Fri, Jun 19 - Wellwellwell Willer-lee-doo!, it's been awhile since I blatantly posted drunk. What can I accomplish? Can I post a cartoon? Apparently so. But a systematic though broken checking regime will be necessary (will be faut, as the French would sorta have it) to ensure at least some fragment of this update is readable. Fri, June 12 - A Nice Number Ah, 12. Divisible by three, four and two. And six! Not by ten or five, sure, but you click comfortably into the 10-5 system with quickly terminating rationals. 12, you're a great number. Next time I'm out and toasting, 12, I'm gonna toast you first. You earned it. Weak Force this link and The New Physics by Paul Davies, just so I remember it. Fri, June 5 - Coercion You know folks, I don't take enough time on this site to thank y'all for coming here even though you're not coerced. No one's forcing you to come here every so often to look at my cartoons. You do it of your own free will. That's great. The last thing I want is some damn bureaucrat in Washington using my tax dollars to mandate your consumption of this web site. No. I want that to be your choice and yours alone. Speaking of which, The 10 Doctors I already posted elsewhere on this but... well, I'll just repost: Okay, folks, if you ever liked Doctor Who, get thee to http://comics.shipsinker.com/category/dr-who/ http://comics.shipsinker.com/the-ten-doctors/ (pdf version) for an insanely well done, 250+ page fan-made graphic novel bringing all 10 Doctors together in one story. Drawn with a loose, expressive style like what I would do if I had the talent, patience or devotion, this sprawling, continuous epic is positively stuffed with Doctors, companions, enemies, plot twists and more. I stumbled across this last night at 1 am and couldn't stop until 2:30. Packed I say PACKED with Time Lordy goodness. Oh man. F'real. Fri, May 29 - And the Livin's Easy Well, I don't know about you folks, but I'm enjoying what from my angle appears to be the onset of summer, or at least solid spring. 'Twas the weather back in Edmonton and it was perfect, big ol' blue Albertan skies like no other. Ideal for scrotossing, and toss we did. Good times. Terminator Salvation isn't very good. I'm not telling you anything you probably haven't already heard, and I don't really have any particular angle on why it fails. I just know that, 10 minutes in, I was distractedly wondering how Skynet maintains its industrial base. I mean, seriously now: where do Terminators come from? Automated factories, I'd always figured without thinking about it, but when it really comes down to it, that makes no sense. Even the most automated factory needs people to operate it and supply it with raw materials. So was it off-duty Terminators who shlepped around the post-Judgment Day America, driving trucks full of steel to the Terminator/Hunter-Killer plant? These were the thoughts I had rather than, say, thoughts about the movie. Just muddy and flavorless, really. Cartoon? Sure, why not. Thu, May 21 - Glurk! Forgot somehow, in the midst of all the frantic I'm-taking-off-the-weekend correspondences and duties, that I had a web site to update. Got so wrapped up in making the next cartoon I done momentarily forgot this one even existed! Fri, May 15 - Vulcanized It seems I'm not entirely done with the new Star Trek movie. But First Hey! Got some new Peggle Nights replays for y'all, now check'em here here here! A Tall Place I was at one. How tall? This tall: I stared down at the whole of Seattle. I glanced behind my shoulder thinking my house was that way, my behind-my-shoulder way, not realizing I was so high above that no, my place was fully in view because I was so tall up. I was in the tallest place there was. I quailed and cracked nervous jokes about class distinctions, that was how tall up I was. It was a good time, being up that high and watching the rarely clear sun drop below the lower mountains before me. I liked the people to whom I spoke, highest above as all we were. But I'm honestly glad that I, after all the aboveness, trolled back down to the surface and strolled, strolled, strolled, up and down and down and up in the way of Seattle streets back to where I'm used to drinking, back to the good ol' Two Bells, where I was pleased to meet lovely folk in their own right. And Finally I owe a friend some links and here they are. MVMGR.com is, from what I'm told, Seattle's ultimate Life Coaching and Management Service, while MVWHAT.com seems to be some place you can set up a Drupal site. What is a Drupal site? Why gosh, friends, it's a site where you can set up a site! A Drupal site, no less! Must Sleep So I shall. Fri, May 8 - I Confess I didn't like the new Star Trek movie. I know, I know... I'm the only person on Terra