Starting tomorrow I’ll be participating in The 30 Characters Challenge which is held annually by the folks at ComixTribe.com. Comix Tribe is an online community for comic book writers and artists that are serious about improving their craft.
The challenge involves creating 30 characters in 30 days during the month of November. A friend did it last year so I thought this time I’d give it a try. I’m hoping the challenge will help me populate the Alternative City universe as well as give the old brain a workout.
So for the next month look for a lot of posts (hopefully every day) featuring new characters.
Hi guys! I have blogged before about various times I’ve made loans on the website kiva.org. Basically you make a small loan of $25 and people all over the world do the same and then the person who asked for the loan gets it, gets to invest in their small business, then pays it back over time. You get to see the photo, name, and story of the people asking for loans, and you can search by gender and other factors. I search for women asking for the loan on their own rather than in a group, and pick people I feel will pay it back, and who seem to have a positive effect on others. But that’s not all. There’s an extra idea I have in mind….
I loaned money to Hedaya in Palestine through Kiva.org
I also pick people I’d like to have tea with once or twice, or people with whom I feel I’d like to have a brief conversation. People I respect and admire and would like to encourage. I do this because I want to reward positive people, and also I believe that the spirit of those I pick actually know about me and the other lenders on a subconscious level. I believe that we actually can meet briefly, in our dreams (on the “astral”), with our angels, and actually have tea. So today I picked Hedaya a Palestinian woman who is 38, married, with two children in school. She is making improvements to her women’s clothing shop.
Batbold has a wife and 3 kids in Mongolia. His daughter is a university student!
I also picked Batbold who is 53, married with three kids in Mongolia. Both he and his wife are chefs and he is opening a cafe. I had a positive sense of him right away, but when I read that his daughter is going to a university that reinforced my sense that he has a good heart. So here’s to having tea with kind, sincere people, both while awake and in the body, and in our dreams with our angels!
OK here is the biggest deep dark secret of Harry Potter, our foster cat. The kind of secret that you would only ever learn from a cat that’s being fostered in someone’s home, with an honest foster mom. Harry Potter will eat bread, still in the bag, like he’s starving and he hasn’t eaten in years. Seriously.
He will scarf down big pieces of many slices so that by the time you find him having his pig out binge-fest you need to throw away a few slices. He’s had a bread binge fest twice in the month or so we’ve had him. The first time we were so shocked because we’ve never seen a cat do that. The second time we just forgot to put the bread away, so then we decided to keep the loaf we’re using in a tupperware and that’s been a good solution.
So there you go. Now you know the worst. Stay tuned for more juicy tell all about this amazing, loving, mellow, get-along cat who needs to find his forever home. Oh and here’s Harry Potter’s writeup and video on petfinder.com.
This may sound cruel to some, but I believe that in this world of over seven billion people give or take a few, half of them are idiots. Fifty percent. I’m not the only one that feels this way. The corporate news media and most advertisers must agree because they sure talk to us like we’re all idiots. A good chunk of that fifty percent believe Mitt Romney won the first debate with “style points”. WTF? Are we picking America’s Next Top Model or the leader of the free world?
This kind of sign will get you in all kinds of trouble. You know somebody’s gonna come in and ask something like,”should I ask my girlfriend to marry me?”.
At the Xsport where I’m a member there is a regular hot tub and a resistance pool. The resistance pool is basically a treadmill for swimmers. A sign above the pool states: MAXIMUM BATHERS IN RESISTANCE POOL 1. There are often five or more bathers in the pool using it as a not-so-hot tub taking turns with their backs against the only two jets in the tepid 6’x9′ pool. Fifty percent.
I know I posted this a few days ago but it’s worth an encore.
Last night our softball game was rained out. After having a few beverages and mediocre overpriced food items at our sponsor bar we headed home. On the way to the car the conversation turned to politics. The team’s organizer, let’s call him “B” mentioned that he does not like Barack Obama and planned to vote for Mitt Romney because of his disdain for our president. B also believes that the media is heavily biased and liberal and that Fox “news” just balances things out with CNN and MSNBC with their Rachel Maddow & Keith Olbermann spewing their liberal views. Now B says he’s not a republican but a libertarian, like Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation.
