Method Man

Emerald City Comicon is THIS WEEKEND in Seattle. It is my favorite show of the year and I will be at the Blind Ferret Booth (#1106-1108) all weekend. Check out the new mini-banner/ price sheet I made for ECCC on my Tumblr.

I will have a lot of the stuff pictured in the ad below with me at the con, but what I really want is for YOU to have it. In return I want to have your dollars.

OK, I know this is crazy bonkers banana sauce, but hear me out Hollywood. How about for the next Oscars you hire a professional entertainer to host? Maybe someone who is used to being on stage in front of a lot of people. Maybe someone who doesn’t come off like he is reading his bad jokes for the very first time in front of 100 million people. Maybe, oh I dunno, a comedian? Or a seasoned veteran of the stage? Someone who isn’t constantly shouting, “I REALLY DON’T BELONG UP HERE!!!” with his eyebrows. The 2013 Oscars were a crap stabbing train wreck. Perhaps not quite as train wrecky has last years “Which host has greater contempt for the other?” contest, but the train was thoroughly and irrefutably wrecked.

Seth MacFarlane has a fantastic voice, and he’s managed to become the highest paid comedy writer in history (despite having relied on the same 7 jokes for the last 15 years), but Oscar host is a job he is in no way qualified for. His subpar hosting performance could have been saved by some top notch writing, but they seem to have gone instead with NO writing. I found myself staring at nearly every bit and bit of banter with the face I usually reserve for Five Gum commercials. A sort sideway eye-SQUONK that says, “I know what all of these things are individually, but when you put them together in this way, I suffer complete cognitive disconnect from whatever emotions you may have intended to evoke, or message you were attempting to relay.” Did anyone have any idea what the dudes from The Avengers were talking about? If the real Avengers were that unrehearsed and disorganized, you know who would be hosting the Oscars? MOTHER FUCKING THANOS. That’s who.

When Daniel Day-Lewis took the stage to accept his Best Actor Award (which at this point really shouldn’t be applied to any particular film since he is just THE. BEST. ACTOR.) he seemed to either have rehearsed his jokes so much that they seemed completely off the cuff and hilariously perfect or HE’S JUST THAT GOD DAMN WONDERFUL. My vote is for the latter. I was really hoping D-Day-Lew would have just decked MacFarlane right in the beady black shark eyes and, as his foe lay gobsmacked on the floor, let out a John Lovitz-esque, “ACTING!”

COMMENTERS: Speaking of method acting, or The Method, as purveyors of douchebaggery might call it, have you ever kept up a falsehood for so long that it eventually became true? For instance, did you ever pretend to like something (say to impress a potential partner) that you eventually really liked it, or at least knew so much about it that you were nearly an expert?

At my last real job, one of the requirements during the interview was than I be proficient in Photoshop (a particular proficiency that I totally lacked, despite what my resume might have said). I had to fake it nearly every day with tricks like the “I know how I would do it, but how would YOU do it?” technique or the “Yeah, I can do that [QUICK GO WATCH A TUTORIAL ON YOUTUBE]” process. I did this so much so that I did eventually become somewhat of a Photoshop expert. Now it’s the main medium I work in for my comic-maker job.

While You Were Out

Between the sky falling over Russia (or so they WANT you to believe), the Pope resigning (or so they WANT you to believe) and a cruise ship running out of gas and overflowing with poops (or so… no that shit totally legit happened), I’m sort of getting the impression that the loose band of Internet weirdos that set sale from Orlando for JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 might have been the only thing holding this stupid world together. We leave for a week and vigilante cops starts murdering people, Olympic cyborgs start murdering people and North Korea gets reruns of Dharma and Greg! How are they going to get any of the cultural references in that show? Dharma is SUCH a free spirit and poor Greg just isn’t used to her “live for the moment” attitude what with being a straight laced, buttoned down guy. I bet they get four episodes in and ignite a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere out of frustration.

Emerald City Comicon is NEXT WEEKEND in Seattle. It is my favorite show of the year and I will be at the Blind Ferret Booth all weekend (#1106-1108).

Did you know you can get a really nice looking print of any comic I’ve ever done? YOU INDEED TOTALLY CAN.

COMMENTERS: Have you ever been away, unreachable or somehow otherwise totally uninformed when MAJOR NEWS went down?

If I Had Glass

I have a bunch of clearance shirts in my store. Please buy them.

