I like that I did this picture, because it serves a really useful function for me.  Whenever life seems hopeless, or the World seems like a dark and scary place, or somebody talks about something a Republican Presidential Candidate says as though it actually made sense, in those dark times I can always just look at this picture and remind myself, “The World’s not so bad- It can’t be when there’s a guy who looks like that who posed for hours in that position so you could draw him like that from life.”

I wrote some comics about this guy a while back, and they appeared in my book.  We actually only went out on a few dates and things ended amicably, so I still talked to him from time to time, and eventually I brought up the fact that it occurred to me that out of the guys in the book I talk about dating, he’s the only one I hadn’t done a portrait drawing of.  So, we hung out a few months ago and I did a drawing of him that I’ve already posted on this website.  The drawing turned out well and we both liked it, so I started to talk to him about doing another one.  When we were talking about what pose to do, I said that I didn’t want to start getting repetitive with pictures of guys just sitting or lying in bed, and I thought it would be fun to do something with his wrists tied, or slightly kinky in some way.

Turns out he didn’t object to that at all, and the boots and gloves were actually his suggestion.

I kind of drew this to commemorate the completion of my book that was published last year.

I was in the last few days of working on the book, and having the general predictable cycle of self-doubt and despair that it was all pointless and that the book was shit, and who was I fooling to think anybody was gonna want to read this? and etc., and then something happened that I took as a sign from whatever great unknowable forces there are out there…

I got a friend request and a message from some cute guy I’d never met before on Facebook.  He was really cute, so I was wondering what it was all about.  I messaged him out of curiosity, and he tells me he’s a fan of my comics.  That’s great, I don’t mind being Facebook friends with people who are fans of my comics.  But then, almost immediately, he asks me about portraits I’ve done of guys in the past, and whether or not I knew them personally or if they were fans.  I said that most of them I’ve known personally, but sometimes I draw from photos guys have sent me.  After I said that, he proceeds to email me almost 30 pictures he had already taken for the purpose of sending them to me.

Pictures of himself in underwear, pictures of himself without underwear, pictures of himself in and out of various compromising positions.  He was even wearing glasses and things in some of the pictures specifically because of things he had read in my comics about various sexual fetishes I have.  He had pretty much done a whole little multi-costume strip-tease show for me in the hopes that I would make a drawing out of one of the pictures.

The fact that the comics I were doing elicited this kind of response from a cute guy I had never met I couldn’t take as anything other than a sign from the Universe that I was doing the right thing with my life.

OK, a little bit of information about what’s going to be coming up with this website and my comics.

I’ve finished posting the strips that appeared in my book that was published last year, and am going to spend the next couple of weeks posting odds and ends and related things before jumping into the strips that will be part of my next set of strips, which I’m calling Damaged Goods.  It’s all part of the ongoing stories that I’m collectively calling A Waste of Time but I’m grouping strips into chunks and collections and storylines, so before I go on to posting more new strips I’m going to be posting some odds and ends related to the book and some miscellaneous things I’ve done.

Coming up starting next week I’m going to be posting portraits of some of my characters with blogs discussing them, and that will go into creating a character guide for this website.  The next two posts after today will be portraits of guys I’ve known, and they’ll have stories attached to them too.  I haven’t decided yet if these drawings and comics relating to the points in my life when I made them will be part of Damaged Goods, but we’ll see.  They’re new content that was made after I finished the strips for this last book, and leading up to Damaged Goods.

Then there are a few other odds and ends I might post before I start posting the first strips that will officially be part of Damaged Goods.  I’m hoping to get far enough ahead on those strips that I can be posting them as I work on my next project, because that will require lead time if I plan to keep posting three times a week.  The next thing I’m going to be working on is still part of the whole A Waste of Time project, and it features my rabbit, I plan to work on it concurrently with other strips, but as I was writing it it started to become such a large story that now I think it’s going to be its own graphic novel.  I don’t feel quite ready to start talking on here about what it’s going to be about, but it’s going to be in the 150-200 page range, and a lot of the pages will be more complicated, drawing-wise, than shorter strips that mainly just feature dialog and my characters, as far as the drawing parts go.

So, the idea is to have the first few chunks of Damaged Goods on here, and then to start in on my big mystery project.  Along with all that, I’m trying to work on putting together an EP of songs for Dove of Love, and I’m also going to work on another side project, which I’ll also be posting more about soon. So, a whole ton of stuff coming up, keep checking back, even if sometimes I miss a few days of posting here and there, and I know I sometimes do.  The plan is to, as often as possible, still stick to the Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday posting schedule, but that might get messed with a little bit from time to time as I try to get all these projects going, along with some other things I haven’t even mentioned on here yet.

