 you guys
I kinda got smooshed by work I have to do for money I have to have + I cold ran out of ideas + I got real, real sick of internet dot culture (so boring) so instead of going through the motions for a month I decided to… not. It sucks when cartoons go through the motions, I think. Especially mine. I had something come to mind earlier today, though, so maybe the new year starts in February? Mock my cranial misfortune as you will.
UPDATE
Oh my god. While I am trying to come up with cartoons again I must direct you to the best comic of the decade. It is also tied for second best webcomic ever and it is definitely the best superhero comic ever. It is called Axe Cop whoops it’s here and the reason it is the best superhero comic ever is that it is written by an actual five year old instead of a pretend five year old. Sometimes I am facetious when I write my sentences but that last one was unvarnished truth.
[17] see below
I thought of a Christmas cartoon like three hours ago, which was way too late, so maybe next year for that. This little drawing I came up with yesterday. I have been working on a cartoon too and it will be linked to here when it is done.
SAY GOODBYE
I have finally fucking figured out what I am going to change about this comic and it is going to be the setting. Say goodbye to the Nobody Scores! apartment! I have three more comics to do and then I am setting my characters completely loose from their three-roommate situation to wreak sad havoc on every other stock setting in the world. I think they are well established enough that cutting them free will work out and just adding auxiliary characters is proving suboptimal. Look forward to Nobody Scores adaptations of – possibly – samurai movies, instructional pamphlets, Food Network cooking shows, Slylock Fox, and C-SPAN. Then run far away of course.
After a stupid last half of 2k9 around here the 2010s are gonna be more interesting if it fries my little brain like an egg in an active volcano, which’ll probably happen. Save a padded room for me. Also I like grape flavored mush.
N.Y. RES
Resolved! Well, several things, one of which I’m gonna try to get you poor readers to help me with, but I know some of you have been asking for comments to go with the comics, and also I have all these stupid transcriptions sitting around in Ohnorobot.com picking their noses, so I thought I’d throw both problems in the same meatlocker – what? That’s a common enough solution to warrant clichehood! Cough – anyway, I’ll start opening up comment threads on the comics and post transcriptions as the first comment and that’ll fix that. It’ll probably be mid-January before you see any of this. I’m drowning in actual paying work too and all my clients want to kill me.
WHAT’S THIS I HAVE PRODUCED FROM MY ORIFICE
My orifice has produced a variety of found and digested internet amusements for you to peruse with your fingers. I don’t know what exactly that involves. I presume it’s kind of like braille but with orifice substance.
I suppose this comic about interconnectednesses is the kind of thing that would go up around here if around here ever involved things that were vaguely plausible.
I have been reading blogs for inspiration. I know, I know. But if you read them too, you may get a sneak preview of what is going into my head. You probably shouldn’t, unless you read Hipster Runoff, in which case you’ll probably be soothed.
I only link to the highest quality pratfalls. The key to high quality pratfalls is psychology, as you will find.
Gotta do this. Haven’t done it yet. Gotta do it. What is it? Infinite breakfast! I also have to do this which is not infinite but it is beautiful.
I found a capable cartoonist on Flickr that produces reliably amusing cartoon products. So, you know, different than here.
Experimental comics. Haven’t yet read alla this.
I like fine art too and this painter looked interesting. Protip: don’t read the captions. Beans wrote the captions. I’m not even joking, I’m totally jacking this site for Beans quotes.
Speaking of jacking, I have found this company useful for all my stock panel needs. You can see it implemented in Big Help if you look. It’s like Where’s Waldo but with creative atrophy. So it’s perfect for the internet.
Let’s end this pile of links on a high note.
[14] where have you been young man
Two updates. No! Three updates.
– I moved a pretty long distance at the beginning of the month and am still not in permanent permanent permanent digs; suggest to me the nearest nice city location on top of a buried treasure hoard and I will take it under advisement;
– I still don’t have my own real computer – the real computer I am getting arrives in about a week after a three-week-long shipping process (so bear this in mind if you are about to get a similar device through popular online channels) and in the meantime I must share a fake computer which, though it runs Photoshop fairly decently, has proven to be not much faster on net than the jury-rigged setup I had before of one (1) G3 iBook with 1 (one) non-functioning screen connected to a monitor via video mirroring, then running 10.4 via an external hard drive since you can;t normally run 10.4 on an iBook since it does not have a DVD drive; this conglomeration of devices I secured into a solid CompuSphere with duct tape.
