2x2 Comic (about a serious feng shui fail)

Basically Pica, our cat, disagreed with the position of the floor fan that Michelle and I brought into the computer room over the Summer months. And by "disagreed" I mean her lunch disagreed with her stomach. The fan was on at the time.

Honestly, I was in the other room feeling miserable with the flu when it happened. Michelle shrieked and the folks she was on Ventrilo with while playing WoW thought she was fleeing the room in haste to take care of an ailing husband. Instead, she had bigger problems. The dialog is slightly exaggerated but only slightly.

2x2 Comic (about Mexican restaurants named El Viento)

Sometimes when you go to a Mexican restaurant, you find that you indulge and perhaps eat a little too much. Then afterward, when preparing to leave, you find that your clothes feel uncomfortably tight. Every once in awhile, the extra pressure exerted by said clothing is joined by the pressure of a seat belt. This leads to a chain reaction resulting in... ...well you know where this is going.

I love my wife. She's always helping me come up with new ideas for this strip.

Happy Brewfest, Warcrafters...

Apologies to people who do not play World of Warcraft, this week may seem a little... ...odd; even for me. We had another 2x2 strip written up and even roughly drawn out on the dry erase board but I was asked at 2:30pm today to hold off on doing it tonight without explanation.

In the game of WoW, there are seasonal silly events and one of my favorites is the Brewfest event which coincides roughly with Oktoberfest. There are beer-related activities, a special boss with unique gear that drops including a mole-machine teleporter. The whole thing is just goofy fun and I got a chuckle out of picturing a drunk orc stumbling out of Orgrimmar and hitting on the first green living thing he saw. Too bad Durotar is dotted with so many cacti. On the other hand, a cactus probably has smoother legs than a female orc...

2x2 Comic (about being a dude)

Sometimes it isn't so much "selective hearing" because the male mind doesn't actually key in on what it hears. Sometimes it is more about selective attention. Attention shifts from what's being said to what's being communicated and the result is written all over my face. This strip wasn't based on a specific actual conversation the way the previous 2 were, but more an extension how many conversations have gone. My mind doesn't always go to nudity but my face definitely says "I'm somewhere else right now, please leave a message."

On a side note, yes, her helmet is really large compared to her body and the image Michelle was originally trying to bring up as a strip idea is not far from reality. Without the riding jacket on with all its body armor, her helmet makes her look like a bobblehead.

2x2 Comic (about World of Warcraft, and Guitar Hero)

Ever notice how people start to refer to you by your avatar's name rather than your real name after you've been playing the same character for long enough? Ever had the urge to exploit that for your own egocentric amusement? I have and I haven't (yet). Heh. Conveniently Blizzard only bans characters if a complaint is registered. Create a sufficiently humorous yet inappropriate name and you're golden (just don't do it on an RP server, those merry folk will verily see to your prompt banishment from their digital constabulary).

2x2 Comic (about World of Warcraft, no kidding)

This strip is based on a real conversation that I had with my awesome, WoW-playing wife. When we read that the Horde was going to get goblins as a playable race and the Alliance (which already dominates the server in number of players) was going to get the coolest race in the game, she immediately tried to think of some way that Blizzard could make up for it. Like the good husband I am, I then immediately thought of a contradiction to her idea that made it seem ridiculous... ...that my characterization of her suggestion was no more ridiculous than goblins in the first place is probably what kept me from getting in trouble. We seriously laughed about this for a full hour.

Setting up my favorite non-pirate joke.

Last time was toilet humor, now it is a naked dude. I guess what is obvious here is that I'm not that creatively funny.

The issue now is that I'm really just setting up one of my favorite jokes that doesn't involve a pirate. So this is part 1 and part 2 will be in 2 weeks. Sorry to make you wait for such a low-brow punchline. I have other thoughts but attempting to express them with a force-5 sugar coma in full swing at 11pm is probably not a good idea.

Toilet Humor

It has been too long but I'm back. Things got a bit distracted around here and I'll spare everyone the boring details of why.

Now that the excuses are out of the way, let's get back to cartooning shall we? When in doubt a cartoonist always returns to his comfort zone, the old proverbial "well"... ...the porcelain fixture. Hilarity ensues.

