radio free north hollywood

Cloudhopper 125 and wallpaper

2009-11-11T08:12:16Z

Got this idea from Dresden Codak (one of my favorite webcomics btw):

For the nominal donation of any amount whatsoever, including single pesos, you can have an extremely high resolution wallpaper of either of these images:

From now on I'll post a wallpaper a month. It won't always be clouds, but I bet you that it will be sometimes. Tell me which one you want with the Paypal message and include an email address.

(If you're curious what I'd do with the money, at the moment I am saving pennies to do one big print run of Cloudhopper. So let me know if you know anybody who wants to invest a couple thousand dollars).

Cloudhopper 124

2009-10-31T20:07:57Z

With this page Dan is done wandering aimlessly around on top of clouds.

Forever, actually.

Story's a year old now. Look how far we've come!

It occurred to me the other day that the part we just read is about freedom, and the problems of freedom.

If it wasn't for unemployment we'd all be in real trouble.

2009-10-27T19:50:09Z

People are freaking out about losing their jobs. Guess what; we are all going to lose our jobs. All of us. The labor economy as we know it is over.

Computers and robotics are going to replace nearly every single occupation. You work in a factory? You fix cars? You're a secretary at a dentist's office? You wash dishes in a restaurant? You pick apples off of trees? You answer phones at a call center? You are an accountant? You will be replaced. It's over. Computers can do nearly everything, including a lot of stuff we haven't thought to ask them yet. All we have to do is build the robots, and guess what, we have robots to do that.

Let's make this less emotionally charged for a second and examine something that does not affect most of us too directly. Roombas.

You know what a Roomba is, right? Ever see one in action? They work. But they don't work too good. They don't get in corners, or on top of furniture, or in between the legs of chairs. But they do bring the general level of dust down, and in a room that's designed for them they are flawless.

No big deal, right?

Let's say you're on the cleaning staff of a major hotel.

A Roomba still needs to be supervised by humans. They require touch-up work after they're done. But Roombas take half the effort out of vacuuming a room.

So you only need half as many employees to vacuum.

On a small hotel, who cares. On a big hotel, they can cut a couple people. Just a couple. Most of the staff keeps their jobs.

But those two people out of their hundred staff that get cut, what are they going to do? Work at another hotel? That hotel just bought a Roomba and fired 2% of their staff too.

No, my friend, I'm afraid they are out of work. Permanently. Because wherever they turn next, they are going to find:

a lot of other people who just got fired applying for that same job
and anyway a robot is doing it now.

This applies to all of us, all the way up and down the scale.

Yes, even you. It will take longer or shorter to get to you but automation will eventually destroy either your job or its economic underpinnings. Everything. It's already happened and we're just waiting for the ramifications to play themselves out.

Yes, even doctors. Even artists. Even musicians.

Anyone who says "robots and computers will never replace live music" is probably correct but anyone who says "robots and computers will never destroy my ability to make money off music" is nuts, as even a casual glance a record industry news will show you. No, robots are not *exactly* replacing us in the arts (though I bet there are a lot fewer spotters and background inkers these days...). But the Internet is making it impossible for us to get paid for what we're doing, so factor that in.

This is scary to most people because we're looking at a whole new world and it's got some very bad things about it. But in the long run I think we'll all be better off.

This is a new form of life. It's always scary at first.

Unemployment is never going back below 10%. Even if we had more manufacturing in America we all know that it would be robots doing the manufacturing and we would not be able to absorb the products they make. Unemployment will continue to climb. Forever.

I am not afraid of this. Why should anyone be? This is freedom! This is it! This is exactly what human beings have dreamed of since we evolved the ability to dream -- a world without hard labor. Everyone will be free to do exactly what they want whenever they want.

Actually, I can see why you'd be afraid of that. But I'm not. I've lived like that for some time and I spend a lot of time in the company of those who live by their own volition, it's quite pleasant.

This is a very good thing because, I don't know if you saw the news, but according to the rules of the "old" economy we LOST. HARD. China BOUGHT us. If we do not evolve the fuck out of this old economy right away and get into something where humans are more valuable than money we are all going to be working in factories making cheap crap for China.

What will probably happen...what I hope will happen...is that unemployment and SSI will be turned into de facto doles, where people are born, live, and die getting a check from the government. This will shatter their motivation and leave those left in control with an uncomfortable degree of authority that they will certainly abuse. Britan has proved that. It's still better than the alternatives, which are this:

a) everyone who doesn't have a job starves to death in the midst of plenty (and I mean literal plenty, we're about ten years away from robot-raised and robot-cooked food).

b1) we invent busywork for the entire population (management, security guard, sales jobs for everybody! Everything where you produce nothing is fair game)

b2) we put half the population in jail and hire the other half to guard them (the Republican plan)

c) things split into two economies -- walled cities surrounded by sharecropping farms, basically

d) things stay the way they are. Which is more than bad enough.

I'm fine with a fat, lazy, pointless future where people are forced to search for meaning within themselves instead of plugging into a pointless economic caste system and holding on to boring, loathed cubicle lives with all fingers and toes. Nobody should have to spend all day in a cubicle** if they don't want to. If you do spend all day in a cubicle, you should be shorn of the easy excuse that "you have to" and forced to confront the fact that you either want to or or are scared not to.

My average day is not a whole lot more interesting than anyone else's. But it's mine. If I stay inside on a sunny day staring at a computer, it's on me. I know this.

I think automation is going to bring this to all of you. Freedom. Ready or not.

Then you be forced to live your life, your entire life. Shielded from brute necessity, you will be forced to recognize that things are the way they are because you wanted them that way. And you will have to ask yourself the two toughest questions in the world:

"Why do you want that?"
"Is that really the best you can do?"

