Me and My Big Mouth

Friday's strip wil be late. As in, a day or two late. It is 10:15 PM Eastern Time (U.S.) Thursday, June 30 and I am just now getting in from the office. Plus, I have to help prepare our home for weekend visitors.

See, here's my boring-ass problem: I'm trying to get 2 clients' projects out the door at work at the same time, and they are not exactly helping me help them. These are the same clients that hounded me during the infamous mom-in-the-hospital week, so you can imagine how sad I will be to see them go.

It is a three-day weekend though, so I do plan on having Friday's Strip up along with (or before) Monday's.

Must... finish... this... story!

Believe It Or Not...

...I am close to wrapping up the Haley/Carol story arc; much closer than I thought I was. This should over by two weeks from Friday or so. Then I'll probably post a "debriefing," followed by a bunch of stand-alone strips before moving on to the next story arc.

Also, sorry for no punchline today. Had to put the plot first. :(

Quote Of The Decade

"As you get older you'll find your desire to see shit [movies] disintigrates and your abilities to avoid it grow in leaps and bounds. I'd rather play with my kid and make comics than go see Hilary Duff movies."

-Brian Michael Bendis

There And Back Again. ...Again.

Pro cartoonist and fellow Kentuckian Tauhid Bondia has at last reincarnated Spells & Whistles in the new S&E 2nd Edition. Click on over to the Rocket Surgery comics site to get your regular dose of D&D-type thrills and giggles before "someone" tries to sue him out of existance.

The art looks damn fine, too. This is what Suburban Tribe would look like if I were doing it for a living. Go! Right Now!

Story Interruptus

We went out to visit my wife's family in Chicago this weekend and had a flight delay on the trip home. When we rolled in, I was too pooped to create the next chapter of the Carol/Haley arc, so I pulled this stand-alone/gag strip out of my ass. I mean hat.

I'll pick up where I left off on Wednesday.

Kiss-kiss.

Batman Begins

Just got back from seeing it tonight (Thursday).

I never blogged it before now because as far as comics characters go, Batman (and DC Comics in general) just isn't on my radar. Marvel seems, to me, to be where most of the super-hero comics innovation is these days.

Having said that, HOLY SHIT this was great. I heard it was good too, but I didn't think they would totally blow me away like that. Not a single person miscast, and every single relationship between each character hit all the right notes.

I now consider Bale to be the definitive film Batman. Michael Caine and Gary Oldman may also be the first actors to really capture Alfred and Gordon, too. A wonderful super-hero movie as well as a damn good drama. I will see this in the theater again.

Why did it take them five movies to get Batman right?

"I Don't Know If It's Art, But I Like It!"

The only opinions I have about music are binary in nature; I either like it or I don't. I'm not really big on reading music reviews, either. They're just impenatrable to me, and a lot of them just seem... I don't know, snobbish. Reading them reminds me of when I was studying photography a few years back. 4 out of 5 big-name photographers would cite their entry into the field as some variation of this sentence: "I always wanted to be an illustrator, but learning to draw was just too much work. So I became a photographer." I never figured out if illustrators or photographers were supposed to be more insulted by that statement.

But anyway, Jagged Little Pill is a decade old this year and Alanis Morissette released an acoustic version this week to commemorate it. It's only available at Starbucks for the time being, so I stepped into one (grrr...) of our local shops and picked it up this morning. I prefer to buy my music through iTunes, so I had to get over a mild case of sticker shock when the cash register rang up $16.95. It was worth it, though. I've listened to the whole CD three times today. In 1995, there were three female celebrities on my 23-year-old radar: Gillian Anderson, Janeane Garafalo, and Alanis. I think maybe Alanis has held up the best. (In an artisitic sense, of course.)

I'm also really into orchestral movie soundtracks. I listen to Classical music the most, and movie soundtracks are, in a way, the only classical music that is freshly composed and recorded these days. The fact that they also tell stories is a bonus. Hans Zimmer has co-composed the soundtrack to Batman Begins, and since his Gladiator score is one of my all-time favorite soundtracks, I'll be slipping out of the office at lunch to pick that bad boy up on Tuesday.

And as a quick aside; what the hell is going on here? First Episode III was good, and now it looks like someone has finally made a decent Batman movie? Fingers crossed for Fantastic Four for the hat trick.

So that's all. It's just been a while since I've bought two newly-released CDs from a brick-and-mortar store within as many days. Maybe I am getting old.

Okay, Let's See...

O.J. Simpson? Check.
Robert Blake? Check.
Michael Jackson? ...Check.

