Month: February 2020

Quick Comic About Superheroes

Okay, you know that Quentin Tarantino riff about how Clark Kent is Superman's impression of humans? (B: Yeah...) I contend that Lex Luthor is the ultimate human, the Don Quixote, the Sisyphus-
B (off): He's a billionaire! Em: He's the one willing to take arms against an undefeatable enemy. It's the ultimate human emotion! Footnote: The ultimate American emotion, anyway.
B: Hubris is the ultimate emotion? Em (off): Yes. B: Not, like, snuggles? Em: Hubris.

Drew this one quickly to reflect a conversation we had while driving home from voting yesterday, then scanned it using my phone. Technology has come a long way since I first started drawing comics (I was living in Viet Nam and had to take a stack of drawings over to the Vietnamese equivalent of a Kinko to be scanned and put on a CD for me [side note, Kinkos doesn’t exist anymore and CDs aren’t much used, so this story is flawed]).

I’m not that into superheroes, but I have a weird soft spot for Lex Luthor. Previous other comics including him are here.

I signed up for a 50k in April, which will be my first since November 2016 (actually, that one wasn’t quite 50k if I remember correctly–and that race report suggests I do, meaning my last actual 50k was…the Kettle Morraine 100 back in June 2015). Wow, digging that out was a trip down memory lane. Also, this is my first race of marathon distance or farther since the North Face marathon in September 2018. Anyway, I can’t do long runs two days in a row right now, so we’ll see how this works out. So far I’ve done a few runs in the 15-16 mile range (the weather has definitely been a limiting factor in this) and felt pretty good, so I’m basically…halfway there. Yes.

Em oi! #443: 24 Hours

Em lying in bed, sleeping through alarm.
Em continues to oversleep.
Em pouring coffee.
Waking up Hal.
Running.
Oh there are scones.
Em gets dressed.
Doing a training.
Still doing training.
Debugging SSL/TLS.
Doing some chores.
Anxiety.
Lifting weights.
Picking up Hal.
Aikido night.
Em needs dinner.
Bedtime.

I did a twenty-four-hour comic! Except 2/1 was a Saturday this year and my drawing time on weekends is a little scant, so I did a Thursday. And okay, real talk: a lot of comic artists talk about a type of pen called a Speedball, which is basically a dip pen with a fairly stiff nib (I used a B-6, which has a round end and can produce a nice variety of line widths). And I can sort of see why professionals like these, but inking a comic with a dip pen as a left-handed person is a special type of torture (see, for example, the first two panels. Ow.). And then I went to do a little watercolor on it and discovered the ink I was using was not waterproof. So yeah. Nuts to that.

Anyway, a little look at my life. Not that exciting, honestly. Even on nights when I don’t go out to aikido (which is most nights), I’ve still been spending a good amount of time doing things like revising written stuff, submitting stuff for publication, and watching “Portrait Artist of the Year” on YouTube. So it’s not like I’m James Bond on other nights. I don’t know what you were expecting.

You can check out a couple of previous twenty-four-hour comics here and here. The biggest change from both of those comics is that now my coffee maker has a TIMER, so the coffee is just ready when I get up in the morning. If you don’t believe that this is one of the greatest innovations of the late 20th/early 21st century, you are wrong.

And we’ll file this one under PS3612.U686Z46 2020 for American literature—Individual authors—2001-—L—Biography and Criticism—Autobiography, journals, memoirs. By date.