*People are going to take this as smug, because of my current situation. I assure you that you are putting the cart before the horse. I'm not laughing from a sheltered place; rather, I saw the way things were going, and got out of the rain. The only thing I'm worried about is that I might be too soon. But when you consider CA is up to 77 weeks of unemployment, and probably going to go further, this might be it. The "dole" may have begun.

**if you change "sit in a cubicle" to "wash dishes" or "shovel manure" you will instantly see why this is so good.

Cloudhopper 123

2009-10-25T21:08:16Z

Ka-CHUNK! Another tooth in the gear that is this story.

It's at a difficult, labor-intensive stage right now. I expect when this story is done I will have taken apart the Campbellian storyline as thoroughly as ever I could. It all feels a little tame these days. In a world with stuff like this:

Terrifying Sniper Prank on Japanese TV - Watch more Funny Videos

I bet you the people who made this aren't in jail right now. I bet they got rich even if they are.

What this demonstrates is that narrative can now reach right out and grab you. Art is interacting with the audience in new and unexpected ways, and it's certainly unpleasant at first.

The poster and page 124 are on the way.

Superman Special #1 and twenty-four hours with Gil Kane

2009-10-22T19:23:35Z

Hello there, I would like to present to you two works, or perhaps one and a half. The first is Gil Kane's classic Superman story, "Behold, the Ultimate Man!" The second is my 24-hour comic where I attempted to redraw and retell the story, with mixed success.

I don't know how easy this will be to read -- you're reading two things at once, and it can be confusing. There is a lot of writing below. Take your time and please feel free to respond to only part instead of the whole.

Superman Special #1: "Behold! The Ultimate Man!" 44 pages, of which the equivalent of 14 are reproduced below interwoven with 24 pages of hasty reinterpretation.

Gil Kane wrote and drew this story in 1982, apparently for the German market -- something complicated about publishing that I don't understand happened -- it was relettered and re-released here in America in 1983. I'd wager Julius Schwartz helped with the English dialogue....

The villain(s) in this story never appeared before, and haven't been seen since.

I have not figured out exactly what Kane was trying to say here. This is a philosophical work of some complexity.

This story is three iterations of the same theme. Superman defeats each iteration with his unique powers and then draws a moral conclusion that...confuses me, to say the least. Let's take a look.

PAGE ONE: Superman flies through space.

PAGE TWO: he runs into Cthulhu:

http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/superspecial%20%281%29.jpg for a slightly larger image of the above. You don't have to read all the words, but they do seem to have a relationship to the symbolic structure. It's an energy-being and it's "feeding...on whatever matter it can suck into it's maw!"

Lots of exclamation points in this story. After 24 hour comics day I had a problem with putting exclamation points on all my sentences for a few days. Seriously, just about every sentence in this story ends like this! IT'S ALL CAPS LOCK TOO! AND ITALIC!

For those of you who never heard of it, 24 Hour Comics Day is when all sorts of artists get together and each produce a twenty-four page comic in twenty-four hours. I think this is the sixth time I've participated, so I decided to try something different. Instead of making up a new "song" I covered an old "classic."

I'm glad I tried this because it meant an intense twenty-four hours with Gil Kane. I learned so much that I can't even begin to list it all. Definitely one of the more artistically fruitful experiments lately.

In the two weeks since the event I feel my perspective drawings and life drawings have picked up remarkably, and also my invented landscapes and textures are much improved. I'll go through and mention things I learned as I go.

I also learned that I'm no Gil Kane, and without years and years of life drawing classes I never will be. But I was content to learn from the master.

* I changed Superman to a woman because I wanted to do something to make my version different. I changed all her dialogue, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For the most part I kept the Silver-age looniness that I could.

I include this whole sequence because, you guessed it, it's important later. My main question here is: does Gil Kane know something amazing I don't about quantum physics and spinning, or is he makin' stuff up?

I love the spinning poses. I have this theory he was watching figure skating as he drew this. And I love the way Kane...twists everything! I mean, his panel borders were always dead on and straight-edged -- this is as weird as his layouts get, he's no Neal Adams -- but Supes and his cape are always contorted in strange but logical poses. If you look at it, Superman is waving his arms around like a big gorilla! His legs and arms are always flexed, in action. It's amazing, I think responsible for a lot of the lifelike quality he has.

Of course I did not capture this very well. In fairness, Gil Kane probably had longer than 24 hours, but I'm not trying to kid anyone. Ah, well.

When I look at this page I mostly see how I do not draw as well as Mr. Kane. I hope it brings you some pleasure to see my rather crude reproduction.

I did learn a lot, though. For example, it's here that I started to notice Kane's approach to landscape. I know that seems odd to say "landscape" for a sequence that is supposed to happen in vacuum, but every panel has some kind of background and they happen in the same pattern you see a thousand times in this issue: three textures. Backgrounds, to Mr. Kane, are made of three interweaving textures. I don't think my art reflects this yet; you can probably watch me figure it out as the evening goes on.

Also I began to notice here that my approach to faces is entirely different from his. His Supes is naturally pretty grim and I tend to draw my heroine with a more active smile.

^^^That's a bit of exposition about Bentley Wayland, who was the actual villain of Iteration Two.

I changed him to Ronald Reagan. Because I'm immature, I guess. I can't figure out who he's supposed to be, in the comic. I thought maybe Nixon? But then I began to wonder if he's some European politician from the 70s or early 80s....anybody know?

Reagan was actually in the White House when this comic came out, so it's not too far a stretch. Also remember this was for a European audience.

^^^Lovely, lovely framing panel -- ripe for all sorts of re-uses. Gil Kane's work has this cool beauty...

