This week’s comic illustrates what happens when you mix Lord of the Flies with baby caterpillars and a holiday stool pigeon… Does anyone else find that damn elf as creepy as I do?! This was a weirdly cathartic strip this week.
The Making of Glen
This week has been rough. I’m dealing with some things in my personal life that have left me drained of energy, creative juices, and time. As such I needed something super simple to draw and well…. how did it get so complicated?!
I ended up tracing a photo of Elf on a Shelf and then deleting the photo layer and then repeating that with a chair that was tilted at just the right angle. Resize so both fit. Add caterpillars. And lights, and a halo around those lights with a soft wash… and there we have it!
I’m actually happy with this. More so than I thought I would be!
Recently
I watched Interview with a Vampire in it’s entirety and it was hilarious. Don’t get me wrong – I have crazy mad respect for Anne Rice, she’s still
the only author I have ever come across that can make me vomit with her words –
and I mean this as a compliment not a criticism. I was reading William S
Burrough’s in my mid-teens and the visceral descriptions of gangrenous heroin
usage didn’t make me bat and eye but Anne Rice writing about her vampires
feeding? That sent me flying to the bathroom twice. RESPECT.
Maybe
that’s why I find the need to relentlessly make fun of vampires. I don’t
know… but Glen is more than happy to indulge me in this. So here he is all
floofy and fluffed burning shit down just like in the movie (and I presume book?)
Meanwhile
we see Depressed Teddy in the background getting a little mixed up in it all
for that adorably disturbing touch as if having a fire bug in the foreground
wasn’t enough.
I
don’t even know how long I spent on this week’s comic. I lost count of the
hours. Apparently drawing fire with absolutely no experience or instruction is
obscenely difficult. And conflicting because I want it to look real… but this
is a comic and nothing else looks real sooo…. What is my problem? I DON’T KNOW.
Suffice
to say I started out with this little attempt all on my own. It’s cute. And I
think the idea of fire is pretty good here. It’s basically just a “for effect”
pen in different colors. Not bad… but it does sort of also look like crate
paper blowing on a fan…
Then
I looked it up on YouTube and wow – were those tutorials shit. The first one told
me to just do the same thing but add some blurring effects. Somehow it came out
looking weirdly like a big smudgy pastel blob which was super disappointing at I
spent about 300 unnecessary steps making it. Pushed all sorts of weird buttons….
Still don’t know what half of them were supposed to do.
And
then I watched another tutorial – with no sound – which was fun. That one told
me I should draw the flame free hand in vaguely squiggly blobs, overlay different
lighter colors of vaguely squiggly blobs, and blur the crap out of it manually
rather than with a filter as the first suggested. The first time I tried this
it came out PERFECT. And then I wasn’t able to do it again…
Meanwhile I came across additional struggles when I decided to draw Depressed Teddy. I really want to add him to more comics doing a Harold and Maude sort of gag in the background – mocking scenes of suicide for attention… I hope people get the humor in this or at least the reference! Else it comes off as odd. That being said it’s not easy drawing a teddy bear and AGAIN I find myself wanting it to look more realistic…. Whhhhyyyy…. I don’t know. Maybe I am going somewhere with this drawing thing and it isn’t normal comics? God forbid I start drawing everything in 3D. Please send help.
It’s my favorite month of the year – October! And since Halloween is just around the corner I thought this week’s comic should be about something spooky – and that’s how I came up with spiders. Keeping to my musical theme the only song I could think of was The Who’s Boris the Spider and for some reason that combined in my head with Charlotte’s Web and before I knew it there was a torrid break up scene wheeling its way through my strange mind.
So there you have it. How spider break ups work. An answer to a question no one asked.
This week’s comic was an absolute joy to draw. This was the first time since I started this website that Glen decided to take me for a ride. This was not at all what I was trying to draw when I started but I must say I am super happy with the results! I feel like I finally reclaimed Glen’s disturbingly cute spirit.
And this is the first comic I have drawn that’s more than one panel! I think I will do that more often now. I am having so much fun working with layers and adding details that now my mind is on fire with the idea of perhaps doing an animation someday.
This comic was supposed to be another joke on a popular song but with the addition of a Kraken that went out the window and I am at a loss as to any songs that do in fact describe such a wonderful beast. So if you happen to know some kick ass death metal song about a giant killer squid, or perhaps some sort of acapella punk ballad about sunken ships, please leave them in the comments! All genres welcome!
Oh and since I was working with layers I was able to quickly jot up this bonus panel which looks like it’d make an awesome meme…
So this week’s comic has really thrown me into the surreal. It plays on an old folktale about Baba Yaga – the witch who lives in a house on chicken legs and eats small children unless you trade their lives for a blue rose. It’s a bizarre Russian fairy tale that I have loved since I was young enough to still believe in such things. But there was always several questions I never got answered… why did the house have chicken legs? And where did they come from? So I sent Glen to find out….
And the results are in! They come from a giant chicken on wheels. Makes sense. Now what happens after this little show down? I have no idea.
Although this comic wasn’t inspired by music I am however going to add some anyway because I now have two songs on my roster about Baba Yaga – this delightful heavy metal cover sent to me on Twitter last night and of course this steamcrunk favorite. So now you get to see the mixing of three medias – old fashioned story telling, comics, and music. Got to love it! And also love these comics. They are getting seriously complicated to draw… and I almost feel like I am wasting my new illustrating skills on something so frivolous but nah. Glen’s fucking amazing and that’s all there is to that.
Do you have another Baba Yaga song or inspiration? Feel free to tell me about it in the comments!
I remember when the Deadpool movie was coming out. I had no idea who or what Deadpool was and only could imagine one of those fish tanks full of deceased guppies at Walmart… you know, a dead pool.
I did however watch with some glee and intrigue as others argued among themselves about it. Would this movie do the original Deadpool justice? Would he be a psychopathic killer who shags anyone and everyone he sees? And then the obvious… nope… he’s been mainstreamed and cuteyfied, like the Ninja Turtles!
But my issue with Deadpool wasn’t any of the above. I’m not enough of a nerd to care that much about him buuuuut I could wonder how the fuck he was breathing without a mouth hole. My issue was with the artist and his general design. WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO SMOTHER HIM?!
Welcome to my mind. It goes off a lot.
PS Glen’s hapless children will always be more subtly disturbing to me than any pansexual serial killer…
Inspiration strikes in the strangest places sometimes. Today it came from a single line in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The words in question were, “homicidal dirt muppet.” Hilarious without explanation but what the hell is a homicidal dirt muppet?! Clearly it’s a zombie Elmo clawing his way out of the grave with a giant hunting knife clenched in his teeth like the final scene of Freaks. Right? Apparently that’s what my deranged mind thinks… Glen as usual is not really happy with me putting him in this scene as you can tell. He has a thing with Elmo. I don’t know what but the two seem to have some sort of blood feud going. It’s like every time I turn my back he’s picking a fight with some other random character.
I debated whether or not I wanted to post this for Halloween but I decided against it as homicidal dirt muppets can appear at any time of year.
Today’s comic is brought to you by the word Muppet:
Muppet (plural muppets) (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, slang, derogatory) An incompetent or foolish person.
Muppet (plural muppets) (American) A fuzzy puppet with big boggly eyes.
Sometimes I like to give Glen and Old Timey feel by drawing him in black and white. Today I was messing around with the new software and dashed out a really quick little homage to a local New England author – Edward Gorey and his grim ABC book that adorned many a child’s room: The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Does it do the original any justice? Not in the least! But I really wasn’t aiming to share this one either…