The Baconatrix

This week's image isn't so much a strip as it is just a completely silly painting. This is the Baconatrix, the nightmare fantasy of vegetarian males everywhere. With her two demon steeds, "Cat Pig" and "Deviled Ham", she sews a unique brand of emo-laced burlesque/goth/ballerina Halloween mayhem in costume parties around the season's hipster parties throughout all the trendy neighborhoods.

I have no idea where this came from, honestly. It was just going to be a silly picture exercise and I started liking it more and more so it evolved into a full project. The original image was made at 72 dpi and about 2000 pixels tall so it will likely never see print but oh well. The pet pigs really make it for me I think. It is the contrast they have from her lanky frame probably. Anyhoo, as I said, no punchline or pun, or anything like that this week, just me goofing around with the joy of sketching a silly idea.

Second Prototype

I guess I have a thing about the "right to privacy" that we're supposedly guaranteed in this country. Whenever the technology we have for transmitting personal data is penetrated by yet another government domestic spying program, I envision it as rather "personal". So today's news about an Australian company hawking a spying technology that would allow ISPs to inspect the transmissions of all communication on their network (even encrypted data they claim) was not a nice way to end the day. It doesn't matter HOW they try to justify this or even implement it, it is nothing more than institutionalized datamining. George Orwell might have had less of a sense of humor about it than I do but we both imagine no good coming from a government taking up the power to monitor its citizens' remotely all the time.

Totally hot debate

What can I say, the folks at SNL have it nailed when it comes to Sarah Palin in many regards... ...she's either completely muzzled by her handlers or she actually doesn't know what to do with a direct question, particularly ones having to do with international politics. She may be a great leader but it doesn't come across that way when everything she says is just a generic colloquialism.

Biden's no better but there's no male equivalent Tina Fey to make fun of him with. Biden's a career politician who has been a voting member of the national machine which has brought us these trials. What was his vote on the Patriot Act? What was his vote on the No Child Left Behind Act? What was his vote on going into Iraq? What was his vote on the banker bailout package? To put it bluntly, he is as opposite of the promises of the Obama campaign as you can get. I really kinda get the idea that the reduction of these debates where voters SHOULD be getting to know the kinds of policies that the candidates support from informative or at least combative into wishy-washy sound-bite strings is only going to result in them being judged by how entertained people were by them in the first place. I bet if you took a survey of Twitter, Digg, Fark, and other aggregators that are based on user contribution for their content, you'd notice that folks basically don't care if the candidates actually say anything real, they just care whether their candidate came out more popular than the other one.

Even though I know he couldn't be impartial if he wanted to, I'd prefer the next Presidential Debate be moderated by Jon Stewart.

First cold of the season

Okay. It is no fun getting sick and staying home from work. I wish I could say that taking 2 days off because of a head-cold was fun and relaxing but it is hard to enjoy it with this throbbing numb greyness clouding all my thoughts, with my sinuses filled to capacity (and often above capacity) with phlegm, and with the utter inability to breath through my useless nose. I was supposed to do a strip about Biden selling out for his political career but really, I couldn't pull that off the way I was feeling this week. So you get this self-portrait. OOH! It's in color though!

After speaking with my wife about the strip earlier this week, it became apparent that the direction we were going to take it may have been funny in conversation with Chris and myself but didn't express any truth specific to the subject of the strip. If we're going to do topical humor, we may need to understand our topic a little better. Either way, I'm completely stuffed up and my body is telling me that it is time to go to bed and sleep through another fitful night attempting to get rest.

Saving the Hest for Last

It turns out that this WHOLE THING started out because of my fascination with the Bard class in Dungeons & Dragons. I'm also criminally obsessed with puns so thus we now have Cherry Hested, the barded lady. Solomon's not really all that into playing RPGs but he's got a subversive streak a mile wide. Cherry is supposed to be incredibly charismatic... ...so much so that you don't even notice the beard.

Bring it On III: The Drow Chick

And the self-indulgence continues. You have to understand, this is hilarious fun while we're coming up with it but in looking at it as a strip one can miss half the stuff we were laughing about. For example, we thought it would be hilarious to have a character in this MMORPG based on American Pie that was the cheerleader character but gothy and emo like her creator, Judith. After laughing about the possibilities, I decided to go on to Google and see if "drow cheerleader" returned any hits. As it turns out, we're not that original.

