Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding

I invite everyone to check out the new banner. All systems are go for a new independent animated film production. Now what?

Well, my focus now is directed towards raising the necessary funds, on top of what I need for living expenses et cetera. I have been relieved of my lucrative construction job, due to my inability to control my temper, so I am now back to my paltry cartooning income and eBay sales. I am an irascible and unhappy man and working a 9-to-5 around people who often decide to be disrespectful and shitty never works out. I walked off the job rather than go to prison for killing someone.

I’ve done everything within my power over the past 20+ years to help the world understand that hearing music which I feel is superficial and/or devoid of talent is literal torture for me. So instead of murdering a human being for hurting my ears and disrespecting me while I’m working, I removed myself from the situation*. Don’t ever ask me why I didn’t just “ask them to turn it down”. Whatever the reason, when I am “being tortured” enough, I can’t be anything but physically violent. This goes all the way back to high school. All the way back to working in the mall record store in the early 1990’s. It’s why I created Bands I Useta Like in the first place.

Oh yeah- the deadness in my arms that I mentioned in prior updates wasn’t caused by the construction job (which actually helped fix it). Hey- remember the months and years we were all forced to work out of our homes, thanks to our coward fraud government? Well guess what. For like two years straight I held my arms at chest-level sitting at a desk or computer. Over time my shoulders hunched up and my arms withered because I was constantly resting them on armrests. So I started waking up in the morning with lifeless hands, because for less than 20 minutes a day I was standing with my arms at my sides. Since I was never walking, there was never any natural momentum to drag blood to my fingertips. If you ever wonder why some of us still seek a windpipe to crush regarding the “pAnDeMiC”, I hope this clears that up. Heed my warning/example.

I’m too tired right now to finish this, and I need to give my li’l hamster pal some TLC before I hit the hay. (He’s on my shoulder supervising at the moment.) If I haven’t already said so, past/present/future donors to my cause are all slated to be credited as executive producers. I’d like to reward every donor with a miniature John’s Arm figurine, but I haven’t figured out the logistics on that yet. I have pages and pages of treatments and notes, with some dialogue, and things have really picked up now that I have the aesthetic concept properly defined. As I’ve told my secret collaborator, I had to rediscover the uniqueness of what I’d created, and relearn its appeal. I had to work out how to introduce the world to the John’s Arm universe a second time, without retracing my steps or anyone else’s. And now that I’m working in high-definition, it’s a whole new ball game compared to 2005. You see them fire and lightning effects I did in the trailer? Yeah bro.

Stay tuned. Time for zzz now. Gomez the hamster says hi.

*Next Day Edit: I neglected to mention that when I flipped out over the ear-splitting music and walked, I’d also been watching my friend basically killing himself doing the job for no money, because we hadn’t been paid yet and hadn’t eaten a thing that day. Kind of a crucial detail that hopefully will help folks understand that I’m less psychotic than I might seem. Believe me, it takes a hell of a lot for me to just ditch a job like that in Current Times. Thanks for your understanding.

Okay so I just figured something out this morning that tied a great many things together. And hey, if you were a Patron, you could learn about stuff like this on the regular. 

I have been working on other people’s houses for 6 to 8 hours a day, a few days a week. Even this combined with everything else I make doing cartoons is barely enough to get by for another month. It’s been a lot of good exercise and sunshine, but I’ve been in a very foul humor for weeks now, partly because of the way the country is going, but mostly because my arms have been working off and on for some time. Arms, hands; y’know. What do I use those for anyway, right?

I became less out of shape during the phony “lockdown” than most guys my age, and you know God damn well I refused vaccination and will continue to do so indefinitely. (Hey, if you think the resentment’s ever gonna go away, I don’t know what to tell you.) My mind started to wander down darker paths as I woke up at 6 am once again unable to feel or close my hands. Tendonitis? What does arthritis feel like? Is this something that will combine with my slowly diminishing eyesight to finally kneecap my career as an artist? Is it chickens coming home to roost from past injuries? Mom had MS, but doctors told me I’d never get it. Then again doctors have told me a lot of things in the last few years. 

I calmed myself down by figuring it was just nerve damage from the green bruises on my forearms caused by flinging eight-foot ladders and sixteen-foot 2×8’s around a muddy suburban backyard. Then yesterday while priming a ceiling I almost had to tap out from the searing pain and numbness in my arms. I couldn’t hold my arms over my head for more than a minute at a time, and my left arm continued to mess up the rolling by crapping out intermittently. All that kept me from losing my composure was knowing that at home after work, there was some really amazing weed waiting. Seriously, I was like just let me get through to 4pm. 

