August 26th

This one is a quiet little interlude.  Or just one of those days.  The next one is at least a three parter(maybe more).  So it's going to take a while.  All the main character make an appearance on one weird day of super highs and super lows.  Or maybe I just stub my toe and complain about it for thirty pages.  You'll just have to wait and see.  I added storyboards/layouts for the next episode if you want to get a feel for where I am going with all this.  Doesn't help I have a little stage fright drawing these particular girls.

I'm going to take it as a synchronous coincidence that two hours before I posted this I ran into the girl in this comic late at night at the gym.  I somehow didn't even tell her(I mentioned it a while back though).

I've been scanning a whole almost 30 page chapter of my other comic that I work on.  It always totally resets my mind when I can hold more than 70 pages, a good chunk of my work year and actually feel what a graphic novel of original art weighs.  My bigger Thought Balloon Man/August pages are actually too heavy to hold all together(its well over a hundred pages).  On some weird level that scares me.

I've been itching to make a new Brooks Laughton short.  Still considering.  I want my Brooks character to be in a movie called Robot, the Teenage Ghost.

The Johnny Cash Project

I did two frames(I may have possibly done three and forgot) of this music video for a Johnny Cash song.  Two frames is a very short amount of time.  It is a project where any random artist can draw certain frames of this video.  What you get is hundreds of artists drawing really cool frames of Cash.  I saw the commercial today on tv.  Have no idea if a frame of mine is in the commercial but I now am obsessed.  You can add a frame yourself at the link in the title above.  It's fun and cool looking and remarkably easy to do.  

The Goode Apples

Before there was Brooks Laughton/childSTAR(the shorts I wrote directed and acted in), there was the Goode Apples.  About five years ago I wrote an epic about two geeks who were in a shitty band.  The main characters were 15 year old Trinsic Goode, and his best friend Quinn.  Trinsic owns a talking computer and they meet the ultimate geek kid(who has Linda Carter's Wonder Woman costume in a glass case).  That kid's name is Gosh(which the two leads assumed was a swear).

They invent a totally insane super bouncy ball game.  Later on they find a magical super bouncy ball/meteorite(they were on the look out for super bouncy balls of course).  After meeting some beautiful groupie girls, they struggle with new found puberty issues(they bloomed late) and decide to enter the Band Off(a battle of the bands).

Along the way Trinsic's older brother Brad, and his sidekick, Nuegat(like the candy), steal the Goode Apples demo and hide it in Old Man Macallister's haunted house.  They also meet their mirror versions/rival band called New Tooth(which sounded like a mix between Rush and Yes, musically, with a bunch of weird fantasy thrown in lyric wise).  Yeah and the magical super bouncy ball and talking computer are important to the plot(?).  Also Trinsic and Quinn had some genuinely confused religious issues.  Gandalf and Jesus are both Merlins to them, and they don't swear, and girls are weird(hence their insanity when they meet hot ones).

It was an epic two hour movie.  A mix between Weird Science, Bill and Ted's, Explorers, Goonies, any eighties movie with a talking computer, and horror movies.  There was references to American Werewolf In London and The Thing and Flash Gordan(strangely, for me, no Ming's daughter reference).  Of course all this cost a shit load of money and there was no way I could finance it independently.  It was entertaining, and strangely even logical(in it's own logic) but it was epic and would have cost a lot.  But it was fun ass all hell to write.

I did write some shorts with those characters.  Like one where for some reason they have to take care of an elderly man and something bad happens so they throw him a surprise party and he dies.  And then the kids forget about it and eat some candy.

That was my favorite part of writing Trinsic.  He was such a know it all, ignorant asshole on a constant basis.  A control freak, who is afraid of girls and just wants to be a merlin one day.  But you still like him.  In his world, no parents were ever mentioned, and probably didn't exist, and summer lasted many months.  One of my favorite parts at the end, is after all this turmoil and changes in the lives of the characters, One of them laments that summer is almost over, and the other says, yeah, we only have a few months left.  That was the feeling I was going for.  A complete world governed by kid logic.

