Sometimes blogs have this funny, insidious spam that pretends to be a comment, but usually there’s something just…off. In the context, that is. Like this one from Linda: http://blog.patbarrett.com/2009/06/cover-girl-whole-shebangin/#comments

Folks, I’ve been having lots of fun in my sketchbook lately. I am feeling some small moments of clarity and putting them on paper. I’ll shut up about it, though, because I’m not even sure how many of these I’ll show you. That might also be what’s making them good, that they aren’t made for an audience. So, sorry, we’ll have to give some of these some time. I’ve been picking up my Microns again, to get ready to make chapter two of Petrified Girlfriend. Let’s hope that’s good!

Dear Blogfriends,

Those of you with Blogger accounts using the newer commenting system, I’m trying to write on your posts, really I am! For some reason, nothing happens when I post selecting a Google ID or a Wordpress.com ID. I noticed at least one of you (I think Jen/Devon) also had an option to just put in my name, email, website manually, and that worked. The rest of youse, I really want to give you feedback and toss up some comedic gems, but it just ain’t happening for some godawful reason.

Speaking of gods being awful:

Boy oh boy was I so excited to be somewhat up to date with technology and be able to watch videos all the time on the computer. But no. Basically I’m like the kids in Wet Hot American Summer, “We’d need some kind of super mainframe computer, and we for sure don’t have one of those.” Streaming videos blow. There’s always some Flash ad in the corner taking up all my bandwidth! The timing of jokes and the momentum between them always gets ruined by buffering! Eventually I figured out that if you press Pop Out on Hulu, you can hide the other window and watch more than a frame per second. It seems like it’s a lower-res version too, which should be easier to find.

Anyhow, I wish everybody could go to cartoon camp. We play soccer on Sundays and we draw comics for homework. There are only three bars in town and one is too snooty (but I work at it, which works out well for tips), and another too scary. So there is one bar filled with cartoonists. Even if it wasn’t for it’s Goldilocks just rightness, I think I would love this place. It’s in a basement and it’s named CJ’s. They do turn the lights on pretty bright for a bar though.

In other news, in cartoon studio, the class, we all wrote down an emotion, an animal and a job and then each got one of each. I got ebullient mouse barber. The consensus was that his ears could be rounder, so as to distinguish him from a gerbil or a Guinea pig. Check check:

The Inspiratomatic has gotten a really positive response from my dearly beloved, so I got a domain for it. I’m gonna see if it can’t make at least a minor splash in the Blagoblogosphere. Just a heads up. So look out!

Speaking of Dr. Strange, I drew a picture of him (below). In my never-ending quest for accurate detail and my nerdy desire to stay “on model,” half way through doodling the occult surgeon, I looked up drawings of him by co-creator Steve Ditko on the Google. I had read through his adventures in the Marvel Essentials format, which is a big soft cover, black & white newsprint book. I thought the crazy character designs and psychedelic dreamscapes were basically the coolest thing to ever happen in super hero comics. Then, thanks to the Google and Sanctum Sanctorum Comix, I saw it in color. Whoah. God bless those little old ladies in Connecticut that meticulously cut out all those halftone screens in these acid candy rainbow hues.

I’ve spent so much of the last few months building websites (plural? you ask; well, I’ll tell you all about it next week) that I’m experiencing minor turbulence in getting back into the swing of straight-up creating. But, we’re getting there. And speaking of turbulence, how ’bout those geese and that airplane?? Around Jeopardy time last night, all the networks were still interrupting programming to cover what was soon dubbed the Miracle on the Hudson. Come on, networks. Miracle? Can we call this what it is, which is people doing their jobs very well? A pilot making an impeccable water landing in the middle of a crowded river, and then ferry captains and dispatchers immediately rushing to folks who were obviously in need? Can we not bring God into this? If the Tough Guy did anything here, it was to put a flock of geese in the way of an airplane, not to rescue all 155 people on board, right?

How do you like this string of rhetorical questions? Is it obvious I’m enjoying writing a blog post again? And have you been wondering what else I’ve been doing other than messing around with WordPress and learning snatches of CSS and PHP as I go along for all these months? The answer is mostly doing illustration work for TheBigMoney.com. The Big Money is owned by Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive which has a pretty restrictive contract wherein I can’t publish my illustrations for them until three months after they do. However! As far as I can tell, I still own the sketches. I’d like to show them to you. (The first three will all be on PB dot C in the next week and a half. Since the second one was published a month before the first, it already is.)

First, an unpublished first draft for my first Big Money piece ever (and so far the only one I’ve done for an article by BFF Chad), “The War on Endowments.” I was still getting used to the flexibility of doing a drawing for a website, where I can sorta do whatever size I want, and this was much too big and would shrink down to an indecipherable blob. This was also the one time I had more than a day to illustrate, so I had the chance to start over.

And here we have the ink drawing for the one illustration that was online more than three months ago, about the way advertising is creeping into content on TV. I’m letting the whole universe in on a secret here: I did this one completely at my internet cafe place of part-time business. I had to run to Utrecht and buy pencils and Microns, and drew on a scrap piece of laser copier paper.

Next is a sketch for an article about who has the next big idea for tax policy.

Then a digi sketch for a story about Windows Vista not being all that bad. Here I discovered that a monitor can be a lightbox. Having traced the basic composition of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People with my Wacom, I was all, Shit, how am I gonna get the final on paper lickety-split? Then I taped my Bristol board onto the plastic frame around my screen, et voila! I reeeally hoped the headline would be “Vivre la Vista,” but it was “Vista Rules.”

This is a concept that came from Big Mon editorial, of lawyer vultures circling over dying businesses, but having slim pickings. I stuck ‘em in a tree. I did the final with the fake silkscreen texture of that The Wire drawing I posted previously, and soon realized that this fanciness makes my files ten times bigger than they used to be. Woopsos! I had to send a substantially lower-res final than I had been, but oh well, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal.

And finally, the New Year feature about the five worst days (economically speaking) of 2008. Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson are crying in the New Year hoping things can’t get any worse. Well here’s hoping…and speaking of which we only have four days to go before a certain terrorist fist jabber takes office!