Squidbunnies.com

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:40:03 -0800

illicit liason
(wednesday, the 21st of february, 2007)

If I've been conspicuous by my absence it's due largely to a love affair with the Great American Novel. I expect it's just a fling, though, and doubt it'll produce any viable offspring. I'll probably see you sometime around March.

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:28:16 -0800

illicit liason
(wednesday, the 21st of february, 2007)

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Sat, 25 Nov 2006 15:37:21 -0800

ah, how i have enjoyed these last six years
(saturday, the 25th of november, 2006)

I was on AIM this morning and someone asked me what I was doing and I said "painting an embarrassingly sincere piece of FFXII fanart". This person replied "Um. Cool, I guess. Yes. I'll stick with 'cool.'" and then quit talking to me.

At what age did fanart stop being an acceptable thing to do? I'd kind of forsworn it myself, but why? It's been about 6 years since I really did any, smug in my surety that I'd outgrown that kind of obsessive love for videogames. Well there was that whole Psychonauts business. But besides that.

I had to go to the old GIA mirror because I submitted it to Sketch Artist along with a bunch of other stuff that makes me chuckle and cringe in retrospect, but for comedy, I dug up the last piece of Final Fantasy fanart I did.

Until now.

My interest in XII's plot rested so heavily on the shoulders of a single character after awhile -- a character not cut from the cloth that fan artists tend to represent -- that I was compelled. What a rad man, that Dr. Cid. And still radder the voice lent him by John Lee; the JP Cid didn't strike me as half so stellar.

Anyway, Click the thumbnail for the full image, but at your own peril; it could be considered minorly spoilerific.

The lighting is botched pretty badly and the anatomy is wonky but after three repaints because I started with no solid head-on reference for the coat I figured I'd spent long enough on it. It's not great, but I'd fain see you do better.

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 07:31:24 -0800

the reins of history back in the hands of man
(monday, the 20th of november, 2006)

Seriously, I should set myself up for disappointment more often. My readiness to shit on this game and its feisty refusal to give in and suck have made me love it in a way I never expected to love a Final Fantasy again.

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 08:21:34 -0800

augh
(wednesday, the 8th of october, 2006)

What the fuck, Wisconsin? I'm moving to Canada.

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:55:51 -0800

rat in a punkin!
(monday, the 30th of october, 2006)

Title says it all.

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:32:04 -0700

open invitation
(friday, the 27th of october, 2006)

Free punch and pie at the NEW squidboard.

Squidbunnies.com tragic but infrequent news

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:18:43 -0700

hey, weird
(wednesday, the 24th of october, 2006)

Remember Kwikke's Copies? I totally just did. What's weird is that I actually made one this morning, after forgetting about it two and a half years ago. What's weirder is that, although I didn't resume the Wedding Saga of the Damned that got me into so much shit with the comic's real-life archetypes, I did base it, in the old tradition, on something that actually happened. But perhaps weirdest of all: I drew it, on some retarded impulse, in MS Paint. Not so weird, maybe, is that fact that it doesn't really look any worse.

scholastic saga

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:57:31 -0700

scholastic saga
(thursday, the 19th of october, 2006)

The story so far:

1999: I turn 19 and figure I should probably do something with myself besides spend all my Wal-Mart earnin's on fan-subbed VHSs of then-obscure anime. I live a good distance from the University and don't own a car, so I decide to enroll at Watertown's community branch of Madison Area Technical College, a biggish tech school that as near as I can tell has far better course offerings in computer science than the University, anyway. At this point in history I think I want to be a Network Systems Analyst (go fucking figure, eh), and they have a program for that. However, there is a waiting list to become a Network Systems Analyst because all these new Network Systems Analyst programs haven't yet barfed a hojillion graduates onto the IT scene and broken it with a stupid glut. A career counselor asks if there's anything else I want to do and I grudgingly say "Oh, fuck. I dunno. Art maybe." Amusingly, though, the only enticing art major is Visual Communications, which at least includes various flavors of digital imaging, but since the entire world is apparently as obsessed with fucking with computers at this point in time as I am, it too has a 40-year waiting list. So I get myself put on both waiting lists and start taking whatever classes aren't full in both of these areas.

2000: In addition to all the vanilla economics/psych/communication skills/whatever classes everyone everywhere has to take regardless of what they intend to do I manage to get my loathsome Liberal Studies ass into a bizarre assortment of art and technology offerings, and quickly realize that I didn't actually like computers and that low-level programming was the bane of my existence. Also Novell NetWare is stupid. I drop off of one waiting list.

2001: Having pretty much taken every class I can in Watertown I move to Madison to attend MATC's primary campus where they actually have, you know, classes and stuff. I am still not technically in an art program, and am running out of shit I can take without being in one. Incidentally, I briefly assume the mantle of Double Agent and, when asked by a reader, I lie and say I actually am a Visual Communications major. Another reader informs me this is a bullshit major and for some reason I still remember this 5 years in the future. Independently, I drop off the ViComm waiting list because it is a bullshit major.