Am I missing anyone? Let me know. And I dearly hope that all of the far-right neo-con die-hards are taking note that a bunch of us filthy, intellectual, godless, baby-killing liberals aren't thrilled about this either, but somehow, I'm sure we'll be the ones blamed for Peter Pan flying back to the ranch.

Beat it, Michael. Just beat it.

Time For a Facelift or Two... or Three... or Seven...

I'm gearing up for another round of promotion for the site and I decided that the character portraits up top and on the cast page needed refreshing. Here's a sample of the works in progress. Right now I am in the middle of coloring them and the step pictured below I believe is called "Laying Flats."



More blog stuff about a bunch of pop-culture crap later today or tonight.

Haley = Carol = Haley REMINDER

Sometime during the day tomorrow (Saturday, 6/11) I will post a "clip strip" that will feature all of the panels in this story arc that had little clues or lines with hidden/double meanings that imply Haley's true identity. So log on this weekend and see if you think I was as clever as I thought I was. :)

It's True. Haley Bhairavi is Really Carol Bradley.

You'll find out how it happened starting with Friday's strip. And I planned it this way ever since this comic. You can look back through this story arc so far (which finally has a title) for the little clues that have been there all along.

Did I surprise anyone? Or did you all see it coming a mile away? Let me know through the comments link below or post in the Forums.

Don't You Just Want to Vomit All Over Yourself?

I mean, really.

There And Back Again

Thanks to Tetsubeav, ElJefe and ElMacho for minding the store while I was away. I got lots of compliments on their postings via word of mouth and email.

Since I am a Cancer, it's hard to say which is better: Getting away from it all at a cottage on the beach for a week, or returning to my little home studio with my drafting table, art supplies, books, music and computers after being away from them for a week. I'm doubly blessed, I suppose.

Look for this week's second strip tomorrow (Tuesday, June 7) as it contains the cliff-hanger that I wanted to leave you all with two weeks ago, when the craziness started. The third strip of the week will likely run on Friday.

I'll post a blog about our vacation in a day or two, but first I need to attend to some Suburban Tribe business while I still have this Monday off from the Day Job.

Real-Life Haley Bhairavi Sighting

Reader Brandon Aten recently moved to the New Jersey/New York City Metro area. While he was in NYC one day, he found a poster for a concert by an Indian musician who looks kind of familiar...

UPDATE: My wife, who pays attention to such things as details, just informed me that the musician below, Anoushka Shankar, is the half-sister of Norah Jones. Apparently, they share the same father. Read about it here.

Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio

It's definitely summer. Well, summer starts later this month, but sitting in front of the television last night really indicated that summer has already begun. While flipping between watching Evander Holyfield ballroom dance and Bill Goldberg talk shop I was saddened to find that the most appealing thing on television was The Inferno II (apparently, there was a previous version of this) on MTV. Watching roommates from Real World and contestants from Road Rules of yore continue to whore themselves out to MTV rather than enter into the workforce got me thinking: Just how the hell old have I gotten? What is wrong with today's youth? Why in the hell is it so hot in this house?

I remember when the Real World dealt with people trying to make it in life. Sure, all the kids were trying to make it in the entertainment industry, but it dealt with them cutting albums, building a portfolio for modeling, etc. MTV has turned the concept into a show full of narcissitic famewhores taking a semester off college ever since The Puck was dropped. I'm glad that my hero in high school, Dominic, hasn't had anything to do with MTV since his being on Real World 2.

I remember when rap music had a message from the street not involving keeping all your ho's in diferent area codes (thank Chris Rock).

Thanks, Britney, for "Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." High school students are supposed to question authority. Now, they think that the governemnt should aprove newspaper stories before they can be published. Of course, I'm not giving Britney credit for that. I'm just going to pin that on the decline of civilization as we know it.

You know, I Loved the 80s, VH1. And, surprise surprise, I Loved the 70s as well. But, you can't make me Love the 90s. How do you expect me to get that warm and cozy feeling in the cockles of my heart from the nostalgia of five years ago?

I remember when teen sex comedies were exactly that. Teen sex comedies full of nudity with hilarity ensuing shortly there after. One naked set of Shannon Elizabeth breasts, does not a teen sex flick make, American Pie. The whole genre has been tainted with the inclusion of you.

I remember liking The Doors as a high school kid just because everyone went through their Doors phase. Unfortunately, Jim Morrison is just an ego driven ass rather than the god that I was once brainwashed to believe. Now, I get them though.

I really need to turn on the A/C.

P.S. The moon landing did happen. 9/11 was not a US government plot. Elvis is dead. There aren't any aliens. Darwin was not wrong. The Raelians did not clone a baby. L. Ron is not on the mother ship, Tom. Dinosaurs are not scientific fabrication.