Comic Higlly Blug Derg Herg Klbhhl

PLATE WARS: PART 1 OF 0

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:21:42 GMT

So cool!

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:57:34 GMT

Hnnng

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:53:04 GMT

In that one Belle Starr post I screwed up the format of the coolest page in the set, so here it is again.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

News and Girly

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:00:26 GMT

I'm just gonna say this crappy news with deep regrets, as I know a lot of you liked that cat, but I had to give Frankie up a few days ago. It wasn't a terribly fun decision; the cat has always had mental problems, and they got a little out of control that night, had to decide if I was capable of taking care of this cat anymore, decided I couldn't.

I got a little moany the past few days and couldn't draw much, but I'm a bit better now. I saw the Small Stars on Halloween, and it cheered me up a bit... but it was also their final show for the indefinite future, so that was a bit sad too. This was Miles from Fastball, his good friend Jeff (not from Fastball, though he does play the sax on some of their albums), and 3 others playing as a "Lounge band from Reno 'temporarily' relocated to Austin", which is just what it sounds like. One of the funnest live bands ever, they'll be missed! And now we'll always have Fastball.

And Darcy. And a new cat, eventually. :|

Here's the latest Girly. It turns out this is an all right place to pause things, so there's going to be a two-week pause now while I collect my bearings and also get started on some other secret thing.

Almost the home stretch. It's the home stretch to the home stretch.

Collette

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:16:41 GMT

Ohhhh. Right. LJ Syndication is still down. At this point I just suggest dropping the feed if you're on it, y'all. No point in getting the from both this journal and the feed (When it decides to work)

Horse!

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:57:42 GMT

When we last left Belle, she was still locked in a closet, and the bandits managed to piss off the U.S. Marshals.

Karbo's brigade manages to miss everyone except the hostage. And they weren't exactly making an effort to avoid him. The point being, this is not a nice Marshal.

Jim continues to panic and decides to bolt, much to Daniel's chagrin. He tries to shoot him (and Belle) in protest, but Belle's quick thinking keeps them safe for now.

Trying to use Belle as cover isn't exactly a great idea. The Brigade just killed the goddamn hostage; of course they're not going to care about some dame.

And in fact, they're about to mow them both down right now. What's a gal to do?

First, flash back to the time when her brother was killed by Union troops. DAMN YANKEES.

Then... shoot them all:

Okay, obviously this isn't an ordinary girl. Why, it's none other than Myra Belle Shirley!

Whoop, she didn't come out entirely unscathed. Meanwhile, Jim is a jerk and escapes, leaving his partner behind.

...who gets killed.

...but Belle escapes! HYAAAR!

THE HUNT IS ON

Belle stumbles onto land owned by the Starr family, made up of a half-Cherokee settler known as Sam Starr and his two cute fictional sisters (not pictured)
Belle is saying "God is cruel" but little does she know this is the best thing that could have happened!

And so they meet!

The name of the comic is Belle Starr Bandits, by Akihiro Ito. It is one of the best comics ever!

Back in 1993, Ito took the Belle Starr mythos and wrote a punchy 3-volume story in the style of a crazy balls-to-the-wall John Woo-style action series.

I know the first chapter doesn't show much of that, but I'll be posting more scans. They won't be long chapter summaries like this one, mostly pages that display whay the comic is awesome.

Soon!

videogaaaames

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:44:21 GMT

Looks like LJ syndication is broken again. Best get back to posting these, then!

Girlyyy!

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:49:29 GMT

I was originally planning to fill the bottom panel with speedlines, but then I realized that keeping the background white and plain sort of makes then scene less intense, and places a greater emphasis on how Winter has gotten a little caught up in her speech and went a little overboard, making the whole scene more charming and humorous.

I hid this under an LJ Cut because explaining the whole thing makes it less enjoyable, and you clicked on it and read it.... sucker!

There will finally be some more Myra Belle adventures in the next post.

Twirly hair

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:10:04 GMT

Got nothing to say at this particular moment!

GILLIGAN! Drop those coconuts bonk ow!

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:49:53 GMT

Bloom County!

It began when I was 3 and ended when I was 12, and in hindsight, it's odd how influential it was on me, considering how based in pop culture and politics it was.

At around this time, I'd sort of pretend I was a newspaper cartoonist and draw little newspaper format strips, on graph paper, in pencil, every day. I think it was around 1988 when I realised I should stop ripping off Garfield and start ripping off Bloom County instead. I went as far as to introduce my own quaint little political jokes which were based on no understanding of the subjects whatsoever.

