I will not be able to update the comic today on account of I haven’t colored it and want to do it right.  Time management and I have been on the outs lately, and real life has entertained me far more than it usually does.  Hey, real life, thanks.  But I’ve got a job to do.

So I wanted to compensate by posting something on the blog today.  And I’ll start with a little inside baseball into why I do my comic in the format I do:  I decided to use the standard newspaper strip format because I originally intended to submit my comic to newspaper syndicates.  I did so only once, a few months back when my act was noticeably less together, and it was rejected.  So up until I introduced the stoner character I was still operating under the assumption I’d submit again when I thought my material was good enough.  But lately I’ve been less interested in that direction and am becoming more content on doing whatever I want with my comic here, on this site.

The 3-4 panel format has always terrified me because everyone knows you have to dump a joke in the last panel, and I always feel like I’m under a lot of pressure to work in a rigid format.  So I may change the format of this comic up a bit in the coming weeks.  I noticed that when I started the graphic novel I’m working on, my brain felt so free and unencumbered by structure.  Updates to follow.

Other than that, the song remains the same.  I hope you’ll forgive me my gaffe, and maybe you and I can take solace in the fact that the next comic represents a leap in progress.  I don’t know what happened but I’m becoming better at picturing things.  Legitimacy is within reach!

One of my deepest shames as a comic artist is that my knowledge of the comicverse is very tiny.  I’m the comic equivalent of the guy who politicians poll who doesn’t know who the vice president is.  My main concentration all these years has been newspaper comics, and while I’ve extracted a large amount of enjoyment from them, I’m beginning to realize all the stuff I never bothered looking into is what holds the real appeal.

The more I go on with these comics, the more I realize I’m not a gag-a-day guy.  I like telling stories, I like putting detail into the art, and the format in which I’m working inhibits me like an unsexy girdle.  Much of the genre-expanding stuff exists in the long-form format, and it’s something I want to be a part of.  Besides, coming up with a punchline every single time is the hardest motherfunking thing involved in these comics.  I have a much easier time making jokes if I know I’m not expected to come up with one.

So anyhow, the reason I write, aside from missing my comic update and feeling pressured to provide something, is to pose the question:  Is there a comic whose central conceit is time travel?  I think a comic should exist with this as its premise, but I don’t think it should focus on the wacky adventures they get into, such as putting the moves on cavewomen or pretending to be robots.  I think it should focus on the potential of messing with time and creating physical impossibilities, and each saga should end with the universe folding in on itself.

Furthermore, this comic should be centered around a drug-abusing wacky scientist who got into the time-travel game because he wanted to see his dead wife again, but got distracted because time travel is so much fun.  He can have a pet dinosaur that also attends the local college and is a linebacker on the football team.  He can also have a straight-man college intern guy who is interested in the scientific ramifications of what he’s involved in, but whenever he travels through time he always gets a banana-cream pie (or its time-appropriate-equivalent) thrown in his face.

That’s about as far as I got, other than the time machine should look like a lowrider.  Any takers?  I can be the writer or artist for the poor soul who’s interested in tackling this revolutionary comic idea.  And if no one is interested, then perhaps I’ll have to committ myself to this atrocity all alone.  More huge profits for me!