Curiously, this was not meant for American audiences at first. I wonder if the European version has "America" or the world. Gil Kane was Polish, by the way.

I don't care what you say I love my John Wayne panel.

Have I mentioned how amazingly satisfying this experience was from beginning to end? Could not recommend it more.

As re the story, I'd like to point out that once again Supes uses super-powers to defeat the threat. Supes does not act at all like a regular human in this story -- he appears as Clark Kent for EXACTLY three panels. He's more like a law of nature, relentlessly punishing blind ambition/hunger.

Anyway, he gives him a little speech as he smacks him through the wall.

I'm more or less pleased with my dialogue here.

OMG so much sciencez!

It was here that I began to suspect that Sir Kane was drawing stereo equipment and cookware and using it for laboratory equipment. NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. In fact if Kane does it I'm gonna do it too.

Gosh what a great page. That guy right over Ulimate Man is a bit crosseyed. Let me tell you; after spending 24 hours intensely staring at this issue, Gil Kane did not make very many mistakes!

Did not nail it. I think my framing device at the top is alright, but I aimed for that expression in panel 3 and did not hit it. Also, note unfortunate hatching at top of page -- compulsive hatching is one of my worst habits.

This is one of my better attempts. You can see in the bottom panel that I am beginning to grok out his landscape structure -- three textures! Everything is made of three simple pen patterns, in approximate perspective, organized with a black area in the foreground, then a white area, and then hatched texture areas. Look! Pointy waves, blobs, and smoother waves overlaid by the pointy waves.

Now, this was one of the interesting things about the experience. This was not organized like a normal 24 hour CD. This is not organized like a modern comic at all. It's extremely repetitive, but with variations; much like a symphony. There is a long sequence here where the Ultimate Man basically sends textures to kill Superman, and Superman defeats them with curved lines. There are no people anywhere in this -- he's attacking uninhabited areas and anyway Kane didn't feel like drawing them. Other than the White House and the Observatory there are no buildings in this comic at all!

In the original comic this takes eleven pages and he fights all four of the elements -- water, earth, air, and kryptonite. Kryptonite kicks his butt, we'll get to that in a minute.

This is one of the very few times I feel my work stands up to the master's. Although I don't approach his draftsmanship this page has a pop-art feel that entertains me -- if I'd managed to do the whole comic with this sense of zap-boom-wonder I would have been happy.

Q: "What if Jules Feiffer inked Gil Kane?"
A: "Readability problems."

Oh god I totally flubbed the podium here. It's the same podium at the same angle in every frame but I didn't notice that until page 20 or so.

Ultimate Man sends another challenge ... a plague of meteors!

I cut almost all of Kane's meteor sequence because it was three pages, accomplished nothing, and had no one part that was all that beautiful to look at. So you're stuck with my version, which cuts to the chase:

I am pleased with the dialogue. I do wish that I'd done my censorship bars a little better, though.

The textures in panel B please me. You can see me figuring out his pattern and adapting it -- instead of worrying about recreating his three textures here, I used my own (except instead of technique I used media; line, wash, and white-out).

Panel A is alright. If I'd done a better job on panel B this would have been a great page.

You probably can't make out the secret message in the last panel, but it reads "If you own books on tape in Klingon, we can help." I think somebody said that when I was working on the panel.

Panel two -- nailed it.

Anyway, he's defeated a tsunami, volcano, meteor strike, and now tornado. I was mapping this to air-earth-fire-water, but I think that's stretching it maybe. Maybe the volcano is fire and the meteor is earth, but why bother reaching that far? I don't know -- what do you think the significance of the challenges and their sequence is?

It's pretty clear we're looking at some sort of allegory about ambition and punishment. I am not at all sure I understand it yet.

I had nothing to add, I was only pleased to learn at the feet of the master. Bonus points to anyone who can see what I did to the font here -- it entertained me. There are a lot of font jokes in this, like Reagan speaking in Comic Sans.

In theory the reframing works. In practice, not as much.

Anyway, force beams from the Punch Dimension! Of course they're green like Kryptonite -- that's why I mentioned it before -- but the real reason is that green is Supes' anti-color, especially in the Gold and Silver Age. I think this comic is Gil Kane's last love letter to the Silver Age. Flat color and giant word ballons.

Oh God I am no Gil Kane. Look at his face in the last one. Look at it! What the hell was I doing? I was so tired by that point.

Anyway, Ultimate Man is beating him/her up with pure thought now.

More spinning. I do not understand this stuff. What is he trying to say here? That kinetic energy can defeat vacuum? Is this an early version of Superboy punching Reality?

Let it be known that whoever Superman is and whatever he represents, he is immune to confusion. This sequence, as best as I can untangle it, shows the spirit of pure ambition (Ultimate Man) throwing Supes into a realm of pure thought. Which he defeats with the same trick he defeated Cthulhu, who is an inhuman principle of hunger (the most terrifying trope in literature -- the animal who is a predator to man).

So the Ultimate Man is a predator.

Superman/woman defeats him, through the use of "natural" principles. Mostly gently curved lines. And I'm not being sarcastic here -- there seems to be a consistent line symbolism in this book. These gently curved, loping lines are Superman's. Any time you see someone with a oval background over their head they're up to something -- Wayland/Reagan has that pattern in the Nuclear Bomb Room.

Yeah! Put your hips into it!

There is a coloring error on his shoulder in the last panel. I always feel good when I find an error in this book. His shoulder's also wrong in the first panel on this page: http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/superspecial%20%282%29.jpg

Those are all the mistakes I've found so far.

:(

I love this panel, though I think the letterer botched it.

Baffling thing -- whose eyes are that in the top panel? Is that Supes or the original Ultimate Man or what?

It was around here that I got tired and didn't care any more.