As time went on, and my brain developed a bit more and I became a little more socially aware, it became more and more clear how great these comics truly were.

And that was part of the beauty of it, I think. When I first read the comic, I laughed at Bill going "THPPPPT", then every 5 years, I'd read through it again and understand a lot more material to laugh at and be enlightened by.

Somehow or other, new revised book collections of the comic have begun publication, and I almost didn't notice. It took a post in GBS, of all places, to bring my attention to it, but that doesn't really matter. Bloom County has always had some awkward book collections. The first Book "Loose Tails" was heavily abridged and out-of-sequence, and the next two books had missing content as well, due to restrictions by the publisher at the time. Then an unusual omnibus called "Babylon" came out, collecting a small fraction of missing strips from the first book, an even more abridged version of books 2 & 3, and a bunch of uncollected comics up to when Breathed was forced on hiatus by his back injury.

Thus, when the trend of reprinting newspaper strips in complete collections began, I was always hoping Bloom County would be as part of it, so its early days could finally get collected in its entirety. Nice to finally see it happen!

Also, it kicks ass. It's actually pretty amazing how much was cut from the original books. There's like a couple hundred comics I never read before in here, and even a couple I remember from the newspaper that weren't reprinted before (so it WASN'T a fever dream!)

BUY IT. If you ever had even a remote interest in this comic.

just a typo

Here's a Girly!

Generally, my response to people who compare this arc to the android fighting story in Wendy is that they're completely full of shit.
Buuuut now they're attacking a factory where the armies are coming from, I concede that there's a slight similarity at this particular juncture.
But never mind that. I promise it will kick ass.

I am in Arizona!

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:29:53 GMT

I forgot to do a Girlypost when the comic updated last night.

Y'all don't mind me posting the comic here? I just want the journal to update regularly again and this is a good way to make me do it.

Photoshop crashed once while making this, but it was entirely my fault. Still kinda learning my way about this machine, but I'll tell you, it isn't like the old days, where switching from Mac to Windows and vice versa was like learning an alien language.

I'm in a fancy hotel in Phoenix at the moment. My family can really be fancy sometimes. Because I'm one of those webcomic artists that can't ever never work ahead, the comic's on hold until I get back to Austin, but I think I mentioned that a few times already.

If anything interesting happens, I'll come back to tell the internet. Otherwise, see y'all next week!

Things happen

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:45:06 GMT

Soooo I came down with an illness yesterday, most likely a cold 'cause it didn't knock me out too much. I don't think it was that Swine Flu we're all hearing about, although I hear the Swine Flu can be pretty mild too.

Also, I almost lost a lot of work in Photoshop, due to be what appeared to be some random memory problems. This right on the heels of a hard drive crash, replacement, and total reinstallation... it made me a little fed up so I decided to just replace the entire computer. I thought about doing the usual thing and ordering a new motherboard, processor, and memory chips from NewEgg, then transferring the drives, video card, etc over. Then I decided to forego that plan and just run to Frys and buy a Mac.

Soooooooooo... I switched from Windows to Mac yesterday. Most of the comic above was drawn on the new machine.

I may be able to squeeze another comic out this week, but all the aforementioned family business is coming up quickly. I'll be gone on the 1st and back on the 6th.

That about covers everything.

Oh also

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:28:12 GMT

Girlypost

Comic

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:17:41 GMT

Myra Belle, part 2

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:28:50 GMT

In truth, I have what some may call an "elementary" grasp of the Japanese language, so excuse me if some of these summaries end up innacurate or flat-out wrong.

But anyway, Belle was summoned to Way Station by a Mr. Grayson and/or his associates. She's picked up by a bandit named Jim, who was expecting her to be a gunman. Or gunwoman. But obviously she's just a cute girl and not a gun(wo)man at all!

"GUNMAN? GUNMAN? Does this brat look like a gunman to you!?"

So Jim brings Belle to Grayson's place, and I don't now EXACTLY what's happening, but it's obviously not good, as we see Grayson tied up and held at gunpoint by Jim's partner Daniel. Belle is just kind of ^_^ about the whole thing.

They momentarily get Belle out of the way by knocking her out and throwing her in a closet with Grayson's dead wife.

Belle is all like "WAUUUGH LET ME OUT" in the top right panel. But the bandits are not paying attention, instead they're fretting and wondering what the hell they're going to do now that the Brigade has arrived, and with no hired gunman to help them out. Not only that, it's Marshall Luke Karbo's Brigade. Karbo is the most feared and ruthless marshall in the West, so Jim starts to kind of freak out.

