I am blog.

My new comic is a reformatted, somewhat redrawn, and slightly expanded digital collection of the first chapter of my popular (among a very small group of discerning readers who are also friends of mine that have instagram accounts) webcomic, GOD’S LITTLE GOONS. You can get it on my gumroad or itchio for $3.

Here’s the synopsis:

Freed from the awkward cropping and algorithmic whims of Instagram for the first time! The glittering mountain of American show business is a metaphorical sight to behold. At its peak, success, money, all your fantasies realized. At the bottom, poverty, the abyss, all your dreams dashed. And clinging to its rocky base are fast-talking Ritzy Rhubarb and her tap-dancing brother Eli. Little kids with big aspirations! Eli thinks he’s got what it takes to make it – ankles, diligence, a belief in something greater than himself, but Ritzy knows there’s only one way to the top – the crooked escalator of grifts and swindles. When our vaudevillian heroes run afoul of a tough crowd that includes scheming seagulls, fallen angels, and pillars of the local art community, they soon discover that the biggest scam of all might be existence itself!

Full color! At least 35 pages! Many words!

As of now this remains the final Satan’s Boy strip. I will probably draw more of them eventually though I did read an article this weekend about how almost half of the earth’s potable water will be gone within the next 6-7 years so I’m not going to make any promises. I have enjoyed using Tumblr again anyway so I’m gonna try to keep posting here for a while.

Thanks for reading!

I think I mentioned this before, but for a while I had an idea to do a subplot where this band of free jazz-playing angels makes Satan nervous that God is taking over the music business (with the joke being that they’re a small band that isn’t popular), so he pushes Frankenstein into “selling out” and making a contemporary pop album. I still think this could have been funny, but as usual, I think just this one strip was probably enough of an exploration of that idea.

If I was currently still drawing this comic, I’m sure I’d be drawing a strip where Bazooka Joe is negotiating a bubblegum bailout.

When I quit smoking years ago, I started chewing gum instead until I got jaw pain from too much chewing. I then switched to lifting a barbell every time I wanted a cigarette until my arm was hurting too much. I replaced that with Wii bowling which injured my already carpal tunneled wrist and finally settled on an iphone game where you make a frog hop around. So if you’re trying to quit, maybe go straight to the frog game.

This is a spoiler for a future that may never come to pass, but the final Satan’s Boy strip that I worked on that’s like ¾ths done, shows what happens to Pleather Patience and the lessons she learns once she becomes a cactus.

The purpose of Pleather Patience’s investigation is revealed and my idea, when i drew this, was that Iguana Donna would use her underworld connections to track down the cartoonist behind the anti-Bazooka Joe comic strip, and discover a hidden, cross-species, political organization that even has operatives in heaven and hell, but I didn’t bother to draw that.

Obviously I was drawing my own “version” of a scorpion here, only inspired by the real animal, but a couple of months ago I saw pieces of dead scorpions where I was staying in Joshua Tree and now I feel like I didn’t go far enough to capture the scary alien vibes of of an insect that feels like it came out of a primal nightmare into our reality. 

I drew this strip not too long after I had watched the Josef von Sternberg movie Dishonored so I purposely tried to make Iguana Donna look like she was being played by Marlene Dietrich. 

Here’s the first mention of desert crime boss, Iguana Donna, and the beginning of revealing a broader plot to the strip. The scaling of the armadillo is something I witnessed in a p horrifying nightmare a few years ago, though in the unconscious theater of my mind the armadillo didn’t have a name or musical ability as far as I know. I think there’s some consolation that if your brain is constantly trying to scare and terrify you, you can make fun of it in a comic.