Since I follow Dave on Twitter and elsewhere, I’ve known of this project for some time and have been massively excited about it. Today, he finally posted the first trailer for the film, along with a new Kickstarter project to help fund its completion.

This film looks ah-mazing, featuring the likes of guys like Jim Davis (Garfield) and Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine). Any cartoonists and comics artists out there, I urge you to help this project along, however you can. I myself just pledged $50 towards it.

Check out the trailer, then go here to help out!

If you’ve been on Facebook for any length of time and/or have more than a few FB friends, you’ve likely seen statuses like the one in this strip. At first it wasn’t so bad, but I started seeing several of them a day, posted by multiple people.

On their own, some of them aren’t so bad. But then they start getting preachy and passive-aggressive, like one that suggests you weren’t raised right if you didn’t re-post it as your status. They vary, but the general insinuation is if you don’t re-status, well, you’re just a bad person.

“Set this as your status if you have a [insert relative] in heaven…”
“Re-post this if you love your kids…”
“Make this your status if you think mean people suck…”

It goes on and on. What’s weird is I’ve never seen anyone actually use the same status as anyone else. So I wonder if anyone is ever re-posting at all. But then again, the original posts are being written by someone.

Either way, I hit the “unfriend” link several times this week.

About the Art

Obviously still playing with character designs. Came to the sad conclusion that only a select few cartoonists can pull off the single oval for eyes (Bill Watterson, Dave Kellett), so I’m playing with options. Better, but still has issues.

The thing that’s been hardest about drawing these on paper is that it’s infinitely harder to deal with mistakes than on the computer. Things get out of proportion easily and you can’t just scale them. Sure, I could do a lot of post-production after it’s scanned, but that defeats the purpose. What you see is what I drew, for better or worse.

The comic pretty much says it all. Remember when TLC stood for “The Learning Channel”? Not sure what it says about us as a society that we consume the kind of garbage they’re making shows out of these days. I’m talking about these shows like Hoarders, Extreme Couponing, and the show about people that like to dress up as babies and make love to cars (yes, this exists).

The worst offender, I think, is Toddlers and Tiaras. The parents behind that show should be arrested for child abuse. They’re breeding tomorrow’s monsters.

About the Art

In a word…rubbish. While I think this strip is funny, I really struggled on the art. I kid you not, I erased and re-drew one of those arms at least 12 times. And it still looks horrible. Still feeling my way around this “brushed” style, but I gotta tell ya, I feel I’m struggling to find my way. Will keep at it, though.

My wife and I recently got to see “Cowboys and Aliens”, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It wasn’t as mind-blowing as I’d hoped for a movie I’d anticipated for over a year, but I thought it was pretty fun.

As usual, they showed lots of trailers. Some got me excited, some were “meh” and some were just downright perplexing. The latter was a trailer for “Battleship”, a little movie based on the popular game. Not a video game. A game game. A board game. A game with ships and pegs. Somewhere, somehow, somebody had played this game and at one point thought, “This should be a movie!” Apparently, this person also had connections in Hollywood, or someone owed him money.

It’s clear right from the get-go that the plot is pretty flimsy. Some hot actors (and Liam Neeson) are out on a battleship when this big alien ship comes out of the water and attacks. They fire back. End of trailer. Don’t get me wrong, the effects here look amazing, and maybe it will be at least a fun popcorn movie. I’m not above that. I mean hell, I still loves me some Armageddon. But what amazes me is that this is a licensed translation of an incredibly simple board game. I’m dying to know how they make any real connections to it, although there’s a hint in the trailer. At about the 1:55 mark, the alien ship actually fires what looks like “pegs” at them, embedding themselves in the hull of the ship. WOW, just like the game!!

At any rate, I had fun drawing the strip. On the second panel I’d planned on doing the blacks in ink and adding some painted stars, but I’d completely forgotten about it until I’d scanned it. So I did that part digitally. I might still go back and do it to the original piece.

Check out the Battleship trailer. The “pegs” show up at about 1:55.