who feels this way. Believe me; it's lonely. But, as I've been known to say, the heart, she makes her own rules. But enough about all of that! Here's a cartoon! Spoilers The thing is, this new Star Trek movie forced me to realize I was more of a Trekkie than I thought. I believed I had a good distance from Star Trek, appreciating its solid dramatics and soaring imaginations while still maintaining a nice patronizing amusement at its flaws, goofy charms and ill-served premises. But no. Turns out I'm more committed than I thought cuz here comes this new movie and without getting into specfics of the plot, it essentially and explicitly takes all preceeding Star Trek stories and burns them to ash. It makes it so that they never happened. There's a scene in the movie where stuff was going down where I suddenly felt an internal clench, a sick lurch in my gut as I realized, well, there goes "Journey to Babel," that story can never happen, and a few minutes later I'm like holy crap, well, there goes "Amok Time." And Tuvok. And, well, Jesus, all of it. Everything that ever happened in the original series or the next generations has been erased. The only part of the old Star Trek universe that escapes the nullification is, sickeningly, Enterprise. Fucking Enterprise. See what I mean? I mean, who cares, right? It's not as though all those episodes and movies have disappeared off the planet. It's not like I can never watch them again. They're all still there. And if I liked I could even imagine the old Star Trek timeline happily going about its business, serenely unaware of this new one. Which should be fine. Except... all of us in this universe, our living universe, we're stuck with the new Star Trek timeline. So what do I have against this new one? Is it just pique at my sense of its treatment of the old? Probably. It's like the Onion story "Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as 'Fun, Watchable,'" except without the irony. I admit it: I decry this film as breezy, entertaining and easily accessible to anyone regardless of how much he or she knows about pon farr. Certainly the douchey circumstances of the screening where I saw it the first time didn't help my mood much. Perhaps I was just grumpy. I wanted to like it, and perhaps I still can. I plan to see it again; maybe I'll like it better the second time. I hope so. And yet... it still bugs me. It's all about recreating the classic Star Trek set of characters --Kirk, Spock, McCoy, the rest-- in all their classic Star Trek roles --captain, first officer, doctor, and so on-- with one caveat: they're all fifteen years too young. It's Star Trek Babies. The whole movie is about handing the Starfleet flagship car keys to a quirky bunch of college kids and while people are giving the Wolverine movie crap for silly plotting nobody except me is bitching about Star Trek's nonstop flow of contorted situations and contrived circumstances all directed towards cramming this 20-year-old Kirk kid into the captain's chair against all reason. But it doesn't have to make sense. It's just supposed to get the characters in the scene so they can play off each other and they do. I actually like the cast. They felt like their characters and the relationships clicked. I just couldn't get that nagging irritation out of my head about why they all had to be so frustratingly junior. Last week in a headline I referred to the movie as Star Trek Light. I reiterate and say that it is light, not only in its visual style, light streaming into your face all the time from ferociously illuminating lamps and suns from just offscreen, but also light in the massive or antimassive sense, as in lacking weight, filamentary, without substance. It's about nothing other than setting up its own premise. It does this, lightly, easily, wiping the dirt away and presenting cleaner and shinier versions of all and who we loved without their old accrusted details. Let's start over! Forget the grimy past; forward on! And yes, perhaps, it may be true that every glint and hint of meaning we derive from this past-wiped creature draws its flash power and bright entertainment from the hardwon ugly lame silly goofy clunky stories told by men and women older than us and wiser, still, still, isn't that good and fun enough? I dunno. Maybe seeing the movie with a jazzed crowd having fun instead of a bunch of stiffs will change my heart. We'll see. She's stubborn. Fri, May 1 - May Day Apparently people celebrate this, or have. Or is it another day in May? Don't know too much about it m'self. Something about flagpoles and loops of ribbon and burning people alive in giant stick effigies... I can't keep up. What I can do, however, is deliver unto you a cartoon. Star Trek Light I saw Star