I Give You...Acoustafuckit: Part Deux!

Nerd points if you recognize what the cover is an homage to:


(Get enough nerd points and George Lucas has to give you a handjob: it's true! (That's gross why would I even say that?))

Here are the song titles:

The World Outside My Head
Only Getting Older
S.E.X.
Leave Me the Fuck Alone
Chronic Indignity
Isolated
Solid Ground
Cry for Help
I Don't Have a Lot of Nice Things to Say About Myself
Familiar Old Obsessions
Oedipal
In the Dark

They can be heard to your right in my little Soundclick player, along with the entirety of Acoustafuckit (Part 1). The little player is by far the best feature of Soundclick, the worst feature being their aggravating tendency to censor my song and album titles and lyric sheets. And the fact that nobody ever ever goes to my Soundclick page. But if you did go there you could download all the songs from both Acoustafuckits for free.

My personal favorites are "Cry for Help", "Familiar Old Obsessions", and "In the Dark".

Now here's a fun not-really-related-to-this-business story! I generally never clip my strings, thus all my guitars have long string-ends flopping around on the headstock at all times. But the other day my mom, my sister and me went out to the beach like we do when it's just slightly cold, not to swim, just to sit there and stare at the water (we do live in Florida, the ocean is just RIGHT OVER THERE). I recall being a bit bored the last time after a while, so I thought I'd bring a guitar to play, as that seemed a very beachy thing to do. But I didn't want to have to lug my Stratacoustic around in case I didn't feel like playing after all because that could be really annoying (also I wouldn't want to sit it down in the sand). So I decided to put some new strings on my First Act Mini-Guitar (which appears on the cover of Acoustafuckit) and take it, as it is tiny and weighs next-to-nothing (adjacent-to-nothing). At some point First Act starting putting these goofy things on their mini-guitars I guess you'd call "string covers." They're these plastic things that snap down on the tuning pegs and I think are supposed to keep kids from getting poked by guitar strings. Kind of a stupid thing to worry about, but they're also fairly hard to remove, plus regular scale strings on this guitar leave string-ends that are almost as long as its neck, so with both these concerns I HAVE to clip my strings when I use this guitar. But since I never usually do that I don't really have a tool for it, I had some diagonal cutters that did a really terrible job at everything so I gave them away. I haven't replaced them, so trying to come up with a way to cut the strings I had what turned out to be a really dumb idea: my fingernail clippers! My fingernail clippers are actually toenail clippers, so they are pretty tough, so I figured they would do the trick, and on the heavier wound strings they worked great, not surprising as those are the easy strings to cut. When I got down to the light strings the clippers started having trouble, and finally I had to give up and find something else.

So (and this space represents a time-lapse of about a day or so) yesterday when I went to clip my fingernails, I noticed my clippers were having some trouble. Examining them I realized that the smaller gauge strings had left little indentations in the blade. So that is the story of how I ruined my fingernail clippers and left my fingernails jagged and crappy. I hope you have learned something from it. Like...always inspect your fingernail clippers before use? I don't know. BLOOG OVER.

COMIC: Joe Bivins: Man Genius in "Santa Claus Conquers the Saturnians"

It's February 2010 and the Joe Bivins: Man Genius 2009 Christmas Special is done. Luckily comics are awesome all year round. Not like that milk you bought in December. That milk is no longer awesome. You should throw it out.

Well this issue took a lot longer than I wanted it to because I didn't realize that virtually every page had something major I'd have to design for it. And all the action sequences and big giant establishing shots that make Paintshop freeze. I gotta either switch imaging software or get a better compy. Maybe both.

Also, and if you read the issue you probably noticed it, this issue had a much more complicated plot than the last one. I think I must have a tumor pressing up against the part of my brain that likes to make ridiculous shit up. I conceived the silliest premise I could and then the sci-fi nerd in me insisted I write a shit ton of background information explaining it. And if I'd wanted to actually include all the crap I wrote for this story it could've been 120 pages, but trying to keep it short I cut it down as much as possible and only managed to get it down to FIFTY-SEVEN PAGES.

Years ago when I started trying to write a long form comic for the first time, I asked some comic-making friends how long comics typically are these days. The answer I got sounded insurmountable: about 44 pages! (I should point out that this was back when my main comic was Torando, a page of which was famously observed to have taken less than three minutes to make, which I famously observed was the whole point.)

