 once again back it's the ridiculous
The comic returns! Some of you may notice that I said “Wednesday” up there on the status bar, and lo and behold, it is not just technically Wednesday in certain time zones when the comic appears. That is but one of many wonders I have implemented. Possibly, I’ll get even better at this, and have updates go up in the (shudder) morning.
Some of you may also notice that the comic isn’t actually over. No credits, no end statement, no nothing. It is so! Nobody Scores! comics will now be slathered together in a slightly longer overall format while each installment will be shorter, the better to kill me less. In fact, and this may not be immediately apparent, I am now working with set page sizes. The current installment size is two pages, and I’ll update twice a week as in the past. I might shift to one-page installments three times a week if I can write that short. I am trying to fit in some kind of climax at the end of each installment so reading comics out of context isn’t entirely pointless. So the current tale, detaling the dangers of black boxes, will be four installments, an eight-page comic in total. Future stories may run two, eight, twelve, even twenty pages maybe.
So. Comics!
[38] the unsuckening
It is true! That which has been foretold shall indeed come to pass. No, not the Destiny Quest Of The Chosen. That, that’s just the manifestation of a long-held desire to write a fantasy novel wherein the Chosen One from the humble village of Hamlettownsville gets knocked the fuck out in the first chapter and carried to the Tower of Destiny or whatever by someone who is, like, competent. But isn’t it better this way? It’s a cartoon and it’s like three pages. I think everybody wins. Well except for the world being covered in unholy darkness and all. People always gotta be critics.
But what I was talking about was the return of regular postings of Nobody Scores! cartoon entertainments. Yes, indeed, even in the face of how the slow July has had no appreciable effect on the traffic on this here site, even in the face of scientific refutation of the cartoonist work ethic, YES, there will be comics, starting next week. Regular comics. I’ll tell you more about it once we get into it, I kinda want the initial story to stand alone for a little tiny bit.
Elsewhere, I have found a little comic that is worthy and since it is basically a minimalist take on many of the themes of Nobody Scores! – pain, hurting, inevitability, hurting, that is – then perhaps my audience will enjoy it too: Herman the Manatee. Go forth and peruse. The cartoonist has the sack to draw a Krazy Kat tribute/parody, which impressed me, especially since most webcomics people get all sweaty-palmed about doing fricking Penny Arcade takeoffs. But most of it is good old fashioned unavoidable traumas.
IS IT CAN IT BE STARFUCKER TIME NOW PLEASE
And then I attended the San Diego Comic Con and I saw all my cartoonist buddies that I know and you totally don’t like Dan Piraro and Meredith Gran and oh I met the fabulous Lisa Hanawalt call me and and it’s so neat to be on speaking terms with cartoon people who have books out and give them to me like I am an equal and not a consumer and who is at the door a reader you say OUCH CRAP AW GOD WHAT DID YOU JUST TAKE OUT IS THAT MY LIVER I THINK I NEED IT STOP WITH THE BEATINGS ABOUT THE HEAD AND SHOULDERS CRAP MY TEMPLES MY SPLEEN
Yeah there wasn’t that much to it but I’ll spare you the oohs and ahhs. Horribly, there’s a chance Dan Piraro is going to put up a picture of me and my brother and him on his blog in which case I am never linking to him again because in real life I am hideous, ghoulish, and drip pus while Piraro basically hasn’t aged in over 15 years. On the other hand that probably means he has useful connections he hasn’t told me about. Fuckin’ decisions man.
[10] think tanking
Yes. The Summer Hiatus is upon us and I have been hiatusing the shit out of it, as you can tell, since I haven’t even posted a comment about it for a week after it started, and actually, I guess it kind of started a couple weeks before it should have what with all the late comics. Apparently eight or so really long Nobody Scores! installments in a row can really take it out of a cartoon maker. It’s no thing, I wanted to get through all the scripts I had in the can, but at the end of that shit, my head was beginning to work like this, with brief moments of relief where my head went something a little like this.
But, now, I’ve got my mind right. Hey. Don’t look at me like that. And I’m about to serve up some good ol’ miscellaneous content this week while I cook some new scripts for the new version of Nobody Scores! And possibly a bit of a site redesign (I am basically happy with it, it doesn’t need to look super-gradiently-dropshadowy “perfessional,” but I want the upcoming content to fit).
The July break will last basically all of July. That is because, though I had not particularly planned it, that which I have most feared shall come to pass: I will be going to the San Diego Comic Con. Hold me. As is so far par for the course in these types of events, I won’t be having a booth. Technically, I am going there in support of my brother, whose short film will be showing at the convention. So if you are reading this, and you are going, that is the part of the convention where I will be. As I consult the material, I’m not exactly sure there’s a booth. But, I will be carrying around prints of a few of my ha ha best selling posters, which I’ll sell to you for something below list price, or possibly even barter for shit, and failing that, I’ll have nice shiny Nobody Scores! business cards if you’d like to collect something just entirely pointless. People actually make business cards of their comics, it floors me. I mean, I have a business card for my illustration work, but that’s different. If somebody remembers your comic, they’ll find you. The business card is not a useful mnemonic device for a cartoon! So I don’t actually have the card designed yet, I want it to be pointful somehow, see exhibit a, but the only thing in that vein I can think of is detachable razor blades, which’ll be highly useful for getting my monkey ass sued. So, peanut gallery? You’re a buncha nuts, think of something! Protect your cartoonist’s mind. It is fragile and prone to relapses.
