Tag: hourly comic

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.

Em oi! 431: One Sunday

Hourly comic day is technically February 1st, I think. It started back in 2006 when John Campbell, who once drew the comic Pictures for Sad Children (and then later set a bunch of stuff on fire and maybe quit the internet, I don’t know anymore) would draw an hourly comic every day for the month of January, and then invite other artists to join them on the last day of the project. The only rule is typically that you have to draw one panel for every hour you’re awake depicting something that happened during that hour. Technically you’re supposed to draw them AS THEY’RE HAPPENING but I never manage that. These were done during naps. Here I have in some cases done multiple panels in order to provide more of a narrative. Unfortunately it didn’t scan as well as I would have liked. I used to draw them on index cards (1-2 panels per card per hour). Perhaps I’ll try that again.

I’ve actually drawn these before (in Thai too), but not for quite a while. This one happens to cover last Sunday, which was the 4th of February. It was an atypical day around here in a lot of ways… we were recovering from a party the night before and B was struggling with a stomach virus that had been bugging him for a few days, so I did maybe more baby care than I might usually have and also we ate lunch at three in the afternoon. I think I maybe left out one wake up with Henry at 2ish? I don’t remember. Sunday is currently the day that I don’t run, so that’s also different from the quotidian, but that’s probably why I had time to draw this. Oh, and Henry spit up (on me) a few times more than usual. I have only depicted some of the bodily-fluid-related events here. It turns out that as babies get older, they tend to spit up less. Except when they’re fussy, they can swallow air that can lead to more spit ups. Henry got his first tooth last week. So you can maybe guess. Anyway. The lucky part is I didn’t give him the bright red Tylenol until after the last spit up. (Pro tip: If you are holding a baby and you feel his tummy suddenly kind of rumble in a bad way, point him away from you.)

Also, ignore Henry’s skepticism about Night Vision. It really is an excellent book. He is too young to really understand poetry.

File this one under PS3612.U686Z46 2018 for American literature—Individual authors—2001-—L—Biography and Criticism—Autobiography, journals, memoirs. By date.