He gives them to the count of ten to surrender...

Jim shoots off Karbo's hat.

Karbo retaliates! With bullets!

To be GUNtinued!

Wild Wild West

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:23:26 GMT

I think this here is still my favorite comic from Japan.

Myra Belle has arrived at Way Station.

I'll post more pages soon, if that's OK!

#714

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:16:37 GMT

Something about the way I draw melee attacks is a bit off these days, which is a pity 'cause I know I knew how to do it right before.

I said it before and I'll say it again, I hate it when I have it and then lose it. If every art technique I ever learned stuck with me forever, I'd be the best artist in the world.

That really is the craziest thing

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:42:31 GMT

Nah, really, I like Russia okay.

Here's some fan art of something :(

Chunga Splork

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:28:14 GMT

Livejournal Syndication isn't working consistently anymore. When I realized this, I made a post on Twitter which said "Why again, did Six Apart sell LJ to a country that learned about the internet
only a couple years ago?"... which probably wasn't a terribly sensitive thing to say.

I'm just joking around... Obviously Russians have known what the internet was for a while. They've been using it to spam and send viruses and generally annoy the shit out of us for years now!

Ohhhh but seriously, Russia sucks.

The End is coming

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:18:42 GMT

I enjoy drawing all three of these girls.

Some of you may have noticed that there hasn't been a whole lot of variety from me lately. No one-off comics, no pinups, no Doctor V, no porn comics at all... It's pretty much just been Girly for several months now. I'm still deciding if I should be concerned about this... For cartoonists, keeping things varied does help keep the pistons firing, but I do enjoy myself when working on this comic.

I think what it comes down to is that I'm in ending mode, and it's hard to think about anything but finishing this. Once it's done, THEN it's time to go hog wild on 10000 other projects, but for now, I need to finish this, and finish it good.

Oh, by the way, Girly's ending. This shouldn't really be news to anyone, but I never did literally say it out loud right in the open. #750 wil be the last one, give or take a few, and I'm aiming at around February, though I should note that earlier this year I was aiming for November, soooo...

Sorry to sound kinda dry and nonchalant about this, but I don't want to go saying it'll be awesome or terrible or LIKE NOTHING YOU'VE SEEN BEFORE or anything that will create certain expectations. This is an ending, and in the process, it will end. You will possibly enjoy it.

At Kick Butt Coffee

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:05:21 GMT

All the rain storms Austin has had lately have made me happy to go out and look at my lawn. It was so dead for months, and it's nice seeing little patches of plants and clovers and flowers there now. It makes me happy to look at it as I walk to the store and stuff.

What on earth is this. Since when did I care about lawns. It's like I'm growing up into some kind of adult or something.

Also, I just bought a suit for a wedding. Tailored and everything.

MAD

(no, no, not mine)

(oh wait, I already made a journal entry about my sis getting married, there was no need to say "not mine")

I love computers, part 400

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:30:39 GMT

So it turned out it was hard drive failure. Can't say I was expecting that!
Yeah, since making the last post, the computer ground to a halt, blue-screened, and gave me the dreaded DRE when booting. A couple disk scans verified that it was completely fried.

It's a little disappointing when you consider that the power outage apparently caused this, and my computer was hooked up to what I thought was an above-average surge protector. On the other hand, it's been running slightly jerkily for quite a while, this may have just been the final kick in the teeth for the HD.

So I went to Fry's to get a replacement HD. While I was at it, I finally got the backup UPS I've been putting off buying for several months. Obviously, I should have owned this two days ago, but hey, if this happens again, it won't happen again.

Amazingly, I drew the most recent Girly comic in PS the entire time the HD was dying, blissfully unaware of what was going on. PS has its pagefile on another drive, which may have a lot to do with it.

Everything was backed up, just a matter of reinstalling all the programs. While reinstalling XP, my computer decided to play one last joke on me, and it defaulted the installation to the backup drive I tried to install it to earlier, rather than the new drive I bought specifically for this. I didn't figure this out until I completely installed the OS and several drivers, and it was sure fun going back and doing it all again!

At any rate, this whole bag of fun shouldn't affect the output of the comic, which will remain only terribly crappy and slow instad of horribly crappy and slow.

Coming up: Livejournal entries that may be remotely fun to read

Family Matters

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:46:42 GMT

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS

Bad news first: My Grandpa on mom's side of the family, the one who didn't die last year, is probably going to die this year, pretty soon.
The good news is my sister's getting married in a couple weeks!