Also, I was supposed to play Trinsic.  Blond hair, blue eyes, glasses and all.

My only rule with this crazy shit was that you can write whatever you want as long as it's funny regardless of whoever watches it.  As in, if you are not into this kind of thing, I literally wrote it to force you to laugh.  I was an asshole about it.  I didn't want the audience to have a choice.  I wanted them to get mad at me for forcing them to laugh.  Joke wise it's definitely very dense(although the childSTAR commercial is almost as dense joke wise as the movie was supposed to be).  Trinsic was almost an opposite of me in every way(except some slight geek overlap).  Brooks Laughton was more like someone I was at my weakest and lowest(mirroring my comic in lots of ways, but not biographical).

*I forgot to mention this one scene I really liked writing where Trinsic tries to explain to a blind man why the brail is a scam.  Or this time he almost drools on this girl.  Or the sequel at a summer camp(a sort of riff on Meatballs 2 and Sleepaway Camp and Friday The Thirteenth).  I was trying to write the Lord Of The Rings of crazy eighties movies with an original twist.  It was stream of consciousness machine gun comedy with my emphasis on how twisted little kids think.  In a weird world of what are very likely home schooled kids.

Terrorvision(on Netflix Instant, 1986)

I saw a review for one of my favorite eighties bad movies.  This movie is great for being weird/bad.

The thing with Terrorvision is, it is one of those movies that just does whatever the fuck it feels like until it runs out.  And sometimes, when the right maniac makes a movie, or the stars align and all the bad shit comes out looking funny and good, you get a movie like Terrorvision.

It's about this weird family that is 80s/70s.  They set up a satellite dish and accidentally pick up a signal from aliens.  The signal is some sort of garbage monster slime thing.  The boy in the family knows something is wrong.  His grandpa who lives in the basement is batshit insane, and his older sister(the super cute girl from Last American Virgin, a great out of nowhere gut punch of a movie) and her metal head boyfriend(played by the great Jon Gries, werewolf from Monster Squad AND Fright Night 2) make the homicidal slime/garbage monster their pet.

It is a really hard movie to describe.  It's funny and stupid and kind of gross.  It in no ways resembles real life.  Everyone seems coked up or crazy, especially the alien and the monster.  I remember my crotch always responding when the kind of ugly Medusa woman showed up with her amazing cleavage(seriously).  One of the few times simple cleavage was enough to fuck my brain(once a much older woman in my landlords office probably had a chance with me based on her cleavage, I was so horny and mystified at that weakness in me.  Girls have no idea how weak us men really are. ).  This was before the internet and being an artist and seeing naked people all the time.  This was when late night cable was your best and only chance to see a tit or even side tit(hey I was like 10, I still called vaginas bushes, now I call just call them cookies).

I just love this stupid movie.  About ten years ago I brought it to a party and everyone was in love with it.  It was the weirdest campy 80's movie.  Evil dead was the king of this campy category. Other greats in this catagory are Night Of The Creeps(one of the best ever, aliens, axe murderers, slugs, and zombies), Life Force(hottest fully nude eighties movie villain), Night Of The Comet(wake up everyone is gone except for a few zombies),  Troll 1(yeah 1, I haven't seen the legendary sequel yet, but I watched the original as a kid a bunch and it made me a little scared of plants).

Informers

The Informers might be a fucked movie, but Amber Heard in it is an animal engine of lust.  Sorry, it's on cable and I'm not interested in watching it again, but the slight chance I may get to see a scene with her makes me leave it on in the background.  I'm not sure she has any clothed scenes in this.  I guess god exists.  No…have to do something productive...

Moving

At the end of August I was considering co-signing with my dad on a place in southern california.  And then I made a different decision to stay for a few more months because of some personal stuff(good personal stuff).  Stuff that changes the ending of Thought Balloon Man completely, in a really roundabout way.