So, yeah, exciting times :)

Alright, so the last couple strips have discussed Prester’s favorite Christian Rock band, Dove of Love, and I thought I’d post this colored version of their poster and talk a little bit more about what the band is like.

I’m hoping to make an EP with a couple of their songs that I could sell at comic conventions, or maybe include in a future book of my comics, and probably also have available online somehow.  I have some ideas about there sound, and I can probably write their lyrics, but I don’t play any musical instruments or anything like that, so I’ve been talking to musically talented people I know about collaborating on this.  If anybody out there is interested, email me and who knows, we’ll see what happens.  The sound I’m thinking of for Dove of Love is kind of a 90′s grunge band sound, only like kind of bad, low-budget imitation grunge.  It’s supposed to be a parody album and funny, but I’d like the songs to be strong enough that it’s actually enjoyable for people to listen to.  Like I was saying about Dove of Love before, the idea is that I’m joking when I make fun of these things, but Dove of Love doesn’t know that they’re joking.  It’s a fine line there.  I think if the songwriting is strong enough and the songs have strong melodies and everything, this could be an awesome little EP.

As the whole Dove of Love part of things develops, I’ll be posting to the Facebook page for the band , and also the Tweeting for them at twitter.com/doveofloveband , so follow those if you’re curious :)

This is one of the ones where a character is more obviously a mouthpiece for me.  I get really tired of Christians talking about their morals, which either fall into the category of destructive, or have nothing to do with whether or not you’re Christian, like, “Thou shalt not kill.”  And then there’s all the other stuff, like all the wackiness in Leviticus about everything from animal sacrifices to stoning people and selling them into slavery, but for Christians to have an awareness of all that, they’d have to actually read the Bible, which is pretty rare.  The irony is that what they point to as rules that should guide behavior is actually an excuse for them to behave however they want, because they pick and choose whichever bits appeal to them.

I could say more about this, obviously, but maybe for the moment I’ll give my soapbox a break and let the comic speak for itself :)

I kind of agonized over this strip a bit, because it’s something I’ve been planning for a long time, and Dove of Love is gonna be important to my comics.  If you go back a few strips to when they first go into Prester’s room, the Dove of Love poster is hanging there, and of course what Prester was writing on his sign was, “Faggots Burn In Hell,” which is one of their songs they claim as hit singles.  If you go back a bit further still, the other time Prester was writing on a sign, he had written the letters, “AB…” which was him starting the title of, “Abort the Abortionists!”

Making fun of Christian hypocrisy is kind of like aiming at the broad side of a barn, you can pretty much just take actual things that Christians do and say and the jokes start to make themselves.  Christian rock bands are maybe an even broader target, because there are plenty of musicians in “mainstream” music that are some variety of Christian, but the ones who specifically go around advertising themselves as a “Christian” act are usually the ones that are talentless enough that they don’t have another selling point, so they try to use peoples’ piety to get them to buy some CD.  There are reasons, though, that I’ve been setting up Prester’s personality the way I have, and there are a lot of places I want to go with this, and some things I’d like to say.  Dove of Love, specifically, is among other things going to be a plot device that helps introduce another major character that’s coming up soon.

So, sorry for the delay in posting this strip.  I wanted it to come directly after the previous one, since the scene of Rickets and Prester in Prester’s room was, in addition to the Chaplin thing, meant to introduce Dove of Love.  I finished it up to the point that I did for the book I had published last year, because I felt that Prester’s Chaplin speech was something that gave a bit more clarity to his personality and could be a good note to end his part of the book on.  I’ve got some other things coming up that are already ready to go, but I wanted to do this scene all together, and I spent a long time on this one because I was obsessing over the Dove of Love poster.  I wanted it to be pretty much the cheesiest, silliest Christian rock band poster I could come up with, but I wanted it to look like the people who made it weren’t joking.  The type of people that don’t see a contradiction between the statements on the poster wouldn’t get the joke when they made it.

