Bazooka-Zooka Bubblegum!

www.bazookajoe.com
They've been showing a couple commercials for their new gum lately, the baseball one still kills me.
I started our 3rd batch of root beer a few days ago. I may have already fucked it up, but we won't know yet for a while. If Kevin or I had bothered to actually read ALL the directions (we're men, why would we?), we'd have realized that we were supposed to store it in a cool location for another week FOLLOWING the 4 days we let it sit out. That's apparently how the flavors settle in and the carbonation stabilizes. So now, hopefully, this batch will taste awesome. I also put some cinnamon in it, so we'll see what that does.
I got the new Golden Brown done, but I refuse to put it out until Friday morning. I've decided that I can be late, but I can't be early. Trust me, it just works out better for me that way, so stick it.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and...Damn It, the Recipe's Still Not Quite Right

I haven't had a whole lot going on since last week, but I'll throw in a quick summary:
We got back yesterday from Devils Lake, and we're still detoxing. My dad goes pretty overboard with the junkfood when we come over, and we end up like little piggies by the time we head home. I finally got a new cell phone, also! It's much better than the old one.
Kevin & I tried our 2nd batch of home-brewed root beer tonight. It was a bit of a disappointment, but not as nasty as the other batch, so that's progress. We also realized we need to keep a record of our root beers to find out what could be improved upon. There is also talk of alcoholic root beer, but don't get your hopes up until we can find a good recipe first.
The more I read of Dr. McNinja, the more I love it. It's totally my kind of humor, and I can't wait to see more of it. There are t-shirts you can buy off the site, too, and one says "WWBD" (What Would Batman Do?). I want it.
I'm training in a new guy at work, and will be for the next 2-3 weeks. It's not the most fun thing in the world to do, but it's important to do right and find good people to train, so we don't have a repeat of last year's bad luck. Fucking Brueckner.
Anyway, that's about all I have at the moment. Oh, and I got in a little free advertising for my Bone Daddy blog by writing in the "Dear John" (letters to the editor kind of thing) section of the High Plains Reader for this week, so Snap, Biatch!
Anyway, I've got the rest of Capote to watch with Karissa, so step off.

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

www.drmcninja.com
Seriously. It is exactly what it looks like, and it's one of the stupidest/funniest comics I've read in a long time.

A Golden Brown Behind-the-Panel Peek...

I'm sure everyone's had sufficient time to read about how my old best friend is symbolically dead to me. Now on to more fun stuff.
Below are some parts to the creative process that leads to a finished Golden Brown comic. They're not really in the order I do them in, so I'll fill you in. Mind you, this may not be the way it's professionally done, so get off my back, I'll learn the "right" way eventually.
First off, there's character development. I've drawn Kevin before at least 3 times--once for a band drawing, once depicted as Jack Daniel, and once as an intimate portrait with April (aka huggy christmas picture). As I've told him, he's basically a happy-face with a goatee. Other characters, however, are a little harder to work on, and I need practice before I can put them in a comic (bitch-tits/Opus was impromptu--I got lucky).
Next is the script. I usually work out one or two comic pages at a time, so they're not really that hard to get done within an hour. Recently, I've started writing little abstracts to cover the story broadly, then work on dialogue and other details later. I don't usually revise it until I start the actual artwork.
Next comes panels. I try to figure out right away what kinds of panels to use, then make a quick-and-dirty layout just to see how they fit onto one or two pages. After that, I take a ruler & marker to the paper.
After that, I finally start sketching out my scenes. Also, recently, I've started writing quick descriptions for every panel. This is handy, because if I let it all go for a day or two, I'd often forget at least one of the scenes.
Before or after sketching, I will take time and do the lettering. I could wait and add this using a computer, but I just realized that every comic that REALLY stands out for me as far as writing seems to be because the lettering is handmade, and oftentimes will actually add to the overall attitude of the comic (see: Jhonen Vasquez).
After all that is done, I finally get to the inks. I've come to realize that inking is one of my favorite things to do on a comic, not just because it's the final part, but because it's just so cool to see the composition of the picture really come together.
Plus, it's not technically the final part. The final part comes when I use a shading stump on parts the typically ink-shading techniques don't work as well with, like skin color, or even light shadowing.
When it's all done, I run it through my test audience (Karissa). Then, pending her approval, I get it posted for everyone to read.
So that's it. Hope you enjoyed me taking all the mystery out of it for you.