Oh, and here’s the classic 1981 “Connect Four” commercial with the line “Pretty sneaky, sis”

BONUS: If the painting sells for $100 or more, the winning bidder will receive a free color sketch card of any Looney Tunes character they wish. To see more of my work and more detailed story about the creation of this piece, visit http://atlantajones.deviantart.com

Check out the auction HERE!

I’m not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I do generally enjoy the movies. Having not read the books, I was secretly hoping this scene would play out in the final film

About the Art

Still experimenting with brush styles. This was mostly inked with a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, and I’ve still got a lot to learn. I really do like how the third panel came out, though.

I’m a little slow to this, as Google+ was launched a few weeks ago. Even so, I’m still seeing people asking for invites. It’s curious how Google can whip people into such a frenzy, begging for an invitation to something they (likely) don’t even understand. You want it because you know not everyone can get it right away.

Maybe as a web developer with my fair share of time building social applications, I’m a tad jaded on this topic. I’m frequently asked “are you on X service?” or “are you using Y app?”. I frankly just don’t have time to jump on whatever bandwagon is pulling through town today.

As for Google+, I think it’s adorable that the Googs are still trying. Wave has been officially killed, and Buzz never seemed to really make any sense to anyone. I’m sure this new venture is a real achievement in engineering. The interface I’ve seen so far is kinda slick. But a “Facebook killer”? Far from it. Absolutely nothing can overtake Facebook, or even come close. I say that with no joy whatsoever.

What really will be telling here, is how Google+ grows and evolves after the first wave of salivating early adopters are already on it. For now, I’m just not interested. But I’ll be watching to see how it goes.

About the Art

As promised, this is another black-and-white strip, penciled and inked on paper. You’ll also notice that there are new characters. These are by no means final character designs. I’m doing a lot of experiments lately. Some things are sticking, I’m throwing others out. It could take several more strips for character models and overall tone to solidify.

But I figure if I wait until I have everything perfectly envisioned, I’ll be forever publishing another strip. Just gotta dive in and put ink to paper.

Comments welcome!

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted a strip. I’ll spare you the long stories, but the short version is that life has gotten in the way. I can’t promise more strips on a regular schedule, but I’m going to try very hard to keep posting as often as I can.

This strip took a while, as it was the first time I’d ever drawn and inked a strip on paper. It’s also the first one I’ve posted in black-and-white. I’ve got a LOT of improving to do, but I think I’m on the right track.

On the subject of the strip, I honestly never really liked the first Cars movie from Pixar. Just could never get into it. I can buy a lot of things. Toys that come to life? Sure. But an entire world supposedly built by vehicles without opposable thumbs? Madness.

I know kids love it, and as I write this, I have a 21-month-old that will likely want to watch it eight thousand times. I just felt it was a rare miss by Pixar. And Cars 2? If there was ever a more blatant move to commercialize a franchise, I’d like to see it. Oh well. Like I said, the kids love it.

So after much rumor-mongering, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently did a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live. He had a brief bit during the opening monologue, in which he watched host Jesse Eisenberg (who portrayed Zuck in “The Social Network”) open the show. Eisenberg was then joined by Andy Samberg, doing his own Zuckerberg impression. A spastic Zuckerberg fidgeted backstage, complaining to SNL producer Lorne Michaels that HE was the real Mark Zuckerberg and that he’d “invented poking”.

Thus, this strip was born.

For more on the SNL appearance, check this out.

Steve Jobs reportedly asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to dinner, presumably to talk about integrating Facebook into iTunes Ping. As I wrote and drew this strip, a couple things struck me. Sure, Steve wants people to be able to add new Ping friends via Facebook, but seems totally uninterested in any data flowing out to Facebook the other way. Kind of the opposite of what a social network should be. Wonder if Mark actually pointed this out.

The other thing is that, despite both these guys being billionaires, they really are not on the same playing field at all. In the grand scheme of things, Zuck is still just a punk hacker that’s got a lot to learn. Doing a decent presentation would be a good start