Y’ever have one of those flop-sweat realizations? Somebody says, “Well, at least you didn’t do such-and-such, ’cause then you’d be an ass!” riiiiiight before you were going to say, “And then I did such-and-such…”
Yeah, me neither.
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2374 comics.
You know what you should never ever do? Read comics and keep an eye out for exposition pages and panels. You know those panels- the ones where the characters hand you all the Catch-Up Cliff’s Notes for the story you’re in… What’s worse is when you see those movies and TV shows whose creators somehow managed to keep their jobs even though everything seems to be characters either catching you up on things, or saying stuff that just repeats the action you’re seeing anyway. Oh, and commercials? Don’t ever stop to think of all the logical mistakes in advertising’s attempts to convince you to buy anything. It never stands up to scrutiny. Oh, oh, you know what else you can’t do? Read a novel, and pick out how many adverbs and adjectives there are. Oh… My… Head. Also, never read a Larry McMurtry book and wait for him to use any word other than ‘said’ in place of the word ‘said’. You darn near can’t stand to read the book once you spot that. Said, said, said, said, said, said… it’ll just ruin it for you.
So. Don’t do that stuff, for sure.
At least two of you guys are waiting for Patreon goodies now, and one of them is a fine caricature. Hold on. Time delays and crazy stuff have kept me from getting stuff together for you. If anyone else wants Patreon goodies, by all means, click on the Patreon button down there, and after the first of the month following your signing up, Patreon releases your info to me for sending out goodies… which I’m not quick to get back to you, but I haven’t botched it all up yet, so far as I can tell.
Had another inexplicable jump in readership yesterday. I may be able to search through the data and figure out what’s going on… or it may just be another one of those things where a couple dozen extra new readers turn up one day for reasons I never can work out. Whatever the cause, I like it… and wish it’d happen all month sometime.
Another inexplicable thing I see is the security updates about who’s been blocked from logging in and screwing around on the site. There’s somebody in Russia who needs to get a different hobby. Probably some automated program someone’s written, but I’m tired of seeing that he, or she, or it has been blocked- again- after twenty attempts to log in. Same, but not as often, with some ass in France, and a couple others here in the states. Very worrisome, but more readers means more chances that you fall under the gaze of someone with wicked plots in mind, I guess.
Anyhow, enjoy Kelly’s gathering of footage for his giant Exposé, tell a friend or two to read Hubris, and if I suddenly go offline and the site is replaced with a Russian ad for mail-order brides… well, it wasn’t MY idea.
Every so often, I remember that there are still unfinished Hubris comic strips that never made it past of some of the later syndicate mailings. There aren’t many, but they either didn’t fit the tone of the final version of the strip, or they didn’t fit into the generally story-line-ish arrangement I used when first doing this website. This one, I think, was just left back while I assumed I’d one day pull it out and use it, like the 120 or so ‘finished’ Hubris comic strips that convinced me that I could launch a webcomic. Possibly, this one could have been modified to fit into the recent hiking trip Hubris and Kara were on… if I’d remembered it existed. If you like, you can imagine that I went ahead, redrew it, colored it, and loaded it up at the end of last week or something.
It’s probably from 2002. The editor that was looking over Hubris had graciously said I didn’t have to keep sending finished black and white inked-in cartoons, but we could progress with roughs. That’s why this one is so… rough. I had a pile of these rough versions by the time I decided the syndicates had seen enough and I had to get back to working on other things. Most of them got inked and colored and you’ve seen them, starting way back in November of 2010. Some, though… will show up here on Thursdays for a bit.
So, there you go. A throwback Thursday cartoon of a Hubris adventure that may or may not exist, depending on how you see things.
Have any of you guys been reading webcomics long enough to spot how a lot of them seem to start off being about either 20-year-olds running around all crazy or about video games one way or another? And then how, after a while, they turn out to be about lots of other stuff?
Well, I swear, when I started off- this comic was gonna be about skateboarding and kayaking and bicycles. Seriously.
I was an uncooperative interview once.
It was during the first Gulf War. A local TV station called the screen print operation that I worked for, and asked if they could come by and ask about the kinds of shirts we were printing (there were a lot of flags and eagles and things on them)
Turns out they already knew how they wanted the interview to go- the interviewer, who was pretty young and maybe not well experienced in hiding his ideas, kept asking questions that smacked of the term ‘war profiteering’. I can occasionally talk pretty well for myself, and wasn’t going to be led around into saying something that put us into false light.
When the clumsy interviewer asked why we switched from printing shirts for family reunions and church logos to printing shirts with lots of eagles and flags, I dumped it right back in his lap. “Because that’s what customers come in and pay to have printed. I’m not going to tell them they have to order anything other than what they’ve come for, am I? Yes, it’d be nice if they were coming in for FedEx company picnic shirts, but instead, a lot of customers have come in to have shirts supporting the troops printed. What should we print, then?” Of course, the young TV interviewer knew we were supplying our own Tshirt stores, too. I neatly said the same kind of thing. “If customers come to the store for T-shirts with pegasus or unicorns on them, that’s what they can have. If they come for shirts that say “I support the troops”, they can have that, too. We’ll make sure we have whatever designs the public comes in asking for.”
The interviewer left pretty miffed. Mostly, I think, because he wasn’t very good at his job. There may have been a story there, but it wasn’t the one he’d imagined (or sold his editor on?) We weren’t gleefully rubbing our hands together saying, “Oh ho ho ho! Let’s take advantage of this war by selling more T-shirts than usual! Mwuhuhuhuhuhuhuhhhhhh!”
I dunno. Makes you wonder how the TV guy thought stores work.
Lots of folks never get farther than about 150 feet from their cars, even when visiting really neat places. Shame, really. On the other hand, they DID get out and go to the State Park, so that puts them ahead of a few other folks.
It’s one of those things you should look up, once you realize. What the heck IS a ‘stition’, and why is a ‘super’ one so silly? Are regular Stitions NOT silly?
All I know is, you darn well better take a rainfly and a raincoat on camping trips. The one time everyone in the car thought that someone else had brought the tent? Yeah, it rained. No other way THAT one could have happened. We slept under a tarp. With holes in it. I think we might have tied it up with boot laces. It was a long evening anyhow.
Now that I’ve thought a little more about it, we need to find two SUPER competitive people. One of them, convinced that the bad luck of black cats crossing your path is the worst kind of thing, pitted against the other, who is absolutely positive that breaking a mirror will cause the most horrific bad luck. Provide them with an open space, a few black cats and a few mirrors, and things will get lively for a good long while, don’t you think?
This was a good stand-alone cartoon when I wrote it.
Outdoors and athletic-wear is always being upgraded and made from the next New Thing… but the average suit? Or even the above-average suit? Looks pretty much the same as it did a few years ago, if not decades ago ( assuming you ignore Leisure Suits- or as my generation called them “Six Million Dollar Man suits) Even with the advent of Grunge-era billionaires with their laid-back wardrobes, Casual Friday, and social acceptance of pro athletes as All That Is Good In Life, nobody ever said, “Hey, let’s make a men’s suit that a superhero would wear! Get out the Lycra/Polyester waffle patterned sweat-wicking nano-fabric!”
When I ran the cartoon, though, I managed to fit it into a sort of a storyline. That works out pretty good, since there’s no reason, usually, for Hubris to go suit-buying.
