Selective Amnesia, Shredded Worlds and Epic Beards

Is it the weekend yet? Hold on, lemme check what day it is... Thursday! Yay! See, when you're really hip and cool, like me, it's a positive thing to not know what day it is. Yep, a nice, beautiful August day here in sunny Milwaukee...

What?

So, I told you at the end of the last post that I had a surprise for you, if you behaved in the interim. Well, most of you behaved well enough (except for you, Paula! You miscreant!). So here is your surprise.

A new Wagnervana comic strip! Woot woot!

I'm going to post it in two parts.

That should display big enough to read. If not, click to enlarge.

I also redesigned the webcomic page on my Wagnervana site. I made the page a blog (instead of a gallery), and each comic strip is in its own post. Now I can add notes to each one and you can add comments and tell me how much you love me! See? I'm so insecure, I've lost all tact and decorum when it comes to eliciting love!

I was re-reading some of the old ones. They make me laugh.

I really need to go back to doing smaller strips... 6 panels, at the most. This one was fun, but I'm embarrassed to admit, it took me about 14 hours total to get it to its current form. There are still little details to tinker with, including inconsistent shading, and other details (like the missing monitor artwork in panel 10 - you can see the wall poster behind the monitor), and I'd like to add some more little fun(ny) touches here and there, if possible. [EDIT: fixed panel 10, and more tweaks. Added Mel Gibson, lol]

Another thing that made this strip unique was that it's the first strip (or project of any kind, really) that I created using my new Wacom tablet input device. Check it out...

It can be used as a touch-screen, like a laptop has, or I can use the pressure-sensitive pen to draw with. I'm sure you could tell the (hopefully not distracting) variations in pen widths in all the panels. It makes it feel more like actually drawing. I picked the technique up quickly. Before this, I would do all the drawing with the mouse, which was fine, I suppose, since it was all I knew.

Now I know better!

OK, enough shameless self-absorption.

Saw this amazing set of "before/after" pictures from Joplin after that insane tornado a few days ago. Saw it on Bits and Pieces. The guy that runs that site has a fascination like I do, regarding the crazy destructive power of nature.

Kind of takes your breath away, doesn't it. That people can bounce back from things like this is amazing to me. Brings to mind the tsunami videos I peppered you with a month or two ago. Tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes... I wonder which one is the most pants-soaking frightening event to experience first hand? I've ridden out my fair share of mild earthquakes, which to this point have actually been kind of fun. Beyond that, I can only imagine what it's like to see a mile-wide, 200MPH whirling vortex of doom and destruction bearing down on you, with nowhere to run.

I better lighten the mood back up again...

I think that's enough goofiness for now. I've collected a lot of fun stuff to share with you of late. I may bump up the frequency of new posts for a while.

Stay tuned!

Dave the Absurd