Questionable Content is becoming more questionable.

If you’ve been following the story at Questionable Content, you’d know that things are getting “Shit-hot” right now.  Perhaps poor Marten will get laid before I do, again - but the guy has been wussing out and putting up with coffee-shop girls for 3 years, and he has to deal with all of the angst associated with being fictitious. (Yeah! Wicked fictitious!) He deserves to get his non-existant mack on.

I’m eating pocky, working super-overtime at the hotel, marking websites, and simultaneously planning on installing Gentoo on my laptop and setting up Azureus on the work computers so I can set them to the task of downloading episodes of Daria and Cake albums.

Newspaper Dramatics

Warren Haas, humour editor for “The Peak”, much-vaunted news-rag of SFU that it is, has managed to insult just about everybody at SFU. Yang’s response was swift, and brutal, telling Warren Haas that he is so very, very wrong. Chris Conway also takes a much less erudite shot at Warren for the same thing.

In Warren’s defense, some lower-level art courses are really goddamn easy, and taking less than 5 due to the ‘workload’ would be silly and lazy. Most of the courses at SFU, however, involve so much struggling against professors who couldn’t explain the concept of ‘hard’ to a rock, that taking more than a few at a time would guarantee instant insanity.

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Following the same damn Mohammed-comic controversy as the rest of the world, some doof invoked Godwin’s Law in a letter to “The Peak”. By invoking the Nazi analogy, he automatically loses the discussion, even if he’s not technically on USENET. The responses to his letter are almost worse than the letter itself, and they’ve also used the tried-and-true Hitler reference to ‘drive their point home’.

The only really enlightened response was the carefully crafted letter from the Muslim Student Association. The gist? “This is insulting. We disapprove. We believe in free speech, but don’t use it to deride people.” In this case, I completely agree. The comics were tasteless and racist, and clearly shouldn’t have been printed in the first place. To print them in ’solidarity’ is every bit as tasteless. The solution to look upon the comics with stern disapproval and write well-crafted letters-to-the-editor, however, is probably the most mature way to look at the situation.

Shoulder-Angels Are So Cliche

Okay, the old ’shoulder-angel/shoulder-devil’ thing is a bit overdone. It is fun, though.  For a while, I was thinking of doing a comic where a guy’s conscience, in the form of the shoulder angel and devil, became full-sized and could follow him around and interact with his life.  The trick was that the devil would enrich his life as much, if not more, as the angel, as he would be more concerned with pragmatic realities than tired old moral ideals.

It sounded fun, at least.  This was from the ‘tween-schools’ period between High School and University, if you’re looking for a generic time frame for this comic to fit into.

I finished my first Butterloaf strip, and sent it to The Peak.  I won’t have access to a scanner until the end of the week, though, so don’t expect too much.

This week, I’m working at the hotel. All week. I worked last week, too, Wednesday to Saturday, and now I’m working Monday to Friday, all 10-12 hour shifts.
Oh, horrors. Horrors and pain!

New Jersey never did anything to me.

But I’ll lambast it anyways. This is from my early freshman year at SFU, as well.

Butterloaf

What’s Curtis working on right now?

Aside from trying to learn C++, working at a hotel job, performing TA duties, trying to spend some time with his girlfriend, and taking a Calculus course, Curtis is working on developing a serial comic strip. It’s going to look snazzy, and it’s going to fit in your standard syndication submission package. Then, Curtis is going to make many copies and send them to your local comic syndicates, in hopes of being sold to newspapers.

Remember, folks, the minute Curtis gets a job as a cartoonist, the rest of the education gets put on hold. But the 3:5000 odds really don’t look good in Curtis’s favour.

Curtis has a snazzy preview graphic, but it needs to be scanned and photoshopped, so it’ll be awhile.

zOMG, Load Times!

When entering this site, you might notice that the images take anywhere between 5 seconds and 10,000 years to load (depending on your connection).
Why is this?
Because each image is a really, really huge, un-optimized, monster. I promise to get my lazy Photoshop-using ass in gear at some point during this week, but until then, you’re going to have to learn to live with the load times.

