Sarah's Lost!

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I'm actually kind of surprised that I can still even draw. I haven't really doodled at all in the last couple months, much less done any honest drawing. I blame the fact that I haven't been to Montana's in like forever. When I go to Montana's, I don't go to eat, I go to colour on the tablecloths (if you've never been, they're made of brown paper, and meant to be coloured on). I went to Grapes the other night, but they don't offer any drawing opportunities.

In any case, this script has been kicking around for a while now, and it feels good to finally get it outta there. It's not really gold or anything, but it's a funny idea, and I think it works. Maybe it's some kind of social commentary on how we've grown way too overprotective of our children or something too, I don't know. you'd have to ask Edwin; he's the one who writes most of these things.

Also, spot the Metal Gear Solid reference! (It's not a hard one)

Late to the dance

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Holy shit, not only did I post that comic without resizing it (thereby destroying the site layout), but I also forgot the site's bee-day. In my defense, I've been playing Pikmin 2 again in what little spare time I can afford m'self (maybe I'll finish it this time), and it's a particularly engrossing game.

On the upside (for what site readers are left), summer's over and the girlfriend is in school again, so I will no longer be spending every night with her, and normal comics shall resume now that I can sit down and work on a comic for a solid couple hours. The one thing I hate is doing a comic in more than one sitting. Dunno why, but when I have to put it on hold, I can never come back feeling like I want to finish it.

But I should stop typing things, and start drawing things! I have a comic due for tomorrow!

Oh, and also, it's "barren".

Happy Birthday site!

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Ah, and yet another digit for the site comes around. It was actually yesterday, but I kind of only realized it while falling asleep.

So it's been around three years now. That's a pretty long time. It's been a little more baron around here excluding Ryan's grade 5 comics. Maybe I'll sit down and write something out. As far as the yearly birthday comic, we'll see what I can scare up.

Steve's Guest Comic #3

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Well, it's been a long few weeks, but your torture is finally over; I have no more Pointless Killing comics to scan and upload. There's always No Prisoners 2, which I like to considering my middle school comicing opus, but it's still really bad. Perhaps I shall remake it. But of course that will mean a complete restructuring of the plot (structure itself was not a concern in grade seven) and maybe some added character development? They're pretty one-dimensional, and most only appear for a couple panels then get blown up. More importantly however, I would first have to present to you the original No Prisoners, and that is a horror I just cannot inflict on anyone.

I am, however, considering posting The Adventures of Bob, a nearly 60-issue comic I produced between grades six and nine. It was a very simple comic, but I believe it had some real chutzpah. And if not, well, it at least had a little heart.

But I digress, we have a comic in the here and now which needs at least a brief discussion. Steve has graced us with yet another guest comic, and as always, I am delighted to post it. Steve's work may not appeal to Joe Everyman, but those who look below the crude stickmen and out-of-order panels will see true works of genius. This one, also, is calling me out. Why? Well, I might be spending all my time with my girlfriend, and not enough with my regular friends. And of course, by "not enough", I mean "none". So yeah. I'm a jackass. But in my defense, the woman and I have been traveling a lot and even house-sat together last weekend. Now she's suffering from mild work-related depression, so she's been in need of much comforting over the last couple days. It's starting depress me that my quest to be a good boyfriend has caused me to become a bad normal friend, but that's just how the cards have been dealt at the moment. I'll eventually find a way to strike a good balance between the two, even if it means I have to cut out my most precious Ryan Time.

Ehhhhh.... That's a lot of words. I think I'm done for now.

Pointless Killing

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It's halfway through summer, but I finally figured out my plan to save myself the trouble of having to make comics during the sunny months and still have something to post!

I was cleaning my closet a bit, and found some old binders full of drawings and comics from my middle school years, and decided to leaf through them quickly. It was in there that I found inspiration in the form of crap I could post as semi-legitimate comic offerings: Pointless Killing. I know it's an easy way out, but it's not just random doodles, and it's got more than one panel, so it's not filler.

Anyway, I'm heading out on a road trip to Alberta this afternoon, so I'll be running these comics whilst I'm away (and then some. I won't be gone that long). There are 11 pages total, so I'll have one ready to go every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday until they run out. That's a solid 3 and a half weeks of this garbage, so you'd better get used to it now.

