This ship is turning around, this new leaf is turned, this bird has flown, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! Friends of the internet, I think I’m gonna go to grad school. I’m gonna try to go this fall. That might not happen. I think I need to be at the Center for Cartoon Studies. They’re not full yet and I’m trying to get in an application in the next couple of weeks. Yesterday I was going through what I’d send in my portfolio and I was confronted with the fact that my comics output since school has been running at about four pages a year. This has fortified my resolve!

Don’t you see? I’ve been going at things all wrong! It’s crazy to try to make a freelance illustration career that can support a comics career – I’m going at it bass ackwards! First you write a hit comic and direct it, then you feed yourself by drawing.

Now I know what you’re thinking: OK Pat, why not just draw comics instead of spending all your time building websites and promoting yourself to art directors in dying media? The answer is I’m just too fed up with how things are moving now. I don’t think I can hold out much longer doing what I’m doing, and there isn’t much else that sounds too appealing.

That, and I never got a satisfying critique out of my classmates at Pratt. They’d look at blue pencil lines under black ink and say if I added red, it would be like 3-D glasses. This isn’t to say that my friends haven’t been both supportive and constructive, but I’m yearning for a workshop environment and for classes on literature and writing and the comics medium and guest critiques by real -deal cartoonists. Does this make any sense? I don’t know, but it’s what’s happening now.

And I drew this semi-Phallic, World Snake-ish whale:

I hate to impose any pretentious flower child symbolic resonance on my appearance, but I transformed myself yesterday: I pulled a Richie Tenenbaum. The only difference was that after I cut off my hair and shaved my face I didn’t slit my wrists, wake up and write a suicide note. Instead I freaked out and thought the cat disappeared. I couldn’t find her in any closets or under the bed or the couch, and when I stuck my head out the window it didn’t look like she’d fallen out, and then there she was in her regular spot under the coffee table.

I had thought I’d clean house after my renewal ritual, but I was too pumped up from the abyssopelagically cold water on my face, the long process of shaving off beard hairs that keep clogging a razor, the excitement of chopping off head hairs to myriad lengths and the terror of thinking Sheba was dead.

So I turned on the World Baseball Classic and did crunches and push-ups. Yeah! How you like me now! I hadn’t done working out in at least as long as I hadn’t shaved, which is about three years. It felt so good I popped in Wii Sports and did some boxing. Yes, that is exercising. At least the way I do it. Plus I did jumping jacks whenever my opponent or I was on the canvas. Work it! Hit it! Punch it!

Now that I don’t have a beard, I’m not trying to be a grown-up illustrator. Instead I’m a baby comic book artist. And if we make plans to meet somewhere, and some really pale 16 year-old kid starts coming at you from the crowd, it’s me.

Well, I must say I’ve been working like a fiend to get my Abe entry in for I Am the Last VCR before Cait and I leave to visit her parents in Charlotte this weekend. I thought the Inspiratomatic was as in-depth as I would get for our little artsy community, but boy was I wrong. I’ve spent all day and all night for the last week and a half on this damn thang. A three-page comic, in color, and in the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby-Steve Ditko Marvel Manner. It sorta rocks my own face off. There, I said it.

Last night: a breakthrough. Sometimes one’s mind is not in any state to read a New Yorker article. Each sentence takes at least ten minutes, and drawing a drawing will do much better to help said mind to relax while remaining engaged. I hadn’t drawn Buchwald the Repentant Demon in a long time, and it looks like he’s been very lonely.