Trek. I'm... I'm... I'm gonna hold off for a bit. One, I don't want to needlessly spoil people, and two, I haven't fully sorted out my thoughts. Dinosaurs that Walk and Roar While They Walk This, on the other hand, was an astonishing experience. I expected a traveling museum with robot dinosaurs in pens on the floor and you'd walk around and look at the dinosaurs, sorta like the thing they had in Edmonton a few years back. Instead I sat in a seat and watched all the major dinosaurs march around on the concrete like they were really there. Dudes lay in incredibly flat and low to the ground dolly/gokarts underneath, a single pole of metal sticking into the dino's guts, holding it up enough that its legs, lashed to back-and-forth to shuttles on the dollykarts, stepped and moved as though it was walking. Their heads craned around, looked at things, nudged things, ate things. These are bus-sized and bigger creatures walking around. I sat there totally baffled about how they got these huge puppets to do all that stuff with nothing more than being perched on a steel pipe. Crazy. From Single Cells to Multicellular Organisms Nifty. Fri, Apr 24 - Nearer, nearer... The new Star Trek movie approaches, closening with every second, drawing into range with all the destructive power and majesty of a Valdore-class Warbird. See! See as it decloaks before us, arrogantly becoming visible to an entire universe! I would not care to stand against it, not at all. Speaking of attackers, Art Art Art! Not Art Show, not this time. No, I'm talking about the Peggle Art Contest. I just received a terse, urgent telegram from Bjorn Unicorn. He didn't go into details but I got the impression he was hurting for entries for the contest. He's too proud to say anything directly about it, of course. Me, I'm not too proud to anything. I'll gladly beg. Like this: Please enter the Peggle Art Contest! You can win money along with other less transactable goods! Do it! Do it NOW! THIS IS BEGGING! Fri, April 17 - I Just Realized it was Thursday night. And don't I usually do something on Thursday nights? Drink gin & sodas, yeah, did that, bummed around on the Internet, yep, got that covered, it wasn't that, something else, don't tell me, something liiiiiiiiiiike... update a web site? Dammit! That's it! I knew there was something! Fri, Apr 10 - Tax Denial Still haven't done 'em, partly because I've felt just a little too busy to pop over to the H&R Block to set up an appointment and partly because I know I'm gonna owe a distressing amount of money. Stupid income. Anyway, how about a cartoon? **Quickie Sat Apr 11 Update: Sorry for being too advanced to get the link image working right. Should be fixed now.** We Make Stuff Hey, Seattle readers! Come check out our Art Show! Yeah, the one I mentioned two weeks ago! The art's already up on the walls at Two Bells and the reception is this Saturday from 7pm till close. If you're on the FaceBook, you can see info about the show here. If you're not, well, it's at Two Bells, which is at 2313 4th Ave. It's a pretty neat show; lots of different pieces, plenty of variety. Folks are saying it's one of the best Two Bells art shows ever and while that ain't a particularly high bar, still, nice. Should be a good time. Gonna have to pace myself. Must drink beer instead of triple gin&sodas. Can't black out too early. Fri, Apr 3 - Emerald City Comic-Con No, I'm not going. Or rather, I'll likely go but I don't have a table. Every year ECC-C rolls around and every year I smack myself and think, dammit, I should really get a table next year, particularly as this con has become a Mecca of sorts for webcomics folks. But so far I'm just too damn stupid to remember to get a table. Maybe next year! Yeah! Anyway, Man, that strip was kinda accurate when I drew it but holy is it ever not now. Plant Zombie All-Out Attack I don't know about you guys, but Wednesday for me was Official FaceBook Plants vs. Zombies Spam Day. Virtually every PopCap FaceBook friend I have made some kind of mention of the debut of the charming-ass Plants vs. Zombies music video. Not me, though. I held off so I could do my spamming here. And spam I so since darn it, the video really has profound donkey-charming powers. And if you like the video, damn, you just wait for the game. It's coming out in just over a month and it's a corker. Fri, Mar 27 -- And Furthermore What was I saying? Nothing? Sheer babble? Well all right then. Let's proceed directly to the newest cartoon! Art Show For all y'all living in Seattle, many of us artistically inclined folks at PopCap have an art show coming up. I'm not sure exactly when the opening is, but we're supposed to have our stuff ready for up-putting by Wednesday, April 8, so I imagine it'd be soon