Okay, that’s got to be the stupidest subject line ever. Err… I mean EVAR!!11one1uno.

Sorry. Sandra says I’m “fizzing,” whatever that means.

In three work-days I’ve sketched 600 books. I can do 200 in one day before burning out. This time around we have pre-sold 756 sketch editions. Last time we pre-sold 220. Last time I sketched a grand total of 300 books so that we’d have extras just in case. We needed the extras — several sketch editions were lost or destroyed in the post, and there were lots of people to whom I owed favors. Having a numbered sketch edition on hand was a great way to say “BAM! We’re even.”

Anyway, this time around the denominator is “888,” which gives us a smaller margin of extras if you express the margin in terms of a percentage of the whole, but a much larger pool of extra sketch editions to work with. No, I’m not putting them up for sale anytime soon — I need to make sure that everybody who paid for one GOT one.

So… 888 books. That’s 17 and a half of the 50lb, 50-book boxes. It is time-consuming. It is almost mind-numbing. It is the sort of project which you’ll never be able to even START, not if you don’t wrap your head around it in just the right way. I started by saying “I need to do 200 books a day each work-day before the party.” Then I broke that down into “each work-day I need to do four 50-book boxes.” I further broke it down (after the first 150 books) by saying “I’m drawing the same picture 50 times in a row.”

I wish I could create a unique, single-panel comic for each of the sketch editions, but that would take about 60 days and I’d have to use up all the good ideas I’ve been saving for the strip.

This time around I’m using what I learned when sketching in Under New Management — I’m figuring out how to draw a few Schlock Mercenary characters completely free-hand — no pre-sketching and no construction lines. I just pick up the Sharpie and GO. It is extremely fluid, and it forces me to look at the characters in a new way. Instead of seeing Ennesby’s face as “eyes and mouth mounted on a sphere” I see it as a set of objects whose size and position depend on how I drew the mouth.

Today I did 150 Ennesby sketches and 50 Schlock sketches. Yesterday I think I did 100 Tagon sketches, 50 Schlocks, and 50 Kerchaks. Tagon has been my favorite so far — I originally tried free-handing him by starting with his eyes (which is where I start for Schlock) and some 25 practice pages came out uniformly AWFUL. Faces too narrow, faces too fat, hair too big, eyes too goggly… then I went to bed. While I slept, I dreamed the answer… start with the jaw. As I dreamed I watched myself do it. So I woke up and did it. The first sketch was perfect. The second was rough. The third was awful. The fourth was perfect. And then I was itching to get to the keep and draw him dozens of times in a row in actual books for actual patrons of the strip.

Kerchak was fun, too, because he shares a jawline with Tagon. Also, he’s naked (if you get a book with Kerchak in uniform, you’re one of the lucky ones).

Maybe next time around we’ll make it possible for you to pre-order which character you get in your book. I need to develop a repertoire, however. As of right now I can only free-hand Ennesby, Schlock, Tagon, and Kerchak. I drew a few other characters in the first 150 sketched books, but those all have construction lines and they took forever.

I hope you enjoy these sketches. They’re less polished than many of the ones I shipped the first time around, but they’re much, much more dynamic. If you’ve got an eye for it, you can almost watch me draw just by looking at the naked, free-handed lines.

I’ve said “naked” twice three times in this post. Whee!

Tomorrow is Wednesday, and I need to color a week of strips first thing in the morning, and then sketch another 200 books. That will take me to 800, and I can leave the last 88 for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Yes, if you’re coming to the book-release party to pick up your sketch edition, I will be taking requests. (But I’m not drawing Bunni in a bunny-outfit, or Elf as a cat-girl so don’t ask. You know who you are.)

(And I’m absolutely not drawing any of the human females naked.)

(FOUR.)

CNN reports that a brazilian woman was shot six times in the head, and none of the bullets penetrated her skull.

This quote got my attention:

Doctors could not explain why the .32-caliber bullets did not penetrate Pereira’s skull and didn’t even need to be extractedimmediately.

