for you. SPOILERS: One of them is probably about boners.

COMMENTERS: Based on the comic above, please come up with your own drugs and their various side effects which are always worse than the thing they are supposed to be treating.

FLORIDA FANCY BASTARDS: If you are headed down to MegaCon in Orlando this weekend, please stop by booth 331 and see my Blind Ferret cohorts. They will have a selection of some of my most popular shirts at the booth including “The Doctor Is In,” “George” and “Winter Is Coming.” Supporting them supports me, so I highly encourage it.

You can now purchase a super high quality 11×17″ print of any HE comic by clicking the “Buy A Print” button between the “Previous” and “Next” buttons in the navigation menu. If you don’t see it, try refreshing your browser cache.

The Spirit Of Coincidence

Pre-JocoCruiseCrazy Lo-Fi comics continue unabated! Or possibly unabashed! Or maybe unabridged. The closer I get to the cruise, the more useless my brain mind is go having.

Do you ever get the feeling Nic Cage’s movies are less “planned out films” and more “impromptu documentaries?” Like he has all these problems and vices and bizarre situations he get himself into and the only way to exercise the demons from his life is to capture them on film. I’m suggesting that there wasn’t even a script for The Wicker Man, but rather Cage was running around on a island one weekend punching old ladies, stealing children’s bicycles and shoveling handfuls of bees into his mouth just as some quick minded film maker happened to catch it all. A bit of second unit shooting, some creative editing and BAM! Cage movie. Why should Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance be any different? Look at Nic Cage. That is a dude that spends probably 75% of his day almost to entirely on fire. Any director would be a fool NOT to follow him around with a camera for a few days on the off chance he started stealing 50 cars, breaking into an abandoned prison or trading faces with a closeted Scientologist.

The ONLY reason I would ever consider seeing the sequel to Ghost Rider (a movie less “terrible” than it was “just plain boring”) is that it was directed by the duo behind Cranks 1 and 2. These guys seems to know what they are doing when it comes to over the top, “did I actually just see that?” action movies. They make no apologies for lack or story in or incongruity of plot and just GO GO GO GO for the insane shot, the ridiculous stunt and the gratuitous murder sex. I highly recommend listening to the interview regarding the Crank films and Ghost Rider with director Brian Taylor (pictured in the comic above) on the How Did This Get Made? podcast. It’s impossible not to like this guy after hearing him talk about his films and realizing he’s actually right there with you on the whole “that made NO SENSE AT ALL BUT IT WAS AWEOME” situation. He’s totally on your team.

COMMENTERS: Any desire to see Ghost Rider: Vengeance Protocol? How about you post your best “day in the life of Nic Cage” that accidentally got captured on camera and turned into one of his films?

She Could Have Had It All

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

[Thanks to @cajunjoel for the tweet that inspired this comic.]

This starts off a week of pre-JocoCruiseCrazy Lo-Fi comics, and will lead into a week of fantastic guest comics from some of my favorite artists and Internet funny types.

I watched the Grammy’s Sunday night, which is odd since I am extremely disconnected from “the music the kids are listening to these days with the hips hops and the jim-jams and such.” I tuned in right as front Foo Dave Grohl was making an impassioned acceptance speech about how important it is to learn to play a real instrument and really sing into a microphone and not worry about over producing and striving for phony perfection and… he was played off stage by LMFAO. That pretty much distills exactly how I feel about the current state of popular music. I was also rather outraged that domestic abuse not only DOESN’T hurt your chances of winning music’s highest award, but it actually seems to help your odds. Despicable motherfuckers should be treated as the pariahs they are and not like aspirational heroes.

I went on a marathon live tweeting of the Grammy awards presentation and I suspect I lost a few followers. Those that stuck around are my true Fancy Bastards and we could probably share a beer with two straws in real life.

COMMENTERS: Did you watch the Grammys? Do you, like me, think this year’s awards will always be remembered as “The year WUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBwuhhhhhhhhhhvrrrrrrrrrWUBWUBWUBWUBWUBWUB made it’s Grammy debut?” Do you identify with modern pop music or are you [also like me] seeking out more and more specialized/obscure music that isn’t fit for the mainstream? Where are you finding it? I am listening almost exclusively to instrumental prog-metal these days. Animals As Leaders has really opened my eyes to a whole slew of bands that I didn’t even know were out there.

Reptilis Rex launches this week!
A new online comic called Reptilis Rex starts this week! It’s about a species of Reptoids that have been living in the hollow Earth all throughout history who, for some reason have to come to the surface and integrate with human society.

The creator, who goes by the admitted pseudonym William Tallman, is one of my favorite cartoonists and a nearly functional human being to boot. Please do support his new effort and share it with your friends. There is already a week’s worth of comics in the archive.