Tuesday, January 26th 2010I was a SEGA kid
Posted on Tuesday, January 26th 2010.
I was a SEGA Genesis kid growing up, riding the new wave of blast processing and all the bizarre 16-bit dreamscapes that the 1990s ushered in. There was something about that era, when we got a more fully-realized glimpse at the kind of other-worldly shit that was going on in the minds of game developers, that strikes me as psychologically aggressive towards the humble reality we live in. I think the way I felt about games of that day, in particular SEGA games, must have been how the art world felt during the rise of Surrealism. They left a big mark on me, or at least on the part of my brain dedicated to wasting vast scores of time.After the Nintendo 64 had sufficiently won me over with its garishly colored polygons, I unceremoniously dumped my Genesis, controllers, and modest game collection on my cousin as a birthday present. I'd been convinced by more gaming-savvy friends, against my own instincts, that the Genesis was a piece of trash. As such, any meager sum I could expect for it would only make me feel cheaper after the exchange, as if I would be dealing in negative money. So I guess I was cutting my losses by getting rid of it at no cost to my ego. The thing did have a bit of a problem projecting a clear image by that point, so arguably it still cost me some amount of karma to gift it to a family member. But point being, it was gone and in its place I geared my habits more towards the likes of Mario and Zelda.
It wasn't long before I regretted the decision, and wondered often and aloud what kind of societal breach it would be for me to simply ask for the Genesis back. Partially I'd come to realize that the Genesis was really a very robust platform, especially when compared to the paltry selection of games on the N64. But mostly I just started itching to play my old games, like when you get a phantom taste in your mouth that dictates you absolutely need to eat that Ultimate Sub that they used to sell at the shop in your old home town, which probably isn't even there anymore. It was never sustainable enough for me to actually attempt to get the system back, or even follow through on all my half-cocked plans to re-accumulate my collection through flea markets or eBay. It was just there, coming through in soft pulses every few months, like a distress signal from a distant star.
After over 10 years of this, a friend recently made his Genesis collection available to me. I've been feeling immensely stressed this past month, looking for work and a new city to live in after having graduated by the absolute thinnest margin imaginable (really). As such, taking a stroll through the abstract playgrounds of my misspent youth has been incredibly therapeutic. Titles like X-Men, Jungle Strike and Toki: Going Ape Spit barely register on people's radar when discussing nostalgic games, but in my house they were Johnny Carson, The Beatles and M.A.S.H. all rolled into one. I have these vivid memories of all these games, completely unsullied by anyone else's input through all that time, as if my memories were a Sistine Chapel that'd been vacuum-sealed and untouched by human hands for 600 years. But if I've gleaned anything from it other than a pleasing stupor, it's the disturbing realization of just how much I must have played these goddamn games. When I turned them on, I didn't wander aimlessly as one might upon revisiting a home they hadn't lived in for 10 years, trudging through the haze to find significant objects to spark memories -- "Oh right, there's the nook where I kept my rocking chair! That's the corner where I stubbed my toe and had to go to the hospital! There's the closet where the monsters lived!"
Rather, I moved deliberately through each stage, not entirely certain why I was taking such-and-such a path but completely knowing it was the right path to take. Sometimes the payoff would be that it was the right path, other times that it was simply the most expedient path, or maybe just the one that must have felt right to me when I was 10. Either way, it's bizarre to not experience these games for the first time again, but rather to realize that I'd kept such exact records that I could just pick up where I left off. There's a portion toward the end of Quackshot Starring Donald Duck where, in true Indiana Jones fashion (the game is a tribute to the Jones ethos) you're presented with a vast breadth of emptiness before you, and you just have to take a "leap of faith." Platforms appear only after you've jumped far enough that you could never maneuver back to your point of origin. The distance between platforms is nearly constant, but has a few switches in between to mix you up. I was a little disappointed to learn that I could complete the obstacle in one try, not truly remembering where the platforms would be, but knowing practically from muscle memory what I was supposed to do.
The reason I'm mentioning all this is that I've been wanting to post the rest of the Monster Wars drawings from my middle school days, and I've hit a hitch. In 7th and 8th grade I was very fond of drawing with a particular type of pencil that was unlike the average No.2. They weren't art pencils or anything, just made with a softer graphite and a light, porcelain-like wood that was processed to seem more like soft stone than wood. I'd just begun really sketching, with many fast movements rather than one continuous drag to form a line, and the softness of the pencil made errant strokes less obvious. Or maybe it just felt smoother, who the fuck knows, I was 12 years old. Anyway, the point is these made for extremely light drawings that only became lighter over years of shuffling between folders, to the point that half the page looks like unintentional erasures. They aren't well-suited to scans. So, that's why I haven't posted them yet.