If you look closely at the next panel below, you will see that that is totally a frying pan.

This is rather a grim prognosis for humanity.

So Superman tells us what we are supposed to learn here.

The first thing I see is that Superman is not human. He's a godlike figure at this time, pretending to be human because it suits his purposes. Somewhere between a paternal figure and a cosmological principle, he has no problem making decisions with vast consequences for all mankind. And he does a good job destroying the Observatory and all Ultimate Man's work; he's never appeared in another comic before or since.

And why would we want to know the future? First we become sociopaths in bodysuits, then MODOK, then apparently we suck so bad that we turn back into monkeys. No wonder Supes wants to protect us; it's a wonder he doesn't want to kill us.

But as he notes, it's the lack of compassion that's the problem. Ultimate Man would have been a good guy, but he wasn't really evolved. He just thought he was. Actually he was a primitive spirit grafted onto the body of a god, and that's why he failed.

Think about it -- Supes can do everything that Ultimey can do. Whatever he's got Supes will come on stronger. And so we are given the odd spectacle of watching an alien from Krypton fight and defeat the highest product of humanity...while everyone cheers on the alien...but let us not digress. Superman is already what Ultimate Man wants to be. But Superman has compassion.

This is demonstrated to be the only important value in this comic. It's funny that John Wayne steps in to agree.

And so the Ultimate Man was struck back down to a monkey. This is much more metaphor than science. (I hope). If you accept that Cthulhu, Wayland/Reagan, and the Ultimate Man are all the same character, here's how the tragedy maps together:

good intentions (Wayland flashback, Ultimate Man in his first state)
power corrupts. Instantly, and through the gate of hubris (Wayland in the bomb room, Ultimate Man's fist monologue)
Hunger becomes all-consuming and mankind starts to look delicious (Cthulhu, Wayland's monologue, Ultimate Man's sociopathic tests)
Supes smacks you around. With (1)spinning, (2)melting and punching, and (3)punching and spinning and a giant magnifying lens, respectively.

I'm tempted to view the giant lens as a sort of metaphor for the "spotlight" of fame and success. It has a concentrating effect, turning people into what they truly are.

I do not agree with previous commentators who say this is "Superman fights Objectivism." It's more "Superman fights selfishness," of which Objectivism is only a subset. But yes, what Kane's trying to say here is that if you get out of line and forget that you're human, a super-powered alien will beat you down.

Good advice.

Lousy science.

Moral of the story:

If I gained nothing else from this project, I see now that I've been drawing women's shoulders much too wide.

I learned a metric ton from this exercise. Spending twenty-four hours with Gil Kane is one of the smarter things I've done lately. Things I learned from the master:

Landscapes are made of interweaving combinations of three textures. They are organized from foreground to background as black silhouette, white silhouette, and hatched areas.

Arms and legs should often be drawn twisted. It looks cool, it takes the same effort to draw, since it's an odder pose people tend to be more forgiving and it gives a very pleasing sense of action and depth. Gil Kane did not use exaggerated perspective in figure drawing, at least in this issue.

Diagonal panel divisions work fine, especially when you have a main character who can fly.

Gil Kane can throw down the Kirbytech, and I don't have that knack yet. He uses it to create depth. The backgrounds in this issue are amazing. I've improved substantially since I did this comic but I'm not there yet at all.

On the other hand, Kane seems to know Kirbytech better than actual science. Either this story contains deep parables on quantum theory beyond my comprehension, or it's just some crazy pseudoscience. I mean, Superman beats up the vacuum of space. With his hips.

The Silver Age is a marvelous vehicle for a 24-hour comic, and if I knew at the beginning of the comic what I'd learned by the end I think I could have made something truly remarkable. Oh well, next time. But here is why the Silver Age works for this:

simple characters
repetitive action
clear design
redundant text (to cover awkwardnesses in storytelling)
lots and lots of text (to cover problems in the art)

This was also amazing for a 24hrcd, because for once there was no writing to do. I could concentrate exclusively on the art. I liked a lot of what I saw, and next time (we may even start doing 24hrcds quarterly, because it's a great way to get a lot of work done) I'll do the comic more in this way. To wit: simple story, repetitive action, lots and lots of dialogue. Baroque variations on simplistic themes. Maybe I won't do every comic that way but it's nice to have another trick up my sleeve.

Here are some other links to information about Superman Special #1:

http://www.supermanhomepage.com/other/kryptonian-cybernet/kc68.txt

http://grantbridgestreet.blogspot.com/2009/04/happy-birthday-gil.html

http://www.ljpoisk.com/archive/5454342.html

^^^^that's the only remainder I can find of the old article at the old s_d.

update, Cloudhopper

2009-10-19T06:00:33Z

Zach and I are working on a comic called The Red Calf. It could be described as "Flintstones meet Deadwood." It's easily the strongest collaboration I've ever been part of and we got all sorts of pages done. Post it as soon as he's ready; I think the general plan is to make it an Iphone app.

Cloudhopper: The next three pages and the poster, which all need to be done at once, are the most complex pages yet. So they take time. The poster alone has absorbed twenty hours and forced me to relearn perspective drawing.

So when you see them, yer gonna plotz.

But it's taking a minute.

To tide things over, here's all of Cloudhopper book Two to review. Please, y'all, you know how I love art criticisms. If you like the work, please be generous with critiques and paintovers and the like, so we can take this thing to the next level of awesome.

and of course if you want to read all of part one, check here:

http://unnecessaryg.com/cloudhopper/index.htm

do not be alarmed when it suddenly changes to Spanish or Dan's shirt becomes more reddish. These are things that I am working on and it will all be English and orange very soon.

and here are three stencil paintings that I have up at the ASG show:

oh and I am not exactly sure what this is but what the hey, vote for it:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/unnecessaryg.com/artwork/

Please? And I'll do my part and update my art portfolio web pages very soon, I promise. It's only a couple years out of date, anyway...

look at this

2009-10-12T20:20:35Z

look at it.