“I can’t explain how something like this happened,”surgeon Adriano Teixeira said, adding that the bullets were lodged under the woman’s scalp.

That’s odd. I’m pretty sure I can explain it — cheap ammunition. If you get a partial burn of fouled powder, or if only the primer fires, the bullet will exit the barrel at a fairly sub-lethal velocity. I don’t know a whole lot about .32 caliber ammo, but since she was shot six times I suspect her ex-husband (the shooter) was using a revolver. Revolvers rarely “jam,” and a primer-only firing would only cause a problem if the bullet stopped between the cylinder and the barrel.

I seem to recall a similar incident in which a US soldier took a round in the face at point-blank range, and proceeded to tackle and secure the man who shot him.

So… can a firearms enthusiast with a bit more working knowledge of .32 rounds shed more light on this?

–Howard

p.s. And before you make the obvious “the woman wouldn’t take her husband back so she must just be thick-skulled” joke, bear in mind that she probably divorced this murderous jerkwad for good reasons. She’s not thick-skulled. She’s SMART.

You know, I really, really, really hate the down-swings I suffer through. They run something like this:

1) I don’t feel like working.
2) I try to work, and STILL can’t get much done.
3) I feel guilty about getting nothing done.
4) Now I can’t play, because I have guilt preventing me from enjoying it.
5) The day ends, and I hope that I’ll wake up in better spirits tomorrow.

Usually on a day when I’ve got huge quantities of work to do and that work is DIRECTLY CONNECTED to money, I have no problem getting moving. Today should have been a joyous celebration of “doing what I love.” Instead I moped, slept, inked a few panels, colored a little, and basically followed the numbered dance steps above.

Fortunately for you guys, Sandra and Kiki began laying out work for me in my office. I can begin sketch edition work in earnest tomorrow (as soon as I finish coloring a week or two of comics. Yes, Sunday’s strip is only partly colored right now. Ideally, tomorrow I will color a week of strips and then knock back about 200 sketch editions. If there’s any hand left, I’ll ink a week of strips.

Believe it or not, I LIKE 12-hour days. And on the days when I don’t like them, I WANT to like them. All I can figure is that on days like today (and yesterday, truth be told) something is wrong with my brain.

–Howard

I can count the issues I see with Electronic Voting on the fingers of one hand:

1) Entrusting public information that drives public policy to private, proprietary systems is counterintuitive and disingenuous.
2) When votes are electronically countable, they are also electronically transformable. Electronic ballot stuffing seems like it would be easier than large-scale paper forgery.
3) Voting machine glitches are more common the more complex the machinery is. The simpler the process, the less likely you’ll be faced with long lines at 7am because some poll worker can’t program a VCR, either.

That pretty much sums up the issues. And I still have one finger left, not to mention a thumb.

The benefits:

1) It looked cool and modern. Nothing says “progress in government” like shiny new election machines. Yes, I’m easily impressed (this may be “issue #4 — expense,” but I believe these terminals will eventually cut election-day expenses, because I’m a forward-thinking optimist.)
2) I was in and out in five minutes. No glitches, no lines, and the machine was FAST — even when I was insisting that it let me double-check how it recorded my selections.
3) Big, easy-to-read text on a nice touch-screen. No more itsy-bitsy fine-print in dark little booths. When I looked at the proposition for a school leeway, I was able to read the whole whing without squinting or bending over. (I voted yes on that one. No new tax — the vote was for a re-allocation of existing tax monies, which is one of the few bits of true democracy you’ll find in this representative republic of ours)
4) It scrolled a little piece of paper inside, which I could read, review, and approve or even reject. Apparently there is a hard-copy being made in case the election is contested. While this does not completely address issue #2 above, it goes a long way towards making electronic manipulation of votes more difficult.

So there’s my experience with electronic voting. Summary: I like it. I’m not denying that there are issues (I would love to see the software, encryptions, and everything related to the process open-sourced, or at least open to peer review) but they were transparent for me.

–Howard “I probably just elected Adolph von Hussein-Amin as the Tyrant Principio of the Secessionary Territory of Utah” Tayler