I've tried a number of orthodox methods, like making a darker scan -- which only obscures the image further in the wrinkles of the paper -- and unorthodox methods, like taking a digital photo of the images -- which doesn't work, possibly because my camera sucks. Eventually I settled on either the most sane or insane measure (I'm not qualified to judge) which is to simply get a normal goddamn pencil and go over the lines a little darker. I started on the first drawing, careful to just go over the lines and not get all Spielbergy by changing the very obvious aesthetic shortcomings. It's surprisingly easy, and really quite calming -- therapeutic even, as drawing used to be for me before I complicated things by building a website to post them on a weekly schedule. Which brings me back to the Genesis. In my stress, I'd retreated by following the whispered instructions of my 10 year-old self in my old games, and similarly I've been -- literally -- retracing the steps I took when I was 12 years old drawing monsters fighting each other.
HOW FUCKING CRAZY AM I? Who does this kind of thing? I'm a grown-ass man, I'm in the very grip of insomnia because of the fantastic pressure of getting my life in order, and at three in the morning I'm reliving the mundane activities I should have been embarrassed to be doing back when I first did them. And I'm really enjoying it.
Part of me worries that this is how people lose their shit. You see grown men going to fetish parties where they wear giant diapers and piss themselves so women can clean them up. And they don't even have sex with the women, they just engage in the role playing and love it. I mean, maybe that's the last time they were really comfortable and they feel like they have to go back there. Sometimes I catch myself in these reminiscent activities and I feel like a man-baby wearing a big fat diaper. Like I'm losing my shit.
But at the same time, maybe I'm saving myself from losing my shit. Because to a degree it feels like I'm communicating with my past self, and he's communicating with me. I'm definitely not okay right now, but in all likelihood he wasn't okay then either (well, he did grow up to be me). But I'm living proof that he'll get past the stuff that keeps him down and makes him want to escape into gaming or drawing or daydreaming. And for his part, the bits of my mind dedicated to adolescent escapist fantasy is something he built that I can duck into now and then, and take recreation there to cool my nerves for awhile. And when I'm done, and I have to go back to grappling with all the issues that are keeping me down now, it won't just be to follow my goals, but also to realize his dreams, and validate his hopes. I can carry that with me, and in remembering, find it a little easier to go on.
So maybe it is stupid, and maybe even really goddamn crazy, but it gives me comfort. For now, that's enough for me.
Friday, November 27th 2009Monster Wars!
Posted on Friday, November 27th 2009.
I have a box full of drawings I made in middle school and high school, the days when I really loved the shit out of drawing a hell of a lot more than I do now. I would draw throughout any class where I could keep it secret, sometimes working on the same drawings for days. When I was finished, I would just stare at it and feel a profound sense of accomplishment. I've kept a lot of those old drawings in a bunch of folders for awhile, going back through them every once in awhile to connect back with that old feeling. I've always had the vague intention of using a scanner to digitize them, and I had a more pronounced intention of digitizing and posting them here for the Cutthroat Apathy One Year Anniversary Extravapalooza, but obviously I didn't care enough to make it happen.UNTIL NOW.
Most of what I drew, especially in the older days, were just random disconnected drawings of dragons, monsters or robots. But there were a few months or so that I drew what you might call my first comic/cartoon series. At least 100 years ago, I drew a series of full-page battles between as many warring monsters as I could. I called it "MONSTER WARS" (!!!). They're vaguely sequential, in that I tried to keep a consistent cast and sometimes a sense of chronology, and I wish it had sparked an interest in making comics a lot younger. I don't want to give you the wrong impression that I'm proud of any of this crap, but they kind of chart where my interest in drawing and style came from. And after all this time, yes I have some fondness for these retarded drawings.
