Archive for January, 2009
29 items.
If you’ve been visiting this site for the last four years (and bless you if you have), you might remember the storyline where I introduced Charlie as an additional female voice to the cast.
If you were REALLY paying attention, you might have remembered an exchange between Tom and Jimmy in the story line’s B-plot where Jimmy revealed something very personal about himself: He’s afraid to go into the women’s restroom.
I inserted that personal detail into that story line for a specific reason and with the intention of revisiting it in another story line sometime later.
Well, four years later, here we are.
It’s been a while since I’ve attempted a longer story line or made an effort to flesh out the characters a little more.
It’s kind of hard to flesh out Tom, Cami or Jared because they’re avatars for real people and I don’t want to dive into some kind of backstory inconsistent with their actual lives. It just causes confusion.
So Jimmy, Victor and Charlie become the tools that I experiment with and, in the process, you get to learn a little more about the background characters.
One of the reasons I wanted to tackle a longer story line again was because I’ve really been enjoying Questionable Content and Anders Loves Maria lately and, frankly, I’ve been jealous. Writing an engaging story is one of my weaker muscles. I have to flex it every now and again before it atrophies.
But probably the biggest reasons I wanted to give it another go is because I recently wrapped up work on Theater Hopper – Year Three.
The book covers my work from 2004 to 2005 and during that period I wrote both the “Jimmy Loses His Job” story line as well as “Meet Charlie.” That was a very successful period for me both in terms of the site’s popularity and my satisfaction artistically. So I’m going to see if I can’t try and put lightning in a bottle for a third time.
What can you expect from this story line? Well, obviously, we’ll explore the reasons why Jimmy is afraid of going into the women’s restroom. But the reasons why will shock you. In revealing his past, you’ll come to understand more clearly why he is the good-natured doormat he is today.
On that note I’d like to mention that Theater Hopper – Year Three is now available for pre-sale in the store. The book has not yet been published. To gauge demand, it is available for pre-sale until February 28. My goal is to have them printed up to take to the Emerald City Comicon in the first week of April. So if you order a book today, you can expect to see it by then.
As I mentioned before, the book has two of our my most prominent story lines as part of its collection of nearly 150 strips. Every comic includes brand new commentary that explores things behind-the-scenes.
The book also features 139 original sketches – collected here for the first time – and a forward from Joe Dunn of Joe Loves Crappy Movies.
I’ve prepared a 10-page preview of the book that will give you an idea of how the comics and commentary are laid out along with the front and back cover.
I am selling the book for $15.00, but if you are looking to save money, please consider bundling your purchase. Order and two books and receive $5.00 off the cover price. Order any three books and receive $7.50 off the cover price.
This book has been a long time coming and I’m pleased to finally offer it to everyone. I think it represents some of my best work and hope you enjoy it.
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Finally, Tom and I were able to catch an Academy Award-nominated film: Slumdog Millionaire. And, it didn’t disappoint. I felt myself biting my nails, crying, laughing, turning away in disgust (at the jumping in a lake of poop scene) and cheering for the main characters of this movie. One thing that amazed me was the director’s unapologetic snapshot of the human condition of the Indian people over the last twenty years. The child actors in this film were outstanding. Their performances made me want to hold Henry just a little bit tighter when I hug him each night before he goes to bed.
Speaking of Henry, we’re entering a phase of Time Outs, him asking “why?” and for some reason, jumping on furniture every chance he gets. Instead of sitting and participating in his regular Saturday morning music class, he announces “I’m running away!” and hightails it out the door. Is this a sign of things to come or merely a phase? Judging by the perpetual twinkle in his eye, and his bionic-man energy level, I’m guessing we’re going to be dealing with things like this for a long time! We can’t believe he’ll be two years old next month, and I don’t know about you all, but I’d love to see him appear in the comic once in awhile.
What do you think? Would adding Henry to the comic mean it’s finally jumping the shark? Or did it scale the heights of sharkdom years ago?
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As Cami pointed out, we finally got around to seeing one of the five Best Picture nominees this weekend: Slumdog Millionaire.
I’ve been kind of wrestling with this movie a little bit. Like Cami, I thought the performances were winning and the child actors in particular were amazing. I thought it was well directed, tense at times and very engaging. But it didn’t quite make my heart soar like all everyone said it would.