Several years later, after spending about two years preparing Joe Bivins: Man Genius and spending months writing the first story (which is now the third story, which you'll start to see next month probably) I threw this story together in the few spare moments I had while making "Feliz Navideath" and this one ended up being by far the most complex thing I've ever written, and that includes my book. Actually if you just look at page count it's only four pages shorter than my book!

So last time right near the end of making the last issue I thought it might be neat to save some higher resolution images of certain panels, some of the backdrops and props and background jokes which might not have been as visible as I'd have liked, and then posted them on the Bloog. (I'm sticking with that spelling until it stops making me laugh.) Well this time I knew I was doing that from the very beginning, so I've been saving images throughout the issue! Here's some things for you to be clicking: (this is where the spoilers live)

I'm Going to Do Some Blooging Now

Every time I type the word "blogging" I almost type "blooging." I'm just going to say that from now on. I dare ANYONE to correct me. THIS IS MY BLOOG AND I WILL SPELL IT ANY WAY I WANT. Blooging commences NOW!

Hold on, I've got a sugar rush going, let's add a little caffeine and see if we can't make it a full blown hyperspace trip.

I'm trying to remember what I did all through November when I did this every day. Where do ideas come from? Wait I had a little bit I wrote for this, did I use it here? [spends a few minutes scanning old Bloog posts to see if he did.] ARRGH I'M TOO HYPER TO SCAN TEXT! THIS IS WHY THERE ARE TYPOS IN MY BOOK! There are by the way. So I'm told. I proofread that damn thing like five times but there's still crap I missed. If I get the chance I want to take a pen and insert a decimal point in every copy of the book that's out there in a number that the editor screwed up because they don't get mathematics. Fuck my publishing company. There I said it. I kind of hope they don't read the Bloog. I could edit that out I guess but I'M PAST IT NOW MOVING TOO FAST!

It finally happened: I deleted my Myspace page. One of them. What it is is that I had a band page and I had a personal page, in a fit of melodrama and self-loathing a year or so back I deleted all my friends and almost all the content from my personal page, but I left the page there to link people to the Bloog. That was pretty pointless in and of itself but I realized the other day when I was updating my Myspace Music page to reflect Acoustafuckit that I could just link from that page to the Bloog and people looking for my old page would probably find that page just as easily. So I was happily able to delete it! And I'm happily not on Facebook, either! Although I spent a while earlier uploading stuff to Garageband.com (though I decided by the time I was finished that that site sucks and I really shouldn't have bothered with it) and I think they may have put something up on Facebook for me. Facebook is a foreign land to me so I have no fucking clue.

I'm almost done with the 2009 Christmas Comic now, halfway through February 2010. Sad I know, but in my defense I had some unforeseen delays (see the Doodoo Butter Invasion if you just can't contain your curiosity but otherwise don't because it is a really gross story) and also this issue ended up being a lot longer and more complicated to make than I thought. I don't remember if I've mentioned this schedule anywhere outside of my own brain but my plan was after I finished the 2009 Christmas special to have the comic go dark for a little while while I built up a buffer, then come back and do five pages a week for the rest of the year and possibly for the foreseeable future after that depending on how hard it is for me to come up with stories after I burn through this year's. That is still the plan but I may not be able to go dark for all that long if I want to have time to get through the next five stories by the end of the year.

Now is the time that I will chow down on the orange creme egg I bought at the 7-11. The girl there got rather concerned that my egg would get smushed if she put it in the bag with my sodas, so to put her fears to rest I stuck the egg in my pocket. I don't believe the Cadbury company actually manufactures these creme eggs. I believe they harvest them from some kind of alien chicken. Made of candy. I have a feeling this thought was put in my head because I've been reading a weird comic lately called Curvy which is sort of porn but is also a pretty good comic. It's always entertaining to see someone trying to straddle that line between pornography and storytelling because sex DERAILS a story so easily. CLASSIC EXAMPLE: Terminator. We've had this conversation before.

FUN FACT: There was a lot of sexual subtext with many of the secondary characters in Santa Claus Conquers the Saturnians but I cut it out for time and also because I wasn't sure how to write/draw any of it. I'm never sure how to have comic book me interact with girls which just makes me want to write girls into the comic just to see what happens.

What is the consensus on Bloog post length anyway? As a writer I feel lazy if I post less than a few paragraphs but I can see as a reader how a wall of text might be daunting. This one is definitely long enough though, right?

BLOOG OVER.