The difficulty of all this programming and fraternizing with code is among the trickiest I’ve dealt with on an intellectual level. I wasn’t meant for this business, but I’m assuming it will all be worth it in time.

To those who have stumbled across this site, welcome. The reason this is an ugly internet site is because I barely know what I’m doing when it comes to HTML and those things, so progress will come very slowly.

This site is where I house my comic strip, currently titled “Jerkwater: The Comic.” My sense of humor is probably best described as dry. You may notice an absence of jokes that resemble jokes you are familiar with. This is because much of the humor I come across in comic strips doesn’t strike me as funny, so even though there may not be a large market for the kind of humor I produce, it is all I know.

As a comic strip aficionado I’ve grown weary of seeing so many comics where the cartoonist doesn’t even seem to care. From crappy rip-off concepts to recycling the art to relying on references instead of making jokes, I’ve decided that there’s no choice for me but to forge my own path. Perhaps there are others out there who think the way I do. Though if there are, they probably don’t read the comics.

If I haven’t caused you to lose your faith in the form, please feel free to leave your comments on my stuff.

  Call me a quixotic jackass, call me a doomed deluded artist, call me unapproachably handsome, but I have made a decision to recall for the first time my progress as an artist since the dream’s inception.  This may seem like too grand of an undertaking for an artist no one has ever heard of, but I’ve acquired a feeling of freedom from owning my own internet site, and my artistic history will be something nice for my grandchildren to stumble upon while they’re waiting for their future pornography to buffer.  This is, of course, a joke.  There will be no wait for buffering in the future, and day-to-day life in the future will be so hedonistic that pornography will be rendered irrelevant.

This experiment will also be a nice opportunity to display things I’ve always kept guarded in an attempt to get over my artistic shyness.  Although I may be an unknown, I have progressed much as an artist and perhaps documenting my progress and pratfalls might be of some use to up-and-coming artists who stumble upon this site.

No history will be revealed in this post, however.  I just get very carried away with introductions.

Writing used to be a large passion of mine, but in recent months my passion for writing and thus the quality of my writing have taken a backseat to my single-minded fixation on my comics. So this documentation of my artistic progress may not be as thoroughly readable as, say, an autobiography by Larry the Cable Guy. But boy, what could compete with that??!

So, in the beginning, at age 5, I remember we had this assignment in kindergarten where we had to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wanted to be a train engineer, because I thought blowing the whistle on the train was the surest mark of success. As I sat there drawing my picture of me in a train crossing the tracks while cars waited for me to pass (this was before I understood perspective, so everything was flattened) I realized I was having more fun drawing the picture than I probably would blowing a train whistle. So from a few days after that onward I wanted to draw pictures for a living.

A few of very important influences entered my life at this time, to which I owe a great debt, I’m sure.

1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles- The humor and inventiveness of this television show captivated my imagination. Call me lame, but I think a surprising amount of the original television series has held up well over time. I spent many boy-hours drawing the Ninja Turtles in my youth.

2. Super Mario Brothers- My dad’s friend brought his Nintendo over one day and hooked it up to our giant floor-model Zenith. After playing Robbie the Robot for a while he put in the Mario Brothers, which enthralled me completely. Drawing Mario and Luigi in various lame settings was my hobby for a while.

3. The Simpsons- My father, brother and I came home one evening and my father turned on the TV to drown out the voices of his annoying children. The very first episode of the Simpsons was just coming on, the Christmas episode. I’d say that my largest influence in life has been the Simpsons, both in terms of humor and artistic sensibility, but I will not say that, because it’s not cool.

4. Peanuts- Unlike the rest of my influences, I cannot pin-point the moment Peanuts entered my life, because it’s been with me since time immemorial. It’s as if I grew up with a love for Peanuts written into my genetic code. When I was five, my mother took my brother and I to Knotts Berry farm, where the Snoopy-centric atmosphere made me misplace my marbles. There’s a picture of us with a guy in a Snoopy costume and I’m grinning like an idiot because I was the happiest I’d ever been.

So 1990 was the year drawing took over my imagination. School assignments where we got to draw were my favorite. Though I don’t really remember the competition I had from the other students at that time (in later years I imagined competition everywhere) I remember being pleased with my skill. I used to draw memories from field trips to the zoo or weekend hijinx.

This is a picture of me in my backyard. I’m holding (I actually remember) an action figure of Donatello dressed up in a trench-coat. A year or so after I drew this I went back and defaced it, adding long hair. This is because my father had my brother and I grow out our hair in the back. I essentially had a mullet during these years, and the girls in my class would pull it and say “Ding, dong!” as if tolling a bell. I hated it. But that’s not related to art.

This one’s probably self-explanatory. Check out the grade I got. Holla.

I had given drawing a shot and it totally consumed me. The coming years would represent an exponential increase in productivity and a young child’s inability to cope with obsession.

To be continued.

Call me an elitist, but although I grew up drawing comics I didn’t read an enormous amount of comic books. Looking back on it, I can narrow the reasons down:

1. Jumping into the sagas of super-powered individuals seemed complex. I knew that no matter how hard I tried to understand everything that had happened in the comic book worlds before my first issue would be impossible, so I was too intimidated to try. I had a hard enough time following the X-Men cartoon once they got into the Phoenix storyline.

2. I was ignorant. I didn’t think I’d be able to tell quality from crap, and envisioned myself getting dozens of issues into a comic series only to find out it was a promotional for Burger King.

3. I was prideful. I dismissed much as nerdy: comics, Magic: The Gathering, computers, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, and so on. I’ve come to enjoy everything I listed here after admitting to myself that I’m a nerd.

So I was content to sponge my influences from the newspaper comic page, which has served me fine. I only referenced comic books when I wanted to know how to draw something realistic or incorporate wild perspective. Over the years, though, my transgressions have become more obvious to me, and I’ve been thirsting for more comic knowledge. Since I consider myself on my way to establishing myself in the comic ind., I thought it would be useful to attend the Wondercon in San Francisco a couple weeks ago.

The Wondercon is a division of the San Diego-based Comicon, which is hip slang for “Comic Convention,” itself a term that presumably carries too much stigma to utter. I attended this shindig alone and alert, and was unprepared for the enormous scope of the mess. Held at the Moscone center in the SOMA neighborhood, the comic convention was wall-to-wall nerdish energy. Upon sizing up the arena, I began looking at the booths and the first person I see is the comedian Brian Posehn. That gives me the courage to soldier on, replete with the knowledge that I’ll be okay.

Much of it was just fat guys with beards and obvious social problems selling comic books out of cardboard boxes, but a lot of it was comic artists themselves selling stuff. I chiefly enjoyed getting to look at the set-ups of comic artists on footing similar to mine (the unknowns). One artist whose work I admired can be found here. The section for the up-and-comers gave me much hope for my own future in comicking, and I fully expect to attend the next Wondercon (or Comicon) as an artist with a booth. Sure, I may be a complete bomb, but at least I can always go drunk.

Though there were a myriad photo opportunities, I thought it would be fun to have a single boring picture.  This was it.  I like the idea of a booth labeled “Entertainment of the Future” being completely empty.  A bold statement, sirs.