The Ancients

What’s the deal, Curtis, you might say if you were familiar with my body of works. (Which you’re not, of course).
“Why are you posting comics that you finished at the very beginning of freshman year at SFU? You have newer, better comics to post! “

Well, in my effort to place the entire bulk of my work online in no specific order, I’m jumping willy-nilly through my comic history. Why, you might even see some of the terrible webcomic that I produced in high-school. 

I’ll make an effort to post something new and interesting every week, but the rest of the comics are going to be filler from times of yore, at least until times of yore dry up and I have to generate all the more interesting content.

I think that I will never knows; A place as good as Timmy Ho’s

A sad story, this. The features editor at The Peak, Debbie, asked me to do an illustration for a “Last Word” article that she was running. The kick? I was allowed to use colour and everything! I may have gone a little nuts… It was my first real experience with colour that didn’t look like total ass, and it took me most of a day to complete. All of the colours are flat and very ‘animationy’, and the emotional effect is completely dulled by the complete spectrum of pastel colours. Let me tell you, the front counter all by itself is pretty.. well.. depressing.
The technique of using an almost monochromic set of colours on each layer makes for a much more eye-grabbing picture than one would expect. I didn’t think of any real emotional bent, to the article, so I went for a neutral with this one- If I was going for a more piss-&-moan “I’m so very cool” coffee-shop look, I would have done the whole thing in purples and blues, like the front counter.

Well, I produced something that’s at least interesting, if a little bit too ‘way overcrowded’ and a little bit too ‘nickelodean’. So, then, the article that it was to accompany, a sordid piece of crap about how white guys never pay the bill at Tim Hortons, never ran. I’m kinda glad that the article didn’t run, because it really sucked, but now the picture has no home. Except here, where I can pretend I’m an artiste’, just because I drew a picture with some colour.

Curse you, Warren Haas! Curse you to the fiery depths of Hades!

I seethe with unbridled emo rage at Warren Haas, humour editor for The Peak, current master of the comics-page-layout. Once again, he has foiled my devilish plans of world domination by preventing my most beautiful of comic efforts from seeing the light in his comic heap of horrors. “Too big”, he says, “Not funny enough”, “Maybe you shouldn’t have Jesus doing that with those nuns”. Censorship, I tell you, and most foul, at that! My comic is no bigger than “Warren’s Dream” or “Dildo Coffee Talk”, .
But nay, this comic may never see the light of day. Nor shall it’s bretheren covering the recent power outages, which didn’t go in THIS week’s Peak for… well, no specific reason, except that perhaps Warren did not check his inbox, or didn’t find it funny, or the comic didn’t fit.

They say, if you don’t like it, contribute something yourself. Yes, I will once again be running for the much-loathed position of humour editor at The Peak, for the Summer Semester. You must submit articles to The Peak, and then, you must vote for me.
Of course, I have many comics that have been rejected by the Peak for various reasons, by at least three of the humour editors (Warren, Dock, and.. uh.. who was before Dock? Jim? James? Something like that.) and I’ve decided to post them here, over the course of time, alongside those comics that actually did make ‘the cut’.  Some of them really don’t deserve to be in The Peak- but when someone asks me where my comic is *this week*, I can say, “Go to my blog, it’s there!” instead of offering up an excuse.
… And yes, I will change them to an appropriate size for reading on the web. Nobody should have to struggle through loading THAT MUCH image, just because I’m posting ‘print-quality’ comics on the web. I just need my sexy Photoshop by my side.

Tickle Attack

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This is the last comic that I sent to The Peak.

I’m not going to lie, Kristen had a hand in making it too, being that she all but came up with the joke.  We were sitting together, and I was doodling on a pad of paper, as is customary. She nabbed the page from me, scribbled a note on it, and handed it back to me. “You have been warned. TICKLE ATTACK!”

Sadly, the warning did not suffice.