I'll be here a few more months while I finish my projects and then move down south to someplace pretty.  I always try to move to places that remind me of Stinson Beach I noticed.  I have a rule that wherever I move has to have hills to hike in and an ocean to watch sunsets on(like when I lived in Pacifica).

- Adrian

P.S.: I got to reverse that third panel, because it flows better in the other direction.  It's easy to fix in photoshop.  Also, I'll add the title.  And the next post is the next episode of August.

August 25th

Funny thing is this is exactly how I plotted this years ago.  I drew and inked it and then suddenly thought, oh shit, didn't I have a phone conversation in this comic already that ended like this?  I didn't actually, it was just another dumb message I left earlier in the story.  But then I remembered I specifically wrote that one(which also happened) playing it as what happens from these two particular messages.

It's been a weird consequence of time and distance from the subject matter, and also how I write.  I like to put all the clues in the story without spotlighting those clues(and by saying this I'm blowing those clues out of proportion, they were just set ups for future stuff).  But what that does is make people assume the clues were meaningless in an episodic sense, but reading it all in a row doesn't have that problem.  It also doesn't help that I don't have the rest of the story up yet.  I now get moments where, I say oh yeah, that's why that's there.  A lot of the story has changed as I have changed and some stuff is no longer relevant.  Certain names and places, and one segment(a part about a girlfriend) was cut down because it was just a moment in time instead of something that echoed into the future.  If anything the story is about the echoes of moments and how life can be a logical puzzle or story if looked at a certain way.

In the present, most things are random moments, but put in a very singular spotlight, the repeating events and how they interact make a story.  That's all any story is, the parts that play together minus all the extraneous detail.  August is about the details and the march of time, the rest of Thought Balloon Man is about change and moments).

This particular episode is echoing some of the episodes from the previous week(in the story) where I went to school and tried to look at the bright side.  In the episodes I met a cute girl in class and had lunch with my friend Lissette(she's in the next episode, also an echo of the previous week in the story).  And yes, I left a lame message on another girl's machine after putting her in a comic.  I only mention all this because I don't have those up and am editing them after I finish this last half.

Also, I introduced the girl in this story in a dream sequence in a previous episode.  It's kind of self explanatory from there.

True Blood

I pretty much liked this season and was captivated by the juggling act they played with a bunch of barely converging story lines.  Plus Jessica(the red head) is fine as hell.  And Lafayette is consistently entertaining.  I had a little crush on Sam Merlottes shifter girlfriend(not the annoying blond werewolf girl, guh, ).  And Eric…geez, way to put all us other men to shame.  I don't trust a woman who doesn't want to fuck Eric.

He even won me over when he was sweet which I was sure was going to be intolerable(to me as a man, I knew women would love it).  But when he is scary he is even better.  Like when he bit that heart, was one of the coolest vampire moments in the show(Daenarys in Game Of Thrones ate a whole horse heart, you pussy.  HBO must have some kind of running bet, I wonder when they'll eat a heart on Boardwalk Empire).

Also, Jason Stackhouse was great, getting what he always wished for on many levels to his regret.  I think it's funny how in some weird way Sookie is a non entity to me since she is the central sexual focus of the show and I'm not attracted to her(I'll just lust over Jessica, than you very much).  It's weird.

But Tara, really brought it this season.  She had that hot ass girlfriend and punched and shot people.  Plus, she was no longer a victim.  I got to admit I was into her this season.

Also there is a heavy dose of Puerto Rican/Caribbean Sex Magic going on this season, which is funny since I randomly decided to base a fantasy part in Thought Balloon Man on my made up fantasy sex magic loosely based on Caribbean religions.

Spitting Cobra

I was at the Acadamy Of Sciences the other week to look at the reptile exhibit.  They had some night time mixer with wine and beer.  I drink so rarely now I forgot to even have some. The jellyfish were the most mesmerizing.  I just stood in front of their tank for like five minutes straight watching the closest one slowly show off all it's intricate layers of colors.  The albino alligator was pretty cool.  I saw a giant water bug which basically looks like a super colorful intricate giant cockroach.  Then I saw some flying cockroaches.  Then a big dead bug that looked like a drowned potato bug covered in soggy grape leaves with gnarly root-like antennae coming out of weird places.

