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:

Okay, okay. I forgot how long it takes to settle into a new place. It’s almost been two weeks, and obvi I haven’t been keeping up with the weekly portraits, or, for that matter, drawing much at all. But! this ain’t LiveJournal, so I’m gonna berate you with another unnecessary change I’ll make to our writing system once I enforce my Totalitarian will on the people.

Numbers. They ain’t right. Whenever I’m measuring, or reducing, or enlarging, I always end up with .125s and .8625s and I hate it. I remember my middle school geography teacher telling my class that the Maya used a base-six system, which is actually better than base-ten because it divides better. Six divides into halves and thirds and ten divides into halves and fifths, and who the hell measures things in fifths? I think we could go a step further and make our base unit also divisble by quarters.

How about twelve?? Twelve!! The perfect number! It’s actually not all that ridiculous. Think about it! We already have unique words for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Past that, we ad the -teen to the digit in the one place, right? That means we’re already set up for making King Twelve the successor to King Ten. I’ll admit this gets tricky once we get past nineteen, but what’s so bad about tenteen, eleventeen and twelveteen? Or what about twenty-ten, twenty-elven and twenty-twelve? Or even deci-one, eleventy-two and twelfy-three? We could do worse. I mean it. Cause we are doing worse, dudes.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking, how could we ever transition to this insane new system? You’re thinking it! Come on, admit it! But, just ponder a moment, please, about circles. 360 degrees. That divides into twelves. And, uh, hello? Twelve hours? Sixty minutes? Three feet? Twelve inches? Do I even have to go there?

Of course we’ll need new numerals. Don’t worry, everybody, I got it covered. Since twelve is the new ten, it is represented by a one and a zero. And I made up some passable figures for ten and eleven. Check it:

Ookaa, duu yuu get it? Xen get wix it!

I’m sick of spelling. I’m sure everybody else in the world is too. Why not make phonics actually work, especially if that’s how we’re going to teach people to read and to write? Wouldn’t it make sense to condense our language a bit? (Wudn’t it maak sens too kondens aur laqwij a bit?)

Nobody needs Q as it is. But, Q looks similar to G, so it can be NG.
X is also useless, but since it’s like a crooked T, it can stand in for TH.
No need for Z either, so turn that backwards S into SH!
C can be replaced by K or S where it makes those sounds, but we need it for CH, so it will do that on its own.
G will always be hard G, J will always be soft J.

Now, I admit the vowels are much harder. This is probably the most imperfect part of my New Spelling, and I admit it could use some work. But I’m trying to avoid accents and letter combinations, and to use only the letters we already have. Then again, the vowels as they stand are pretty freakin’ imperfect.

A alone is hard like cat
AA is long like ate
E is like ebb
EE is like pee
I is like imp
II is like eye
O is like pot (and like walk)
OO is like oar
U is like up (and like what, and at least for now, also like bird)
UU is like poo
Y is a consonant!

Ookaa, yuu kan luk foor moor uv xis in xu fyuucur. Heer’s a kupl droweeqs, boox storted wix xu litl droweeqs of karakturs II’m wurkeeq on and xen II druu giis on xu traan: