Archive for November, 2009
8 items.
Food safety is a topic we, as human beings, should all be concerned about. Did you know that over forty billion people die each year due to turkey-related injuries? You should!
Those unfamiliar with ZZ Top point yourselves this way.
I am writing this on Thanksgiving and my brain is a little muddled from turkey and apple pie so I am going to keep this news post brief. I hope everyone had a lovely start to the holiday season!
Today is Black Friday and for those of you involved in retail, my heart goes out to you. Truly. You are brave souls and you deserve commendations for your courage. Should you perish, I will do my best to hold memorial services.
Addendum: What is with me and beards lately? Three strips in a row featuring ridiculous beards…
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Macbeth is, really, the only play written by William Shakespeare that I actually enjoy. It is strange, it is fairly sophisticated, and it has some very interesting themes to speak on about power, greed, and corruption. However, the entirety of the play hangs on one pivotal element I feel is just too stupid to pass up: Macbeth leaving that damned forest alone. If you’ve never read or seen the play, Macbeth is told (act 4, scene 1), by a ghostly child no less, that he will not be vanquished until a particular forest near his castle marches to his walls. Seeing as how a forest can’t really move, he lets the matter go like the idiot he is. I don’t care how awesome you are or how bullshit you think that prophecy is, you burn the damned forest. Problem solved. King forever.
I’ve also always thought that a ghostly child handing out sage wisdom was incredibly hilarious. Who thinks of this shit? Oh yeah, Shakespeare, right. The greatest writer who ever lived.
Seriously though, it’s a great play and I highly recommend it. I’m not a huge fan of theater, but there are some things you just can’t miss out on. Do yourself a favour, and read it online. You’ll feel awesome when you quote Shakespeare at your friends and sound super intelligent.
Thanksgiving is just around the corner for those of us in Ye Olde United States! Time to feast like gluttonous fools and remember how awesome it was when white people decimated native Americans with smallpox, war, and general douchebaggery! Woo!
Wait, that’s not what it’s about? It damn well should be.
Have a good Thanksgiving! Or a good Thursday for those of you that don’t like parties and dinners based entirely around fowl.
Väinämöinen is a supremely badass figure in mythology.
Finnish folklore and mythology in particular are full of wizards and magic of all sorts. The culture and history of the Finnish people is rife with interesting stories and ideas that aren’t really reflected in many other cultures. They are unique in many ways, anthropologically speaking. It stands to reason that a people with a history of totally awesome magicians may be able to provide far better entertainment to our pathetic modern culture. I’m looking at you Harry Potter. You pussy.
In case you’re wondering, I do have a vendetta against JK Rowling’s iconic character. I made it through three of the books before giving up entirely. I wanted to like the damn things, they had so much potential, but as a franchise hell bent on keeping up with its readers as they aged, it presented some rather horrible scenarios wherein the main character could act like a supreme douche and get away with it. I found it intolerable.
I look at ancient myths and find infinitely more value than anything writers today can live up to.
This is, personally, my favourite strip so far. Comic writers shouldn’t have favourites, probably, but I do. I can’t help it. I love mythology and I always want to learn more about it. I guess this is more the sort of comic I’d thought of when I started Happle Tea and maybe we’ll see more strips like this. It’s been a tough semester at school and I’d like to spend more time writing strips once the Winter arrives and I hole up in my cave for months on end.
Also, I attempted to record myself drawing this strip but the software and website I used weren’t really great. I am going to attempt it again with some other things next week, I think. If you’d like to check it out anyway, you can view it here. Because of the quality, a lot of it is inexplicable and because of my internet connection the roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes it took to produce is broken up into 4 unequal parts.
Oh, and I’ve been updating randomly at the blog, if you’re into that sort of thing. There are some sketchbook drawings and backgrounds from a simple pencil animation I’ve been working on.
And a big thanks again to my brother, Jonathan, for being totally awesome and always supporting me. And helping me with my writing when I need it. Thanks bro!
Yes, you can buy ghosts in China Town. You can get anything in that place, you just have to look.
The strip is slightly late again, please accept my apologies. I had crafted a strange experiment wherein the strip was presented in four, wide, vertically stacked panels. When I came home to finish working on it at 10pm, the file completely failed to open so I had to start from scratch. I figured the comic gods had deemed it an extravagance and done away with it. First time that’s ever happened.
I guess there’s nothing like a little consistency, eh?
It’s crunch time at school for the next week or so and things are spinning out of control pretty quickly. I ended up animating 25 seconds of work in 2 days just to get it over with and I feel like my brain is melting out of my skull. Couple that with sleeping only 3-4 hours a night and you have a dangerous cocktail.
That’s right, Sweet William’s love of stupid puns is rubbing off on me. I must fight against it!
I also must figure out how to start generating some revenue with the website. Would you guys be interested in buying prints if our store were set up nicely and I had more ridiculous things on offer? The reason I say this is that I’ve had a lot of people interested in buying happle tea books next spring, but to do that, I need money. Unfortunately, living in Boston, not having a job, and doing 70+ hours of work every week between school and this comic doesn’t leave much for my printing fund.
Let me know, I’m interested to hear what you might want, dear readers <3
I’d rather not shift over to advertising…I hate those ugly boxes mucking up beautifully designed websites…
With the media and everyone else in the goddamn world in a panic over swine flu, it seems that we may have overlooked a crucial connection. Allow me to hit you with some logic.
-The new H1N1 strain of Swine Flu arose first from birds, then pigs.
-Who eats birds and pigs? Humans.
-Birds and pigs, therefore, have motivation for destroying humanity.
-Working in tandem, avian and swine contact Al-Quaeda
-The nefarious criminals create a deadly cocktail of diseases, hoping for one to stick
-The H1N1 virus spends time in birds, then invades pigs, and eventually hits humanity like a flaming school bus full of those weird russian nesting dolls
-Humanity panics, missing the point entirely
That’s right. Your food is out to kill you. The tables have been turned.
At least, that’s how the screenplay I would write would go. Did I mention that I am awesome at coming up with incredibly relevant Hollywood Blockbusters?
Let me be absolutely clear here, Sasquatch may or may not be Lil K’s dad. There are rumours that Sasquatch may once, sometime in the past, have had a child. These sources go on to say that he could, conceivably, produce additional offspring. They conclude by stating that Sasquatch is, probably, a male. Or something. They think he exists. Well, maybe he does.
Let’s be sort of hazy.
Okay, but seriously, Sasquatch can’t be Lil K’s biological father, they look nothing alike and Sasquatch is terrible with words while Lil K has a firm grasp on the English language. His foster father? Undoubtedly.
Overuse of emphasis.
In other news, things are getting back to a sense of normalcy or what passes for it in these parts. We are extremely busy developing several comic concepts (some more ridiculous than others) and I am writing the script and doing final passes on 10kM’s first animation project. Things have been terribly busy and it is becoming extremely difficult to keep up! Next semester will, thankfully, be better.
I will have an animatic to show you all soon hopefully from a short animation I am doing with my girlfriend for our final project in Animation Basics 2.
I am also considering doing some screen capturing of my work on a comic strip as I keep getting email about how I work with gradients and textures and things like that. I’d love to do it but my work is so mixed up it’s hard to figure out a time I could do this. Perhaps I will try it for next Tuesday’s strip.
The japanese in this strip reads: “Welcome! I’m Little Kei”
Today’s strip is by William Gibbons, author and artist of Para-Ten and my main bro in 10kM.
As much as we may think we are unique in this world, no manner of strange living is completely without peer. William’s strip for today illustrates that maybe, just maybe, every one of us can find something in common with people of far-off nations.
I’d like to say thanks to William for filling in on today’s strip, he did it with very little notice and I commend him on an awesome idea. He’d actually drawn this character, Lil Kei, in class at one point and I laughed so hard at it, I’d hoped he’d do a guest strip with him in it and lo, here it is. It would appear that Sasquatch’s equivalent in Japan is a tengu.
Anyway, thanks William! We will be back to our regularly scheduled Happle Tea updates on Tuesday.
I always thought it was hilarious that authority figures would ever take kid/teen detectives of any sort seriously. The majority of them were, in some way, related to police officers or mayors or whatever but the idea that kids would know how to solve a case is ludicrous. I will be honest, I was a pretty smart little kid, but solving real crimes was out of my league.
This strip raises some interesting questions:
1) Is Sasquatch a detective? Is this why K is involved in sleuthing?
2) Is Allev a boy or a girl?
3) What the hell is that monster in panel 3?
I can answer the third question. It is the dread popobawa.
I will leave you in the dark on the other two questions.
This is the first time I’ve been late with a post and I am loathe to admit it here in the news space where it will be forever immortalized. The strip is a whole 29 minutes late and it is a huge bummer. Unfortunately, life has stepped in the way of work at the moment and my presence is required home for family business. Because of the work load at school I haven’t got a back-log of comics to utilize. Normally, this is not an issue as I can keep up with the strip in spite of mammoth courseloads, disease, famine, and sundry other afflictions. However, this event has surprised everyone and so I am (hopefully) leaving you in the capable hands of Sweet William for Thursday. If need be, I may find a stand-in for Tuesday as well, but we will see.
William has not agreed to this but we were talking about him doing a guest strip again earlier today, so here’s hoping!
Also, don’t forget about the forums and the store!