Baby Box: Out of ink

I fell asleep reading about monopolistic competition and now I'm really out of sorts. I thought a snack would help but all I could come up with was a bowl of crushed, unsalted saltines, salted and drizzled in olive oil. There had to be some logic in that, but I can't see it for the life of me.

Yesterday I had a much more productive day when I woke up. I drew a bunch. I even ran out of ink, so I couldn't finish this Baby Box:


Otherwise I might have started the one below. As it is I just reviewed the tabs to describe each panel.



They have quotation marks on them – get it?

Life is Lies: Good Line

Kicking off that March... Tiny Mix Tapes gets to the point in my comics queue where I've started to color things in by hand.


I made this shrimp stew the other day. It was really good – I used my grandmother's recipe, there's all this rice, and these shrimps. Was it the sole cause of mild food poisoning? Remains to be determined. I'm willing to risk it, cause you never know. You eat any number of things in a given day, why would it be the shrimpy rice stew?

But then my friend who came over for shrimpy rice stew also had food poisoning the next day. Still, I'm a man of science, and nothing is certain until tested. Especially when it's delicious. Delicious Science.

The best science?

Bear Hive

I really like bears. I think they're great. Deep down I also get the impression that my impression of bears is not the larger, society-wide impression of bears. An incongruous bear-interface, if you will.


I was drawing bears like this for a while. I don't know what this bear is doing. Leaping? Flying? Notions incongruous with Bear. Still, I'm not one of these honeypot bears, or plush Roosevelt bears. When I think of bears I think of Steven Seagal† and werewolves. Because they're both ferocious.

I was going around asking people to draw bears, too. I wanted to see what people thought bears looked like. I got one fairly naturalistic bear, a couple teddy bears, and a few ferocious bears. You hit the ferocious note and you hit bear, that's the end of it. If it looks like a mountain cat or whatever who cares – it's going to eat you. My drawings don't really look ferocious, it's not something I can sustain; so I need to concentrate on some other essence of bear.

I met a friend for breakfast the other day – meeting for breakfast is way better than meeting for brunch – and when I asked her to draw a bear we hit the jackpot. On the left you see her perfect bear, and on the right you see my copy of the perfect bear.

$-BEAR


I've been drawing that bear in every way imaginable. Here he works at a newspaper stand. Notice the bear in the lower left that actually looks like a cat. Missed the essence there.

I'm supposed to be working on a project now – The Bear Hive. I'll tell you about it later, but for the time being, you should just think about that:



Bear Hive


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†The first thing you see in this trailer is a bear, I mean, right on.

Life is Lies: Report

I'm starting graduate school in the fall, so I think about writing reports now. Not all the time or anything, just, once in a while. I fully intend to continue going to rock shows and draw inspired and engaging pieces about an alien rock band.


I'm going to super-juggle my time and keep working with Tiny Mix Tapes, obviously. Just you see.

Life is Lies: Nose Game

Is it redundant that I post when my comics post on Tiny Mizz Tapes? Probably. Do they post them in full and at better quality? They do do that. Do you also maybe read some of the other stuff they do when you go look at the comics? I don't know. I do. I check out the other stuff. They reviewed that movie about the rabbits living in the no-mans-land between East and West Berlin. That's a movie. See. It's a movie. It's even been reviewed. On Tiny Mix Tapes.



I need to draw more of these and get them cued up. But I also need to apply for fellowships to go to graduate school. I'll give you three guesses to divine what I actually do this week.

Kicking around the Baby Box

I've been rereading Kazimir Strzepek's The Mourning Star and thinking about projects I've got on hold, and it's making me want to pick up the Baby Box again. Probably not in the way I conceived of it at first, cause I've been drawing these goblins I really like lately, and they had nothing to do with Baby Box before.




See look, these goblins. I've been working on a goblin alphabet, too, but that's not hard – it's mostly based on some other alphabet.

Man, by Sketch #3 they're already turning into the space aliens from Life is Lies, with the unibrow... and the spears...? and the parka. Anyway, I'm excited for what I want to do with it; we'll see how the ideas play out.


This golem is going to be in the new Baby Box. I think there'll be two Baby Boxes. Originally I wanted the comic to be like what's below, and I think I'll still do that, but I also want to do something I can distribute really easily – like how Beau started distributing copies of Mime Hunters whenever he played a show; except I don't play shows. We'll see how it goes.


Man, though – so much is so good about Mourning Star. I was at the comics store the other day and I gushed a little bit about how much I wanted the third one to come out. I also want more Joann Sfar to get published in the US – this, for example. Fat chance, I guess. But think – Blacksad #4 is out in Europe, and the first three were just published last year in the US practically all at once. Does that mean they were a hit? Then why hasn't the newest one been translated ?? I don't grasp how this all works exactly, but my posit is "not entirely well."

Life is Lies: Mindbend

This is from a week ago, but I was on vacation. That just means you can read the other comics that have posted since, or look at other things, like writing. I feel like a zombie. I'm trying to listen to more 80s music from Spain, and clean my house.


I had a dream last night under the direct influence of a long, multi-party gmail exchange about Magic: The Gathering, and I don't know how I feel about that.