Cloudhopper 122

2009-10-09T07:45:32Z

Twenty-four hours with Gil Kane

2009-10-07T09:54:07Z

Twenty-Four Hour Comics Day, October 3 2009

Thanks to Dragon's Lair for hosting! I had a great time.

So...this is the 24-hour comic I did this weekend!

For those of you unfamiliar with the exercise, you draw a 24-page comic in 24 hours. This is the fifth time I've done it.

I tried something different this year. Taking a cue from Zach, I "covered" an old comic instead of writing a new work. I chose Superman Special #1 by Gil Kane, published in 1982. It was originally 44 pages -- I took it down to 24. The main character was originally Superman but I changed that to make things a bit more interesting.

I learned a metric ton from this exercise. Spending twenty-four hours with Gil Kane is one of the smarter things I've done lately.

Things I learned from Gil Kane:

Establishing shots are made of interweaving combinations of three textures. They are organized from foreground to background as black silhouette, white silhouette, and hatched areas.

Arms and legs should often be drawn twisted. It looks cool, it takes the same effort to draw, since it's an odder pose people tend to be more forgiving and it gives a very pleasing sense of action and depth. Gil Kane did not use exaggerated perspective in figure drawing, at least in this issue.

Diagonal panel divisions work just fine, especially when you have a main character who can fly.

Gil Kane can just throw down the Kirbytech, and I don't have that knack yet. He uses it to create depth. The backgrounds in this issue are amazing.

On the other hand, he seems to know Kirbytech better than actual science. Either this story contains deep parables on quantum theory beyond my comprehension, or it's just some crazy pseudoscience. I mean, Superman beats up the vacuum of space. By spinning real fast.

In the original issue it wasn't Reagan, it was an anonymous politician called Bentley Wayland. We'll get to the actual story soon enough, though. I'm planning on doing an art analysis post on it very soon.

It is difficult to draw a picture of a woman while looking at a picture of a man. I tendëd to mess the shoulders up. I'm working on it!

I'm not in the same class as Gil Kane, and will not be until I do a lot more life drawing. I'll scan the comic pretty soon and you'll see what I'm talking about. But I found this immensely valuable, and learned some fundamental lessons.

This was also amazing as a 24-hour comic, because for once I had no writing or laying out to do. I could spend the whole evening concentrating on the art. I liked a lot of what I saw, and next time (we may even start doing 24hrcds quarterly, because it's a great way to get a lot of work done) I'll do the comic more in this way. To wit: simple story, repetitive action, lots and lots of dialogue. Baroque variations on simplistic themes. Maybe I won't do every comic that way but it's nice to have another trick up my sleeve.

Fun!

This is the first time I've ever done a comic with fonts.

Also while you are here I am giving away free Cloudhopper posters to anyone who would like one. Message me somehow (here, email, facebook, whatever) with your snailmail and I will mail you one.

And if you check the previous post or my website unnecessaryg.com you will of course find the paypal button to buy copies of Cloudhopper book one, which I would cheerfully sell to you and ship along with the poster.

Cloudhopper 121

2009-09-30T04:47:12Z

I am giving away free Cloudhopper posters to anyone who would like one. Message me below (or email, facebook, whatever) with your snailmail address and I will mail one to you.

I have also dropped the price on Book One substantially -- it's $12 now, shipping included (if you live in America or it's not too expensive). Here's a button you can press to buy it:

Cloudhopper 120

2009-09-28T07:03:45Z

Considering the vile and uncouth nature of my next project, and the ease of doing so, I have made Cloudhopper kid-safe. Which was not very difficult. I just went back and drew little lines over the curse words. There are only three.

That's page 007, which is funny because it's Dan's least suave moment, ever.

Seriously good to be home.

Cloudhopper 119

2009-09-24T08:49:38Z

Economic Ultimatium

2009-09-22T20:32:20Z

Alright, America, this is how it's gonna be.

As you know, I'm an artist, and I don't get paid much. I don't even make enough to live on, let alone to pay for health insurance.

I'm thirty-four. Sometime in the next ten years I will almost certainly have a major medical incident. Unless I stumble onto that one-in-a-million project that makes a fortune, I will not be able to pay for it.

This will leave me with four choices: dying slowly of whatever condition it may be, borrowing money that I will never be able to repay, forcing my family and loved ones to pay for me, and suicide.

None of these are acceptable to me.

So you have a year. My brother's getting married in France about a year from now, and I'm going. And I might stay. I don't really want to stay -- I want to live here, in the land of my birth, with the people that I love. But you don't give me any options.

Either fix health care by next September, or cede me enough money that I can buy health care for myself. I would prefer the first, but am willing to accept the second.

If you don't, I'm going and I can't come back. I can't force my family to pay outrageous sums for something that should be free, or watch me die for something completely preventable. I have to live somewhere where life is respected enough that I can survive.

I'm sorry it's come to this, America. I really do love you.

Cloudhopper 118

2009-09-17T08:28:43Z

This one took forever and I don't even know why, it's not the most complicated or anything. And I'm still not precisely satisfied with it.

Other stuff is happening fer shure. There's a lot been going on since I got back to town.

I did a bit of the music for one piece in this here modern dance performance:

http://www.nowplayingaustin.com/event/detail/440121943

That was very interesting. First time I've ever heard my music played for an actual audience, it went better than I could have hoped (in that nobody stood up and said BOY THIS SONG SUCKS. So my expectations were low).

Zach Taylor and I are working on a comic right now. It's about cavemen in Kentucky, seven thousand years ago.