Doodle Filler #01

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It would seem that things are just as bad as ever around here. And by that I mean I'm not posting anything for weeks at a time. Le sigh.

While I'm not providing a comic to you this week, as my contract states I should be doing, I do have some neat filler here for ya. I was out with my girlfriend at the cottage of one of her family's friends and in the afternoon, a bunch of us decided to spend some time doodling. Of course everyone ended up fawning over my cartooning ability, and of course I was very modest about it.

The woman herself isn't a drawer, but she's a big fan of colouring, so I let her work her magic on this page while I started a new one. Unfortunately, I didn't provide a colour key, so Ryan ended up blonde and my sweet bat-wing sword became green and blue. Oh well. Might have been nicer if the colouring job had been finished, but it was dinnertime and nobody was going to choose colouring over food.

So this one, I think, is probably the first and only piece of filler that was ever worked on by a team rather than just me or Edwin.

Oddball by Association

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I've been slacking pretty hardcore on this here comic lately, and I've got to admit, it probably won't be getting any better anytime in the near future. Not only am I working completely insane, ever-changing hours right now, but the woman and I have at least three entirely separate trips planned for the summer. So yeah, I think I'll probably be missing a couple more weeks in there somewhere. I might even just turn over the reins to Edwin for the duration of the summer (he's got a rather charming idea brewing anyway), or even go so far as to put the site on hiatus until university starts again and my girlfriend has far less time to spend with me (which I'm not looking forward to).

So this comic isn't overly spectacular in and of itself, now is it? The last panel is mostly reused, and the first two are more or less exactly the same. Not that I mind personally, because it saves me hours worth of work, but the end result doesn't appeal to the eye quite as much as something a little more varied. Oh well.

I dun screwed up

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Well, I had plans to do something different this week. It seems that what I wanted to do was a bit more difficult than I expected it to be. So I apologize for this week's lack of comic. Next time I'll make sure I've got something before I decide to provide a week's comic

Oh shit!

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Oh crap. Sorry guys. Ummm... We'll see what the future brings. Expect something a little different.

Uuuuuuhh...

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Edwin said he would take care of the comic this week, but I don't see anything, do you? I just went all day assuming he uploaded one of his MS Paint masterpieces, but now I log on and there's been nothing all day? Sigh... guess we miss another week.

My Life As A K.K.King

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But seriously, how much do I love My Life As A King? I wasn't interested in it at all before launch, but then I read the manual and found out exactly how it was played and knew that we were made to be together. In fact, I spent over seven hours playing it yesterday. I haven't played that much of a single game in a day since Twilight Princess.

Um, as for the comic itself, Edwin is like on vacation or something so I had to write something on my own. Look how well that turned out. Not only is it not funny, but it's catering to a very, very small niche. I mean really, how many people give two shits about anything in the Crystal Chronicles series? How about just one shit? Not many. Or at least, I can't imagine there are many anyhow.

So I suppose the "parody" here is that you are limited to a town full of clavats unless you pay for the DLC add-ons (which obviously I did) to unlock the other races. Also, single-costume downloads are bull. I'm not paying a whole dollar just so my king can look a little more like a pirate. If you gave me at least two or three options then I'd maybe understand and shell out the points for it. Also, why do extra costumes suck up three whole blocks of my Wii's precious internal memory? It's an incredibly limited resource to begin with, and I don't need overinflated downloads clogging up what little space there is.

In any case, pricing and space-hogging issues aside, the whole DLC thing works oh-so smoothly (and in-game!) that I'm willing to overlook the flaws. Now all we need is some sort of storage solution and I think the Wii will be ready to truly compete with the 360 and PS3 as far as nickel-and-diming us into poverty goes.

Take a Big Bite out of Life

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This one, in Steve's perfect world, is true. Unfortunately he hasn't actually gotten around to leaving a Big Bite hidden at anyone's house yet. We have however, frightened Edwin into thinking that we're hiding garbage around his house. It's quite funny.

I haven't much else to say, besides noting that yes, that is the Poltergust 3000 Ryan is carrying. I had to have him in there doing something, and I figured hunting ghosts with a modded vacuum would be kinda funny. At least to anyone who gets it. There's a ghost there in panel 3 too, in case you somehow missed it.

Sea Filler #00

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Okay, I swear, things will get back on track around here eventually. Seriously. At this point, even I am horribly disappointed in and annoyed by my lack of dedication to my hobby. It might take a couple more weeks (there might be a guest strip by Steve in the near future, so rejoice), but for now, I've just completely let my work here slide.

