I am blog.

I haven’t been paying attention too closely, but it’s my understanding that Tumblr is attempting to rebrand as a site that advertises pilgrim garments, like shoe buckles and big hats, and to prepare for this they built an extremely horny algorithm that flags everything as too sexy to handle. So I guess this is my last post, if the shame filled algorithm allows you to see it.

The comic I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past couple years, AN ACTUAL GOBLIN, is for sale digitally here if you’d like to read it. It’s the only comic I’ve ever drawn in full twice, but you can read it as many times as you want.

Nick Hanover wrote a little review of it here 

See you out there in the blogosphere, friends.

Here’s a page from a comic book that I’ve been drawing for a long time.

I’m not sure this makes any sense removed from context, but here’s a page from the comic that I’ve been slowly drawing for the past 60 years. 

Probably because it most resembled a collective, ongoing anxiety attack, 2017 feels both like it just started and like it’s the only year that has ever existed. When I was just looking through my files to see what comics I drew this year, I found a draft of my 2016-year-end Tiny Letter (if you want to sign up, I’ve never sent one and can’t remember the password, so there’s a pretty good chance I never will, you basically have nothing to lose https://tinyletter.com/petetoms) and it was literally like ‘I’m sitting on the floor eating a pineapple in the dark and listening to my body age as American democracy continues to crumble,’ so, for me, not that much has changed.

I have a lot of ongoing projects in various states of completion (including staring at social media for 19 hours a day while trying to figure out how to stop looking at it) that sort of makes me feel like I have never finished anything in my life, but off the top of my head, these are the things that I remember coming out with this year:

Dad’s Weekend

I drew this comic in the span of like 2 months in early 2016, but I don’t think it came out in stores until maybe like the first week in January.

If you want can still get a copy here: http://hicandhoc.storenvy.com/collections/69412-all-products/products/18633589-dads-weekend-pete-toms

You can also read a review of it here: https://hyperallergic.com/359107/a-comic-whose-characters-swim-in-apathy-and-cynicism

Or here: http://leonkpow.tumblr.com/post/156736086549/dads-weekend-by-pete-toms-published-by-hic-hoc

The Short Con

Aleks and I made this comic like 4 years ago now, but the book collection came out this year.

I’m not totally sure if you can still order a copy online, but you can still read it online here: http://studygroupcomics.com/main/the-short-con-by-aleks-sennwald-and-pete-toms/

And you can read a review of it here: http://www.brokenfrontier.com/short-con-pete-toms-aleks-sennwald/

Boo! Halloween Stories 2017

I think the only anthology strip I did in 2017 was for this year’s volume of Boo!

If you want to you can get it here: https://www.comixology.com/BOO-Halloween-Stories-2017/digital-comic/584349?ref=c2VyaWVzL3ZpZXcvZGVza3RvcC9ncmlkTGlzdC9SZWNlbnRBZGRpdGlvbnM

Go Down, Matthew’s Halloween Special 2017

I also made like 5 mins of Halloween music that if you really want to, you can listen to here: https://godownmatthew.bandcamp.com/album/halloween-special-2017

Instagram

I took like 4,000 daily pictures of my dog. You can look at them here if you want: https://www.instagram.com/pete_toms/

As always, I apologize to anyone that knows or will ever know me and hope everyone has a great 2018.

Page from the comic I’m currently working on very very slowly. 

spectacletheater:

Tonight and all July, the best in knock-off anime from South Korea. Series continues today with Raiders of the Galaxy.

This continues a run of the finest in psychedelic pulp posters from Pete Toms. Get the poster on our Etsy.

spectacletheater:

This. All month. Horrors in babysitting via Michael Thelin’s EMILIE.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 18 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 27 – 10 PM

Babysitter psychedelia design by Pete Toms. YES, in fact you can get a copy on our etsy.

I’m jazzed that our book, THE SHORT CON is now in print and looks very nice. You can buy it here.

You can also still read the webcomic by me and Aleks on Studygroup, but it doesn’t have the Francois Vigneault designed covers or the Steve Weissman blurb.

A couple of recent drawings that I forgot to put on here including my attempt at the, now long-aged, Alolan meme. 

leonkpow:

Dad’s Weekend

By Pete Toms.
Published by Hic & Hoc Publications, 2016.

Despite whatever pretense one might like to maintain about a supposed ability to know and understand another human being, the truth is that we’re all actors in each other’s plays. There is no way to completely understand how the surface of a person - how they act and what they say - relates to the subjective entity that lies below this facade. Despite this insurmountable divide, humans have done our best to attempt to traverse the abyss that lies between one person and the unknowable Other. We manufactured language as a means to approach a precision in communication that was previously lacking; using words to replace our reliance on physical gestures, non-specific sounds and grunts, constructed images, and facial expressions as a means of transmitting meaning to another person. As a means of transferring and storing knowledge, language has proved an extremely effective tool, so much so that it’s easy to forget the fundamental divide that language attempts to surmount but inevitably fails to do so. Try describing something ostensibly simple, such as your precise current emotional state, to a friend and you quickly run up against the ineffable - that which can’t be properly put into words. Being the ingenious creatures that we are, we’re able to supplement language with the knowledge gained from shared experiences and our prodigious imaginations to generate a tacit empathy with others. This state is tenuous and guaranteed only by an act of implicit faith - we believe in what we think we understand of a person and ignore what we don’t. The sad fact is that it doesn’t take much to uproot this faith - perhaps you fail to spot a friend’s depression, mistaking outward signs of contentment for reality, or maybe you finally realise that you’ve been repressing certain feeling, throwing to light the realisation that, if you can’t understand yourself, how can you hope to understand someone else? As humans, we’re unique in our ability to paste over such existential worries and maintain an obstinate denial of the absurdity of our condition in the face of contradictory evidence. But what happens to those who aren’t able recover their faith from such shocks? Who aren’t able to shake the inscrutability of the mask of the individual? Dad’s Weekend by Pete Toms is a comic that explores the existential angst that comes from being a person surrounded by people you can’t make sense of, treating this idea with a mix of philosophical rigour and absurd humour so that the story constantly hovers on the border of comedy and tragedy.

Keep reading

Every morning I walk by this huge rose bush that’s waist level and I try to make an Instagram story where I do that thing in Taxi Driver where he puts his hand over Cybill Shepherd’s desk and he’s like ‘All these phones and stuff on your desk,’ except I say, ‘All these roses and stuff on your hedge,’ but I have yet to do it in a way that I feel is successful enough for me to post for the very small group of people that would ever see it.

Like everyone I know I’ve been sufficiently or overly distracted by obsessively reading, responding to, and fretting over our racist cartoon president and his team of money goblins, so everything in my life currently remains only partially done, Tiny Letter, laundry, Tumblr posts, emails, relationships, bad ideas for Instagram stories. Somewhere in my drafts is a post where I link to a few reviews of Dad’s Weekend and thank people for writing about it. Maybe some day I’ll post it. For now, I’ll just mention that I am surprised by and genuinely appreciate the response and support the comic has gotten so far and will reblog this thoughtful piece about it by Leon K.