It was difficult for me to get caught up in the movie’s tale of star-crossed lovers because the film does not pull any punches in it’s depiction of India’s poverty, squalor and corruption. Maybe this is the wrong thing to focus on, but it left me feeling guilty for accepting the story as entertainment. I left the theater thinking about what I could do to help.
I’m not completely naive. I have heard about orphaned children being maimed and put on the street to beg. But later I became conflicted and started to wonder if the movie was promoting some kind of stereotype. Isn’t India one of the largest growing business centers in the world? What about their advances in education?
Turns out I’m not alone. Time Magazine recently published an article that tackles the same question.
I know it’s not fair to ask one movie to provide a thorough examination of the social and economic strata of the entire sub-continent. Especially when it only wants to tell the story of two people. I mean, I doubt non-American audiences watch movies like Goodfellas and assume that the country is overrun by gangsters. I’m just saying it was a distraction, that’s all.
Slumdog Millionaire is a good movie. Experty assembled and told with an effective time-bending narrative. Will it make you shoot rainbows out of your eyes after you see it? Well, in my case it didn’t. In that respect, it didn’t live up to the hype. Ignore the critics and commercials and see it with reasonable expectations and you’ll have a good time.
EDIT: Here is a another article written by Slate’s Dennis Lim that confronts Slumdog Millonaire’s confounding moral compass. Lim says a few things more acutely than I could in my review.
“If Slumdog has struck a chord, and it certainly seems to have done so in the West, it is not because the film is some newfangled post-globalization hybrid but precisely because there is nothing new about it. It traffics in some of the oldest stereotypes of the exoticized Other: the streetwise urchin in the teeming Oriental city… And not least for American audiences, it offers the age-old fantasy of class and economic mobility, at a safe remove that for now may be the best way to indulge in it.
Slumdog has been so insistently hyped as an uplifting experience (“the feel-good film of the decade!” screams the British poster) that it is also, by now, a movie that pre-empts debate. It comes with a built-in, catchall defense—it’s a fairy tale, and any attempt to engage with it in terms of, say, its ethics or politics gets written off as political correctness.
A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy.”
Food for thought.
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It’s probably not good form that I’m talking about Theater Hopper’s site traffic with you, but I thought this was a funny story that you might enjoy.
Last night when I got home from work, I settled down at the kitchen table and was checking the site’s traffic while Henry was eating dinner. Looking at my logs, traffic to the site was on par with an average Monday. Refreshing the logs a little later, I saw an insane jump in the number of hits. About half of Monday’s traffic gathered in the time span of about 15 minutes.
I was checking my referrals to see where the traffic was coming from, but using my real-time counter, could only see they were coming from StumbleUpon. I couldn’t see where on my site they were landing.
A Henry finished eating, I folded up my laptop content to wait for Google Analytics to pull the landing page information once it had time to log the traffic a few hours later (Google Analytics runs on a delay).
I gave Henry a bath, put him to bed and left to get a haircut (while Cami was still at home) before coming back to check on the traffic logs. I logged in to Google Analytics and saw that it had been populated with the new data. I checked on Traffic Sources, I went to Referring Sites, I identified StumbleUpon and I filtered the results by landing page.
What was the comic everyone was going so crazy about? This one. A guess strip by Clay and Hampton Yount of Rob and Elliott from 4 years ago.
You probably found this story underwhelming. Imagine how I feel!
In all seriousness, though – Rob and Elliott is an excellent comic and their guest strip from 2005 is actually one of my favorites. If people are checking it out, all the better. Because that means not only are they visiting the site and boosting my numbers, but they’re seeing that link back to Rob and Elliot and hopefully checking out more of Clay and Hampton’s stuff, too.
I’ll just be damned if I can figure out exactly how StumbleUpon works!
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Apologies for the delayed blog post. But things have settled down and everyone is okay.
If you missed the earlier message, the blog was delayed because I was sitting in a walk-in clinic with Cami who was suffering from a 103° fever that she’s been battling on and off for the last three days.
Why didn’t I prepare the blog last night? Good question. Basically, it was the culmination of a handful of frustrations over the last few days.
