November 30, 2006
 Submitted by Broken Halo One day a guy died and found himself in hell. As he was wallowing in despair, he had his first meeting with a demon. The demon asked, "Why so glum?" The guy responded, "What do you think? I'm in hell!" "Hell's not so bad," the demon said. "We actually have a lot of fun down here. You a drinking man?" "Sure," the man said, "I love to drink." "Well, you're gonna love Mondays then. On Mondays all we do is drink. Whiskey, tequila, Guinness, wine coolers, diet Tab and Fresca. We drink till we throw up and then we drink some more!" The guy is astounded. "Damn, that sounds great." "You a smoker?" the demon asked. "You better believe it!" "You're gonna love Tuesdays. We get the finest cigars from all over the world and smoke our lungs out! . If you get cancer, no biggie You're al ready dead, remember?" "Wow, the guy said, "that's awesome!" The demon continued. "I bet you like to gamble." "Why yes, as a matter of fact I do." "Wednesdays you can gamble all you want. Craps, blackjack, roulette, poker, slots, whatever. If you go bankrupt, well, you're dead anyhow. You into drugs?" The guy said, "Are you kidding? I love drugs! You don't mean . . ." "That's right! Thursday is drug day. Help yourself to a great big bowl of crack, or smack. Smoke a doobie the size of a submarine. You can do all the drugs you want, you're dead, who cares!" "Wow," the guy said, starting to feel better about his situation, "I never realized Hell was such a cool place!" The demon said, "You gay?" "No." "Ooooh, you're gonna hate Fridays!"    By: Reverend Mace Band Profile of the Week By: The Dancer http://www.myspace.com/strawfoot Strawfoot I cant stand this freaking band. They suck. Do not listen to them. They are stupid. NEXT!  Since the vast majority of the staff here at TW have blogs or livejournals, you can now get to these pages via this pulldown menu. |
Ok, We're back again. Why so long THIS time? Well, it wasn't laziness this time like it is usually. This time it was a combination of a massive computer virus infection of my harddrive, a crew-quake (Descending Angel uprooted herself and moved to parts undisclosed). These things in addition to my drinking and our usual F.U.B.A.R.s lead to a massively late issue. Additionally, since Ford wrote this weeks article and was being exceptionally longwinded, as usual, this weeks intro is almost nonexistant. This week we've got...
Enjoy. -Reverend Mace Way More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Our Comic Strip By Ford W. Maverick  Amongst the questions I'm asked most often, "Where do you get your ideas?" is probably the most frequent. Right after "What the fuck is wrong with you?" don't have a good answer for either question. When asked where his ideas come from Stephen King says "My answer is Utica. It doesn't mean anything, but I don't know the answer, and at least it shuts 'em up." God, I wish I'd come up with that. Not as much as I wish I'd written any of his New York Times bestsellers, but still... But that seems to be a common thing with us creative types (not that I'm putting myself on the same level as King) none of us really have a good answer to that question. I can tell you how I started though. Without rehashing the incident, I suffered a grievous injury on December 31st, 2001 and was afterward unable to return to work, so I was spending a lot of time on the computer. I started meeting people and in 2003 one of them, a young lady going by the internet handle Zombie, talked me into getting a blog and joining the staff of Terribly Wrong Online (then just Terribly Wrong). All this was going swimmingly and eventually Miss Zombie inspired the first two strips I ever drew. See, I've been drawing stuff for as long as I can remember, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that if you draw a woman's picture then quite often they'll sleep with you.   Unfortunately for me that didn't happen in this case. Fortunately for you guys she liked them so much she built a website around them and I've been doing cartoons ever since. I've always liked comic strips. Some of the first books I had as a kid were compilations of Charlie Brown comics. That may seem a little tame to have been a source of the strip you read here, but I learned a lot about comedy from Mr. Schultz's little bald kid. I learned that tragedy happening to someone else often equals comedy and that's perhaps the most important thing I've ever learned in regards to what I do, and hell, in life too. I also read a lot of Garfield when I was a kid. I know, again that seems kind of tame considering what I produce, but from Garfield I learned the basics of sarcasm which is now like a second language