A few days ago I was watching Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s first Christmas episode, where Joel and the ‘bots watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I doodled a little bit in my sketchbook while the flick was on and here are the results. I remember hearing rumors of an MST3K comic book years ago and I always wondered how that would have looked.
For some reason, the Internet was down at our house all last night. I have the next two comics in this week’s series scanned but I can’t upload them until the WiFi problem gets fixed! As such, here’s a sketchbook page I happened to have saved on my school laptop.
A couple of drawings of characters from Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time with Finn and Jake. I mentioned awhile back I had become a fan of the show but after some Thanksgiving break viewing, I’m now upgrading myself to “big fan” status. There are tons of blogs better than this one to give you a rundown about why the show works so wonderfully well… but my own higher appreciation for the show came from the recent episode titled I Remember You which was one of the best takes on losing someone to Alzheimer’s disease I’ve ever seen.
One of the great things about that episode was that it wasn’t even ABOUT Alzheimer’s disease. The main story was just powerful enough to put you in mind of it. I Remember You wasn’t evocative of the show as a whole, but I’m always impressed when a TV program is good enough to deviate from its’ format and say something new about the characters and situations. Adventure Time is that kind of show.
I also love the designs on all the characters and how easy they are to replicate. Pendleton Ward’s style is deceptively simple… but it’s the kind of thing a kid can sit down and do themselves. That’s one of the great hallmarks of cartoon design, so much so that my son Elliot’s a fan of the characters even though he hasn’t seen one episode of the show! He’s just seen drawings. Look at this, we were out to dinner a few days ago and he drew his own Lumpy Space Princess!
(The one on the right is mine… the two on the left are his!)
To say Elliot had a healthy curiosity about my recent oral surgery would be an understatement. He was RELENTLESS, asking questions about my blood and teeth and stomach.
A sketchbook page I did a few days ago.
I was really happy with a lot of the character designs in my last run of comics and I want to work some of what I learned from t hose strips into this year’s batch.
Some longtime readers might remember Melissa. Melissa used to pop up in the comic all the time when we were living together in Boston… and then when we were both living in Brooklyn. Miss also used to be kind enough to draw guest strips for me, whenever I’d be out of town or on an extended break from scratching out comics.
By a wide margin, Melissa’s comics were always FAR better than mine. You can check some of them out here.
Well, Melissa and my friend Mary came for a visit this past week and Miss took a couple of minutes to doodle these on a napkin. This is the first napkin, with the boys, Ellen and myself.
…and this is the second napkin, drawn for Mary to commemorate the visit. Melissa’s been my best friend for almost fifteen years and I wouldn’t be married to Ellen if it wasn’t for Mary… so these are very special to me.
I picked up Sara Benincasa’s Agorafabulous: Dispatches from my Bedroom from the library a few weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed the book. A memoir detailing Benincasa’s struggles with depression and agoraphobia, Agorafabulous is often funny and occasionally moving. As someone who dealt with depression in my teenage years, Sara’s observations come from a candid, compelling place.
Some of the later chapters read like short stories unto themselves; as a teacher, I was particularly enchanted by the author’s rough appraisal of working with… well, I guess I’ll say “inner city” students although I don’t believe Sara was working near a major metropolitan area.
I picked up the book as I’ve been a fan of Benincasa’s Sex and Other Human Activities podcast, wherein Sara and her co-host Marcus Parks answer questions about… well, pretty much anything, despite the specificity of the show’s name. On one of their earlier shows, Benincasa tells a story about a disastrous one night stand which made my wife and I howl with laughter on a drive somewhere or another. As a response to that, I drew this picture in my sketchbook, depicting one of the scenes described in that woeful tale:
I drew the thing and Ellen liked it enough to encourage me to send it over to Ms. Benincasa… which I did. She liked it enough to mention it on her podcast, which was a very nice thing and thoroughly impressed Ellen, so thanks for that Sara.
At any rate, the book is great, the story I drew this little sketchbook illustration for is included, and you should go out and read it.
This is the last page of that sketchbook, I mean. Not the last page of sketches ever. I wasn’t even going to bother scanning the thing… but considering I’m going to start posting comics out of my new sketchbook sometime next week, I figured I might as well.
A few weeks ago, I was in a professional development and (I know you won’t believe this, but I’m going to come right out and say it) was getting bored. A colleague of mine was doodling on her notebook and she drew this… thing. It sort of looked like a viking egg. I kept it up in my notebook.
It sort of snowballed into a menagerie of breakfast-related characters. That later snowballed into this…
…and then I did this later.
It’s pretty stupid, but I have to admit- I kind of like the designs! They’re cutesy and kind of kid-friendly. I might do a couple of comics this summer with them.
Here are the first couple of panels for a story I started last year about grad school.
I will never finish this.
I’m always looking for stupid stuff. Like…
To be fair, I don’t think Santa and Superman ever actually FIGHT in DC Comics’ Presents #67… they just team-up or something. Still, I want it and the comic yet eludes me. However, I DID manage to find this on Sunday:
Marvel Team-Up #74, with Spidey teaming up with the cast of SNL (well, mostly John Belushi) to fight the Silver Samurai. GENIUS!
Teachable Moments 