This is the very first, which I decided to draw spontaneously one day in sixth grade when I was home sick. I really don't know what inspired me to do this, but a safe bet is either video games or cartoons. For instance, the ghosty looking fellow in the top-right is morphing his arms into a shield in exactly the way Venom does in the Genesis game Separation Anxiety (it's awesome). I can't say specifically where anything else came from. Maybe that weird bird in the upper left came from those umbrella birds from Alice in Wonderland? I know for certain that the big guy in the center has goo for legs specifically because I couldn't figure out how to draw feet for a giant muscle-bound head. He quickly became my favorite monster to draw. You can see the same thing going on with those ghosty dudes – sometimes legs just don't make any kind of sense.
Even by this second drawing, you can tell that what I was interested in doing is drawing the moment prior to the point of impact. I used to have a lot of Where's Waldo books as a kid, and I loved scanning the pages where tons of stuff was going on at once. A lot of it would set up a few characters on a collision course, but it let you imagine who came on top, or whether some third party would interject. Maybe one guy was about to get the drop on another, but then there was a monster behind him. Does the monster eat the guy, or just ruin his ambush? It added a lot of room for imagination and sense of movement in a completely static scene.
This drawing is basically three cases of that exact idea. You can see on the right, the ghost and the flamingo dragon are about to crash, but then the little slug (based on the booger-monster Snott from Earthworm Jim 2 – I hate real slugs) is jumping in the fray. Then in the middle, the ghost bracing himself for a wave of fire is unaware of the big gooey dude is right behind him with jaws wide open. On the left it's a little more clear what's about to happen with the fireball, but nothing's happened yet. The whole scene is a split second before all kinds of heads knock together, and you can figure for yourself what's about to happen. Partially it's just because it's harder to draw the point of impact itself, but leaving it up to the imagination makes something much more interesting to look at.
This was the last of the original Monster Wars drawings, which I intentionally concluded at the most logical place for a Super Mario fan – a series of platforms hovering over a pit of boiling lava. As in the previous drawing, you can see the goo guy is the star at center stage, with creatures like the umbrella eagle not quite being worth the space they'd take up if I felt like drawing their whole bodies. I don't know why I didn't just draw everything smaller, but I recall being frustrated having to crop monsters out like that, like the cool looking dragon at the top that's really just a fire-breathing head. Another example of laziness – or lack of imagination – would be that I clearly had trouble reconciling what the ghosts' faces looked like from the nose down. I don't know why this was such an issue for me but I distinctly remember trying to think up new ways to keep their faces covered. It's possible that whatever intellectual property that I'd aped for their design also didn't show the creature's face.
The goofy whale- and iguana-inspired monsters new to this page are kind of the last straw, and made it clear to me that I was simply out of good ideas. I decided to stop drawing for awhile. Also, I got better and had to go back to school, where I hadn't yet realized I could draw in secret to avoid the amazingly boring lectures. A few months or maybe a year later I made friends with a kid who did just that, all the damn time, at which point I started drawing Monster Wars again. But this is a good stopping place so I'll save those for another time.
Wednesday, November 25th 2009Anniversary!
Posted on Wednesday, November 25th 2009.
Brawl in the Family is quickly becoming my favorite gaming fan comic, though it helps that stuff like F@NB0Y$, Awkward Zombie, and Eegra don't update regularly anymore. There's just such a rich reservoir of love for retro gaming in that comic, it's enjoyable even when it isn't funny.Anyway on to the point: Brawl in the Family has reached 200 strips, and Matthew Taranto really went all out to celebrate. Check out this musical comic he put together here. By contrast, Cutthroat Apathy passed its one-year mark a week ago, and I didn't even bother to update. I haven't even been busy.
Sunday, November 1st 2009A year in the life
Posted on Sunday, November 1st 2009.
So! It's November... the month I started this website a year ago. Mostly I have discovered that I am not terribly good at this comic thing. But the year isn't done yet. The 18th was my first post, so I have two weeks and some change to show some real progress and call the 2009 Comicking season a success.Sunday, October 11th 2009Challenger cartoonist approaches
Posted on Sunday, October 11th 2009.
Today's update is a treat, a strip done-up by somebody who actually knows how to draw visually humorous and interesting things (nope, not me!).
Credit goes to Adam Glasgow, who is such a huge douchebag he puts priorities like "working to pay for rent/food" over making more of these drawings. Bug him to draw more and I'll be glad to host them here for
Friday, October 2nd 2009holy shit i cannot believe this is happening
Posted on Friday, October 2nd 2009.
A NEW CARTOON COMIC STRIP has been posted today. Thus concludes the epic saga of the Super Fan Trilogy.
