Meet the Geeks

Been awful quiet around here, hey folks? But now life is again starting to settle and I might have a bit of time to dedicate to side projects and maybe - just maybe - starting to draw again. But until that point, I have another plan.... My parents introduced me to those little interlocking bricks from Denmark that, since the 1960's, has been holding the attention of generations of children, young and old alike. Many of the first sets that I received from my folks were the space sets which were popular at the time. Flash forward thirty odd years and many of those old pieces are now in the possession of my oldest son Riley. I never got rid of those brick sets. Sure, many pieces have been broken or lost to the ages but I still have much of that old LEGO. I had the idea, as a bonding experience between Riley and I, to try to recreate - or rather rebuild - at least one of those old sets. It's going to involve going through the pieces that we have and trying to source out

A day late and a dollar short; such is the life of a cartoonist.  With Tuesday’s update we see the Geek’s traveling to their new abode with Clayton narrating the ride.  For me this was a fun strip to do. No only was it a multi-panel but I got to experiment with a few different effects including trying to mimic the opening scene of Star Wars: A New Hope including the title crawl and even the start screen for the DVD.  It won’t be long before that first panel makes me feel old when kids don’t recognize it. Just remember, when Star Wars Episode one, the first of the prequels came out for home video, George Lucas was still refusing to put it on DVD because he wasn’t sure about this new technology. I bought it on VHS. Feel old? I am old. The strip is a bit blurry because I didn’t have a higher resolution one saved. The original strip was saved at 72 DPI and most of the published strips are at 96 DPI. I upscaled it to make it readable but it left it a bit blurry.

Even back in 2007 I knew there would be troll’s. I knew exactly what those shite disturbers that you find on every website would be saying. They would be sitting at their keyboards, hat’s backward on their heads, White plastic framed sunglasses over their eyes and a sense of entitlement in their black little hearts, guffawing to themselves as they typed out their devious little message: LOL. YOU GUYS ARE GAY. YOU’RE SO FU**ING GAY! LOL! LOL! So why not beat them to the punch? Thing’s were moving right along here as we prepared to start on our first story arc, that of the Geek’s moving into their new digs. The tripod gag was actually written by Clay and inserted into the strip. I would like to claim responsibility for it but that zinger was all him. By this time Clay was getting more and more adept at the coloring and inserting other elements and I was, and still am, by the polish that his coloring jobs put on the strips. I’m going to have to brush up on my coloring skill

One more from the politically incorrect pile. Hey, back in 2007 the word 'Tranny' still flew. Nowadays I would probably use 'Ladyboy' as the punchline. This was an actual last minute comic that I submitted to Clay when he asked if I had an update for that week. I was at my folks place and quickly drew the stick figures in ball point pen on a piece of lined paper before scanning it and e-mailing it off to Clayton with the hastily written script and telling him to just put the same picture in all four panels. It was Clayton's idea to remove Sean's mouth in the third panel which I think gave a nice beat before the punchline in panel four.  This is in a way one of my favorite strips. I understand the simplicity that draws people to Cyanide and Happiness or XKCD. Simple comics that rely on the humor, dark as it may be, and not the artwork. Not that I would ever put my gag writing in the same sphere as those comics. I'm simply not that much of

Anybody who knows me knows that I loves me some Bloom County and I loves me some metal. In fact, metal is what initially caught my eye in Bloom County. I first noticed Bloom County in the funnies when I was an aspiring young cartoonist and a teenage metalhead (I blame my parents) ((No, seriously. When my parents bought me my first walkman they gave me Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry album with it.)) (((Years later they bought me a stereo and a copy of Metallica's ...And Justice For All. It's all their fault. Before that I was listening to Duran Duran, Gowan and other top forty wonders))) and Berkley Breathed (he stopped calling himself Berke when he found out it was slang for female genitalia in the UK) had started the Deathtöngue story arc. I was excited, to say the least, that a comic strip had a story about a metal band and quickly became enamoured with the comic and all it contained.  So years later Bloom County still holds a special place in my heart. Y

Someone needs to school Alanis Morissette on irony, but there was a certain irony going on with this comic as well. Aside from the Mystery Science Theater reference, behind the scenes I was falling behind on my duties as writer and artist of the comic and Clay found himself having to scramble to fill in, thus the Geekstery Science Theater was born. Four heads in silhouette taking the piss out of a movie. Honestly, I wish I had thought of it. Meanwhile I was still un-medicated and my depression was getting the better of me so nothing new was getting done on the comic from my end. I recall giving Sean and Clay some concern for my well being at the time. It was around this time that the original comic started to really fall apart. But, it's a new year and a new beginning! I want to thank everyone who's come back to check out the blog following the holiday break (because it was totally planned - yeah, right) and to assure you that the blog and the comic will continue i