Category: People

June 1, 2002 / Brendan

As seen camwise, I have a lightbox. Like a real honest to goodness lightbox. It is made of a box with plexiglass on top, and it has a light switch on theside, and when you flip the switch these two fluorescent lights on the inside come on and you light it up FROM THE INSIDE. So you can trace things. It is a miracle of modern technology.

Like most of the web cartoonists who have one of these, I built mine instead of buying it–if by “built” you mean “stood around and made helpful grunts while Mom’s boyfriend, Joe, did all the real work.” It ended up taking six hours and costing about $50 in materials, plus probably hundreds of dollars’ worth of skilled labor on Joe’s end that he wouldn’t even let me chip in for. He’s a really good guy, and amazingly skilled with anything related to carpentry or building. He tends to stay away from computers, but lately I’m starting to think that’s a wise attitude.

Anyway, I have a lightbox, and it’s well beyond merely “cool” into “slopy” territory. I need to sand down the corners, probably, and maybe stain or varnish the wood, and I’ve got a can of glass obscurer that I may or may not use on the window to diffuse the light a little. We’re going to Gatlinburg tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll pretty much have to test it out tonight if I’m going to do a comic thisweek.

I’m guessing it’s going to cut my inking time in half, at least–which will knock that out of its top place as Most Dreaded Part of doing the comic. Now the writing is all I have to fear.

Back Wednesday.

May 18, 2002 / Brendan

I don’t really guess I’m qualified for this. But sometimes you have to write, and sometimes you have to speak for thedead.

I was in love with Alycia Smith for a long time. She knew it, and she teased me about it, and then she was in love with me for a while but nothing ever came of it except friendship, because that’s how things like that work out most of the time. We stopped talking as much after I graduated–I came here to Centre, and a year later she went to U of L. We saw each other at church sometimes, on weekends home.

Maybe a couple months ago, she IMed me again out of nowhere, and we talked and it was sweet and beautiful and we were starting to get to be good friends again. I missed talking to her in real life. I was looking forward to this summer,and maybe seeing her again.

You know this is coming by now, I guess. She drove over the median sometime yesterday, or last night, and ran head-o ninto another car. She, her boyfriend in the passenger seat and the other driver were all killed.

Alycia would hate reading this. She was a much better writer than me, and she wouldn’t stand for this kind of cliche. Especially the part where I tell you that it’s sitting on my brain now, like I think I’m going to wake up; where I tellyou that she was alive, more alive than anyone; where I tell you that she of all people…

She lived a little outside the lines. She wrote brilliant sad stuff that yes, was amateurish, but showed every sign of blossoming into real brilliant mature poetry and fiction. She drew pictures with the touchpad on her laptop. She had sex with more people than are usually in one bed at the same time.

She had beautiful long black hair that she cut to a bob after high school. I asked her to mail me a lock when I foundout she’d gotten rid of it all, and she promised she would. She never did. She loved manga and black and Poe and girls and boys and English. She sent me a bunch of naked pictures of herself the other day, half as a joke. She’s beautiful in every one of them.

She beat me out of a spot in the Governor’s School for the Arts once, and I was a little disappointed but mostly proud. I went to GSP instead of GSA, and we left around the same time, and while she was gone she started writing me letters–stories and jokes and cartoons and brilliance. I got them all in a box from my mom one day, and I sat in the library and read through them and could barely believe that people like her existed. That was four years ago, less one month.

Alycia didn’t really want to get old. I always hoped her life would outlast her lifestyle. It didn’t, and now the people who loved her have only who she was to love, and not who she would have been. I wish it were enough.

May 4, 2002 / Brendan

Saw Spider-Man (who needs links anyway?). Good; fun; could have been better. Tobey Maguire kicks the appropriate amount of ass, but it’s that infernal Koepp at the dialogue controls again. I kind of hope he dies.

And again, courtesy of Ken and Yahoo! News, comes a brilliant “What’s Wrong With This Picture” (click for a bigger version):

Look carefully. Well, not too carefully. Full article is here. And now I have to go close out a play.

turn all of the lights on
over every boy and every girl

April 28, 2002 / Brendan

Yesterday morning, my uncle John got up at some ridiculous hour and ran fifty kilometers. Fifty kilometers. Then he kept walking until he had done fifty miles. Then he went home, had something to eat and went to an unusual retrospective of his work.

Uncle John makes custom birthday cards, and has done so since he was a teenager. A few weeks ago, my aunt Dana started sending letters to friends and family asking to borrow any cards we might have saved. Of course, everybody had saved everything–you don’t get a personal work of art in the mail and throw it away when you’re done.

They got enough cards to fill four rooms full of shelves (and they had leftovers). During the day it was an exhibition for clients; that night, when I got there, it was food and a jazz band and my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party.

It was one of the best gallery shows I’ve ever seen. The sheer volume of work and creativity and originality was humbling and inspiring and it still stuns me a little to think that I own at least a dozen of those original pieces myself.

I think it was my tenth birthday when I got the foldout card. It was a huge battle scene my uncle had drawn and then left half-empty, inviting me to fill in the rest. It was perfect. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I could probably redraw it from memory.