I only mention the weed because without it I wouldn’t have figured all of this out. 

Sometime in early 2020 (I think) I bought a posture corrector off Amazon for a few bucks. For a few more, sometime earlier I bought a new desk chair for working, that had actual lumbar support, which my previous chair lacked. Both of these things improved my posture and overall mood significantly over the following three years. The chair, although still comfortable and such, has a deflated seat cushion that makes you sink down when you sit in it. 

So you don’t realize it, but for extended hours, you’re sitting slumped while working at the desk, propping yourself up on your elbows. Meanwhile, your shoulders compress into your neck and spine, and they not only cut off blood to your head, but they grow weaker, because they’re rarely holding the balanced weight of your two arms. Which also begin to grow weaker, and your hands become numb and itchy. 

Okay, now let’s add a perfectly good posture protector into the mix. The one I have works by compressing your lower ribs, so that your spine naturally aligns your ribcage and sternum. However, it uses shoulder straps that can press against your neck and underarms. If you slump in a chair with your elbows on the armrests while wearing this device, that’s exactly what those shoulder straps do, slowly putting your arms to sleep, while also putting a very weak sleeper hold on you. 

Bottom line is, before heavy physical work carrying things through and working in Georgia sunlight for several hours a day, I have been having coffee while unintentionally putting my arms and head to sleep. 

I raised the armrests of my desk chair this morning when I figured this out, and the problems with my arms and hands have been slowly evaporating (and this is with the posture corrector on). Holding my arms up to the keyboard to type this (my keyboard is above elbow level, as is my desk where I draw) is making my hand start to fall asleep again, so I’m taking that as confirmation that my theory is correct. Folks: you have to put your arms down. Our bodies are not built to keep our arms above waist-level for extended periods. You just end up hunching at the neck and messing yourself up. Trust me, this was a painful lesson. It just was more embarrassing than life-threatening and I’m glad I waited until I figured out what was what. Now that so many of us sit at desks all day, God only knows what kind of conditions are being misdiagnosed and improperly treated. 

Even now my arms are still over-correcting to avoid the armrests which are no longer in place. Learn from my mistakes, people. Don’t eff up your core because you don’t realize how bad your seated posture is, and that it takes time and effort to fix when it gets worse. I thought I was taking extra naps because I passed 50; turns out I was choking myself out in the mornings. And I think you can grasp why the “hands slowly ceasing to function” was stressing me out a tad. 

More to come. 

This page hopefully doesn’t look it, but from a couple standpoints it was a great big pain in the backside. Once I explain it a little better you’ll see what I’m grumbling about, and I’ll have exposed flaws in my work you never would have noticed before, not to mention completely sabotaging my own comic strip. So let’s carry on, shall we?

This page is actually part of an arc pre-written months ago, but here’s what a page requires after that; sectioning the dialogue into panels by number (based on the necessary timing of the “speech”), loosely graphing out the parameters of the panels (based around the shapes of the number of the page), roughing out the page in the sketchbook (including sketching any new characters needed), blue-lining the borders on Bristol board, placing the dialogue on the page (again, based around the shapes of the page number) in blue mechanical pencil (then using a Micron 05 to ink all text), using an 08 Micron to ink the borderlines and speech balloon borders, sketching the art composed as it is in the sketchbook, using the Micron to ink the speech balloon tails (closing all the borders), inking the art in Speedball India with a 102 crow quill nib and a Deleter G-2 pen, then scanning the finished page into Photoshop and coloring it digitally. 

Are you snoring yet? Regardless of how boring the process might seem, I assure you this is how I operate at (nearly) peak efficiency. I backlog scripts until the time comes to use them and build up from there. Being efficient is key, because a lot of work goes into this long-running comic strip for which I don’t receive payment and almost nobody reads. 

See, any time I miss a Sunday, it weakens the overall integrity of the comic strip. If I was working for an editor, which is typically the case with syndication, the best-case scenario would be that editor running a re-run, and worst-case scenario, I’d get booted. Editors get an idea of how long something takes to create when they see it; they often have seen thousands of cartoons in their lives. I have a character flaw where I work best under extreme pressure, and oftentimes this has caused me to biff deadlines by minutes. Editors were a lot more forgiving of lateness when you had to physically hand-deliver your work to the Bay Street newspaper office across town via Habersham on a bike. I made that trek so many times my nuts were ground into paste by a cheap bike seat and I became impotent. Guys; if you’re gonna ride a stupid bike, spend the money on a proper seat that makes room for your perineal raphe and doesn’t parboil your nutsac. Also one time I misjudged the height of a curb on the way to deliver a cartoon to the Creative Loafing office on Victory Drive and went over the handlebars, as karmic punishment for riding my bike on the sidewalk. But it was Savannah, Georgia, where more than once I was almost given the end-of-Easy-Rider treatment by truck-wielding maniacs angered by my legal use of the road instead of the sidewalk. So fuck ’em. 