Josh IRL brought up a good point in this tweet. The possible proliferation of Google Glass won’t lead to people doing a lot more sky diving and hot air balloon racing. It’s going to lead to everyone walking directly into oncoming traffic and getting hit by a bus because both you and the bus driver were watching some hot heads up (and heads down, and back up and back down) sexytime action on your future glasses. What’s that Clarke quote? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from porn? Maybe Larry Flynt said that. Either way it’s the most true statement anyone has ever made.

Nearly every leap in technology going back over the last 100 years has been driven by a desire to look at naked people while sexing oneself. Video compression? Porn. Credit cards over the Internet? Porn. Gutenberg press? Obviously porn. Powered flight? The Wright brothers assumed there was better porn two towns over and didn’t want to make the long drive. Porn is the engine around which society and technology gyrate. To deny this is to deny our nature, is to deny our future, is to deny our boners [and lady boners].

COMMENTERS: What applications, both legitimate and legitimately sexy, do you see people REALLY using Google Glass for? Will this tech be the next iPod or the next Google Wave?

JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 Guest Comic By Chris Hallbeck Of Maximumble

JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 Guest Fortnight is over! We are safely docked somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi or one of the other states you are supposed to completely avoid. The passenger unload is going much faster than anticipated since we don’t have any luggage. I mean we HAVE luggage, but after 4 days without power or running water pretty much everything became a de facto toilet. We’ve drunk all the fresh water from our souvenir snow globes and boiled the shells from our souvenir necklaces to make a sort of broth we called Sea Juice. All in all this trip was 100 times better than the time I went to Branson.

If I may be ever so slightly serious for a moment, JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 was once again a transformative experience. I made new friends, strengthened old friendships, frolicked on tropical beaches with some of my favorite people and received world class entertainment every single day and night provided by some of the most wonderful funny people, musicians, and purveyors of talent that I have ever shared a floating mall-hotel with. If you are on the fence about going next year, GET OFF THAT DAMN FENCE! It’s a week of fun that you will never forget or regret. It’s crazy expensive, but what are you going to take with you when you die? Money or memories? (If they find a way to let you take money with you when you die, I will go back and amend this post, because… I mean, c’mon. That would be AWESOME.) I haven’t even gone through my photos yet, but if I do make Fancy Photo Comics of this trip I will post them somewhere besides the front page of the website so that those of you (heartless, joyless wretches) who do not enjoy them will not have to be unnecessarily burdened.

This final Guest Fortnight offering (on the theme of me accidentally getting on the wrong boat) comes from my friend Chris Hallbeck of Maximumble, Minimumble and his flagship comic The Book Of Biff. Chris and I are both parents of young children and seem to share many of the same ideas about raising a functional, exceptional human in a weird internet world and blah blah blah mushy frienship whatever HE MADE THIS SHIRT WHICH I THINK IS VERY FUNNY. Also this mug. Funny. Go buy those things.

As a little tag to Chris’s joke, I thought I would include this photo that I took in a shipboard karaoke booth with Wil Wheaton and John Scalzi. Somehow I knew it would come in handy. [click to embiggen]

JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 Guest Comic By Sam Logan Of Sam And Fuzzy

JoCo Cruise Crazy 3 Guest Fortnight is nearly back to the mainland! The pod of friendly humpback whales there were towing our powerless and increasingly Thunderdome-esque vessel back to Florida ended up being chunks of that possibly mythical, Texas-sized trash island that broke off and developed sentience. Monstrous trash whales are truly the gentle giants of the sea.

As I mentioned yesterday, the final 3 Guest Fortnight comics feature three different artists taking on the same idea. What if I got on the wrong boat? I mean, I like big boats and I cannot lie. Who’s to say I’m going to be super picky about WHICH big boat I stumble onto? They all look pretty much the same. Round, juicy… bubble…y? You know? Boats. Fellas? Fellas? Does your girlfriend got the boat?

Sam Logan is a Canadian, but please do not hold that against him. He wouldn’t even know if you did, as that Canadians lack the gene for understanding sarcasm, rudeness and the general purpose “Healthy Directionless American Rage” we take for granted. He is my friend and he makes a comic about a… let’s same a circus clown and a monkey. I’ve never really been able to tell. Maybe the monkey is a cat. Maybe they’re both cats. It’s on the Internet, so chances are pretty good it’s all about cats. He also has something to do with one of my favorite Tumblrs called “Skull Panda Loves Everything.“ I think he’s the webmaster. Canada probably still has “webmasters,” right? I bet they also have “newspaper columnists” and “record company executives” and “doctors” that “help keep you well” so you “don’t get sick” and “die” leaving “crushing medical debt” behind that “devastates” your “family.”