2002: I finish the spring semester (at this point I am largely taking bullshit like philosophy and creative writing 2, but hey! 3.9 GPA!@@!#) go to E3, and realize upon my return that I'm poor and I'm not really accomplishing anything in school by not actually working toward any kind of degree. I drop out to get a job full-time, lay in some funds, and reconsider my choice of school and area of study. Ironically, I get a job at Kinko's, who'd made my computer graphics classes a nightmare with their inability to print one fucking copy of anything within any kind of reasonable amount of time. You always become the thing you hate most; in this case an embittered dropout tech school VisCommie torturing the university students with dogmatic insistence on 24-hour turnaround times. But at least I had some pocket change to start replacing the fan-subbed anime tapes with region-free DVDs!

2003: ~~Kent~~ Reg pisses me off when he refuses to give me a perfectly reasonable raise after I single-handedly save the store from a disastrous failure of our server's RAID array. I quit, because as previously discussed, I don't want to be a Network Systems Analyst anymore. George offers to let me sponge awhile and see if I can make it at comics, since all my coworkers really liked my incredibly assy Kwikke's comics for some reason.

2004-5: Fuck if I know.

... which brings us to the present.

I've been thinking about going back to school for the last few months. I mean, c'mon. People should go to school. And I think it's pretty obvious now that I guess, deep down, I do have some kind of compulsion to draw shit. Also, 20 years from now I really don't want to be that one middle-aged woman in your illustrative figure drawing class who's trying to "discover herself." So I better do this before I wake up one morning and, woah, I'm 30.

The University's art department is a little too fine art for me, but good old Madison Area Tech now has a new waiting list for me: an Applied Arts degree in Animation and Concept Design, the entire first semester of which I have pretty much already taken. It's looking pretty good to me, despite the nagging shame of going to a technical college vs. the University. But, hey, it's not like they have TV spots about "tightening up the graphics."

consumer alert

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:52:02 -0700

consumer alert
(friday, the 13th of october, 2006)

Okay, people who know me on a somewhat more intimate basis know I've been sort of not eating meat for years. It was never for so lamely simplified a reason as "I don't want to kill animals" -- predation is a natural thing and I have no direct problem with is. But factory farming isn't natural (not to mention its negative environmental impact compared with, say, growing cabbage), and I'll spare you the PETA write-up on its innate cruelties because it's not exactly a shocking newsflash anymore that animals are caged in tiny little shitpiles and raised on antibiotics to keep from dying in the filth, etc.. What is shocking is that now that most everyone knows this shit they're still eating at KFC. Clearly, people are fucking assholes.

And after some thought over the last few days I realized that by letting those occasional few strips of bacon slip into my diet via a Bacon Egg & Cheese Bagel I was perhaps being the worst fucking asshole. Because I knew better. With the exception of Arguments With Jay I haven't been tremendously outspoken about animal cruelty but still, what a horrendous hypocrite and what a coward I've been for not being more resolute.

So this year, when I hit my parents' for Thanksgiving I'm not going to be tempted by the turkey. Nor am I going to be tempted by the turkey and then say I only ate some to be polite to my mom.

I leave you then, not with a horrible image of Butterball turkeys shackled upside-down awaiting scalding in some kind of stab at turning you off the upcoming holiday feast (peta.org's got that covered), but rather with fuzzy turkey chicks giving thanks that they're not lined up for the beak burner.

Slaughterhouse colors clash with squidbunnies.com's design.

24 hours later

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 19:44:02 -0700

24 hours later
(monday, the 9th of september, 2006)

So 24 Hour Comic day wasn't quite so euphoric this year. Fun, but hardly transcendent. We were a lot more tireder, and a lot less motivated, and ultimately a lot less done. Catie did a sort of a Gaiman variant; she did 21 pages of comic, falling short of the full 24, but didn't ink the last third. Meanwhile, I did actually complete 24 pages, but my quality nosedives pretty hysterically: there's a noticeable decline throughout the comic, but the last 5 or so pages are of such low-quality that I don't think low-quality is even the right term since it contains the word quality. This can be attributed to the fact that I did the last 5 pages in the last hour of our 24 hours, after my sister said fuck it and went to sleep. I decided finishing the story was more important to me than resigning with illustrative dignity intact. It only really hurt on the last page, which I'd envisioned as a grand, spectacular affair and which ended up being modest at best.

Still a good experience. Recommended. A+. Would do business with again.

Oh, yeah. The comics.

The Alchemist's Garden

Erin Mehlos

Untitled

Cate Mehlos

all the tiny boxes

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:42:56 -0700

all the tiny boxes
(thursday, the 28th of september, 2006)

You probably wouldn't think it to look at the comics I draw but one of my personal pantheon of Comic Gods is master of the morose Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan), who's going to be giving another To the Best of Our Knowledge interview along with old friend Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) here at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

I find this to be cool.

P.S. The Hell's Corners RSS feed works now, and this one does not. Maybe you should just stay away.

coming soon to an unreliable printing service near you

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:56:07 -0700

coming soon to an unreliable printing service near you
(wednesday, the 27th of september, 2006)

I've been working on and off for quite awhile now on another comic project with Nich. Since I'm a jerk and continually sideline my half of the work, it's not yet finished, but I thought you might be interested to know that it does exist.

And it looks sort of like this.

the anniversary of something, maybe?

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:30:41 -0700

the anniversary of something, maybe?
(monday, the 11th of september, 2006)

Whatever. My holiday approaches, and I can't wait.

Hi, by the way. In a nod to the 21st century there's RSS now.