Here's what a script looks like (at least the way I do it). The little boxes along the left side are the types of panels I want to use.

This is the pencil work for the part right after Kevin's transformation. The point was more or less to bore people with the writing so they'd focus more on the imagery depicting Kevin's duality & his separation of self.

Some of my first rough (and I mean ROUGH) sketches of "Golden Brown" These were made while I was still trying to figure out how 'silly' to make him. To the right is my first sketch of "Benny-Bear Rachel V". I had to use some realism in this one, because I've never drawn Ben's face before, and wasn't familiar with it yet.

Some more shots of "Benny-Bear".

Grave Aspersions

It's been a little while since I posted that 'reflection' bit, and I noticed that I never did elaborate on it. It came more or less after one of the anonymous idiots on Josie's blog commented, saying Kevin and April should have been better friends. I admit, I let my rage get the best of me there. And yes, her friends are going to defend her, as my friends would defend me. I just wish they wouldn't pull little arguments out of thin air and throw them out there like they mean something, or are even smart. I know this is getting to be a really old argument, but I'm still hearing the same old bullshit from her defenders: "You don't have all the facts."
Okay, I don't. But neither does Amber, or April, or Kevin, or anyone else who's been screwed around with by them. Here are some bottom lines.
1. Amadon obviously doesn't owe me anything. We've said all we're going to say to eachother, and we're done now. Our fight ended back in February. But Kevin was still trying to keep their friendship afloat. He got frustrated here and there, but overall wanted to salvage what they had. He kept up his end, trying to contact Amadon, get together with him, hash this shit out. Amadon hardly ever returned calls, never got together with him, and expected everything to be fine after an accidental run-in with Kevin at Paradiso one night. He never called to congratulate Kevin & April on their pregnancy news. He never asked how it was coming along. I don't think he's ever helped Kevin move (though he's agreed to more than once). If I seem like Kevin's bulldog, well hell, I am. And he owes Kevin something big.
2. I've tried to get along with Josie in the past, but we're just not in the least compatible as friends. I find that she misunderstands virtually everything she reads, and comes across as a blameless person most of the time. When Kevin and April offered to invest in a portion of the cell store and only get back that portion, Josie still asked what was in it for her and Amadon. She's bitched about Amadon before on her blog, even deleted one long rant about his drinking problems and her issues with Case before letting many read it. It was during one post in February that she talked about feeling horrible about starving children in third-world countries that really set me off. I've seen their trailer in Devils Lake. I've seen their basic quality of life. And, I'd heard things about how much they fed their daughter in formula. I still wonder things like what doctor told them that much is okay, or if I'd even hear it right. So, I went over the line and said something to the effect of, 'people who are worried about starving children should stop overfeeding their own and give these kids some' or something to that effect. It's in my Feb. archives, go ahead and check it out.
Yep, it was too far. It was over the line. I refuse to apologise, however, because I wrote it and everyone's seen it. I meant it not to say, "you're baby's fat!" The message was "worry about your own shit before trying to take on the world".
3. Very important statements, even if we don't know the "wholy story": If someone can't afford to buy their dress when they had over a month to do it, ask for help. If child support took your paycheck, ask for help. If you cannot pick up your dress/tux, don't give the bride a bunch of "yeah, yeah's". If you are stuck in the middle of the shit going down, do NOT lie to the bride to ease tension. It comes back twice as bad. If you're not planning on being in the wedding, the bride & groom might find out when you're not there for anything. They'll be pissed either way, you might as well tell them. Own up to it.