after that. It'll be at the lovely Two Bells tavern in non-sunny Belltown, home of many delicious soups, and I expect --nay, I know-- there will be plenty of neato art. More specific details to follow when I have them. Come check it out and eat soup! Fri, Mar 20 - YeeeHOOOO!! Well, now , you folks havin' a good time? Yeah? Despite the collapse and the general unspoken unrealized ruin of things? Well then double good on ya! Cuz right now our belief is the only thing holding this weak broken superstructure together! YEAAAAAAH! But Bob, you say, shouldn't we build a better superstructure, one not destined to fail in the same way all others prior have? To which I would say, sure! Or rather, not likely. ALL superstructures will fail eventually. But they can help us sets get to better sets. So if you've got a brillianceful idea or a wondernotion in hand, please deliver your thoughtstuff to the appropriate authoritites at once. They're lookin'. Challenging? Yes, yes, there are challenges out there. Too many for any one man or female to face. But perhaps if we all assault them at once we might get it done? Practice here. I was drinking at the Two Bells and one of my co-drinkers broke out a phrase I would invariably have used as the title but the gin&sodas create a fog such that I do not recall. Dammit! Ah, well. At least there's a cartoon. Peggle Art Contest, Dammit! Bjorn Unicorn has been harping on this all week but let me add my words to his. There's a Peggle Art Contest. You can win things. Enter enter enter. Make Peggle-related art and submit it. FUN! Watchmen Look 2 I re-watched Watchmen last Friday and have modified my approach. I decided to imagine how I'd feel if there was no such thing as a Watchmen comic. If this movie had simply sprung into the world with no precursor like The Fifth Element. In that case, if I'm to be honest with myself, I would have swooned. I would have gushed about the audaciously insane images. The blue guy. The spinning WatchThing on Mars. The totally rounded-off uncool design of the Owlship. I would have applauded the gore, the bone-breaking and the fucking as tough, shocking, groundbreaking. But if you'd asked me what the movie meant, what its purpose was, what it asserted about the human condition, what it had to say, then... then... then I'd likely have backed away into a contemplative silence about these questions, blustering all the way about "changing peoples' perceptions" and "crazy images" as I tried to figure out what I really thought. And then we run into the recursion. My sense of comics and superheroes is built on almost twenty years of after-Watchmen comics history. If there had been no Watchmen could I possibly have had the same viewpoint about how superheroes were portrayed in big Hollywood movies in 2009? Unlikely. For the sake of argument, let's say there was no Watchmen but there had been a The Dark Knight Returns. Both books broke open superheroes and opened the genre up to more complex possibilitites than it had been able to previously explore. As Moore himself has complained, the large result of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns' deconstruction of superheroism was two decades of dark, brutal, ugly and unforgiving comics. As a child of those two decades I'd have to agree, but I wouldn't give it up if it meant sacrificing some of the fine comics that were made along the way, a whole lot of them really recently. Was I talking about something? Oh yeah, the Watchmen movie. It's still the same movie. It broadcasts Moore and Gibbons' visions and images out to the pop culture times a hundred more than they'd ever been before. It doesn't really get what the book had to say, so mesmerized it was by the cool moments and virtuosities. I can't blame it. I imagine all the clumsier, more idiotic Watchmen movies out there in maybespace and I can't hate. If anything, Snyder's Watchmen thrashed with machetes into the jungled Watchmen movie maybespace and prepared the way for something altogether more astonishing in, say, 20 years. Fri, Mar 6 - Ah Makes Curtoons Got one right hear. Watchmen When you first pick up Watchmen and flip through its pages, it usually fails to impress. The sour colors and formal 3x3 panel layout don't instantly gratify, don't immediately signal the high points or deliver actiony punch-ups. There are few giant splash pages of superheroic battle (Ozymadias' destruction of his assassin being one of the few exceptions). It looks like there's a lot of talking in it. It looks like there's a lot of reading. Once you do read it, though, you discover it's a masterpiece of technique. Virtuoso structuring plays out before your eyes, scenes interleaved together with dialogue from each scene playing off the other, vast