COMIC: Joe Bivins: Man Genius - "Feliz NaviDEATH: Shadows of Noel"

It took a year, but the 2008 Christmas Special is complete. Actually it didn't take a year, I worked on it for less than a month and then let it sit from January to September, when I got back to it, again for less than a month, and then I finally hit my stride in December and did 34 pages in 18 days.

The hope was to finish the 2008 Special in time to do the 2009 Special before Christmas, but that's probably not going to happen. I do hope to be well into it before the deadline passes, and there's a good chance I think of being done by New Year's Day. Drunk Duck is frozen for the weekend again, so I will post the first page(s) of the 2009 Christmas Special: Santa Claus Conquers the Saturnians, on Monday as soon as uploads are reinstated. Meanwhile here are a few unzoomed, uncropped, slightly higher resolution images from Feliz NaviDEATH: (spoilers found herein)

Pure Improvisation and Meticulous Forethought

Here's a thing I wrote while talking to myself:

Humor is an art like any other, and in humor, as in all art, there is an eternal struggle between pure improvisation and meticulous forethought. As the artist you must walk between these two lines like a drunk with double vision failing a sobriety test, moving towards one and then the other but never touching either line. For pure improvisation is unreliable at best and disastrous at worst, your work will always be honest and new but you will have no control over its quality. An artist is a moody creature, and some moods will allow you to commune with the sphere of brilliance, making you look like a master of your craft, but other moods will direct you to the sphere of shit, and you’ll look like a jackass. And of meticulous forethought, in art as in life, no one can predict with infallible accuracy, it is semantically impossible to expect the unexpected, and so inevitably no matter how thorough your plans, the unexpected will sometimes jump out in front of you and demand to be faced head on, and if you cannot improvise, he will eat your face and you’ll have to have reconstructive surgery. So there.

HAIC: The Lost Story

Sometimes when looking for something in my files I get lost looking at old forgotten drawings and reading half-started scripts and fragments of stories. At some point I wrote a few lines of a sequel to HAIC: Women Troubles, which is the main HAIC story I've eradicated from the Joe Bivins: Man Genius continuity, mainly because it relies heavily on HAIC's lack of a fourth wall, which JB:MG does have. Since the sequel's premise also relies on having no fourth wall, I now know I'll never do this comic, so here's the script:

ANT: Hey, Joe! GUESS WHAT DAY IT IS?!?

JOE: It must be a Thursday, I never could get the hang of them.

ANT: Errr...yeah, but specifically what day is it?

JOE: Valentine's Day, I think.

ANT: THAT'S RIGHT!

JOE: ...So?

ANT: Aren't you excited? TONITE IS RIGHT FOR LOVE, BUDDY!

JOE: We don't know any women, Ted.

ANT: THIS IS A COMIC! YOU CAN INVENT SOME WOMEN!

JOE: TED YOU RETARD! We already tried that last summer and they turned out crazy. They always turn out crazy. I don't know why I can't write a female character without giving her severe mental instability. Then again I don't think I've ever written a character of any gender that didn't have a major personality problem.

ANT: Oh okay. WAIT! I forgot about Yolanda and Emily! I didn't really get a chance to talk to Yolanda 'cause Emily was so crazy!

JOE: Actually it's because I lost interest in writing the thing after I knew my character wasn't getting any action.

ANT: SAME DIFFERENCE! You've got to distract that crazy ho so I can get alone with Yolanda and do the horizontal ant mambo!

JOE: Okay, but I must warn you that this will not end well for you...because I'm going to be writing it and I enjoy making you suffer.

ANT: Honestly dude I'm too horny to care.

JOE: THEN LET US AWAY TO THE PINK TRAILER!!

(blank panel)

ANT: You're such a dork.

(inside the pink trailer)

(knock on door)

JOE: Land shark!

EMILY: Who's at the door?

YOLANDA: It's some boys!

EMILY: DON'T LET THEM IN! THEY ONLY WANT OUR BODIES!

YOLANDA: Good! That's all I'm interested in!

EMILY: You're such a slut!

There's more stuff like this, I'll post some of it some time.