I trust you will agree it was well worth the two-month-plus wait. Whether the comic will resume its natural weekly update schedule or not is something we'll find out together come next weekend. Are you excited? I'm excited!
Thursday, September 17th 2009Cartoon News! and The Cartoonist's Impasse
Posted on Thursday, September 17th 2009.
I recently applied for a cartoonist position at the school paper in response to a want ad they printed a few days ago. I used a few of the tamer comics here as examples, but for some bizarre reason have not yet had the position eagerly lauded upon me, complete with total creative control and even some broad editorial powers over others parts of the paper just for good measure, and a sizable salary even though it's a volunteer position. It's almost as if they don't have the God given sense to know when there's gold in them thar hills and how to appropriately scurry ahead with pickaxe and gold pan in hand ready to strike it rich rich rich!You may ask yourself, "But how would you keep up with a daily/weekly/anything newspaper cartoon when you can't even update your very own goddamn site once a fucking MONTH you lazy shit?" And you would be insightful, if not also terribly rude. But the secret is I have definitely had time to keep this comic up, and could probably get back to my once-a-week schedule what with all the classwork I've been avoiding lately, except that I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK. If I'm able to salvage this comic after such a long delay, the wisdom I come away with is something I should have learned from Matt Milby's Malfunction Junction (sadly no longer online), which is that continuity is the bane of the amateur webcomic's existence.
It's actually a principle I've had ample opportunity to learn (hell, the current F@NB0Y$ "Red Letter Day" storyline has pretty effectively triggered an update quagmire) but Milby's demise was especially epic. Malfunction Junction was a simply but artistically drawn recreation of Milby's life viewed through a kind of Curb Your Enthusiasm lens, focusing on the absurd stories he mined out of the drudgery of working in a gas station.
(sorry for shitty size, but it's hard to find images of dead comics)
Despite fitting the amateur webcomic stereotype of jittery updates, for a few years Malfunction Junction fairly consistently put out some of the top-down funniest comics of its time. Then Milby decided to finally set to work on a project he'd apparently been thinking about for a long while. The storyline WHY I CAN'T GO BACK TO CINCINNATI was a multi-part "gone drinking" story that seemed like it was meant to be sort of the "movie version" of the episodic comic. It certainly lived up to this idea in its length.
In spite of its fairly straightforward plot by the bullet points, CINCINNATI ballooned to around 20 or so strips (the comic rarely used continuity other than in following ongoing semi-connected events of Milby's life). The endeavor clearly drained the shit out of Milby, as updates became further and further apart as it went along. It's something The Hussie talked about concerning Problem Sleuth's epically spiraling ending: at some point, there's a dual pressure to fucking end the thing already but also legitimize all the time you've already spent and give it a proper ending. For a king like Hussie, walking this tightrope is clearly no big D, but lesser men find this pressure frustrating, and it leads to long delays for a lot of webcomics. Given that I'm on only the third strip in a row for my "story," you can get a sense of where I lie on the spectrum of artistic fortitude. Eventually Milby finished his story decently enough, but after a few stutter-steps of new strips he eventually stopped updating, and evidently stopped paying for hosting of his site altogether. And to dig it in just a little deeper, I'm pretty sure excessive continuity is what killed his desire to continue his previous comic, Gin and the Devil.
Getting back on topic, in most cases it's not so much a problem with ego, but with motivation. The fact is, with a continuous storyline everything's planned ahead and there's really none of that spark of creation (this would be one distinction that might have aided Hussie, whose comic is quasi-improvised by reader input). The comic I've been very very slowly drawing lately is one I'd conceived of months ago, planned out more specifically around the time of Super Bear Returns, and have had sketched out for weeks. There's nothing left to do but the job of inking and coloring, which kind of HAS TO BE REALLY GOOD to legitimize all the time I've spent dicking around. But it won't be, because I can't just magically be better, and I don't have the enthusiasm to spend an inordinate amount of time on it. So... that's the impasse.
Luckily, at some point I will realize that nobody will give a shit whatever it looks like other than me, and I'll slap something down so I can finally get on with writing new stuff. The Comics & Animation class I talked about last post has taught me a very slight amount about panel composition, and I'd like to see what I can do. But even more importantly, it's once again fooled me into thinking comics are important or worthwhile in any way, which is close enough to inspiration for this kind of work.
Saturday, August 22nd 2009AAANGST
Posted on Saturday, August 22nd 2009.