I was a weird little kid, and if I’d been born to different parents I probably would have been a Ritalin poster child.The only things that could get me to sit still for ten minutes were a big fat fantasy book or a chance to draw with my uncle. I didn’t quite get all the genes that give him his talent, or maybe his dedication–he did better stuff at fifteen than I can hope for now–but everything I love about sequential art comes from trading panels with him on “Captain Zero” and “The Adventures of Petey.” That this site exists as more than a blog is due to him.

A dozen cards, a million comic strips. Happy birthday, Uncle John, and thanks for all my presents.

April 16, 2002 / Brendan

Two guys are driving past a field populated by a large number of cows. One of the guys turns to the other and says”What a big herd of cows! How many do you think there are?”

“Eighty-four,” says the second guy.

“Wow!” says the first guy, stunned. “How’d you figure that out so fast?”

“Easy,” says the second guy, “I counted their legs and divided by four.”

This is my Discrete professor’s idea of a joke.

Somebody’s been searching a lot for “xorph.com” on Yahoo, repeatedly and regularly–like twenty times in less than amonth. A fine thing, in my opinion, but how long is it going to take him or her to figure out the address bar? Also,somebody found this site by searching for “elephant dildo” the other day. Believe it or not, that exact phrase has cropped up in here before. All the same, I’m hoping it was one of my friends who’s in on that particular joke; if not, I hope it was someone who’s going to get help soon.

Speaking of help:

THAT MISTER HYPNOSIS IS A VERY BAD INFLUENCE YOUNG LADY!!!

March 5, 2002 / Brendan

I’m going to be on a plane very soon. This hasn’t quite settled in my brain yet. I love flying, probably because I get to do it so rarely–the last time I was in a plane was on my way back from Brazil, summer after senior year, when I was exhausted and homesick and weighing 120 pounds. That wasn’t the best flight, actually. But the way down, six weeks earlier, well… of the roughly fourteen hours we spent over ocean and rainforest and cloud, I’d say I spent at least thirteen just looking out the window.

I’m going to be crazy far behind in my classes when we get back late Sunday night, and I’m probably going to be bored once the sound and fury have settled down, and most everyone but Ian and I are going to be drinking heavily at night, and I’m going to miss the chance to copy edit for the paper this week (for which transgression someone has already beaten me severely). Even so, I’m looking forward to this. I keep getting asked if it’s a competition, but if it were I doubt I’d be going. We’re going to be half-killing ourselves just because it’s never been done before, and that gives me kind of shivers I imagine mountain climbers must get.

I need to figure out what books to bring, and also how the hell I’m going to get to the airport. Wish me luck.

they saythe more you fly the more you risk
your life

February 14, 2002 / Brendan

Update 0757 hrs: In response to any questions you may have about the show, the answer is “yes.” Whoo.

Three entries in three days is almost unprecedented. Maybe I’m trying to make up for the fact that I’m heading home for the weekend–again–and when I get back I’ll commence trying hastily to ink this week’s toon. Ah, the jet-setting life of an unpaid cartoonist! Ha ha! See you Sunday.

Update 1353 hrs: But before I go, I feel I should mention that my roommate has purchased his very first professional team from Yahoo! Shopping. I mean, with prices like these, who can refuse?

February 11, 2002 / Brendan

I am a seamster, which does not, as you might expect, refer to my actively seaming, so much as it does to my cosmic, astonishing ability to sew. I can sew things. I am in fact “the man” at sewing things. I sew like the proverbial Stygian bat.

Actually I’m fairly awful at it by anyone’s standards but my own, but the fact remains that not only did I successfully fix up three years-old rips in my favorite coat, I also made repairs on another shirt entirely. That’s four (count ’em) different seams in two articles of clothing, for an average of two seams per article. At least three of those consisted of itsy bitsy stitches, and two of those I actually did inside out for that nifty hidden-seam effect.

Too many italics. Next topic. My roommates got me a pirate monkey! Or possibly a monkey pirate! Either way I’m going to marry them. Also, go hang loose in the new forums right now. They taste of delicate butters.

one look in her eyes
and I feel undressed

February 9, 2002 / Brendan

Less than a week until Anne makes her presence known on the Centre campus. It’s an event we’ve been looking forward to all year. Ken stuck a little portrait of Ms. Murray on our markerboard in August, and it’s been saying horrible and profane things daily ever since; now that the countdown has begun, she’s taken on positively demonic aspects. It’s only a matter of time until we see her in concert, and I fully expect some kind of pyrotechnic battle between good and evil when the curtain opens. Ph34r!

Heading home for the weekend. This has disadvantages, such as the fact that I won’t be able to hang out or play videogames; it also has advantages, in that I will miss at least a day and a half of Rush Week. Ah, those crazy fraternity boys!

and if I had a gun
there’d be no tomorrow

November 20, 2001 / Brendan

The answer is, of course, that I be me on some Thanksgiving Break. This is one of those “breaks” that doesn’t actually involve me getting a break or anything–before and after stuffing myself with free-range turkey, I will be putting together Theatre History and Comp Sci presentations (sans all my resources) and writing comix like a demon. I hope. If Ian brings the magic home, it’s likely all out the window.

Speaking of my brother, he and some friends have finally managed to get together a Kentucky chapterof the SCL–of which, he informs me, he is suddenly president. Meanwhile, my sister has conquered the competition to complete the Adkins dynasty and become freaking president of the Kentucky JCL. My siblings rule.

mic check one two