symmetries of pages mirroring pages, palindromic chapters, sprawling dozens of major and minor plot threads flung out and woven tight back together into a confounding knot. To use the obvious metaphor, Watchmen has all the meticulous care and internal perfection of a fine handcrafted Swiss watch. It's more machine than book, or it would be if Moore didn't genuinely care about all the characters and their awkward, vulnerable moments. Which brings us to Zack Snyder's Watchmen. There is little vulnerable or awkward here; this is the kickass Watchmen. And it is very kickass. Tons of special effects. Eye candy handed out like candy. People gettin' exploded and arms snapped in half. Objects getting' taken apart and rotated! Rorschach knows kungfu! And there's tits! And dongs! Racy stuff! Wow! Snyder's clearly loyal in his way to the book, putting together a greatest hits of Watchmen scenes, recreating some of them to the panel. He thinks Watchmen is cool so he's making the cool Watchmen and that's what his Watchmen ends up being: cold. Watchmen is an adult comic, so Snyder made sure his Watchmen was adult, except his idea of adult is less about wisdom, compassion or maturity and more about bone-cracking brutality. Where the book has humor, the film has gore. Where the book has taste and class and frailty, the movie has a porny fuck scene. For a film so devoted to recreating the book, its glorification of violence and mindless action sure do exemplify the very things the book was written to oppose. Oh well. Better luck next time! Oh, and as Hitler so rightly puts it, not going with the squid is a total cop-out. Hey! Why not go to PeggleFever.com while you're at it? Fri, Feb 27 - Wonder of Wonders Con, that is. By which I mean Wondercon, all up in your grille if you happen to be in San Francisco this weekend and, you know, going to it. If you are, do pop by the Artists' Alley area and say "Howdy!" or something similar. Here's a cartoon. Strange Ink Some of you folks may remember a few months ago (like, April of last year) a kerfluffle regarding a cover illustration I'd done for Vue Weekly lo these many years ago. Well, an alert reader sent in this wacky image of same illustration actually impressed into someone's skin. Evidently this image came from the VancouverIsAwesome site which seems to aver that Vancouver is, in fact, awesome. Certainly this tattoo supports their case. Fri, Feb 20 - WonderCon!!! Comin' up real fast, next week in San Francisco at the Moscone center. I've never been to the Moscone center. I've never been to WonderCon. So much newness. I may even eat at a new restaraunt this time! Gasp! If I'm not careful I'll surely overload my Fever le Fever Peggle Yeah, yeah, I know I've been jabbering about PeggleFever.com lately but hey, we've got some funny stuff there. And Peggle is a great game so I don't even feel the least bit guilty. Fri, Feb 13 - Terrorfying Yep, I'm actually considering seeing the new Friday the 13th movie. Don't know why, exactly, but somehow it calls to me, whispers in my eyes of dreams and butchery, all while taking soft, delicate sips of Fever Catch it. It's Peggly n' stuff, like jelly. All at PeggleFever.com. Laffs, they reside there. Thu, Feb 12 - Peggle Fever. Not Game. PeggleFever.com Last week when I spoke about Pegglegame.com I was really talking about PeggleFever.com. PeggleFever.com is the thing about which I spoke and PeggleFever.com is what I'm blabbing about right now. Why am I blabbing? Cuz, well, straight up, I'm writing gags for PeggleFever.com, (vetted, of course, through Peggle Institute heamaster Bjorn Unicron). Why am I bringing this up now? Only cuz I figure if you're reading this, this angryflower.com, you might well enjoy some of what Bjorn has to say. He's a very smart cat, even smarter cuz he's not a cat but unicorn. Plus, he's all about day and night Peggle. He knows the THING. Fri, Feb 6 - Push That's what it's called, I hear, when you edit your web page and then transmit those edits to the servers hosting your site. It's a push, as in you push your site. Apparently it can be complicated if your site uses any of that newfangled stuff they've built since the 20th century but I wouldn't know about that. I wouldn't know about that at all. Peggle. Reloaded. I don't want to get folks' hopes up, I don't want to alarm or entice folks unnecessarily, I don't want to promise anything that I can't deliver or point people to things that don't exist. But I have it on reasonably good authority that sometime within the next, say, 16 hours, there will be something going on at PeggleFever.com. Check back a couple of times if at first you fail to meet success. Rumors are flying around in my head, different aspects of my personality insisting one