Any way you slice it, the Maddie Webbers out there are going to out-do us in terms of character development but at least we've got a ditzy rogue in go-go boots. Now you see why "flexibilty" was an attribute on the Beefwind character sheet...

Flop Secret

I love putting in silly movie references and in this thread of comics about the explosion in the MMO market, I'm going to be sneaking in a bunch. In this one, if you pay attention to the heraldric symbol on Beefwind's chest armor, you may notice something odd about the cow, something that reminds you a little of an old Val Kilmer movie perhaps...

Anyhoo, this is the series in which we force you to watch us have fun with character creation in a completely fabricated RPG which is essentially an unholy union between Dungeons and Dragons and American Pie (with a lot of other crap tossed in the parody salad). Bear with us as we delve deeper into that hidden realm of nerdity: the RPG Character Sheet...

Try a Little Renderness

So we're definitely not the first folks to comment on the issue of over-rendered anatomy with a limited polygon budget but that doesn't stop it from being funny. The fact that Gamebryo is currently being used as the engine for Warhammer Online doesn't mean that some truly ancient build out there wouldn't be licensed for a lower-budget MMO.

If you're not into the whole Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game genre, the more generic MMO (minus the RPG) concept is being deployed on a massive scale across intellectual properties that don't necessarily warrant it. Hello Kitty has one for Heaven's sake. Once Blizzard proved you can basically take a built-in audience and print money with a subscription model and regular updates to an elaborate chat program, well I guess everyone figured it was time to jump on that digital bandwagon. God help us all if the makers of American Pie actually tried this...

Mariah Carey-oke

It happens to the best of us. We think we've got a little bit of privacy in our workplace, in our homes, in our cars, but inevitably we find that privacy shattered at the worst time possible... ...while singing "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey.

Man, this comic honestly took the longest of any of them so far because I'm introducing 2 new characters and trying to decide best how their interaction will dictate the way that their characters are presented. I am of course putting WAY too much pressure on a single strip but I wanted to get the tone of it just right. It is now 1 am and my ability to rationalize this issue is weakening rapidly so I might as well post what I've got and call it a night. I know it is a week late but I hope to do better next time. We'll get back to the dirty jokes soon enough, don't you worry.

~Russell

No Comic This Week

Wow. how mopey can I get? I had an idea for a strip for this week (several, actually) but when I sat down to draw it, two nights in a row, I found I had crap for motivation and crappier crap for output. I let it slip this week because I figured I could get away with having my cake and eating it too on Wednesday with some Frolf but I got home at 9pm and by then, I was in "coast to bed" mode. I find myself in similar straits tonight without the benefit of something to build off of from yesterday.

This means that you, both of you, the loyal readers are now screwed out of a whole week's worth of pent-up anticipation. And for that I am deeply sorry. To both of you. Support system or not, I need to be able to make a strip happen without getting distracted. That didn't happen this week. See you next week.

I can has hygiene?

I swear this is the last "lolcats" picture I make. Really. Okay so let's just admit that it is a dirty little secret of mine that I enjoy Icanhascheezburger.com for reasons I can't explain. Let's just say that bad grammar and cute pictures of kittens doing mundane things somehow appeal to me. It makes me wonder sometimes whether that means years of watching cable television (especially recently) has lowered my taste in humor and entertainment enough to make such a genre even palatable in the first place.

As my cohort can confirm though, I am easily amused. Perhaps a little TOO easily amused. Combine this with a fear of letting my cat anywhere near my bathroom lest it abuse my dental maintenance tools in any way, and well, this strip has way WAY too much of myself in it...

Mono-x-treme

So last week was a bit of a departure from the style that is developing for this strip and what I realized afterwards was that it greatly distracts from the "comic strip" feel we were working on, I think to the detriment of our efforts.

This week we're back not only to the strip format and simple line-art style but also the "punchline" writing and character introductions. That's right, Occam is a platypus and a new character in the strip. His namesake is actually "Occam's Razor", the philosophical notion that the simplest answer is often the correct one. As a platypus he embodies a kind of genetic question that utterly lacks any simple answers.