Begging Your Pardon.

Friday's strip is here. It didn't go up until mid-day Sunday. Sorry about that. Thursday was Thanksgiving, of course, then Friday was spent in preparation for a dinner party at our house. You would think that since I started working for myself, it would be easier to hit my own deadlines, but no.

Anyhow, here's a long awaited video of my coloring and lettering process. Hope this makes up for my tardiness. Back to work for me, along with dreading the inevitable Christmas shopping.

Happy Thanksgiving...

...to my readers here in the States. Enjoy one of the few American holidays that isn't commercialized out the yin-yang and is pretty much the only one that our mid and low-level workforce still has the cajones to demand adequate time off to celebrate (I speak of the Friday after).

Friday's strip may or may not go up late that day, but it will be there.

And of course, I am thankful for all of you who read this on a regular basis.

Breaking My "No Blogging About Movies" Rule

UPDATE: I saw Casino Royale, and I thought it was fantastic.

I don't like to blog about a movie unless I feel strongly about it. Honestly, nothing turns me off more than someone posting their uneducated and blinkered opinions about a transient piece of pop-culture and trying to pass it off as a high historical fact by starting their written statement with the words "Uhm, actually,"

Example: "Uhm, actually, Kindergarten Cop is the template upon which all post-modern action-comedy-dramas are based."

Barf. You especially don't need to hear that crap from me, the amateur cartoonist. I hope you come here for the comics. You can go read PVP or Ctrl-Alt-Del for that other nonsense.

Regardless, I ate crow for breakfast this morning along with everyone else who assumed that Daniel Craig was hired as a cheap gimmick to make another soulless and overpriced Bond movie. I was blown away by what they did, which was to make the first James Bond movie that was about James Bond. Most reviews have bestowed Craig with the title of "Best Bond Since Connery" and many have gone so far as to place him even higher than that. I agree.

Casino Royale is not just "Good for a Bond movie" or "One of the best Bond movies", it's a damn good movie, period. It sticks with you after you see it. Most of Bond's assassinations are executed with his bare hands, and you can see in his face a couple of times how he struggles to accept that he's so capable of killing another man. This was also the first Bond move to be based off of one of Ian Fleming's novels in years, and I thought it had a very literary feel.

My mom used to say "If you've seen one James Bond movie, you've seen them all." She was probably right. But you've never seen this James Bond movie.

_______________________

Since I was old enough to get past the box office without a parent, I've seen every James Bond picture in the theater from A View to A Kill on up. Unimpressed with the latest actor cast to play him (especially after he broke his two front teeth filming his first fight as Bond), I was planning to skip Casino Royale.

Then I woke up this morning and saw that whopping 96% on the Tomatometer, and all of a sudden I have tickets for tonight's 7:15 show. I'll report back later.

And... scene!

EDIT: Seems that Blogger automatically resized my wallpaper. CLICK HERE to download a 1280 x 1024 version.

Click on the cover for a larger version.

Today's strip is Suburban Tribe #750, and the end of this year's Halloween story.

I didn't want to do another Halloween story where I picked one or several characters and come up with some way to kill them off. Since the Halloween stories "don't count," I decided to bend the rules a little and play around with the characters in a different way.

I've gotten more emails and comments on this story than any other, topping Haley's origin story. It was fun to do, and it was a fresh change of pace from the usual workplace stories. To answer the most common questions/comments:

1) Why weren't Haley/Roger/Jessica/Skip in the story?
I had planned to put them in there, but there just wasn't enough physical space on the page, nor was there enough time to draw all of those characters in all of those new costumes. If there were enough time and space, Jessica would have shown up as "Diana" and Skip would've been "Presto" from the D&D cartoon. Haley would not have been seen (no electricity in ye olden days), and Roger would have been a Gandalf-type wizard, but would have died halfway through the story from advanced syphilis, which he would have contracted from a half-elf prostitute.

2) If this story were an ongoing monthly comic, I would totally buy it.
Here's the chance to put your money where your mouth is, because this story will be on sale in a few weeks as part of Suburban Tribe #3! The cover is at the top of this post. Tell all of your friends, it will be on sale in about 3 weeks. If it flies outta my studio, I'll step up development on Empyreal Fall.

As you can see from the ending, there's also the possibility of returning to the D&D world to see how our heroes are faring. Not to mention that 10-year gap that happened in the course of the story. We'll see.

Lastly, I'm celebrating the 750th strip with my very first Desktop Wallpaper! Click here to download a 1280 x 1024 resolution version.

Halloween 2006: Rise of the Machines

Here's a scan of the defective part that nearly caused me to scrap my entire computer system last Tuesday (click on it for a larger version). This is (was) a USB 2.0 PCI-slot card that connected my scanner, digital camera and iPod to my computer.

Apparently at some point, this thing burned out - literally - and rather than my system just tell me "Hey, I can't see your scanner, camera or iPod anymore", it would simply freeze on start up as it couldn't initialize the card and give me one of three or four different error messages related to the Motherboard.

Luckily, I was able to figure this out after talking with Dell tech support in India for several hours. I was this close to transferring all of my backup data to my MacBook and working off of that until a new desktop could be delivered from Dell in 10 to 14 days.

The new USB 2.0 card I put in my computer came from CompUSA and cost $35. The one that nearly destroyed my livelihood and may or may not have burned my house down I got off of eBay for $12. Moral of the story? You tell me.

The High Horse I Rode In On

Newsarama posted these preview pages from New Avengers #26. These were painted by Alex Maleev and they really struck me. There's a big to-do about kids in the US forsaking Marvel and DC's traditional super-hero fare for Manga. Maybe that's what happens when a culture invents an art form and the publishers/suits beat the dead horse long after it left the Alpo plant because they're so terrified of creative risk.

These pages are a huge step in the right direction for giving American comics more of a unique vision and voice without borrowing so heavily from Asian culture. I hope we see more like them.