Guest Comic By Lar deSouza

Nothing says, “I bought you some stuff from the Internet,” like buying people stuff from the Internet.

JoCo Cruise Crazy II guest week starts now! I will be on a boat all week with about half of the Internet and a dozen or so of my close friends and at least a handful of my creative heroes, and YOU sent me there with your generous participation in my fundraiser! So, thanks for that. What a swell lady or gent or undefinable organism you are. I will karaoke “Come Sail Away” by Styx in your honor. Was I being too presumptuous in classifying you as an organism? I’m trying to be sensitive but at this point I will have been drinking rum punches with dolphins for several days and I should not be held responsible for… well, anything. Of course I am technically writing this the Thursday before I leave, so… now my eyes have gone cross. RUM PUNCH STAT!

It is a safe bet that you aren’t Lar deSouza, which is to say I am not as fond of you as I am of Lar deSouza because I AM SUPER FOND OF LAR DESOUZA! He is essentially the greatest guy. Completely disregarding the fact that he can draw EVERYTHING in nearly any style or configuration, have it look amazing and somehow seem effortless – disregarding all of that – he is one of the most genuine, sweet men I am ever met. Let’s see, you got the talent. You got the sweetness. You got the MIGHTY MIGHTY beard. You got the penchant for wearing fezzes and various other novelty chapeaus. He really has it all… ladies. Also he has a wife… ladies. So whatever you’re thinking… he is probably totally cool with you thinking it AS HARD AS YOU CAN. Maybe even email him some pictures of what you’re thinking of.

Lar was kind enough to contribute a comic for Cruise Guest week, but introduced him to Jonathan Frakes, so that makes us even essentially forever. You can see Lar’s work on Least I Could Do, Looking For Group, on Twitter and you can buy some pretty fantastic prints in his store. I personally recommend this one of all 11 Doctors as bunnies because… well did you read the thing about Doctors and bunnies? I know, right?

COMMENTERS: Perhaps The Doctor is our only hope against The Phantom Menace in 3D. How could he make the movie, nay, the whole prequel trilogy more palatable?

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.

The Final Problem

Wil Wheaton and I got excited and made this “Fighting Time Lords” shirt for you.

@sizemore twatted a tweet so good I had to ask for permission to make it into a comic. Luckily he obliged, and thus you have the only ending to House that I will ever accept.

Before the pedanti-squad gets their pedanties all knotted up, I do know that once during season four of House “it” was, in fact, Lupus. I’m actually quite glad House is ending. It’s really the only formula driven, procedural show I’ve ever appreciated. I think the blame for that appreciation falls squarely on Hugh Laurie. He has remained consistently captivating for eight years. Even when the plot was faltering, the sidekicks were boring or the case was too fantastic to get emotionally invested in HE was the grizzled glue that held it all together. Despite my stubbley crush on the pill popping, leg limping wonder doc, I firmly believe the writers and producers of House have taken that character absolutely everywhere he could possible go. He has gone through various stages of addiction, recovery, self-destruction, and re-recovery more than a few times. He’s taken the same physical and emotional journey through the peaks and valleys of self loathing and self discovery over and over and to have him continue to circle around the depths of the human condition for 1 or 2 more years would be abusive to the character and the audience.

In all honesty, the show could have ended after season 4 and I probably would have been fine. They might have even checked out with a little more integrity at that point. The subsequent seasons have veered into territory so implausible that the ideas might as well have been borrowed from rejected Nip/Tuck scripts. Still, they somehow managed to real in the crazy and keep things interesting without resorting to too much sensationalism.

The problem with House is that it has always asked the audience to suspend disbelief in order to allow for a character that in any sane world would have long since died by his own actions or those of someone who has spent any length of time in his company, or at the very least been completely abandoned by anyone and everyone he had ever worked with or known personally. The show has explored each of these ideas multiple times, but the consequences never seem to stick. No matter how smart he is, no matter how many lives he’s saved, House would have been fired from PPTH in the first season and had his medical license permanently revoked. It gets harder and harder to ignore this fact as the show goes on since he starts committing felony after felony and goes essentially unpunished. Even after he basically attempts to murder his girlfriend/boss and her entire family he gets a truncated prison sentence, a slap on the wrist AND his old job back. I think the writers found it harder and harder to reset the show back to its basic premise after each consecutive escalation of insanity. If it were to continue any longer, house would have to assassinate the president with a tank, then somehow be elected president himself.

OK, I would totally watch that show.

COMMENTERS: What show that you enjoyed just went on at least a season too long? When should it have ended? I bet more than a few of you are going to say Supernatural season 5. For me it was Heroes, after season 1 and Nip/Tuck after season 2. I would also have accepted a straight up cancellation of LOST after season 3, since none of the unanswered questions up until that point were EVER answered in the remaining 3 seasons.

ALSO: Check out what I made for Josh’s 30th birthday.