Libertarians make a lot of sense until you talk to them for a few minutes. They believe that government should stay out of individuals lives. Sounds good on the surface but it runs much deeper than that. You can google the party if you want to know more about them. I asked B what his beef was with Obama and this is the best he could give me: When he met the Japanese Prime Minister he bowed to him and that showed weakness. He blew off Nutanyahu to go on Letterman. There was tape of him not putting his hand over his heart during the national anthem. Really? Really B? You’re willing to vote against your best interests for things that are pretty trivial? I don’t know him very well but I’ll betcha B is not a billionaire or even a millionaire. He used to be a paramedic until he broke his neck in an accident. Thanks to “Obamacare” he can never be discriminated against by any insurance company because of that injury. There are millions of people like B that will vote against the president for similar reasons or just because they don’t like him. They’ll vote for a man that is so out of touch with reality and the common man that he truly believes it is his right and his destiny to be president. A man that has shown his true feelings about half the nation by dismissing them as lazy entitled freeloaders. That is why we have got to make sure that we don’t let anything stop us from casting our votes In November, to save ourselves and even people like B from Mitt Romney even though they don’t even realize they need saving.
A few years ago I did a Mini Comic called Alternative City #0. It collected twelve pages of comics that I intended to try and get published in a weekly alternative newspaper. Alas, this never happened so I decided to publish them myself. If you don’t know what a mini comic is, it’s just a half sized comic that can be done by a professional printer for a lower cost than a full sized book, or in most cases they are printed by the creators themselves at Kinko’s or at work when the boss isn’t looking.
The minis were cool for comic shows when you needed an inexpensive way to get your work into a potential reader’s hands, but they were of poor quality. I recently found the original art so I scanned it in at a high resolution and did a small print run with Ka-blam printing. It took them FOREVER to ship them to me but they are finally here. I have to say I’m happy with the way they came out and at $3 it’s still reasonably priced. Right now you can find it at Chicago Comics and of course the psychic unicorns etsy store.
Carmilla and Victor are characters in Alternative City. If you would like to visit Alternative City you can do so by clicking here and that ‘ll take you to the website that bears it’s name and is home to all of my webcomics. Parts of Alternative City #0 and #1 can be read for free on the website and fresh copies of #0 are at the printers and will be available soon!
Carmilla & Victor don’t make an appearance until #1, but for now here’s a print of them that I just added to the Psychic Unicorns etsy shop.
Lately I have been focusing more on the comics than the prints with Awesome 5! #1 now in stores as well as online and Alternative City #0 now at the printer. That said, now is a great time to add some new prints!
The Obama print and The Happy Cat are from larger paintings i did for a couple of fund raisers. You can find out more if you visit our shop. Also don’t forget to like our Facebook page!
With the November presidential election just around the corner, this is a great time for a movie like The Campaign. Will Ferrell & Zach Galifianakis star in this hilarious spoof of american politics.
Two powerful CEOs (very much like the Koch brothers) decide to back a candidate in a congressional election in North Carolina so that he can help them fulfill their diabolical plans for his district. What’s so cool about this movie is that it’s full of laughs without being too silly and if you pay attention you could learn a little about politics without having to listen to the stuffed shirts and talking heads on CNN or MSNBC.
Our movie experience was enhanced by the fact that the theatre we saw it at was pretty cool. The Century 12 in Evanston has become our favorite place to take in a flick. We usually go to matinees which are a few bucks less, and these guys extend their matinee hours to 6pm during the week and 2pm on weekends.
Another cool bonus is the piano bar called The Rhythm Room. Its nice enough to be a destination bar even if you’re not seeing a movie!
Just finished two new Complicated Hair strips that will be part of the second issue due out in the next month or so. The cool part is that one of them was inked and lettered in Manga Studio which I have been learning how to use the last couple weeks.
This is going to save me a lot of time in the future and that’s really important when you’re a staff of one. See if you can tell which is which.