And there are all sorts of other excitements about right now. Oh, we're riding our bikes to Enchanted Rock in October. And there's the ASG art show! And Alicia's wedding! And the glow-in-the-dark party at my house tomorrow...

Yes, this is probably why the comics are a bit slower...

Cloudhopper 117

2009-09-11T05:41:45Z

Happy memorial day.

Cloudhopper 116

2009-09-09T22:15:04Z

Cloudhopper 115

2009-09-09T06:55:51Z

Dante the Drunk Dialler

2009-09-07T22:11:27Z

http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/psycho_calling_season_one.mp3

Enjoy!

Correction: He was not stalking me. He's stalking my friend. He just drunk dialed me for the one night, in between stalking her, and drunk dialing another ex-boyfriend.

Look, world. I have access to advanced technology. As a general rule I'm not the guy you want to drunk dial.

But I do hope, some day, to hear a dance remix of this.

Maybe even autotuned.

I'll text him a link to this, I guess. It seems the gentlemanly thing to do. Hey Dante. I don't know you and I don't want to.

And I guarantee to you....

that if I ever see you in person....

I will not have the slightest clue who you are. Seriously, if you say we've met I believe you but there are so many people through CALM, I don't remember folks who I see every day. It's the nature of the job. I'd like to see you do better, Dante. I'd like to see you hang around and do something useful. Though this bullshit here has entertained many, many extremely sarcastic people, and that's sort of worthwhile.

So, Dante, if you want to opt out of this whole pathetic shenanigan, it's super easy, just change your name. I didn't save your number.

I have a stalker!

2009-09-05T09:18:02Z

This was too good to not share immediately:

http://unnecessaryg.com/lj/psycho_calling_05.mp3

I think this is the seventh message he left since 1AM. Long story short, this guy (Dante) is convinced that I am sleeping with a friend of mine. I'm not. I don't see what that has to do with this guy but he seems upset.

Whoops! He just called again.

This brings up several issues that I've been meaning to address lately.

The first, and always the most interesting is the technical -- I figured out (only an hour ago, great timing) a way to record more than a minute on the basic windows sound recorder! Load a longer file and then record over it. Or record something sixty seconds long and decrease the speed once or twice, that's what I did. Works like a charm! That's why there's all that slow stuff on the end, I left it for fun.

Also, as you may have guessed, I did the bleeping with fruityloops. So it was a hassle, and I'm not gonna post the others for a minute because it's more effort than I feel like tonight and I want the lady in question to have the right to say, "Take this down." But it's really too great, and after all he did call me.

I've meant to talk about some stuff lately, and though this may seem like a hostile and negative place to begin, let's go from here; they say you can measure a circle beginning anywhere, and anyway it probably won't get much worse than this.

To all my female friends: yes, I am perfectly willing to take this heat. No one need feel ashamed or embarrassed because an acquaintance (or friend, I honestly do not know precisely his and her relationship because she's never really mentioned him) goes off the rails and does something like this. It happens, it's essentially random, it's not your fault. Men are freaking weird about sex. Sometimes dangerously so. I would argue more often than people give credit for. I am always surprised at the level of completely baseless sexual hostility the women around me undergo every day, and how casually they shrug it off. I would not be so calm. So in recognition that this is absolutely nothing to the omnipresent sexual hassles (directly proportionate to breast size) that women around me face every day, I honestly don't give a shit about this guy. If he kills me or steals my bike I will be upset. I hope that he's not being rude and cruel to my friend, but if he is, she's a very intelligent woman and will deal with it however she thinks best. Everything else is cool.

This is not the first of her hemisemidemiparamours to take a disliking to me (a constant occurrence that I think we both find humorous), nor the first to call me at 1AM and yell at me, though he is certainly the dumbest and cruelest. Jimmy had more style; he played a song by Dispatch ("The General") into my cell phone and hung up, content that I would get the message. I got the message that it's a great song but I still don't know what Jimmy was trying to say with it. Jimmy's a great guy; our friendship began to recover after he realized that I was not sleeping with our mutual friend and, now that he had made a great screaming mess of things, neither was he.

Now:

I don't know whether to move to the delightful observations outlined in his critique, or to the larger issue. Let's start with the specific.

As you probably know, I delight in criticism. Not only does it mean that somebody is paying attention to me (yay!), but it means that they sincerely want to help me get better at what I do.* Many of the most hostile criticisms have been the most helpful.

That said, Dante showers me with backhanded compliments here. I particularly liked the bit about my "cracked veneer of civility" (though he said "stability," an interesting substitution). Moreover the main thing he seems upset about is that the lady keeps talking about how she likes me and enjoys hanging out with me. Newsflash, Dante: one of the things she likes about me is that I don't try to crawl into her pants every thirty seconds. I have nothing against her pants, believe you me. But I value our friendship too. I listen to her when she talks and pay attention to what she says. You ought to try it; she's a brilliant person.

No, I do not answer the phone when you bother me. He's right. I talked to him twice, that was enough, I'm not talking to him any more.

I am also a hypocrite and an asshole, though I would hope that I am a hypocrite that at least tries harder than average. I also agree that I have yuppie tendencies, though I try to subvert them.

This guy's upset about me being rude to him at the Gathering. This is also accurate. There are legions of people that I have been rude to at the Gathering, most of them fools. He was upset in earlier calls because I didn't remember him. Nope, don't remember all them fools. I am assuming he was a fool though maybe he's just having a bad night. He did mention that he had mental problems. Isn't it odd how people try to apologize and explain exactly why they're being an asshole? Even though they know it, they can't stop themselves.