As I mentioned, Cami has been sick since Monday. Fever, chills, exhaustion — the whole ball of wax. She went to the doctor on Monday, but they couldn’t diagnose her. It wasn’t strep, it wasn’t mono. It was something that was just passing through her system.
Cami being sick puts me on Henry Duty full time. I don’t mind it, but managing a 2 year-old is much easier when you have someone you can tag-team with. Monday night wasn’t bad, actually. I made him dinner, we played with toys, I gave him a bath and read him bedtime stories. Once he was settled down, I recorded our weekly broadcast of The Triple Feature. All routine.
Tuesday was… worse. The novelty of hanging out with Daddy wore off. Henry wanted his Mommy and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t be around him. Reminder: The is no reasoning with a 2 year-old. They want what they want and if they can’t have it, they wail.
That really makes you feel like a hero — When your chasing your child around the house trying to keep his shoes on his feet while he’s crying for his Mommy. At that point, you basically have to become a hard ass and say “Well, you’re already crying for no good reason, so we might as well continue doing things you hate and you can deal with it once I’ve buckled you into the car seat.”
I had a doctor’s appointment myself on Tuesday to have someone take a look at a head-to-toe rash I’ve been suffering from. Which, as it turns out, was an alergic reaction to an antibiotic I was taking to clear up a different skin condition!
That’s probably too much sharing. I’m sure your not interested in my rash. I’m just building a case for why Tuesday sucked.
So, I come back from the doctor’s appointment I took during my lunch break putting me behind on today’s comic which I had hoped to draw and ink over that hour. I put in my remaining four hours for the day and head out to the parking lot.
I try to start my car — nothing. The battery has died. Meanwhile, Cami is still at home sick and can’t drive to pick Henry up from day care. I call my inlaws who were planning on coming over to our house yesterday evening anyway to help Cami with Henry while I was at my night class and they swing by to pick him up on their way over (thank goodness they have a car seat in their car already!)
Meanwhile, I sit in the freezing cold waiting for a tow truck service that I’ve called to find me in the parking lot for a half hour. He gives the car a jump and charges me $50 for the trouble. Talk about highway robbery! But what can you do?
At this point I only have a half hour to make it to my night class before it starts. So my dinner comes from a vending machine. The class itself was fine and luckily my car started up again afterwords. By the time I got home, took a hot shower and had a proper dinner, it was 10:30 and I hadn’t started on the comic yet.
Some penciling, inking, scanning, coloring, shading, and lettering later and it was 3:00 in the morning. Blogging was out of the picture.
I went to bed anticipating about 3 hours of sleep before having to get up and go back to work. Of course Truman decides he wants to go out at 4:00 in the morning, so that kind of shot that idea down.
Went back to bed, got up again at 6:00 and Cami said she needed to go to the doctor again after waking up in a cold sweat. We put Henry in the car and took him to daycare before Cami and I turned around and went to the walk-in clinic.
Again, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her. They did a battery of tests, even took a blood sample. Basically the only thing they learned is that her white blood cell count was a little low and that typicall means your body is fighting a virus of some kind. There are no antibiotics to fight it. You’re body just has to work it out.
And that brings us to the present!
I’m glad Cami doesn’t have anything serious like mono or… goodness knows what. And I’m sure things will get back to normal soon. But the last 24 hours have been a challenge and that’s pretty much all that’s on my mind at the moment. Truthfully, I’m still kind of cheesed about the $50 charge for a battery jump! But today is a new day.
Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to pass out.
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Regarding the Theater Hopper – Year Three pre-sale, I’ve gotten some feedback that the store is not working and people cannot complete their orders.
I guess if you live in the States, it asks for your zip code, but can’t figure out the shipping rates and won’t let you complete the order. However, at the same time, I have received ordered from people outside of the U.S. with no problem.
I’m attempting to troubleshoot the issue. I just need to know if I’m on the right track.
Has anyone else who has attempted to pre-order the book experienced this problem? Please let me know in the comments below.
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Whoa! Tom is turning into a bit of a pervert in these last two strips, isn’t he?
Don’t worry, ladies. It’s only temporary. These are exceptional circumstances. He’s been given the keys to the kingdom, don’t you understand?
