Pen and brush: better together!

So I actually spent time on this one, and it made me fall behind on my other work and I only slept for two hours last night, and I blame all my Pratty fart school friends for making me feel bad about my shitty drawings. Now I understand the appeal of bigheads, by the by.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, today you get two Dear Diaries for the price of one! First, you’ll find out what happens when a household’s estrogen levels become dangerously low (this one is especially rough, but I ain’t apologizin – you’ll just have to figure out where those speech bubbles point for yourselves, goddamnit). Second, you’ll get a cartoonist addressing his audience directly in every panel.

What a weekend! This marks too all-play weekends in a row (this one with a short detour Saturday night at work, but followed by Halloween festivities). On Sunday I got on the soccer pitch after what had been about a month-long absence. It was a great game, wherein a bunch of self-involved cartoonists somehow figured out how to pass to each other and score goals. That was followed by some pizza and about six hours of The Beatles Rock Band (no lie), the latter provided by good ol’ Joe Lambert.

And in case you forgot what I did the previous weekend:

Last week I saw Zombieland. I didn’t really like it much. Plus, as you’ll see below, I was pretty distracted. There are movies I want to see! Like A Serious Man, and now there’s Where the Wild Things Are tomorrow! But I go out pretty much whenever something’s happening on Thursdays. It’s about hangin’ with friends.

Annnnnd, while we’re all here together, here are the actual, live, on-the-spot drawings of and on Mt. Ascutney.

The next one you can enlarge if you’d like.

The leaves are at about half-saturation point here in the wilds of Vermont. Prime leaf peeping just in time for Columbus Day weekend. Suddenly White River Junction is a far less gloomy town. Walking on a path through some very young woods to school and back makes me understand some of the appeal of living in the country. And then I remember that to really live in the country, you have to drive a car.

Anyhow, here’s some more messing with the G-nib…and with prof/Swamp Thing artist Steve Bissette’s style (in both form and function). Tryin to pick up what he’s been puttin down.

H’lo folks. Sorry I’ve been such a bad blogger. Here’s some cartoons with which I’ve been learning how to use a dip pen, and especially the mythical G nib. Forged by samurai metallurgists obsessed with manga, the G nib is the only pen designed specifically with cartooning in mind. I’m not sure that it can lure me away from my Rapidographs, though.

First, a one-panel gag. I made two others, but one is pretty dumb and the other has been deemed by some to be too much for the internet to handle.

Next, a dear diary dream comic. (Trying to work looser, more cartoony, faster, but not exactly getting great results yet.)

And finally some autobio-ish strips in the style of EC Segar (you can click em to see em).

I’ve got more stuff to show you, and I promise to throughout the week.

One of my roommate’s last name is Horak, which sounds like a Stan Lee monster name, but is actually Czech for Man of the Mountain. (Which seems really long for two syllables – maybe Mountain Man just has too much of a negative connotation?) Last week in drawing class we went to a poet’s house and drew Mt. Ascutney, which is a mountain way bigger than the wimpy little Green “Mountain”s. This week we went up it. In between, I made this comic.