to me. Later came Bloom County and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outland_%28comic%29, whose influence people have noticed, and Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side. Red Meat by Max Cannon also kicks ass. I currently read only other webcomics though, most notably Ctrl+Alt+Del and Penny Arcade, both of which are way better than my work. Comics in print media are a dying art form. As more people get their news from TV and the internet ad revenue becomes more important to newspapers and comic pages have been shrinking. What little space is left is dominated by the dinosaurs, your Dick Tracy's and Mary Worth's. You know, comics nobody has given a shit about in 50 years. Therefore it's only natural that if the internet is contributing to the disappearance of the comics page then comics should contribute to the death of the newspaper by going digital. I started out drawing my comics out on paper and then scanning them, cleaning them up and coloring them with Microsoft Paint because that's the only program I had. The cleaning up and coloring took longer than drawing them though, so I eventually progressed to drawing them entirely in Paint with my mouse and then later a trackball. This was extremely tedious. I was drawing them the same size they were to be displayed in 96 DPI (Dots Per Inch) and doing them pixel by pixel I'm sorry to say I was doing that as recently as Strip 63 (August 2, 2006) and you can really tell. That's the problem with being self-taught. I was just using what I had on hand and I had no idea I could change the DPI or even what DPI was. So the size of the image really limited what I could do with the artwork and it all came out looking like old-school Nintendo graphics. But it was in August that our very own Remdog, an accomplished artist in his own right, got up my ass about switching to Photoshop Elements and actually digging up the Wacom Drawing Tablet I bought in 2000, but couldn't get to work with the computer I had at the time. Once all that got going my strips took a huge leap forward and continues to make smaller jumps at a rate of about three or four a week. This led to a major computer rebuild and my current pattern of blowing deadlines. See, every time I learn something new I have to use it in the new strip. Used to be I could crank out a strip in a few hours if I needed to. Now some strips take a day, some take a week, some take longer. I'd like to think the increase in quality is noticed, but even if it wasn't I'd still proceed as I have been because I do this as much for me as I do for you fuckers. I really have little control over the cartooning compulsion at this point. These fevered visions come to me and I'm driven to finish them regardless of the time they take. And they can certainly take some time. Usually the hold up is the artwork, but sometimes it's the story that eludes me. Sometimes I'll just start drawing and the art will inspire the story. In any event I rarely have everything written out till the very end because the art and the room for the word balloons can pretty heavily influence the dialog. It kinda works out like this, the strips that are part of a multi-strip story usually come right out of the dark depths of my imagination, but the individual strips (the ones on the couch in particular) are usually the result of a real-world conversation between Mace and I or Meesh and I. And yes, the fact that this strip is based at all in reality really worries me. When it comes to characters though, Mace is Mace, I'm me, Meesh is Meesh (wherever the hell Meesh is). Elwood was Mace's creation physically and I'm not the first artist to render him, though if I'm not being too bold in saying so I believe I've done the definitive work on his personality. He's Sort of an amalgamation of Mace and myself or, as some have pointed out, the Anti-Opus. Harvey the Psycho-Bunny was originally done at the request of a friend of mine in about 2000 and I liked him so much I kept drawing him. I've had many a disturbing vision of that little furry whack-job running around the inside of my skull. Most of them became pics that accompanied each of my Terribly Wrong articles. A few of which I still have...  All in all though, the strip is just the result of me having too much time on my hands and watching too much television. The drugs and booze probably play a role too. That's it people. I guess if you have any other questions, or if you just want to bitch at me relentlessly about why the new strip isn't up or why you didn't understand the last strip, you can contact me at Ford_Maverick@hotmail.com. I'm Ford W. Maverick and I'll see you in hell.  photo sent by Broken Halo |
