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.

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34 Comments

  1. Obviously Joel's beard will have grown more majestic due to exposure to the blood, also Denise will return from the blood.

  2. It's the artpocalypse! We're all going to d……..Oh, wait – that's different. These new appendages might come in handy.

  3. I always assumed that 4-fingered cartoon characters were less potentially offensive, since you could never know for sure if they were giving you THE finger or just the ring finger.

  4. did they have five toes before? i'm curious (idk why but that's my main question)

    also a fifth finger will make sponging all that blood out of stuff much easier

    • I havent drawn that many shoeless feet in the comic but Im pretty sure they always had four toes. I assume everyone's balance is now a bit better.

      • actually the pinky toe is pretty useless and biologists are fairly certian it will evolve out in a few more generations

        • That seems to be debatable. As with the appendix and muscles behind the ear, unless there is an environmental/reproductive pressure to lose them (ie people selecting partners b/c they have smaller pinky toes) they will probably remain.
          http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-01/fyi

          Sorry – pedantic, but evolution is one of my passions because it is so poorly understood by the general public.

          • My wife only married me for my ear-wiggling ability.
            So that's one more generation for the muscles behind the ear.

  5. Sci-five to you, good sir!

    In The Simpsons God has five fingers. Are your characters deities now? Your eBook is called Drawing Hands is Hard. Does an extra digit make it more difficult or easier now you can look at your own mitts for reference, without amputating anything? Great job on incorporating the fourth wall/meta thing with the storyline, I'm keen to see what happens next!

    • I am my characters' god so I guess they're made more in my image that before. Drawing the few five fingered hands in this comic is the hardest time ive had drawing hands in the last couple of years.

      • What's the new trick (ok, skill) that results in 5 hand penises (penii?) instead of the bunch of bananana's effect that was the early cartoon problem?

    • Joel unknowingly (or knowingly) brought about a bit of history in this comic. Ages ago, man only had 4 fingers (ages could've been thousands or millions of years in this sense. Numerical tracking back then was very different than it is now because… you know… 4 fingers) until the great quetzalcoatl of ancient lore brought about the Great Blood Flood (shortened to the now Biblical or Great Flood). The great misconception about the quetzacoatl was that it was a feathered lizard, when, in fact, it was just a giant bird with teeth. Weird, right?
      Anyway, the great creature, in a fit of rage over losing a game of parcheesi, filled the world with a cleansing blood. Instead of having the intended effect of killing all of civilization, the creature ended up mutating every simian, living and dead, giving them all middle fingers and toes. The great demon bird then died from exhaustion. In honor of the quetzacoatl's gift, we now refer to the gesture of sticking out our middle finger as "flipping the bird." This soon became a negative gesture, however, when people realized that they could no longer wear their old gloves and had to buy all new ones.

      Edit: Sorry, Joel. I made the glove joke before I saw the alt tag.

      • The real joke about the chicken lizard in the comic is that he doesnt have anything to do with Quetzacoatl except for the fact that Eli thought he did and named him as such. I suppose he's closer related to a cockatrice.

    • Im not 100% sure Ive ever drawn any bird flipping, though I have done the metal horns a few times and it has always looked weird to me.

  6. Funnily enough, I had never even noticed the digit count in previous volumes. I shall curse myself for paying more attention to the jokes, I guess.

  7. Any time I see a comic world with 4 fingers instead of five (Simpsons, Hijinks Ensue, etc), I always want to argue that they should be using an octal numbering system instead of decimal.

    • As I was writing the comic that comes after this one I was REALLY starting to freak out about how different the world would actually be if we had 8 fingers. I decided to basically say "fuck it," make a few jokes and move on. Its too much to even think about.

  8. Now that I've gone back and read the last three comics, I noticed that everyone's hands are showing in almost every frame! You Sixth Sense's" us. It was right there in front of us and we missed it.

    Oh, and now everyone has feline AIDS. Right?

    • The real hint was eli saying "I cant put my finger on it" just before the Blood Wave hits. So far no one has caught that.

      • It really is amazing how you can get used to something like that. A lot of comics in the past have done the 4-fingered thing so when I see it in a comic, my brain just glosses over it. It doesn't even seem WEIRD. Which, in itself, is kind of weird.

  9. A man walks into a doctor's office. "What seems to be the problem?" asks the physician. "It's…well, I have five penises," replies the man. "Holy crap!" says the doctor, "How do your pants fit?" "Like a glove." replies the man.

  10. Nice blend of funny and function! Though, I have to say, there was something oddly endearing about the 4-fingered hands. Will the lo-fijinks still have the mitten-like hands?? I hope so!

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