Imagine being invited to The Playboy Mansion. You’d be a little disappointed if you didn’t see topless chicks running around everywhere, right?
Well, Tom has very low standards in this regard.
Seriously, though. What’s going on in your bathrooms, ladies. I remember walking past one as the door was closing and I saw a couch in there! Do you have a cappucino machine and gossip magazines as well? Do you know what’s in the men’s restroom? 10 years of caked-on urine, a flickering flourescent light and a weird smell.
So what do you think of the story-line so far? I know we’re just three comics into it, but I’m curious if I’ve hooked you yet? Curious as to Jimmy’s anxiety about the women’s bathroom? Want to know more?
Even though I haven’t figured out the pace of the story yet, I have the major points outlined in my head. I’m trying to keep from wandering too far off the path while at the same time providing a logical progression.
If you haven’t noticed, Theater Hopper is more of a “talking heads” comic. So I’m not used to writing things that require characters to move around from point A to point B. I feel like I have to explain how Tom and Jimmy moved from the theater lobby to the women’s restroom. Eventually I’ll have to explain how they move from the restroom to somewhere else. I have to explain it because I’m not good with backgrounds. If you navigate by landmark, you’d get lost pretty quickly in the Theater Hopper universe!
At any rate, I just wanted to keep the lines of communication open because I know that the last time I tried to tell a longer story, people were wondering where the movie commentary was. That’s been suspended somewhat for the time being, but I’ll come back to it eventually. Don’t worry.
It’s been a pretty long week for yours truly. Cami is feeling better, but not before a false-start yesterday morning. Cami thought she was up to putting in a full day at work, so we car pooled. By about 10 in the morning, she was feeling pretty lousy and all of her co-workers told her to go home. So I picked her up and took her home.
She’s feeling better today, but moving a little slow. Whatever virus she had pretty much wiped her out. But she’s determined. She feels bad for not being able to help me with Henry. I feel bad that we’ve had to lean on her parents twice this week as I went to my night classes! Everyone feels bad. Everyone but Henry. He just wants to play with toys.
Now that Cami’s feeling better, she’s going to reward herself by catching up with Henry and I will reward myself by seeing Liam Neeson in Taken. I’ve been hearing great things about this action flick and I can’t wait to see it. For some reason, it reminds me of Rob Roy, where Neeson played a similar bad ass with a sense of pride. Should be good times, but I’d listen to Neeson read the phone book.
Real quick poll: The Super Bowl is this weekend and Dreamworks is going to premiere their 3D trailer for Monsters Vs. Aliens. Have you guys picked up your 3D glasses yet? I have and I’m psyched to see this trailer.
In fact, I’m so psyched about this promotion, I might actually watch Chuck on Monday night when it’s aired in 3D! I loves me a gimmick! How about you?
Leave your comments below. In the meantime, stay close to the site today. I have an important announcement regarding the Theater Hopper – Year Three pre-order and some of the other problems I’ve been having with the story lately. The good news? I’ll soon be sharing a coupon code for 15% everything in the store. Yow!
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If you visited the site yesterday, you would have seen the blog entry where I was discussing problems I was having with the store and pre-order for Theater Hopper – Year Three. I was getting international orders, but orders within the United States were not being completed. There was some kind of error when the shopping cart tried to calculate shipping and the order could not be submitted.
I could go into all the boneheaded things I did that contributed to this problem, but it’s boring and it’s technical and you don’t want to hear it.
What’s important is that the problem is fixed. And, to celebrate (as well as make up for any potentially lost business), I am offering a 15% discount on everything in the store!
All you have to do is input the coupon code “dummy” into the Promotions and Discounts field at checkout and the discount will be applied.
The coupon will be effective from now until Friday, February 6 – one week. So if you want to take advantage of my stupidity, now is the time!
Thanks again for your support!
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Did you guys see the new page peel ad I have in the upper right hand corner of the site? What do you think?
Right now I’m going to use it to promote the Theater Hopper – Year Three pre-order. But in the future I might use it as a sponsorship location for other advertisers.
I really like it, but I’m curious to know how it’s working for you? Is it slowing down the site at all or making things display unusually in your browser? Let me know!
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