thing or the other, but I'm confident at the very least Bjorn Unicorn, headmaster of the Peggle Institute, will be blogging regularly. I hear he has lots to say about administering the universe's foremost Peggle establishment, and if those pigs at the Peggle Academy say different, don't listen. Fri, Jan 30 - Winds o' Change Well, Obama's first week-'n-a-bit seems not too bad. Opened up stem cell research, allowed funding for groups that perform abortions, passed his stimulus bill... got some stuff done. Hell, he even pledged to close Guantanamo in a year. Sounds good, though we'll have to check back in a year to see how it went. I just hope he knows what he's letting himself in for. Fri, Jan 23 - Supa Fresh Sometimes... honestly, I don't know. Ideas bubble up when I'm 3/7ths asleep and they seem to insist on being made into cartoons. Trying to pin down the rationality behind it, the reasons or logic from which it drew its existence... futile. Popstrips! You what there hasn't been a lot of on this page for the last little while? Want a hint? A bigger one than the little sub-headline above this sentence? Okay, you got it: Popstrips! I guess that's not so much a hint and more simply telling you. Anyway, here's one, and there are a few more on the Popstrips page. Fri, Jan 16 - Riddance Whew! What an era that was, huh? Ol' Dubya bein' president, buildings getting blowed up, people getting blowed up, stuff all bein' wacky and YouTube comin' along. Quite a ride it's been with ol' George. Yep. Fri, Jan 9 - Nooz Yeer Yep, it went down, oh-eight became oh-nine with a cheer and a spatter of butter. Good times! I hope y'all enjoyed yourselves and are fresh, rested and ready to start being disappointed by Barack Obama. As promised, yarsh, almost three weeks ago, I got a couple of cartoons for you. More? Okay, fine. Here's another. Dispirited I saw The Spirit on my holiday. It is bad, worse than people are saying, even. I don't get it. I've heartily enjoyed other of Frank Miller's works. I feel certain he's seen a cinemovie-picture before. He's shown taste and an ear for tone in past. What happened? Why did he lard his dialogue with gratingly repeated words? Why did he stick Sam Jackson in a Nazi outfit? Why did he drop cliche after cliche? He must like Eisner's original comic, otherwise why make the movie? But in that case, why make this movie? It was kinda depressing, so here's a web page with a bunch of Will Eisner's Sprit pages on it showing that Eisner was a damn fine cartoonist no matter how shitty Miller's movie is. Tue, Dec 23 - Snowmward Bound Wow. "Snowmward." That is serioulsy inelegant right there. But how else to summarize in one awful neologism both the homewardness of my to-Edmonton departure and the snowfulness of the past few days? There's no way. It had to be done. Okay, so here's this week's strip: And that's it for 2008. But on my return in 2009 there shall be cartoons. Cartoons like and So stay tuned! Replay Sauce Been a while since I posted any replays on the Replays page, so here's a bunch. They're all for Peggle Nights. Cuz that game's cool. And hey, if you like Peggle Nights, go get the free Bonus Levels we made. They too are cool. Sat, Dec 20 - Doof! I dunno how it happened, but Thursday AND Friday whistled by without me realizing I hadn't done my update. Shame on me! Maybe that's why I slipped on the ice and seriously effed up my hand last night, just as a friendly reminder from fate. Hey fate--fuck you! Fri, Dec 12 - Tears of Joy Just got back from a little Jonathan Richman action over at the Triple Door venue here in unsunny Seattle. For obvious reasons I was hoping he'd play When Harpo, which he didn't, but he still banged out a stirry rendition of I Was Dancing in a Lesbian Bar, getting some clapalong work out of the crowd seated in dinner theatre-like rows and tables. Strange setup for a rock show, even one as elfish and folksy as this; I expected to mill around in a darkened cuberoom stomping my feet and splashing gin & sodas on unidentified shapes. But no, it was oddly upscale. I wonder if he does those kinds of divey venues any more. Hmmm... shall I post a cartoon for you folks? Shall I? I shall! Fri, Dec 5 - The Last Frontier Hey, any of you folks read Dan Simmons' Hyperion? Or any of Iain Banks' Culture novels? I sure hope so, or else this next comic probably isn't gonna have a whole pile of appeal. Zanadu Redux Just wanna throw in another plug for Zanadu Comics here in Seattle and the availability of within. Breaking: Obama not American-Born This just makes me like him more. Geek cred, yo. Fri, Nov 28 - Poultry Meat I never really know when Thanksgiving goes down. As one of those "first-weekend-of-such-and-such month" holidays it confuses me, whether it's