But no, I've been rude to intelligent people too. I'm rude more often than I need to be at the Gathering, and it is something I work on. And I mean work with -- not only do I try to lessen my natural temper (and I was one furious little kid) but when I do get angry, which is something that I am afraid comes with the package, I try to use it well. I try to be rude at the right place in the right time, ya know? There was a very interesting example or two of that at CALM this year, but we can't go into that right now. Anyway, I am not above whacking a mule with a board to get their attention, in the conversational sense at least (never had to the real way...), and if you're not willing to beat me up I can be a very unpleasant person to get on the wrong side of. What can I say? I am what I am, I'm doing my best, I get results, and most importantly I am under a metric shitload of stress at the Gathering and I would like to see anyone do better.*** In fact I would love that and when you do I will give you my hat and sit under a tree smilin'. Please, do better. Let me retire. I want to see the Gathering one of these days.

I'm not going to make an insincere apology to the faceless masses who I've been curt with while trying to do forty things at once, build a hospital out of sticks, and get a minute or two to actually ya know enjoy the Gathering all at once. But I do wish I was perfect, y'all. I'm trying.

I LOVE his threat. Why do I attract the weirdos who talk like Batman villains?

Now, all that said, there is a much larger issue that I'd like to use this guy to address. I'm just going to say something. Most of you have guessed this about me already, and I know that a lot of you agree.

Sex is just not worth this goddamn much trouble, people.

Yes, it's great, but it's not that much better than masturbation that you should beat up your freakin' girlfriend for it (frex) or sell your house and sink into poverty (fr another ex) attack strangers in parking lots or humiliate yourself in a bar or make a series of pathetic phone calls to people who couldn't care less about your love life. No, Dante, I'm not going to call you back. And when you post here, if you mention the lady's name I will simply delete your comment and repost your dipshittery with the name excised. You own this one, Dante. What's your last name again?

Where was I?

Oh yeah, IT'S NOT WORTH THE BULLSHIT.

Now, this may be just me and a few other people. But the truth is that I've never cared all that much, I tried really hard to care because I thought I was missing something amazing. It turns out that sex IS amazing. It is an amazing thing that you can do with another person that brings you much closer together emotionally.

SO IS PLAYING MINI-GOLF DRUNK. So is talking on the phone! So is going for walks or watching crappy movies or holding hands or telling jokes or fucking whatever! It's all fun sometimes, a drag others, makes you happy sometimes, makes you feel sad and alone others. IT'S LIFE.

How did I arrive at this conclusion?

The same I way I do most -- selfish, petty insight. I was dating a woman at the Gathering this year. She's wonderful. She's a great person. We had incredible mind-blowing sex. Often. She went out to San Diego after the Gathering to see me. I went to get her from the beach and paid her bus fare back to my house. It was $5. After we got there and had such great sex that we destroyed an air mattress (faint praise, I know, but I guess you had to be there), as we lay in each other's arms in the glow of post-coital bliss, I realized that I'd rather have the $5.

I know that's demented. I realized that at the time, and I did not share the thought. But I also knew that it was true.

So maybe I'm crazy. It doesn't matter; I'm still me. I have to live my own life, not some other imaginary life that I read about in a magazine. This is the hand I'm dealt and what, I'm going to complain? My life is wonderful! I spent the afternoon making beaded costumes for the Mardi Gras Indians, talking politics with Rand, riding my bike in rainstorms, and watching hilarious vampire movies with my friends. I am safe, happy, warm, well-fed, slightly respected, in possession of all my limbs, and I have a high-speed internet connection, a bicycle, a computer, a happy family, and some of the best friends that the world has ever seen.. What the hell do I have to complain about.

Moreover:

We all know plenty, plenty guys who are so completely controlled by their sexual side that they simply can't have friendships with women. It even happens to me sometimes -- I'm not saying I'm not capable of love, or doing something stupid for love (which we all know is tremendous fun), or that I've never loved anyone, or that I'll never maybe meet that one magical woman who sets the senses afire and blah blah bling blah. It's part of being a guy. But at least it seems to happen to me a lot less often.

I really liked Jessi's idea of the "friend crush" and recognized that was what most of my brief passionate infatuations have been. I wanted someone to be my friend and reflexively added sex to the equation. Nearly always a mistake. I can't number all the interesting women I've met and no longer speak to because of misapplied sexual tension. And I would like to apologize to them, although I think both they and I know it's just part of life and not really anything anyone can solve.**

Most of the women I've loved have been unattainable for some reason or another. We all know that I enjoyed the chase much more than the gettin'. It's the way I am. I'm fine with it. I'm not dating much any more. It's not even a priority. It's not worth the trouble. My friends and family more than amply fill my life with joy and satisfaction, and though there are amazing things to be found in the eyes of a woman, there are also amazing things in my life too. I am far from unsatisfied. Actually, I'm in heaven and have been for months. So why be grudgeful?

Why the bullshit, Dante?

*What I do is try to have a really fun and fruitful life. It's my job. It's what I do. I like David Byrne's idea of "A life as a work of art."

**Goddammit JM! Can't we just pretend I didn't say anything dumb and be friends! You're way too cool for me to not be speaking to for the damned crime of liking you too much. I'd also like to say the same to Gina T. and Lindsey B. and Raquel, who I am certain are not reading this, but maybe JM does and pretends she doesn't. I'm pretty sure she just doesn't.

***I have certainly been guilty of Prima Donna behavior many times in my life. I only have excuses to offer -- I'm better than I used to be, and (in re the Gathering) you have to see that acting like a prima donna is an exceptional defense mechanism for those times in your life when you are "essential" or "integral" or whatever you want to call it. It is very very tiring to have to spend all day every day explaining everything! It's necessary to just make space to be human, and by throwing the occasion fit you find it easy to clear people to an acceptable distance. The more "important" you are the more you need this. A fantastic example of this being used well at very high levels is David Lee Roth's "NO BROWN M&Ms" thing for Van Halen -- look it up, it's a funny story. Judge if you like, just respect that judging is not the same as "solving."

