Catches Fleas Just Like Flies

The Fancy Sketch Drive ends on Wednesday 7/11/12!

San Diego Comic-Con is this week! I will be hanging out at booth 1332 with Blind Ferret. Check my Twitter for signing times and availability. More info HERE.

Grammar Dalek Shirts will go on presale after I get back from SDCC.

Big thanks to Mark Waid of Daredevil and Thrillbent for the shout out to HE at the end of this Onion AV Club interview about digital comics.

This comic was inspired by and features the second appearance of my cat, Replay. [UPDATE: Fancy Bastard Stephen found another instance of Replay in the comic archive.] My other, stupider cat’s name is Tivo. They both hate commercials. The title is derived from how my daughter actually sang the theme song to the 60’s Spider-Man cartoon show when she was 4 years old. It seemed oddly appropriate.

I wrote up a bunch of thoughts on Twitter about The Amazing Spider-Man after seeing the movie. Rather than paraphrase, I am just going to post it all below. COMMENTERS: Feel free to post your thoughts on ASM in the comments. I would say, “No spoilers,” but how can you spoil a story that’s been told 100 times over the last 50 years? [words in blue are from Twitter followers]

Saw Amazing Spider-Man. Sam Raimi’s Spider is to Tim Burton’s Batman as ASM is to Batman Begins.

That isn’t to say that it’s vastly superior. Raimi and Burton’s movies we’re 90’s era comics come to life. ASM and BB are more grounded.

Raimi and Burton were all about spectacle and showmanship. ASM and Bat-Nolan are all about characters.

Spider-Man and Batman had strikingly similar arcs in the first 3 movies. Good, better, FUCKING BAT COUNTRY.

@hijinksensue That’s exactly how I feel about Raimi’s films. They’re live-action cartoons. They’re fun, but don’t hold up 10 years later.

yeah they are very time capsulesque. Beyond their era they stick out like a sore thumb.

.@imariaprime I don’t think there was “filler” in ASM, but it was tough to sit through Spiderman’s origin story for 40 min AGAIN.

They tweaked the origin enough to keep it familiar but fresh but sitting there waiting for Uncle Ben to give the speech and die was tough.

But they HAVE to cover that ground to allow the new trilogy to stand on its own. Can’t skip straight to the sequel.

Ok nevermind. They could have spent 15 minutes recapping or streamlining the origin.

As far as actors go, Garfield blew McGuire out of the water.

@hijinksensue was never a fan of maguire as peter Parker. Although that could have something to do with how badly he was written

@OfDoomReview wife and I had the same conversation tonight. You can only work with what you’re given.

Also happy to report that the annoying things about the costume in ASM aren’t nearly as noticeable in the actual film as in the press photos

You never even see the magic silver slippers. The basketball texture is still weird but not as detestable as I was expecting.

@Noahsturdevant since his name was tossed around, Gyllenhaal would have made a better Spiderman than McGuire.

And Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy? Let’s just say I wouldn’t throw HER off a bridge to her death. #what #noidea

Hippocrates Rising

The Fancy Sketch Drive ends on Wednesday 7/11/12! About 50/100 are already sold. Get in on this and help support me in a time of financial need while getting some sweet original art! I will draw damn near whatever you want (within reason). I finally got my home Internet working again and was able to stream some live sketching for a couple of hours. If you missed it, the video is archived HERE.

San Diego Comic-Con is this week! I will be hanging out at booth 1332 with Blind Ferret. Check my Twitter for signing times and availability. More info HERE.

Grammar Dalek Shirts will go on presale after I get back from SDCC.

Check out this board game my daughter and I made! You can download a PDF and play it with your kids.

FINALLY! I get to go where I was going to get with this storyline. I’ve had this planned since way back when Eli got booze-sickness. We haven’t seen Boxcar Pete, the hobo who talks like a pirate for some reason, in a LOOOONG time. What did he do to Eli? Did he harvest his organs and replace them with booze sponges? Yeah, probably. That’s probably it. Actually, seems like a pretty open and shut case when you think about the sponge thing.

I once interviewed for a job at a hypnosis center. Like a “stop smoking, lose weight” type of place. I was about 20 and I had no idea what the job was, but I knew rent was due and I was desperate. The owner basically told me it was all a scam and laid out how he tricked people into feeling good about giving him a lot of money whether they met their goals or not. I was supposed to go home and memorize a script, come back and start working the scam within a week a so. As shockingly broke as I was, I managed to throw away the script and never call them again.

COMMENTERS: Have you ever interview for or even taken a job where you KNEW some shady shit was going on? What finally made you leave? Are you still there?

Cloudy With A Chance

The Fancy Sketch Drive is on! About 50/100 are already sold. Get in on this and help support me in a time of financial need while getting some sweet original art! I will draw damn near whatever you want (within reason) and I will do it live on Ustream (UPDATE: Due to a dead router I was unable to Ustream Friday. Going to try again Saturday).

Donors and subscribers are getting the first HE iBook/eBook. Drop a few bucks in the bucket and check it out for yourself. Take HE offline wherever you go!