The practical upshot of that long-ass paragraph for 99.8% of you is that the next scheduled-type update will be on Tuesday, July 29th. Given where many of you have come from, you can think of this hiatus as “the average time it takes for Dresden Codak to update.” OH NO HE DINT ima get my ass kicked cry for me peoples
[22] round numbers
It occurs to me that as I end the current run of Nobody Scores! and go into the July break I’ll have left you guys hanging at installment #273. This is in clear violation of the Obsessive-Compulsive Tendency Online Act of 2006, so during the latter part of July I’ll put up two installments of the comic in its traditional form. I’ll have to procure some coconut husks but I think it’s doable. Then, when the comic starts up again, I will have 275 old-school Nobody Scores! comics and no one will have to jump off buildings, though they will probably feel like it. Thus is balance achieved.
[34] it's my party and i'll die if i want to
So a couple of days ago was the two-year anniversary of the debut of this comic. Whee for continued existence, huh? Yeah, it’s been a something. I wanna say “wild ride” but to be honest sitting at computers and desks and porches and coffeeshop tables drawing and drawing and drawing doesn’t measure up. It’s not even a ride. A giggle? Maybe a giggle. With relatively few shits! Nobody Scores: for giggles and relatively few shits.
I have been threatening The Remodeling for a while and here’s how it is going to work. I have five more comics to do. This will take Nobody Scores! into July. After that comes the late Nobody Scores! birthday intermission. This one will be longer because I have more changes I want to make. It will probably be the whole of July. As with the previous intermission, I will be putting up content – this time, not old stuff, but I have some various quick little side comics that don’t fit into the Nobody Scores! framework to draw up and put on the site. They’ll only go up here temporarily. When the comic resumes in all its pratfalling glory I’ll move the filler strips over to my long-neglected art blog for future reference and horror.
The changes in the comic will be format, structure, presentation changes mostly. Character, setting, concept will remain basically the same much to Sara and Jane and Beans and Raoul’s continuing consternation. Mock their consternation, audience! Mooooock them. Cartoonist commands it.
For a while I’ve gotten the impression that the internet & increased connectivity has led to more, not less, stasis in culture, as the phenomena that had gotten first mover advantage online become ironclad institutions – hence Static Cling Culture Freeze. The artists of the world are just waiting for me to die off, I just know it. Also, I was sort of lazy in depicting future art directions, making them all direct consequences of technological advances; but then technology does drive art, if you let it. The arts depicted in the final panel are supposed to be: some sort of real-time holographic sky-painting (the woman on the far far left is just being real exuberant); monumental-scale, abstract sequential art (because I Believe Comics Has A Future); the poles the woman is doing gymnastics on are actually a theremin-ish analog musical instrument; and Old Jane Doe is looking at simulcast video screens, sorta like that one Flaming Lips record done for iPhones or something. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta do some shit with lasers, and it ain’t nuttin’ nice. Also you’re gonna want to stay indoors between the hours of 5:30 and 7:30 pm. Wink!
Oh yeah in other party news I am debating whether to open up a “buy a cartoonist a t-shirt” fund so’s I can get me one of these.
[20] in inexorable expansion news
Things get bigger. I’ve been even more off my game than usual schedulewise lately – here’s why. Normally, I have a queue of scripts lined up, some long ones and some short-looking ones; but I don’t know how long any of them will be exactly until I lay out the panels. However, right now I’m just going through all the existing scripts to clean the plate before I retool Nobody Scores! for its two-year anniversary. Which will be late, because I have too many scripts I want to get to. So, if a script runs long, I grit through it anyway. The latest horrible offering is, as is easily deduced, a collection of short gags I had stored to save my deadline bacon in a pinch. In any case I apologize because the horrors I dug up are indeed noxious and old, old, ooooold.
In other site-related inexorable expansion news, the store has been updated as per several requests with user-friendly features such as links to the comics that the posters reprint, and preview pictures of what the full posters look like, that the buyer may not quite so much suspect they’re getting a squirrel fur inscribed with “The Dragon Awaits” in a poster tube in return for their hard-won cash. Also I have been getting requests for additional posters to add to the store. As of this last week, I will proudly be adding Barack Obama Overdrive to the poster selection (as soon as I finish preparing it) because nothing could make me prouder of the world, my country, and most importantly, me, than my being right about something several months before most people had caught on to what I knew. It brings a tear to my eye, it does. Yes I Can!
But I have been getting requests for other, less prescient strips to be made into posters as well. If you have a request along those lines, the comment section here is a good place to make it. Also, no, I can’t ship out of the US yet – I could, technically, but the costs are ridiculous. What I’d like to do is find printers similar to the one I am using in Canada, the UK, wherever else there is demand for posters that I can just print on a one-off basis whenever someone wants one. I don’t know where yet. If you’re in Canada or the UK/EU or possibly Australia and you really want your hands on some Nobody Scores! posters, email me (brandon in the area of loosenutstudio period com) and I may be able to work something out where we help each other.
ELSEWHERE IN STUNNING DEVELOPMENTS
I am so glad that I saw these things, and these… things, before I made them up for some Nobody Scores! strip or other. In all other levels of reality I am not glad at all, and my soul has become that much closer to the great void. So, clicky and have fun!
It has been some time since I have found new music I’ve liked, and this might just have been a product of the Brain Cell Bataan Death March of me coloring Thursday’s Friday’s Saturday’s strip, but I stumbled across this Australian band called Lola Flash (vector: ‘80’s videos on Youtube @ 4 AM -> oh look this girl put up a cover of that song, it should be cute to watch her fail -> holy shit -> is she in an actual band?) and just right now they seem like one of the best bands from 1992 stepped into a time machine. Which sounds like faint praise sorta but everywhere I fuckin’ go I just hear ‘80s music so at least these guys change up the retro.
Then there are hijinks. This video seems sort of like a comic I’d write, except at the end I’d have the world blow up, for reasons that will become evident upon viewing.
[20]
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