My point in all this is, producing one weekly comic strip is a lot more work than it looks like, but because the average person has, from a very young age, seen comic strips that appear six days a week, there exists this myth that being a cartoonist is something one can do in their spare time. 

Well, sure you can. But you’ll be a shitty cartoonist. 

Let’s compare two enormously successful comic strips; Dilbert by Scott Adams, and Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Think for a moment about the two of them. Did you have an emotional reaction to one, or both? Look at a few examples closely. Can you tell which one is the work of a career cartoonist, and which one was based on doodles done by someone in a completely non-artistic profession, when they were bored? Cathy is similar to Dilbert in that its genesis was doodled in secret at some soul-killing cubicle job. Cathy’s Guisewite’s penmanship and passed-note ballpoint aesthetics couldn’t be more feminine if they came out of a locking diary with glittery hearts all over it. 

Now the thing is, a successful comic strip doesn’t necessarily mean a good comic strip. Calvin and Hobbes was a rare bird, being both beautiful and consistently clever, with kinetically illustrated visual gags. Dilbert, despite its font-worthy lettering, is reductive to the point of banality in its art; characters and locations are rigid icons that exist only deliver dialogue from invisible mouths. Funky Winkerbean was another strip that had easy-on-the-eyes lettering and a more breezy style. I swear I saw a Funky comic once where it was just dialogue and photocopies of the house with the treble clef on the garage door. That’s the kind of thing you do when the clock is ticking (or the golf course beckons) and you’ve waited until the last minute. Though in reality, strips like Funky were produced months ahead of time (as per syndicate protocol), so it’s more likely that the strip I’ve described was filler to round out a slow week, or delay the consequences of a previously established plot device, or conclusion of an arc. 

Back to my dubious point. Dilbert, Cathy, and Funky Winkerbean have simplified art for two reasons; one, because the artist knows their way around a pen and doodled often in their life, and two, because it sure as hell takes less time to draw. Bill Watterson approached Calvin and Hobbes from a more artistic perspective, like a cartoonist from the shirtsleeves-and-inkwell days. Even one of his strips without a standard joke or punchline is unique and lovely enough to beautify an afternoon for a while. Dilbert strips are practically interchangeable; Character A delivers setup to Character B, Character B reacts, then Character C appears to add the “twist” after Character A drops the punch (or before). Rinse and repeat. The lore is even more minimal than a kid with a stuffed tiger; a guy works in an office with some office workers (and talking animals) under an amoral boss with pointy hair. There are more visually imaginative comic strips in high school newspapers. 

Here’s the difference between Dilbert and Peanuts. I mean, the one that’s not so obvious. Charles Schulz’s line looks “alive” because he used traditional cartooning materials, and almost literally every single image you see of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, he drew. That means his speed of output was the result of drawing the characters zillions of times and getting insanely good in the process. Yet if you break down how Schulz designed the characters and his distinctive (and oft-imitated) aesthetic, you can see the pen marks that make up the profile of the head; the lines are irregular and organic. Hair is scribbly and wispy. The look is simple, but you can still tell that a lot of love went into it, that someone is doing their absolute best. Not to mention, Schulz’s lettering and spelling were flawless, and his writing was on such a level of genius and relatable humanity, most Peanuts strips hold up over a half-century later. Millions of office workers have tacked Peanuts strips to their bulletin boards; millions of moms have taped Schulz’s work to refrigerator doors. 

Scott Adams’ Dilbert is relatable to a specific breed of office drone, in particular the IT niche. Since it doesn’t appeal in any way to children, there exists no need to put any “love” into it, so there’s no reason not to make an easy-to-use font out of your handwriting, and you can save time by typing big ugly blocks of text into your speech balloons, because what good is practicing handwriting anyway, right folks? The visual aspect is what Joe Matt called “rubber-stamp art”, where the characters may as well be stamped onto the page. Joe Matt is another guy whose work you can look upon and see that he fiercely carved out his own style, using the established tools of the trade. His lines are “living”; even when he has “talking heads” scenes (no action other than dialogue exchange between two or more characters), he tries to avoid re-using the same shot, unless it’s for a specific narrative reason (conveying a “pregnant pause”, etc.). Every panel is an opportunity to introduce more detail and ideas, not to mention background and perspective. This is why, unless he’s lying in his books, Joe Matt is not a very speedy cartoonist. He tends to really put a lot of effort into his own stuff. Hence, it really “pops” when you read it. You can tell he understands the balance of positive and negative space.

