Announcements

Swarthmore – This Saturday!

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This Friday and Saturday, September 22nd and 23rd, I will be at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore Pennsylvania. Freeculture.org is hosting a lecture series, and a few of us who make our living by “giving our stuff away” are going to be there to talk about it.

If you can’t make the Friday evening lecture (which begins at 7:00pm in “Science Center 199 Cunniff Hall”), my position on the matter can be summed up in the phrase “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.”

If you CAN make the lecture, rest assured that copies of Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management and Tagon pins will be on-hand and for sale. I’ll also be able to whip out quick sketches (On scratch and in copies of books), and I may even try to find time for a paid commission or two.

You gotta hand it to those folks at Swarthmore, they know how to cover their bases — in case I‘m not enough of a draw, or insufficiently erudite for the university environment, they’ve also invited J.D. Frazier, Eric Burns, Wednesday White, Shaenon Garrity, and Rich Burlew.

There’ll be breakout sessions on Saturday from 1:00pm through about 6:00pm. I don’t have a schedule, but all events appear to be in rooms 183, 181, and 199 in the Science Center. I’ll be presenting “Business for Artsy Types” and maybe offering a discourse on the mechanics of a good punchline.

Sadly, there’s no time for me to do a comics shop appearance while I’m in the area. You’ll just have to screw up your courage and set foot on campus…

Journal

Taking it Easy

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With the materials now shipped off for Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between, I’ve got a little extra time on my hands. It will require discipline for me to use this time wisely.

Specifically, I need to focus my efforts so that I can get lots of work done during the day, and then NOT DO ANY WORK DURING THE EVENING.

Today went pretty well. I got a late start, but by 4:30pm I had scripted and pencilled a week. So far this evening I’ve spent time with the family, grilled a nice burger for myself, rented a couple of movies, and made plans to play video games for a couple of hours.

Tomorrow I’ll color a week of comics and ink a different week. I expect to be done by 5:00, so I can have play-time in the evening.

Wednesday and Thursday should be spent in the same way, and then Friday I can take a couple of days all the way off for the symposium at Swarthmore College.

Essays

Oh no… it’s the INTERNET again!

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Apparently the loner/loser who died after allegedly murdering a fellow student in Montreal had a website profile at “vampirefreaks.com” in which he said all kinds of darkly portentious things.

The CNN article ends with this choice paragraph:

AP reported that vampirefreaks.com came up in a murder investigation earlier this year. A 23-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl accusedin a triple murder in Medicine Hat, Alberta, had profiles on the Website.

Okay, let’s think about this for a second and make sure we’ve got the cart in front of the horse… the Internet has a website that caters to those with dark fantasies about death, cursedness, tragedy, and the goth perspective on the mortal condition, eh? And now we learn that some of these people commit suicide and/or murder?

Boy, howdy. Shut that site down NOW. Because people never killed people before they had websites where they could talk about it… did they?

Oh, wait. In 1989 there was a different shooting in Montreal in which 14 people were killed. That was pre-World-Wide-Web, for those of you keeping score at home.

There is no changing the fact that some people are twisted enough to act upon their mental instabilities in violent ways. Whether these people twisted themselves through substance abuse, or otherwise re-wired their pleasure centers so they can get off on the pain of others, it’s not the internet’s fault. I will concede that some of these people recruit, and they twist each other by goading each other into more and more depraved lines of thought, but don’t go trying to lay all the blame in one place. Had Kimveer Gill not had internet access, we’d probably be blaming his musical choices, the video games he played, or the trashy vampire novels he dogears. None of these things enable mass murder without the help of a sick and twisted person.

You cannot blame the bottom of the barrel for the things that sink to it.

Speaking of “enabled,” kudos to the police officers on the scene. It seems they were there on an unrelated call, observed suspcious behavior (gunman on campus? Shots fired? Hmmmm…) and engaged the suspect effectively and permanently.

Writer, Illustrator, Consumer