– Beyond which I developed another creative crisis in which I did not merely lose faith in web-comics, or comics, or art, but in fact the very concept of human communication, and attempted to retreat to the nearest mountaintop cave, which turned out to be 1,206.52 miles away so fuck it. Writer’s block note: creative difficulties get worse with time, since: pressure to perform! Imagining people going “I waited for this?!” Whereas if you pop one out every day or so, there’s no expectations! Which I guess is why on one end you get the Nicholas Gurevitches and Aaron Diazes &c. and on the other you get people who are real proud to crank out one joke a day even though you are not particularly sure they have cranked out one joke ever.
So the solution, obviously, is to start cranking out one joke a day until things stop sucking, or get a close as possible to this, so, after deploying quicksand to slurp up various distractions I will do as many short cartoons as I can before turkey and brothers descend upon this here American person. Then I have about three or four long comics in the pipeline that I will finally have the Photoshop power & focus to bring to the screen.
Then things are going to get really sad and pointless! I’m excited just thinking about it.
MONTH-OLD VIDEO SINCE ONLY NOW DO I HAVE A fake COMPUTER SLIGHTLY CAPABLE OF MORE THAN 30 FPM
Pixar’s lamp is brought to justice.
If you see Jane Doe doing this in the first panel of a comic (“Greetings, mooches! I have acquired a what the fuck is that”) well this is where it came from.
I believe I have found an instructional video that is relevant to the interests of my readership.
Has Amanda Palmer ever done a non-delightful cover of somebody’s song? Yes, she has, actually, but I will preserve your illusions: watch this one instead.
Obligatory meta-internet musical number.
This non-video thing is the most pain-causing pun I have ever seen in my life. I think. I tend to block out memories of this sort of thing. My brain just can’t deal with it when language beats me. (The rest of the blog is good in a way that hurts less acutely.)
If you have non month-old video to alert the readership to, please write the home office below.
[20] life during downtime
I’ve got some groceries, some peanut butter, to last a couple of days, but I ain’t got no speakers, ain’t got no headphones, ain’t got no records to play.
Ok, so plans for Thee Nobody Scores Revolution (<- imagine this rendered in Papyrus) have been derailed by life derailments and more directly by my computer going up in flames, which is pretty direct what, and before I got my super pathetic iBook G3 up (difficulty: its screen is dead and I hadn’t touched it in years) I really was living some Talking Heads lyrics. Philosophical discovery: Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, but the converse: false! So. The main computer still being in the shop while expert technicians try and figure out whatdafuck is going on, I’m forced to bend my comic to accommodate my current machine’s capabilities. So, shorter, vignettish comics, somewhat more frequently than once a week, just for now. It can handle Photoshop – I know, right? People actually used Photoshop ten years ago! Craaazy shit. But not Youtube. And no DVD drive. It is a sad existence for me.
This last comic is a little more experimental than it looks as I am trying out an idea for the Post-Nobody-Scores comic that I may yet live to draw. Also, it’s a bit of a riff on something. Lemme explain:
Something I do every now and then when writing a comic is, start with somebody else’s panels – something where I’m interested, but also like what the fuck? – and continue on to wherever I’d wished it had gone. An earlier example, wherein Casualties Are Regrettable. The setup was a Pearls Before Swine strip wherein the piggy, having complained of “chills”, shows up anyway in a block of ice. Ha ha! Except I was like, how the fuck did he get in a block of ice? That seems elaborate! I want details! (I like the idea of Pearls Before Swine, usually, but Pastis always always seems to stop just before he’s about to get interesting. Follow-through!)
Soooo this one came from a review of Faith Erin Hicks’ Zombies Calling that, while I’m not casting aspersions on the book itself & I assume is at least reasonably entertaining, manages to pluck a three-panel sequence that makes the book look pretty unpromising, that is, not even gloriously stupid. I had to figure out what was going on with the protagonist, see, that she felt compelled to say “now zombies, it’s just you… and me.” I mean, Ash could get away with it, but that’s the point – Ash’s travails render him completely de-ranged. That is also why the movie panels are in black and white – from the source I was having a go at a more traditional b/w comics style which was fun. As for the cowboys vs. werewolves, that was a natural progression, plus a copyrighted movie idea that will get me millions and millions and millions of dollars.
2 x LINKS
Learn about comics, guys! Read about comics-making tools at this blog – listen to them, don’t do like I do, I am a cautionary tale – and this class-turned-blog about how to put it all together. It is wisdom time.
[29] open question
Am I back or not? I would like to be but horrible Real Life has been interfering, including but not limited to the inspiration for my latest effort. Ideally I’d be an incorporeal force that ectoplasms about and pursues its interests, and most of the time I manage to come shockingly close to this ideal, but unfortunately (?) my powers of imagination are limited after all.