in its Canadian or American form. All I know is that it's an opportunity to eat some roast birdflesh and breadlike stuffing material. I am okay with this. The strip this week concerns one ZANADU! No, not a misspelling of the Coleridge pleasuredome locale or the Newton-John rollerskating musical, but rather the comic store in downtown Seattle Zanadu, who were kind enough to take a couple copies of Pamplemousse, ie. this thing on consignment. So if any of you readers out there in readerland happen to live in Seattle, please, do give some honest consideration to going down there and buying a copy. Fri, Nov 21 - Pie Meat pie, to be exact, built from ingredients Wednesday night and consumed entire at lunch the next day in some form of "pot luck" sacrifice. I hadn't made crust in years, certainly since I moved to America, so to complete that basic task gave me considerable satisfaction. The reduced mess of ground beef, pork sausage, red and green pepers, onion, tomatoes, cheese and one too many bouillon cubes encased in the crust also proved tasty for an additional dimension of satisfaction. And I must confess I find myself proud that it all got eaten. I only wish I'd taken a picture. Perhaps I'll make another pie and take a picture of it. Anyway, I'm sure you all would like a cartoon. Why else would you be here? So, in the spirit of service and givingness, I present it. Fri, Nov 14 - Breath deep! Smell that? It's air. Air and freedom. Smells good. Or does it? A Replay! What else? Well, there's a reader-sent Peggle replay now resident shockingly on the Peggle Replays page! Yow! Paul Notley's 100 Fave Movie Murders! Sadly, it's a bit too late for Hallowe'en this year, but if you think about it, it's a great Christmas list too! Featuring the movie title, victim character name, victim actor and cause of death, Paul's murder list is a holiday-riffic tour de meutre! And Still, do buy Fri, Nov 7 - Whew... That was a close one. Well, not really. In truth it wasn't close at all but it sure felt that way right up until it went down. So much cheering, so many well wishes, so much partying and intense, intense drinking, it's hard to believe it's all over. I feel kinda spent now. What else is there to care about except for self-improvement? And maybe stuff? Hmmm... I do love stuff. BUY ME! And by me I don't mean me, Stephen Notley, author of this web site. I mean me as in Pamplemousse Fri, Oct 31 -- Miss Hallowe'en As in I'm missing it, or at least it as I know it. I'll be in San Francisco this year, being there a day early for APE, the Alternative Press Expo. I fear having to wake up in time to set up a booth for 10 to sell comics for eight hours might put a crimp in my Hallowe'en partying. But even more than that, I fear that it won't. I still have my PopCap costume to put together, so I'm gonna make this yet another brief update. Here's the strip: Here's a link to the Peggle Replays page, which includes some Peggle Nights replays from a fella who's been tearing up the Facebook PopCap page with his Nights-themed wallpapers. And here's my book you should buy. Pamplemousse Fri, Oct 24 - Said it Before And I'll likely say it again, but man, I am really sleepy right now. Comes of late-night X-Coming and late night post-drinking and not scraping together eight hours of sleep over the last three days. So I hope you'll forgive me if I post this up real quick and get to slumberin'. Also You should buy this: Pamplemousse It's funny. Fri, Oct 17 - Gin Is good, provided you douse it with some soda. Not tonic, my longtime mistake, but soda. Don't have too much to blather about this week other than Linda Duncan fresh-minted Member of Parliament for Edmonton-Strathcona WOOOOOOOO YEAHHHHHHH WOOOOO I totally voted for her and she completely won YEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!. First time I've ever voted for a winning candidate in a federal election. Feels good. Cartoon to follow. Fri, Oct 10 - Next week: Election Day! Canadian election, of course. In retrospect I feel bad blathering all last week about the tawdry American freakshow while giving not even a whisper of a mention to the English-language Leaders Debate the same night. Truth is, I hadn't seen it. And I still haven't seen it, but I got it here, so I'm gonna watch it right now. Here's the strip in the meantime. Huh. Fiesty talk about carbon taxes. Harper's actually pretty decent in the hot seat. Dion's accent is from space; it's like he's doing the exact off-beat for every English word. Duceppe absolutely will not let go of his reimbursable tax credits. Layton is bulldoggy, far more than anybody would dare in American presidential politics. "Either you don't care, or you're incompetent. Which is it?" Yow! Earlier updates? Here!