San Diego Comic-Con is next week! I will be hanging out at booth 1332 with Blind Ferret. Check my Twitter for signing times and availability. More info HERE.

Check out this board game my daughter and I made! You can download a PDF and play it with your kids.

This comic picks up from here, when Eli was trying to recover his buried “rememberies” of the night his helicopter… apparently didn’t crash. What the hell happened that made him go on a two week bender of drunk-bauchery? I suspect we’ll find out more when Joel looks up how to hypnotize someone on the Internet and starts monkeying around with Eli’s fragile, gelatinous brain parts.

COMMENTERS: What’s the craziest thing you ever did, or anyone ever did TO you to try to get you to break a bad habit? I have a friend who has tried to quit smoking at least a dozen times over the last 10 years. Once when we were in our early twenties I took his entire pack of cigarettes and wrote “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!” on every one of them in red pen. He noticed it the next morning and threw them away NOT because he was going to quit, but because he didn’t want to inhale the ink from the pen. Formaldehyde was fine, but ink? Hell no. That shit is gross.

Booty-Call Accelerator

The Fancy Sketch Drive is on! About 25/100 are already sold. Get in on this and help support me in a time of financial need while getting some sweet original art! I will draw damn near whatever you want (within reason) and I will do it live on Ustream!

Donors and subscribers are getting the first HE iBook/eBook. Drop a few bucks in the bucket and check it out for yourself. Take HE offline wherever you go!

San Diego Comic-Con is next week (holy shit)! I will be hanging out at booth 1332 with Blind Ferret. Check my Twitter for signing times and availability. More info HERE.

The first few HE comics, like the Higgs Boson announcement, are actually lettered in Comic Sans. I never changed the font in those early comics as a way to remind myself where I’d come from and what mistakes I had made. Those were dark times. Times when a man could get a newsletter from his dentist that had Comic Sans all over it. Right in his mailbox. AT HIS HOUSE! Sure, he might see Papyrus in the logo of a local spa or nail salon, but no one should have to deal with such fonts at the place where their children sleep. Dark times indeed.

So I guess the Universe gets to keep on having mass or whatever. S’pretty cool I guess. I mean, the Higgs Boson is neat and all, but I’m saving my excitement for when someone figures out why almost all of everything in the Universe isn’t actually there. I feel like maybe 100% to more than 100% of our resources as a people should be spent on unraveling that particular mystery, because personally it crushes my brain out of existence.

COMMENTERS: If we have sent the Declaration of Independence to England in Comic Sans, I’m pretty sure we’d all not be pronouncing out H’s. So what does a person or product have to do in order for you to immediately NOT take them seriously? Is it specific to your field or area of expertise (ie Is is something most people wouldn’t immediately notice)?

You Can’t Take This Guy From Me

If you are a Donation Subscriber, you are A) one of my favorite people, and B) going to get an email today with a link to download the first HijiNKS ENSUE iBook/eBook. It’s called iJinks Ensue: Drawing Hands Is Hard, and it contains all of the HE comics from 2007-2008 plus some neat extras at the end.

It will be in iBooks format for iPad and PDF format for everything else. My wife and I have worked CRAZY hard on it, so I really hope you guys enjoy it and understand how much I appreciate your donations. If you are not a donation subscriber and don’t plan to be ($2 a month? C’Mon!), you will be able to get my eBook offerings on a pay-what-you-want donation model starting later today.

Looks like you’re going to have to wait at least one more day to find out what repressed “rememberies” Eli was starting to uncover.

I doubt I will get to see the Firefly panel at SDCC since people are probably already in line for it, but thinking about their “huge announcements” has sent me down a certain train of thought. Has anyone else seen Tron: Uprising on Disney? Can’t you imagine a Firefly/Serenity animated series done exactly in that style? The visuals look serious enough that you can take the story seriously. Does that make sense? And it wouldn’t cost $20 million an hour like the movie did. If the crew can never be reassembled for TV or features again, and the occasional comic just isn’t cutting it, doesn’t animation seem like the most logical choice for carrying on the verse?

Speaking of SDCC: Due to booth problems beyond my control I will not actually have a spot to sit, but I will be hanging out at the Blind Ferret booth (1332) throughout the weekend. Check my Twitter for signing times and availability. More info HERE. Despite the lack of a table I will find a way to do sketches for you. I’ll probably bring a little collapsable stool or something. NEVER GIVE UP! I WILL SKETCH FOR YOU!

Speaking of sketches, money is EXTREMELY tight in HijiNKS land right now, so I am going to do a live sketch drive this week. Starting tomorrow you’ll be able to order custom sketch cards from this site and I will draw them (whatever you requested withing reason) live on Ustream with times to be announced on my Twitter. I’ll probably limit them to 100, but if it’s a success I’ll do it more often.

COMMENTERS: What do you hope they announce at the Firefly 10 year anniversary panel at San Diego Comic-Con? Realistically and in your wildest imagination? How about my animated series idea? How would you see that playing out?