Well, I cranked out the inks on six strips this morning in the space of 1 hour and 50 minutes. I feel pretty good about that. My hand hurts, though.

Now it’s time to color them. And then script another week. And then pencil/ink/color. And then repeat… I’ve got to get 20 or 30 or 50 strips in the buffer so I can dig into the book work for a week or two at a time.

–Howard

I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. I’d tried for a couple of hours to write Schlock Mercenary scripts, and it just wasn’t working. Lying in bed I realized that I was fast coming up on a WORSE situation than the one I came home to last week: If I didn’t have scripts soon, the buffer would drop to two, and I wouldn’t have anything to draw on.

Fortunately, things broke loose this morning. I scripted a week, and after a break for lunch, I came back and pencilled the whole week. Here it is now, not even 4pm, and I have a full week scripted and pencilled and ready for inks. My goal, ambitious though it is, is to have these all inked and colored 24 hours from now.

My hand is a little tired at the moment, but I’m pretty sure that I can get four or five of the nine rows inked this evening. This is do-able, and if I do it I will have cranked out an entire week of schlock in two days. And that’s the speed I need to be able to work at. The days of single-digit buffers must end forever.

The “turbo-schlock” icon seems appropriate for this post.

–Howard

I saw Batman Begins, and I agree with the multitudes who are proclaiming it the best Batman movie ever.

It’s still not better than Spider-Man, though. See, I came out of Spider-Man wanting to be Peter Parker. I came out of Batman Begins wanting to be Commissioner Gordon. Let’s face it — Batman has it ROUGH. Besides not having any actual super powers (other than super-determination and super-wealth), he’s just slightly crazy.

Gordon, though… as an honest cop in a crooked town, and one of the few people Batman trusts, he’s a hero I can identify with.

No spoilers here. Move along.

–Howard

I’m tired of reading this and saying nothing.Sometimes you just have to speak out…

Every morning the first thing I read, by virtue of where it sits, is the back of the St. Ives Apricot Scrub bottle. According to the bottle, they make this stuff with “swiss glacier water” which is “nature’s pure form of moisture.”

Ahem. No, it’s NOT.

Nature’s pure form of moisture, for any acceptable definition of the word “moisture” and the word “pure” is DEW. It’s as close as nature can get to providing us with distilled water.

Glacier water, on the other hand, is a mess. I just read about the problems they’re having with infectious human waste on the glaciers of some of the worlds most travelled summits. Drinking from a glacier is a sure-fire way to get you some high-altitude Hershey-squirts. Maybe swiss glaciers are cleaner, but that just means that they’re “nature’s less-infected form of dirty snow-melt.”

If any of you reading this work for St. Ives, would you PLEASE send a memo to your marketing team and tell them to pull their heads out?

–Howard