STRIPS STRIPPED: Blood/Sugar 2016

INsights: meh. Soooo, our roommate moved out, and i’m bummed.

And a ffriend pointed out that these strips aren’t as well written as they used to be. Weird. but probably true. In a way today’s strip is an attempt to return to the old “uniquely angry abstract simplicity” i see in the original 15 -

(i did 15 daily strips in a row back in January 2003, which burned me out. 15 more scripts remain from that period. which i’m not sure how to tackle. yet.). I realized I never finished posting “the original 15″ in this blog space so anyone could stumble across them. The images were sitting there, I had just neglected to go in and back-date some posts so they’d show up. Soooo, just now, i went through the motions and quickly tossed them up. I will fill in INsights someday. … maybe right now even? it’s late and i’m of a mind to waste some time babbling. hmm. Well, if you see a strip with a proper title listed next to it, that’ll be the sign that it has INsights filled in. Enjoy at will.

In a way today’s strip is an epic fail to return to those times though. this strip is a horrible forced unfunny pun thing. But it’s from the heart. word. I’d like to think it challenges the reader. That it has it’s own meaning and doesn’t care if you keep up. but. probably just a bad pun thing. dual meanings from the same mumbled nonsense? is that a pun? or just something i seem to do all the time in real life? hmm.

well. ra. wrote up some more scripts. not sure i can maintain this frame of mind. it is disassociative, and not very user friendly. the idea that someone out there actually preferred it to more mainstream leanings is disturbing. hmm. Either way, I guess I won’t be pleasing crowds anytime soon. meh.

In excessive-detail news: Panel one started out with “fuck” instead of “hell”, but i’ve been thinking about sharing these strips with family members, so i’ve been thinking about cleaning up the language. Plus, the usual curse words are starting to seem boring. again.

Panel two started out as “Eye meen 2 pleez”. i guess i changed to be more ambiguous so i could run my little pun thing in the final panel. hmm.

Panel three started out as simply “I mean mean”. which to me seemed like a cute little dense turn of phrase. but it seemed too dense. like people would read it, maybe not get that it meant mean motherfucker (not “mean” as in meaning, or mean as in mathematics averaging trixy) , and then people might tune out because the strip was too hard to understand. At least now it is a puzzle you can solve. i guess.

I struggled a bit with different insults. Was leaning towards Tape Ape or ShitTape. But figured i was probably just being vulgar for the ease of shock comedy, so i went to ambiguous pun town. wee.

art wise. meh. i feel a strong need to start doing more detailed backgrounds. But I also note that original strips had flat white backgrounds, and still worked better. HMMMMM. meh. I do like how Disky’s speach bubble tails look though. might keep that hatchet-arc approach. seems clean and more powerful. wee.

oh, and writing wise i should note : the double meaning must be somewhat inspired by a small game at PAX this past weekend. My girlfriend was all excited to sit down and translate these runes posted around the exhibit hall, for the lord of the rings online game. So we spent some time writing down individual phrenologies (?) and then puzzling out what the final phrases meant in english. So I can dump some of the lame-pun-thing blame on that. whew! too bad we didn’t win anything for all that effort. erk. You, however, win this strip. No refunds.