Set to Sea pg. 78

on April 29, 2010

I finished Gulliver’s Travels, it got very harsh at the end. Gulliver’s last voyage is to the land of the Houyhnhnms, intelligent horses that live in an ideally rational society. The humans are Yahoos – filthy, deformed, stinking savages (Swift spends a while describing the long hairs that grow around their anuses, and at one point they poop on Gulliver’s head) that the horses use as labor. Gulliver spends several years serving a noble Houyhnhnm, coming to admire them.  When Gulliver gets back to England (on a boat with a sail made of Yahoo skin!), he’s been so twisted by his experience that he finds all humanity loathsome (he finds it disgusting to touch his children or share a drinking glass with his wife,) and spends his days hanging out in a stable. Jonathan Swift did end up going insane later in life.

For some reason, they never get past Lilliput in the cartoon versions I’ve seen.

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Set to Sea pg. 76

on April 23, 2010

• I’ve been getting spam recently about growing tomatoes; growing a tree that sprouts giant tomatoes. It’s really cute. At least compared to normal spam.

• Today’s the last day you can nominate books for the Harvey awards (if you’re a Comics Industry Professional, whatever that is). Also, online voting is up for the Eisner awards (also for Comics Industry Professionals). I mention this out of pure disinterested charity, not in any sort of attempt to garner votes for Eleanor’s amazing children’s comic, The Secret Science Alliance.

• I’m supposed to get color proofs for the cover of the Set to Sea book today! Exciting.

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Set to Sea pg. 75

on April 22, 2010

• I’ve been enjoying this series of essays by James Sturm, the premise of which is that Sturm is going entirely off the internet for about a year. I’ve considered this very tempting proposition on occasion. It seems impossible unless you’ve got the ability (and desire) to delegate internet activities onto somebody else, or you’re willing to give up all of the benefits of the internet altogether. The “just use the internet less, dumbass!” comments on the Sturm pieces are interesting. If you feel like you’ve got your internet usage under control, I’m jealous. Personally, I find it very hard to walk any sort of “middle path.”

• Congratulations to my friend Chris Wright for finishing his pirate comic “Black Lung,” which besides being amazing, was a major inspiration for “Set to Sea.” I beat him to the finish line by a month, which in the context of 5+ years, is practically a photo finish. Now somebody get that man a publisher.

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Set to Sea pg. 74

on April 19, 2010

• Hey, that was a fun Fluke, wasn’t it? We were all crammed in there pretty good. Fluke is like some monster hermit crab, leaving discarded Athens venues scattered on the beach.

• I got a lot of damn minicomics, but I didn’t actually spend more money than I made, so that’s a win.

• We had to duck out of the show for an hour or so, to go put on a puppet show at the local library. That went off well too. I think after you’ve had to entertain 50+ children, interacting with a few comics nerds seems a lot easier. The rest of the show was a lot more relaxed.

• I didn’t take any pictures, but this guy did.

• I inked a couple pages for the Fluke anthology as well. Did you hear what the deal with that? Patrick Dean penciled out a 24-page story, and the pages got divvied up amongst a lot of Athens/Atlanta cartoonists, who all inked them independently of each other. We were all surprised to find the story fairly readable in the end! Copies went out to every Fluke attendee, so I think that they might be “sold out” for the moment. I’ll let you know when it’s back in print.

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