At one point I saw this Spitting Cobra.  It didn't have that wide neck plume like what ones expects a Cobra to have.  It was chillin on a rock when I walked up.  There was people to either side of me.  But the snake got a glimpse of me and he was like, "Ahh, helllllll no!" and slithered up to the glass and raised his neck to look right at me and suddenly he went perfectly still. Locked only on me with his head way up.  After about thirty seconds of us staring at each other I nervously laughed and said to the people next to me, "Is it just my imagination or is he staring right at me?"  They laughed a little and maybe subconsciously moved away, which only further proved the snake did not like me.

Then this obnoxious woman came out of nowhere and kneeled right next to the glass and was kind of loud saying stuff.  The Cobra looked like he had to shake off the distraction because he stopped being a statue.  He basically turned to go back to the center of the habitat, mainly out of annoyance at this new interloper, but he kind of kept his eye on me and disregarded the girl.  But on his way back to his spot he opened his mouth and I would say he spit at me.  But nothing came(funny sentences).  

Or maybe the Cobra just really liked me.

The Tri-Olympic Challenge

Also at the Academy Of Sciences the other day I totally had chemistry with this dark haired beautiful girl in tight jeans with tattoos and next thing I know she is making out with her blond girlfriend(I really tried to find a way I could convince myself they were inviting me into something but I couldn't).  So it figures.  I'm pretty sure I should marry one girl and we should share a girlfriend between us, like we're totally, passionately, undeniably into each other and we use this other chick as a plaything.  We don't even take her seriously.  Pretty fucked up fantasy, but play it out a little, it's kind of hot.  It's been on the table before(I like crazy chicks, remember).

Chalk Lines

All this reminds me of one of my very first memories.  The chalk outline of a dead body down the side alley of Acadamy Of Sciences.  I saw it when I was just a little kid and figured out what it was.

When I drove to Golden Gate park I was meeting up with people but I drove alone and parked way the hell away from the Acadamy.  And since this was a night time event, I was parked in a dark foggy dreamy part and had to walk through the fog and down the side of the building to get to the Acadamy.  Truthfully, it was a different side of the building and I never got within two hundred feet of that place, but thats what fiction is for.  I went down the side of the building and the chalk outline was still there.  And someone was laying in it.  Clearly dead.  When some gutteral noise came out of my mouth, it seemed to almost wake.  It tried to get up on it's feet but the flesh fell from it's bones and it came apart, like a loose meat sandwich.  That's fiction for you, folks.  The last part at least.

Athlete

Kind of gross but my feet were itching after I had run my fucking ass off for weeks(maybe "running my ass on" because it's muscular now).  It went away but a few days later I saw an athletes foot commercial, and realized that must have been what happened.  I don't need it anymore but it didn't matter because all of a sudden thinking I had athletes foot from running so much(15 miles this week) meant I was kind of an athlete.  I laughed to myself for about a minute saying to myself, "I'm an athlete" in a mockingly confidant way.  At least I had some proof all this exercise was paying off.  So yeah, I'm a total athlete now.  In my head at least.  You should have seen the swollen head I got from seeing my bicep the other day when turning the wheel.

Curb Your Enthusiasm Theme Song

Since I make such a big deal about how much my cat hates it when I whistle the curb Your enthusiams theme song, I decided it had been too long since I whistled it.  My cat Oliver could in no way remember this particular song and how much he hates it(for the record he also doesn't like it when I sing the Sleeptrain or 1-800-general now song).  He didn't lose a step, I started whistling and he started making a face and shifting uncomfortably and finally when I went in for a second verse he tried to slap me across the face, except with his needle fingers.  I have been scratched more in the face from whistling that song than anything else.  But it makes me laugh so fuck him.

-  Å

P.S.: I might change some stuff in these newest pages.  Also, I'll probably have another episode out this weekend or early next week.