All that said, I'm back to work on Cloudhopper 115. It's the city of Austin's fault. Especially my friends. I've had such a great time every minute that I'm not getting any work done! Oh, that we all had such problems....

Whoops! He's calling again. Keep it up, Dante, I need the material.

Cloudhopper 114

2009-09-02T21:21:29Z

I know some of you are thinking, why did it take so long? It's been two weeks since the last one. Certainly he can't have spent all that time drawing this one page.

Yes I did. I think I put fifty hours into this page, when it's all said and done. And there's still more I want to do, but I've finished the basic construction and will fiddle with it as I move on into the story.

This page has drastically changed my expectations of the story. For one thing, modern stuff it a bit trickier to draw than natural stuff. For another, doing the colors better takes more time. For a third, I had not realized how insanely intricate color crowd scenes are. Making sure crowd scenes have a flow and do not clash with themselves...it's a whole other world from monochrome. So there will come a time in about...oh, twenty or thirty strips...when this story will slow down dramatically. Dramatically.

So I think I really am going to slow it down and do a "prestige" (heh) web relaunch very soon, start posting (in English again! With substantial revisions, too, because I have very deeply revised the first pages already and I'm gonna do more) on a thrice-weekly schedule and spend as much time as this series is very apparently going to take.

I'm scaling back from "done in a year" to my original expectation of "done by July 2011." Let's see how close I get to that...

My visual memory and senses have really woken up in the last few weeks. Since SDCC. The combined experiences of watching people read Cloudhopper #1 (I couldn't have asked for a better laboratory of honest reactions), the glimmerings of an understanding of color and light, and the simple epiphany that caused where I shook myself awake and actually began to look at the things I saw around me have made the last month very pleasant. It's a lot of fun to just look at things right now. Yes, shadows are more saturated than bright areas. No, I have no idea how that is possible. But it's incredibly pleasant to perceive.

This has brought with it a sort of gift of visual memory, which is not something that I possessed ten years ago. It's been building since I began to learn to draw, but now I can activate it and use it, sometimes. Not the way my brain normally works. It's basically my synesthesia running backwards -- instead of visual things creating auditory cues in my head (which is how I draw, when you get right down to it -- I throw lines down on paper and pull out the ones that "sound" wrong. I know it's strange but that's how it works. I also "hear" words and dialogue when I read them, which can be distracting and may explain my habit of arguing with signs), I hear a word and get a mental "image" attached to it. Usually a memory image -- you'd be surprised how quotidian my mental imagery is. I don't have nightmares, I don't see monsters or fanciful beasts, I rarely imagine things that don't exist. It's very Kubrickian in its way. That very rarely used to happen -- it gets to the point where I can do it by choice now.

So there is such a thing as learning.

This whole "learn-to-draw" experiment has been very fruitful.

I pledge allegiance to the ocean...

2009-08-29T01:17:05Z

So I'm driving to Texas, in just a few hours here.

I really wanted to post Cloudhopper 114 before I left but it turned out to be impossible, because that page is just too damn big and complicated. I seriously put eight straight hours in last night, and that still wasn't enough to finish it. So you'll have to wait a bit longer.

I've had a great time in San Diego. There's no particular reason to leave at this time, I'm only in search of different funs.

I went swimming in the ocean again today. I think I've gone swimming in the ocean at least twenty times in the past two months. Today was fun. I spent most of my time swimming just past the wave break, sliding along the sandy bottom, eyes open underwater. Waves are so much more fun when you're underwater than when you're on the surface. There is no point of reference -- suddenly all reality slides left, than right again.

But I'm leaving this all behind to pursue the spectre of paying artwork and creative partnerships. This is simply not an artistic town, not the way Austin is. So I hope it will be worth suffering without my beloved ocean, surrounded by my friends and most of the most interesting people I know.

And I'll be back here soon anyway.

Adios San Diego! Thanks for everything! And thank you again, California, for your time and funding.

Cloudhopper 113 and Giffen LSH repost stuff.

2009-08-21T06:58:03Z

Sorry this took so long -- it wasn't actually this one, but the one after it. 114 will be mind-bogglingly complicated.

Below the cut is a Giffen art retrospective I did for scans_daily. I'm posting it here in case you would like to see some of the art of Keith Giffen, one of my favorite comics artist.

LSHv3#1

Welcome to the Legion of Super-Heroes! I chose to begin with that image because it is very dynamic, and has nostalgia value for me.

In this series we are going to discuss the art of Keith Giffen. We can't really discuss the story yet, because it doesn't make much sense. You're not going to understand it. Right now, it's enough to just look at it. We'll figure it out as we go along.

Pretend you're twelve years old.

For some reason, those are supposed to be two different panels -- that's Ayla's elbow sticking out of the left side of the first panel. Yet they work even better because it looks like a normal portrait. I don't know if this is a happy accident or what.

^^That page could use better coloring.

Some authentically creepy stuff to read at the corner drugstore in 1984.

Pop art.

Cloudhopper 112

2009-08-17T12:29:01Z

I wanted to do an entire page where he looks at lichen.

Sounds exciting, right?

I still might do it.

Death Panels

2009-08-16T23:29:13Z

Somebody said it was a good name for a band.

Playing lots and lots of chess lately. These are all games where i played black, and lost.

Cloudhopper 110 and 111

2009-08-15T01:01:13Z

Is Glenn Beck the conservative Stephen Colbert?

Philip K. Dick was right when he predicted that someday the news will be read by clowns.