Thus, I'll be out of town for family matters a couple times over the next few weeks.

So the comic will update a little sporadically.

Except it's already updating sporadically.

My computer's still running like shit. But not so much that I couldn't crank out a comic in Photoshop today. Strangely enough, my computer ran like nothing was wrong at all the whole time I was drawing the comic, and only started grinding to a halt toward the end when I resized it for the web and uploaded it. Is this a memory or pagefile problem maybe?

Here's the comic in question:

You may have noticed that I pretty much draw nothing but Girly these days. What's that about!

I may try more things with this computer. It'd be nice if it'd just hold together for one more month, since I was considering jumping to Windows 7 anyway. If it is indeed an Explorer problem, then upgrading the OS will fix it, I'm assuming.

FUN WITH COMPUTERS

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:44:25 GMT

HELLO LIVEKITTEN, SORRY FOR NEGLECTING YOU

It's just that Twitter was so damn sexy.

So Austin had a pretty huge rainstorm yesterday. It was nice to see, because it's been a dry, dying wasteland all summer. It started with so much potential, too... I went and bought a nice, energy-efficient lawnmower, and only got to use it once; the grass died horribly rather quickly after that.

During this storm, the power went out a couple times, which is also kind of unusual, because Austin's grids can usually hold up pretty well even in the worst thundery storms. Getting to the point, my tablet stopped working properly after my computer turned back on. You know me, guys... I'm so utetrly dependant on technology that there's simply no comics from me when there isn't a drawing pad made of chips and circuits to work with.

It didn't COMPLETELY die, the cursor just didn't do such a good job following the pen anymore. After messing with it bit, I noticed distinct patterns, like it would work okay if I kept it inside running programs, but then it'd frequently stop when mousing over Windows Explorer menus, and it also stopped being able to click on things in the Taskbar. So basically it was fouling up specifically with Windows Explorer and no other programs.

I cleanly uninstalled and reinstalled the Tablet drivers , no change. So it pretty much has to be a problem on Windows' end. For whatever reason, XP has been running kinda kludgy and jerky for me lately anyway, so I wasn't 100% surprised. Even since the 2000 days, Windows can experience residual software wear-and-tear, what with all the programs and drivers getting installed and uninstalled and malware and whatnot and bad spots get into the code which you can't get rid of, no matter what you try.

Sooooo I figured it's time to attempt a repair installation. I insert the XP disc, boot it up, but oh that's right, it was an upgrade disk. It asks me to insert a disc of a previous version of Windows to verify there was a proper upgrade, and of course I'm like whaaaaa. XP is already installed on this computer. Why can't you just use THAT to verify it. Of course I don't know where my old Win2k disc is. How long ago did I upgrade? 1... 2 million years ago?

Soooo I went ahead and combed my room from top to bottom, looking for the damn disc. No sign of the 2k disc, but in what I can only consider super-irony, I did find my Windows98 disc from 300,000 million years ago. I popped it in and bam, verification complete.

For some reason, it wouldn't give me to option to repair any of the previous system installations, and I was considering doing a new install on one of my other drives anyway, so that's what I'm doing now. Or attempting to anyway. Of course, it doesn't seem to be working. I went through the CD setup, chose a disk to install it to, rebooted, and it promptly loaded the previous XP installation. I rebooted, hit F8, and of course there's only one installation to choose from. Apparently the setup process I attempted on the other drive never happened. I have a feeling it's because it's XP, and Microsoft were complete and total fucks regarding this OS and how it can be used once and only once. Gonna keep trying and if it comes to it, I'll get everything off the C: drive, reformat, and reinstall. Honestly, why can't it ever be easy?

After booting XP a few more times I'm entirely sure it's a problem with Windows... It boots extremely slowly now and is screwey with both the mouse and tablet. Don't think it's due to the motherboard, processor, or USB controller 'cause I can get other programs to run fine. Firefox runs all right, and I can even draw pictures in Photoshop all right, it's pretty much just with the Explorer menus that things screw up.

I'm currently using the laptop, and it can run Photoshop just fine, but of course I can't find my DVI->VGA adapter for the Cintiq. If things aren't working by noon I'll run by Radio Shack to pick up a new one and then at least I can work on stuff while I try to fix this damn machine.

And that's why the next Girly's going to be late. I don't have many good excuses for why the past several comics have been late, but that's a subject for another post, I suppose

Aaand again it's only letting me boot the already-installed XP. Gonna try manually editing the boot.ini file now.

Welcome

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:14:33 GMT

Welcome to my Livegerbil