Leaning back to a once-a-week update schedule was planned, however. I actually have for a long time had a theory about how it is impossible to be entertaining more than once a week, except for an utterly minute few exceptions, and it is the violation of this law that explains why so much stuff sucks so much out loud. Why did I violate my own law? Well I had a lot of stuff squeezed into inventory over several years. That stuff has now been converted into three hundred and sixty-five comics or less.
I have various experimental directions planned as soon as life gets out of the way a little. Slay everything! That’ll help.
[18] the big sleep
What’s this? Welp, once again, Nobody Scores! has staggered – more staggeringly than usual – to its traditional summer vacation, though now it’s barely summer. I’ll get into my plans shortly but mostly this week I have been standing around in public places, mouth agape, a thin line of drool descending to my feet, and I have got to tell you it feels great.
It’s been taking me longer and longer to crank out drawings lately which, tragically, has been giving me longer and longer to conjure up secret details for the comics I draw. For example I came up with all sorts of facts about the aliens that implement The Second Coming and here comes the tragic part because I’m going to tell you all about it.
DON’T CRY FOR ME, EPSILON ERIDANI
It’s possible to infer from the comic that the aliens totally skipped crucial boxer technology on their whole space-race beeline. Also detectable is that the comic implies a world wherein reproducing a given consciousness == resurrecting it, which neatly solves a big problem with teleporters but introduces possible quandaries in re generating multiple copies of a particular consciousness, which I could probably get out of like a cheap Dungeon Master by saying only one copy works, but: cheap.
And ooh! I also decided that these aliens had totally mastered nanotechnology. Doesn’t look like it with their clunky kit, but that’s because it’s all assembled ad-hoc and can be morphed on the fly to deal with engineering problems. Sort of how modern programming is less exacting than the assembly-language code that let you run a word processor in 64k of memory backwhen. But, so, that force-field box effect in the middle of the comic is actually nanotech glass or similar.
Also these aliens can do FTL – didn’t decide how, seemed boring – but even 100x FTL isn’t enough to get you past the logistics of detecting + tracking species over enormous spaces, I don’t think. Space is really quite mind-bogglingly big after all.
CHRYSALIS BUSINESS
Right, pupa mode. This time I am going to change the comic somehow, I just don’t know how yet. There are three hundred and sixty-five of these comics! I counted. That is a lot of comics and I didn’t quite change the cartoon enough last break to keep from going crazy this year. Evidence, above. See, I have DSM-IV personality disorders now. Like, at least three. Not split-personality disorder, that’s deprecated. But I am pretty fucked. Somehow, though, I have considered and rejected a number of whopping changes to the comic. Shit that won’t be happening to Nobody Scores!
• changing to an update-whenever schedule, and throwing like sixteen pages worth of incoherent comics in a dollop at you on September 31st
• changing to a daily four-panel setup-setup-beat-punchline comic until I die of gastrointestinospinal rebellion in, like, a week or two
• completely changing the cast and (physical, not metaphysical) setting. Oh you think I am lying but I have an alternate cast page all written up and what’s more I like it. But no!
• changing the color palette again. Ehhh what’s the point
• changing the art really. Ehhh what’s the point.
• fast-forwarding five years. Sara is married! So is Beans. To different people! And Skeleton Warrior has Baby Skeleton Warrior.
• Nobody Scores Babies. Yup.
• getting them a new sofa. Never!
Everything else is, as douchebags say, on the table. I have a few things I’m gonna try to post – no promises, promises lead to failure and jinxing – while I’m away, which will be until the middle of September I believe. Until then
STAY AWAY FROM ME WITH YOUR FIENDISH MAWS
This is the best Calvin & Hobbes parody comic since the one with the Ritalin from back when. I have no idea who made this. The new one. I am not sure who made the old one either, now that I think about it. But it’s uglier.
Do you know the number to Heaven? You will in thirty seconds.
A Lego blog! Pictures of things people have made out of Lego, in handy blog form.
I sort of hope my comics are this stupid. Keep reading, you with the Lydia-from-Beetlejuice-snarl, it builds up.
Oh my god, have you heard The Knux? Because damn. These guys mix hip-hop and rock like there was never any difference to begin with. Yeah, I know, Outkast, but Outkast never quite pulled it off like this (Dracula’s Wedding is great, but not a rap song). Why hadn’t I heard of these guys before? I blame you.
Dropular is the coolest image feed I have seen in quite some time. It’s all web 2.0 and shit.
I love real life moments. You may not think so, but I do.
Hopefully I will be back soon with more stuff! That is, before comics resume. Please restrict all discombobulations to the proper receptacle.
[32]
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