This time, I haven't got a real excuse. It was just my irresponsibility that caused a complete lack of comic. Yesterday, I put it off until later on, which is how I usually do it, but then I decided to spend the evening hanging out with my friends instead. No problem, I'd just do it after work the next day. It would be a bit late, but still there. Only instead of working on the comic after work, I went home and forgot about the comic and played Mario Kart Wii for a couple hours instead. I wasn't even going to get Mario Kart Wii, but between the passing suggestions from Doug and my girlfriend, I folded like a napkin. Oh well.

On the upside, today you get to see some of my awesome breaktime doodles! And it's a themed piece as well, which is somewhat rare for doodles. Today's theme: sea creatures. If you weren't aware, I am fascinated by most things that live underwater, and generally, the more myths and legends that surround them, the better. You should note that most sharks aren't cowboys though, and very rarely does an octopus ride a car.

Character Filler #01

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I sat down at my computer yesterday evening, all ready to do me up a nice lookin' comic, and then when I got to the script bank, there was nothing there but garbage we've been putting off using for a long time. I doubt I'll ever use the junk that's in there, and since there's no way in Hell I can write anything even half-decent off the top of my head, I figured I might as well make some filler.

Being light on inspiration as of late, I turned to my drawing book to see if there was anything I could scan, trace and pass off as real work. Fortunately, there's pages upon pages of filler-worthy stuff in there! Okay, maybe there's only a bit that I would ever actually use, but still, I managed to find a character design that I liked enough to fill in for the lack of comic today.

This guy up here is part of my current trend of making Heartless characters. And by Heartless, of course I mean people who might align themselves with the bad guys from the Kingdom Hearts series (I've always really liked the whole Heartless concept, so I run with it now and then), for whatever reasons they might have. Some may have been wronged in some way, and some might just be evil. I'm not creative enough to give them actual back-stories. I'm just drawing guys who have a lot of hate in them for one reason or another. In any case, this one here is clearly different from my Inafune-esque style, and I can cite three other established characters from which I've drawn inspiration.

Number one would obviously be Sora from Kingdom Hearts. We've obviously got shades of Nomura in there, just without all the zippers and stuff. The hair is pretty similar, but modified enough so that you can see the traditional Ryan spikes shine through all the featheriness. Though I'd say the shorts and shoes are the dead giveaway for this one.

The second inspiration is Luke fon Fabre from Tales of the Abyss. It's not as apparent, but the open shirt with a tight half-undershirt beneath is similar to Luke's, and I really really like Luke's glove design, so I took it an modified it just a little to put on my guy's left hand. Officially, there's also an emblem on the back of his vest, which in my mind, does resemble the one on Luke's jacket.

And lastly, we've got a little Hellboy in there. Guess where? Really, I've always has a fascination with characters who have arm-mounted weapons (Wolverine, MegaMan, Tyrant), and I particularly enjoy Hellboy's oversized fist (and GutsStyle MegaMan's, by extension), so I slapped a cheap copy in here. Like I said, I love arm-mounted weapons, and a huge (clearly evil) fist makes me squeal in delight.

I guess I kinda pooched the hand holding the spear, as it's kind of a really odd angle, but whatever. It's physically possible (if a little uncomfortable), so you can't say it's totally worng or anything. I did have the hand flipped the other way originally, but that wasn't really working for me, so I changed it around, and by the time I was done and saw that it wasn't any better, I had lost interest and left it as-is. Changing the spear's direction would be the easy way out, but whatever. I've posted it and that's that. And that's about all I've got to say for today. So tune in next week, when we will hopefully have a comic. Or at least filler that's a little more original.

Tater's Close Encounter

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To tell you the honest truth, I was pretty anxious this morning because I was supposed to have a good reason to not do this comic and be able to put it off for another week. But alas. And so it ends up that you have a comic and I... I don't even know what's going on anymore. But enough about my unnecessarily overcomplicated personal life!

Actually, for all the bitching and procrastinating I did going into this one, it came together rather well. I mean, it doesn't look great, but it's passable and only ended up taking me just over an hour. So woo-hoo. One of the hardest comics up until this point is out of the way and I can breathe easy until I get the next script, which will likely have twice as many difficult shots and angles.