My reflections were a little different from these, but I thought I'd put them out there. They sound fairly well thought-out.
I asked Kevin on the wedding night if it felt good to finally tell Amadon off. He said it it did, but it still hurt, too. I definitely understand where he's coming from. When we all started hanging out, we had a lot of fun times. I still remember the first night Kevin introduced me to the Evil Dead movies and Bruce Campbell's awesomeness, and how they thought I was going to jail after I accidentally bumped into the back of his car in front of a cop.
I remember how Amadon made a pipe bomb, and when we could blow it up on a dirt road out of town (yes, one of the stupidest thing we ever did), Amadon trying to get an impact exlposion out of it, accidentally threw it into a ditch full of water.
I remember him & I hanging out in the cemetery at night, just talking about shit and staying out there til it was light out. I remember him sitting there, crying in his mom's room because they were moving and his whole world was changing and he wasn't ready for it.
I also remember my very first post on this blog, talking about how much anger I still had over Dimebag's death just a couple months before. Amadon commented on it and mentioned being tired, and it was weird, because even within a typed comment on a blog, he actually sounded tired.
I think somewhere along the line, he became tired of life. I couldn't help him, Kevin couldn't help him, not even Josie could help him. He says he likes where he is career-wise, but when he went to work, all he did mostly was play games. When he got a store of his own, he wouldn't even come to open it up most of the time. The only time I'd ever in my life seen him excited about anything was when he did anything with his guitar--building it, painting, in the old, old days even playing it lit him up. Now, he has a great guitar, but still can't even perform some basic techniques like strumming.
I miss some of those times, obsessing over the band, writing music with him, making April take gothic pictures of all of us. I miss him being that skinny little goth dork who would turn into a big idiot with me whenever a Manson or Danzig video happened to come on. I miss having to listen to stupid riffs-over-the-phone.
I brought up the thing with Em on Josie's blog out of anger. It was an explanation of what friends should and shouldn't be, and I figured this was to say at least I wouldn't do that to a friend. But really, I've long-forgiven them for what they did. Karissa & I even realized that we don't really have anything against Em anymore. Last I heard, she's getting along well in her own life. She's got a nice guy, a nice house, a nice little boy, and another on the way. She's still got some of her dad's attitude of 'but it could be better', but overall she seems a much different person than she was 5 years ago, and I find myself actually happy for her that she's found something.
Then I look at Amadon. It seemed the only thing that kept him afloat as long as he did was Reyna. I have very few fond memories of Reyna, but in recent years she's mellowed, and we've all seen a better side of her--a very adult side. Unfortunately, getting into a fight with Amy may have skewed her opinion of me and Karissa, but that's life, I guess.
I'm not even sure at what point Amadon being a whole different person to me. I blamed Reyna for alot of it, but in reality she and I were only fierce competitors for his attention. She used sex to get him to go her way, and I used the band. Other than our own little personal imbalances, she and I were pretty simply chess pieces fighting over a pawn.
I've used my own writing "skills"(see: cheese lyrics) as an outlet for my frustrations with him. At least one song makes mention of his drinking and the ways he's changed (mind you it was written about 6-7 years ago) and even one in which he's dead and I'm visiting his grave. There was a point during our little argument in Feb. where he said if I'm going to be this way, we should basically call it quits. I remember thinking it was the most logical thing to do, and the rest is pretty much history. I felt hurt off and on, though, and I couldn't figure out really why. Then it hit me--I'm grieving. Not over our friendship, not over the things I said that past month, but over someone that died years ago. I don't know when that Amadon died, but I never gave myself the closure I needed until last Spring. The only problem is that there's no grave to visit.

Grave Reflections

I've been doing some reflecting here and there, lately, and dug out some old pictures. There's a lot more, but I picked some of the better ones. I think April still has a lot of our old band pics, but the ones I have are still pretty cool. Anyway, I have a lot more to say, but I have to get ready for work, and I have to work on the next Golden Brown, which hopefully will be out tomorrow morning. Who knows? Maybe I'll find time tonight to expand on this post.

I did this one night just to do something weird, and it paid off. By the end of the week I was the duct-tape guy, and April, Jory and Jess even had a "Space Ranger Doug" theme song for me. 

Me & Kevin at prom, his senior year, I think. These were taken by his parents, maybe that's the reason for the enthusiasm in our faces. 

This shot is just cool. April took it while the train was moving (obviously), and I love the contrast. Derek had by then made the orange jumpsuit his own little band trademark. 

Kevin with Blonde hair. I was surprised how well it suited him. He tried it again a few years later, but it just didn't look right.  

We wanted a "dead" shot, so April took this from up on the loading ramp. In my hand is an old, OLD German bible.  

This is the first ever picture taken of the three of us, before we all became close friends. It was at a JROTC pancake feed at the KC Hall. 

Amadon looked really gay in this shot--at least the guitar helped. 

Yeah, I really wore clothes like that, and we thought it would look cool for me to sit up there with a skull in my lap. 

All of us playing at Crazy Days. We practiced every night for over a week before, but didn't factor in how different it would sound outside. Plus, we forgot to advertise until a couple days before, so the turnout sucked. 

Kevin starting his "Happy Song". 

Kevin finishing up his "Happy Song".