To support the Dove of Love part of the storyline, I’m seriously considering recording an EP with a couple of their songs to sell and maybe give away at conventions and things, or maybe even as a bonus with a future book of mine.  The problem with me making a music EP is that I can’t play any kind of musical instrument.  I’m pretty sure I could write the lyrics, and I have a good idea of what Dove of Love sounds like, but I don’t nearly know enough about recording music to record songs on my own.  Anybody with musical gifts out there interested in collaborating on an EP of Christian rock bigotry?  Heh.  Could be fun.  I’m serious about this part, email me if you think it would be fun.

To get Dove of Love going, I’ve started a Facebook page for them , and also a Twitter account , so follow those, things relating to the band will be part of the world of my comics as things go forward, and should hopefully be interesting :)

I’m writing several things at once, and sometimes the way I write these things is out of order, as has probably been apparent on this website in the past.  So, the comic that I want to post next and what I’m actually writing at the moment are two separate things, and I think it will be better for both if I just regroup for a few days and get further ahead on the work.  Basically, I’m being a moody artist about all of this and trying to follow my inspiration as best as I can.  There’s a plan to these things, though, and a reason that I post them in the order I do and why sometimes it makes sense to me to wait in between posts, so stick with it, and there’s a whole ton of new stuff coming up soon that I hope you’ll enjoy :)

This strip actually concludes me posting the strips that are collected in my recently published book, but the story doesn’t end here at all.  When I was putting together the book, I tried to organize the strips and stuff that was included in a way that lent it a structure and brought it to a place where I felt the characters had a satisfying moment that could serve as their last moment in the book and hopefully create a good experience for the reader, but the things I have planned for these characters all feed into big arcs that will go on for quite a while.  Actually this strip that I’m posting today isn’t even the end of this particular scene, the comic that I’m going to be posting on Monday picks up exactly where this one leaves off and shows some more of what’s going on in Prester’s room.

There are also still several spot illustrations and other odds and ends from the book that I’m going to be posting here, and one of the next things that I’m going to do on this website after the next few strips and drawings is a character guide with profiles for the main characters in these comics, which will hopefully be fun for people to read, and also a way for newer readers to jump in, since I think at this point I’ve accumulated enough material that it might be a bit confusing for somebody new trying to figure out what’s going on.

After the character guide, some more strips and drawings and stuff, I’m going to start posting two things that I’ve been writing.  One of them is the collection of strips that will eventually form my next book, which at this point I’m planning to call Damaged Goods.  It’s the next part in the ongoing saga of my rabbit, Rickets, Truckstop, and Prester, and all those characters, and it will also heavily feature some of my other characters like Capitalist Pig, and there are also going to be a couple of new characters that I’m pretty excited about.

When I plan these things, I usually at some point think in terms of big story arcs and things that I want to tackle, and so all the comics I’m doing under the banner of A Waste of Time are part of something that’s going to take me a long time to tell.  Within the structures of the bigger stories I’m trying to do, I also like to leave enough wiggle room for things to be included as they happen, since a lot of the strips are meant to be autobiographical in one way or another, and I don’t know yet what’s going to happen in the parts of my life that I haven’t yet lived :) The storylines and collections that I’m doing are meant to be chunks of all of this, so that people can read one bit or storyline and understand it without reading every single thing that I’ve done.  Although, of course, who wouldn’t want to read every single thing that I’ve done? :P

The other thing I’m doing is a big project that will still fall under the A Waste of Time banner, but that’s taken on a life of its own.  It was originally supposed to be kind of a fun, short thing, maybe five pages or so, but once I started going I felt like there was so much more I could do.  I’ve been doing a ton of research for it, so I want to talk about it, but I feel like I should keep it kind of secretive until I have more to show.  Although, of course, it’s not totally secret, because some people who know me know that I’ve already been talking about it a lot.  That’s because I’m excited, I think it’s gonna be a great comic!  I’m trying to script this out fully before I start doing too much of the illustration, and the drawing side of it is going to be pretty complicated in some places, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to do three pages a week of it the whole time that I’m doing it, so the idea is to get far enough ahead on it before I start posting it that, when I start posting pages, I’ll be able to keep putting them up in a pretty timely fashion.  So, more on that as it develops :)

Anyway, keep checking back, a whole ton of stuff coming up!  Thanks to everybody that’s been reading my website all this time, and if you’ve been enjoying the recent strips, check out the store page for information about how you can order my book collection, which, I have to say, looks really pretty, and I’m proud of!

New comic to be posted on Friday, check back!

Sorry that this post didn’t go up yesterday.  There will be a new comic tomorrow, though!