It's been over a month since I updated. Like everyone else who's tried to keep up a webcomic while in school, I've had to choose between passing classes and keeping up weekly comic updates. In the spring, I chose the latter (really, I'm this retarded). Over the summer I chose the former, and I was surprised to realize I'm still capable of coasting an A as long as I put in some effort.Where I'm going with this is that classes for fall start on Monday, and the decision is on the table again. I have Super Fan III sketched out already, and once it's up I can start using doodles to stall when I don't have an update for the week. However, I'm also balls deep in ridiculous side projects, which is to say nothing of the fact that I'm perennially poor as shit and this kind of thing doesn't put a dime in my pocket.
For the time being, I'm leaning towards a middle ground where I try to update weekly, and if I can't, then whatever. My wounded comics enthusiasm from the death of Horribleville has bolstered itself up slightly by reading Maus for a Jewish Lit class. There's also some cool stuff on my peripherals that I've been wanting to blog about, like Penny Arcade's Automata experiment. I'm taking a Comics & Animation class, so that should provide some liquid inspiration (what?) if nothing else. Maybe I'll even learn to draw!
Monday, July 20th 2009Everyone gets a Retard Day
Posted on Monday, July 20th 2009.
After nearly a month, there is a new comic up: Super Fan II. Keep expectations low.HERE IS A STORY: I was putting the finishing touches on this strip in the university library last week. I avoid drawing in public usually, because I'm too old to still be drawing doodles on everything. It was okay in middle school and awkward in high school and now I'm old enough that I really should be better than I am. And most of my drawing is done on the Wacom tablet now, which I forget to bring with me (actually I remember the tablet all the time, I just almost always forget the tablet pen RRRRRGH). Now, I am a retard when it comes to library etiquette, and when I was trying to get someone's attention I just yelled out their name. It was loud enough that a girl at an adjacent table turned around like she was a-scared of my booming violent tone, which speaks to her survival instincts. Just at that exact moment she spied my comic and then this exchange happened:
"Oh wow did you make that?"
"Um. Um. Yes I -- I made this."
"ALL of it??" (what a stupid question)
"Yeah, uh. This is what I... do." (such a stupid response I actually became exasperated by speaking it)
At this point she maxed out on my ABSOLUTE RUDENESS and went back to her studies, and I spent the next half hour mulling over how to apologize to her without it looking like I was using webcomic prowess to hit on her. That would be unfortunate. Obviously I made a non-decision and she left quite awhile later.
Now, I'm not without ego. There have been many times, back when I first started this comic, when I thought someone might spot me drawing and think it was cool, and I could be all, "Yeah this is cool. I'm cool." Maybe they'd be an art student and we could talk about art? Or some shit? Anyway by now I've become more appropriately ashamed of my shitty comic and I honestly couldn't think of a single thing to say to this person who was completely willing to stroke my ego over my ability to put garish color into aesthetically displeasing outlines. I can't get over how stupid I am. I could have told her the website and I'd have started a local fanbase! THE SHAME. THE IGNOMINY.
The best part is that when I left the library, it was raining like a fucking hellstorm outside, worse than any non-hurricane storm I've seen in years. The girl and her boyfriend (actually probably more of a "safe" guy friend) were still there under the awning at the entrance. And despite my creepy hostility earlier, they handed me a trash bag to use as a makeshift raincoat. Which in a twist of fate was the only thing that kept my backpack's contents from being soaked on my way to the bus, which would obviously have destroyed my laptop and the very comic I practically forbade her from looking at.
THE END
The moral is I'm a cock in real life, but only to people who are nice to me. I was actually really nice just a few hours earlier to someone who was being a dick, yelling at me from their car, "What are you looking at, bitch?!"
"You look like someone I know," I smiled. "I thought maybe you were my friend! :)"
I am usually a pretty capable conversationalist in reality, so I'm calling that my Retard Day. So, so retarded that day.
Tuesday, July 7th 2009Revenge of Google Ads
Posted on Tuesday, July 7th 2009.
As I've noted before, Google Ads' "sponsored links" are either an implement of race-baiting antagonism, or proof that artificial intelligence has developed a sense of humor. But disgracing America's lightest-toned African queen is not enough for the cold machine brain of Google Ads. Its Nazi mechanisms are geared to separate the wheat from the chaff along racial borders, and no black star can be white enough to escape its slander.Again, might take you a minute:
It would appear that nothing is sacred to Google Ads.