I would bet cash money that Scott Adams doesn’t even have to hold a pen anymore. He most likely has a program that designs the strip from his typed (or spoken) specifications. He capped his artistic development with Dilbert, so there’s no point in drawing it because there’s no reason to improve; in fact it would even hamper the strip’s style if the art improved. He’s pissed off because using his strip as a political soapbox caused the expected booting and canceling. He was kicked off Twitter because he did a strip (fairly) criticizing the ESG, which is something TPTB don’t want you knowing about until it’s too late to do anything about it. Recently his cancellation has gone full-blown, after Adams made a comment that either I read wrong or was about the most racist thing one could possibly utter.

Many of you are probably familiar with Walt Kelly’s classic funny-animal strip Pogo. If not, it was a beloved strip fantastically illustrated by (I believe) an ex-Disney employee whose skills had surpassed those of his master. Despite its whimsical atmosphere and cast, Pogo was almost overtly political, albeit from a more generalized, humanist perspective. Because of the swamp environment, it was easy for Kelly to introduce ecological themes. Despite these qualities, only on rare occasions has he been criticized for “being too political”.

The key difference is the aesthetic. It doesn’t matter what Pogo is about or if it’s political; the art will appeal to young children who will carry that affection into adulthood. They will see a Pogo paperback in an antique store as a grownup and have to stop and consider purchasing it. (Books bring up a whole other benefit; the aroma of newsprint and/or Silly Putty has tremendous olfactory advantage over a computer screen.)

Newsprint smell probably reminds a lot of folks of collecting Calvin and Hobbes strips carefully cut from the morning paper, and for those who grew up on his most famous creation, he’s creating something new for them as adults. 

Dilbert appeals to middle-aged intellectuals who hate their boring but cushy jobs, have no children nor a sense of humor, and will most likely die within the next two decades. The strip has all the passion of a dropped microwave taquito. And Scott Adams thinks he should be extra respected and heard because he became a millionaire in the funny papers, when it’s like bro, you literally did the least amount of effort from day one to become rich. You found a formula and made some real scratch back in the day. Just fade back, or keep doing the strip out of reticence. It’s not impossible that there are now adults who saw the Dilbert TV show when they were kids, and developed the enduring affection that carries an IP into futurity. If you draw something that might appeal to kids, it will appeal to kids. The fact that it’s a cartoon wins more than half that battle. 

This is why some political humor is accepted, and why some isn’t. It’s whether or not it appealed to children. 

Look at South Park. As I’ve said before, it originally looked like some late 1970’s Canadian handmade kids’ show. Now its aesthetic has become so ubiquitous, it only references itself. Still, there is a vast legion of persons who abide extremes in South Park that they wouldn’t elsewhere; because they first saw the show as a kid. 

I mean hey; who’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down intended for, anyway?

The forgotten purpose of this quasi-instructional diatribe is that for this page of Ceaseless Fables, I was faced with a “talking heads” situation. The characters are in prison, which is carved out of a series of caves, so it’s not realistic for them to be exchanging dialogue while trotting about or some such. I wanted the environment to feel airless and confining, plus, remember, the lights are ALWAYS ON in this prison, for reasons yet to be revealed. What I didn’t want to do was draw the same image nine or ten times. 

What made this extra difficult, and delayed the strip by a week, was that I now had to draw a native two-dimensional character in more 3-D than I was confident with, in an awkward pose that was decided upon weeks ago in the script. The idea being, Daemir is posed like he’s chained to the wall, but he’s actually just reclining against it somewhat comfortably. Simi (a new character who required a color guide, as per procedure) has his arms crossed as though he’s shackled, but he isn’t. I’m not 100% sure I pulled it off but that’s what I was going for. Frankly I’m about 70% happy with this strip, but now you can understand; you only have so much time to get it right. And like many things in life, if you fall behind, the ones who can work faster will catch up and pass you. 

I hope the galactic mass of gobbledygook that I’ve written here proves beyond the shadow of a doubt how much work goes into creating a weekly comic strip. Thanks again for your support.