Saturday, April 5, 2008

Cupcakes give me insulinemia

Comic 38! The only cure for k. d. is the end of 2nd year, and the end of lectures in your academic life.

This is a good a place as any to brag about the creativity of my friends! I hosted the 2nd DAAM (Dinner And A Movie) party last night, a delightful soiree centered around good films, good food, and of course good times. Also good wine. We watched The Birdcage, and in keeping with the theme, people brought food in drag - food dressed up as something else! Behold the culinary masterpieces of my guests:Bird's nests!

Mini burgers made of Thin Mints and Nillas!Fish tacos!
One of my favorites: the chess squares!
Cupcake ice cream cones! THERE IS CUPCAKE INSIDE THE CONES
Dirt, except you want to eat it! And you don't even need an iron deficiency!
My contribution: a Kroger veggie tray made entirely of meat!
A roast turkey loaf!
And meatloaf cupcakes with steak sauce icing!
IT WAS ALL INCREDIBLE AND I'M SO PROUD OF Y'ALL

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Lexiconnoisseur

Comic 37! Some the funniest moments of the past semester have been phone calls from my little sister asking for the words for various things. Random sample of my answers: phallus, listeria monocytogenes, areola.

I really should be studying instead of drawing...Step 1 feels imminent. Two months plus change away...

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Intermammary sulcus

What is it about breasts? I remember that in middle school, the most important thing in life was seeing breasts, second only to seeing more breasts. Our culture has an obsesseion with them like Jedi battle-focus. (OK, well, half of our culture plus lesbians plus some open-minded girls plus the whole of entertainment media. Some people don't care. They are missing out.) Is it a "forbidden fruit" type of thing, with the "flesh need be covered" imperative dating back to Puritanism? Is it an imprinting thing, whereby our breast fixation germinated in the primordial conscious as we suckled for sustaining milk? Is it a wild over-emphasis on what medical science calls "modified sweat glands surrounded by suspensory ligaments and fat"? Is it a mating thing? Are breasts the barometers of fertility? Am I simply making mountains out of molehills? Now that metaphor will have a different connotation for the rest of your life.

I don't know the answer here. Breasts seem to make people happy. (They are not the happy gland, however. Keep guessing.)

Another rant, while I'm on the topic. Cosmetic enhancement of breasts. Ladies, really ask yourself, and I mean bare-souled-in-front-of-the-mirror ask yourself, what is the underlying reason that you want the surgery. Is it what YOU want? Is it what someone else wants? Self-esteem is an important thing, and a prize not easily won. True self-esteem takes years to develop. The elective surgery that many regard as a panacea for body-image issues - is that not bandaging a wound without investigating the cause of the wound? What I'm saying is, body-image issues do not need to be treated with body-modification. They should be treated with body-image-modification; they should be treated at the source: the culture that tells you that your body is somehow not right. So ask yourself, is that boob job meant to make you happy, or is meant to placate the imps of Illusory Perfection that hound the modern mind?

If you answer in the affirmative to the first question, by all means do what you want with your own body - it is yours after all. Just remember: Cosmetic surgery is still surgery. Watch videos of what happens in a breast enlargement procedure. It's not pretty. It hurts. Many times the incision is made around the areola, and those nerves don't grow back. The immune system can reject the implant, doubling the time in the operating room, doubling the risk of infection. And as time passes, aging tissue is not kind to synthetic materials. It's a good life policy to go natural whenever possible.

In my opinion, how things feel trumps how they look. Then again, I do not have breasts. I should look into a boob job.

From http://news.softpedia.com/news/10-Minutes-Of-Staring
-Boobs-Daily-Prolongs-Man-039-s-Life-by-5-Years-72490.shtml

10 Minutes Of Staring at Boobs Daily Prolongs Man's Life by 5 Years...
- The beneficial starlets
By: Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

Listen, guys, now we know why Pamela Anderson made her transplants: to make us healthier. "Angels of mercy" like Jordan just prolong our life and Hugh Hefner knows it.

A German research published in New England Journal of Medicine and Weekly World News said that men staring at women's breasts in fact prolong their lives with years.

"Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female such as Baywatch actress Pamela Lee is equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out," said author Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist.

The team led by Weatherby was made up of researchers at three hospitals in Frankfurt, Germany, and found this results after monitoring for 5 years the health of 200 male subjects, half of whom were asked to look at busty females daily, while the other half had to abstain from doing so.

For five years, the boob oglers presented a lower blood pressure, slower resting pulse rates and decreased risk of coronary artery disease.

"Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation. There's no question: Gazing at large breasts makes men healthier. Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack in half." said Weatherby, who even recommended that men aged over 40 should spend at least 10 minutes daily admiring breasts sized "D-cup" or larger.

She said that this was as healthy as going to the gym for 30 minutes daily and prolonged a man's life by five years.

"We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years." said Weatherby.

This is indeed a very serious reason for men to enjoy without shame those midnight TV shows, download low-budget women-in-prison movies and collect such instructive and health beneficial magazines like Playboy and Hustler.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

He's going to be your Frankenstein

Comic 35! Yay, the doldrums of February are over. Have to make up for a lot of lost comicing. Fortunately my spring break will be spent at home in Nashville, alternating between drawing and spooning hydrocodone into my sister's tonsil-less mouth. She handles oral surgery like a champ!

Friday, February 15, 2008

Falling Still, pgs. 5-12

More finished pages from "Falling Still". The only feedback I got on the first four was, "the words a kinda small." We return you to your regularly scheduled graphic novel, now in higher resolution! Let me know if you like/dislike; I value your opinions like Gollum values the One Ring! Be forewarned: the following contains some graphic imagery. Please forward all complaints to your local congressman.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Bellybutton Lent

Comic 34! Autobiographical comics. This is almost exactly a word-for-word transcription of a talk with my dad earlier today. Glad I can finally get away with the bomb around him. Any other time in my life, I would have been sentenced to my room without parole.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Still Falling Still

No comic again today. Apologies. How about another preview of one of my bigger projects as a stopgap for lack of humorous triptychs? These are the first four pages of "Falling Still," a graphic horror story inspired by the Silent Hill video game series. I have been working on it on and off for almost four years. It was meant to be done entirely in brush pen - I really like the slightly tremulous lines, the varying line weights, and general atmosphere of out-of-controlness of the pens. They fit the story well. But as often occurs, the best laid plans aft gan agley. Sketching and inking the pages in "meatspace" takes a far greater chunk of than I can commit at this point in my life, and I really want to finish this story. It's spooky, but I think that its message is best borne in darkness. So I scanned all the pages in (there are 44 presently, with 25 in various stages of inking...should be over 100 by the end), and we're going to rock this thing tablet style.