Theophanes Avery is a hapless wanderer, avid writer, artist, adventurer, joyfully androgynous being, and all around lover of life. They are the author of their debut book Honoring Echo as well as the writer of numerous blogs on many subjects.
This week’s Glen started out as a morbid joke and somehow ended up in a really well suited pun. It refers to an actual real-life species of caterpillars called the gum leaf skeletoniser. I had no idea when I was drawing said comic that they’re also affectionately nicknamed mad hatterpillars!
This week’s panel is super simple. It was an easy image born from the fact a week’s worth of cleaning house has left my brain soup. Next week I will try to invite more complexity.
My humor has been a little… dark…. lately. This year’s Thanksgiving comic is the perfect illustration of this. I wanted to do a joke about a pardoned turkey and immediately my mind ran to, “Put him in a balaclava!” (Apparently the voice in my head is British or else it would have said ski mask…) From there it was all down hill.
This week’s comic came very easily to me. I drew the body of the turkey first and added his head and wing in a second layer. From there I just needed to add the ski mask, Glen, and something suspicious for him to say. It all went very quickly. Think it took me less than an hour!
We’re back! After taking a forced week hiatus due to technical difficulties! And I know, this week’s comic is just a stupid simple pun. It’s getting back to the basics… Glen started out as a late 1960’s/1970’s inspired stoner comic. I drew it when I was a super sober and totally innocent high schooler and now look at me… STILL loving this little guy a lifetime later! Nothing in my life makes sense but I’m not complaining!
I am really loving drawing the bubble letters by hand like old music concert posters. I think it adds quite a bit of character. And of course I decided to run with the late 1960’s feel with my color scheme and choice of furniture. There isn’t anything about this I don’t adore. And although it’s simple it is the first time I put Glen in a sitting position and drew a couch/seat. I don’t think I did too bad and I am amping up the courage to maybe do an animation one of these days…
It’s Monday again and as usual I am coming up blank with ideas… which gave me an idea! Here’s Glen taking a happy jaunt in the mountains when he stumbles upon… an actual writer’s block!
This week’s Glen might have been low on inspiration but it wasn’t low on enthusiasm! I have been watching a lot of Archer lately and I am so impressed by the layering and complexity that it has inspired me to take my overly simplistic little drawings and see how far I can push them. I mean I am not nearly as talented as the animators on that show but maybe someday with practice I could be… and maybe, just maybe, I should be dabbling in animation myself!
An early and appropriately socially distanced Happy Halloween to all my wonderful weirdoes out there! Here’s Glen doing his rounds Trick-or-Treating with is kids… all behind masks and on leashes. Bravo, little guy, you’re a brave soul.
I really toppled down the rabbit hole with this one! Spent more than four hours illustrating it because I wanted the spooky house, spooky tree, and the costumes… there’s a lot going on here. And I got to include a little Among Us fellow peeking out from the tree all “sus.” I’m not a gamer so I have to thank this inspiration to my muse and his insistence on making me watch funny YouTube videos (which I love! Don’t get me wrong!)
What did learn from this delightfully nerdcentric panel? Uhhh… how to make shadows for the tree? Everything else was just me playing with skills I already had. I am loving this one. It’s been the best in a long while.
Before you all start yelling at me, “THAT’S NOT HOW YOU PLAY D&D!” I KNOW. Gawd, do I know. This week I have been repeatedly asked to join a campaign. You are so sweet for inviting me but I don’t think you truly understand what you’re asking. This Glen comic is 100% the amount of seriousness I could pull off playing. I am only good at comic relief and I don’t think that’s an actual role sooooo….
This was an interesting comic because it started out being three panels in my head, you know a little conversation between Glen and an unseen narrator, but I managed to boil it down to one adorkable image. I recycled the background of my Popple Dungeon but added a few things – mainly I blurred the grout lines to make them look a little more realistic and a little less cheesy. I’m always in the air about whether I want Glen to be super simple and campy or weirdly realistic. This is apparent in the fact I started out trying to draw an actual Dungeons and Dragons suit of armour and ended up instead arming him with a rubber chicken….
I also realize this comic might come off as a bit… mmm…. misogynistic. Trust me, as an owner of tits and a twat I am actually making fun of the trope not endorsing it. Besides, all us nerds know virgins aren’t great dragon bait – they are much better at catching unicorns.
I have no control of Glen. He damn well does what he wants to do and I am but a hapless observer.
It’s been a weird week, what can I say? Poor Glen didn’t escape it – his kids are BRUTAL in their innocent way. Today’s comic was more an acknowledgement of my inability to draw anything beyond a ‘blob’ than a joke about his adorable chonkiness…
Hey hey! Glen and myself are back after two accidental weeks on hiatus! Of course we had to come back because it’s October and Halloween season is the best of the year, especially living in New England which has such a steep tradition of horror. This week’s comic reflects this beautifully combining the Headless Horseman with the most terrifying things to ever come out of a cabbage patch. Happy October everyone!
I must admit that all these little breaks I keep taking from Glen are born to the fact that I have just been overwhelmed by life and I know with the current climate I am by far not the only one breaking under the stress. Similiarly, I have been struggling with profound disillusionment and disappointment in the human race so I felt the need this week to draw something kind.
And boy was it a challenge! My first attempt at drawing a horse resulted into a crude doodle befitting a drunk toddler. My second attempt inexplicably looked like a kangaroo which made no sense what-so-ever considering I had come to my sense by that time and was just tracing an actual horse. It took a great deal of tweaking before it looked somewhat OK. I’m now mildly satisfied with my efforts. Next week shall be better.
This week I let Glen off his leash and gave him a few shiny shillings to spend…
Did you know that what Americans call pudding and what British people call pudding are two COMPLETELY different things? Here I am eating this amorphous puddle of sugary goo and the Brits are stabbing some sort of cake-like thing. This threw off my initial idea for a comic (which was going to be a riff off the “You can’t eat your pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” line in The Wall.)
Despite these difficulties I am really loving the retro psychedelic light show background….
After a stint of feeling like I was just drawing these comics out of habit I am back to being enthusiastic about Glen and I think it shows. This week I went back to the basics and showed Glen in the same light he was in when I first started drawing him some 20+ years ago! Somehow this seems fitting.
Glen first appeared when I was a teenager and he was supposed to be the many-times-great-grandson of the hookah smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. As such I gave the hookah back to him and he seems very happy about this! I was a well behaved teen so how I ended up penning a clearly stoner comic is still beyond me. I’m OK with this though. I have no control of the appeal my creations have and that’s part of the beauty of life.
This week’s comic was super simple so I don’t have much to say about it other than I traced the hornworm and the hookah and had to work more on his facial expressions. This does not come naturally to me.