Yes, I know, I'm doing it wrong.
It's no secret I have a love deep and perverse for R. Stevens and his webcomic Diesel Sweeties. It's a weird, quirky little comic (as opposed to my weird Kwerki little comic). It's humour is not always as easily digestable as other gag strips tend to be which for me makes it all the more fun to read. Sometimes I find the funniest part of the strip to be things kind of outside the strip itself. Like the title of today's strip which had the anthropology major in me laughing in hysterics.

I also like the sweetness of the strip, the depth of the characters and their interpersonal relationships. This one made me feel a little cheerful because it's something easily relatable to. There have been many times in my life when a well timed phonecall from a much missed loved one has made all the difference in the world. The relationship between Indie Rock Pete and the Myspace "Girl"((?) some part of me still suspects it will be revealed the Myspace Girl is actually a dude) is very touching indeed.

Now, on to other news. I've been getting a lot of e-mails this week. I'll answer the major reoccuring themes here.



Yes, I know, I didn't update this week. I was busy last week with a whole slew of tasks and didn't have the time. Sunday I was too busy to do anything about it because I had a date with a cute young girl, my eight year old daughter who wanted to take me on a picinic for Father's Day. We rode our bikes down to the Peer 4 park, Actually we rode our bikes all the way along the harbour trail which has recently been fixed up to become possibly the nicest spot in the entire city. You can bike all the way from the HMCS Haida to Princess Point. Unfortunately the bike ride between my house and the HMCS Haida takes you right through the heart of the crackiest of crack alley neighbourhoods.

I figured I could work on the strip when I had some free time on Monday and maybe get it up for Tuesday night but then I discovered that Behringer has finally released the new keyboard amp I've been dieing to get so it was off to Pongetti's to order one. I also ordered another DSP 2024 effects processor to replace the effects pedals I use on the synth I play with Science Ninja Big Ten. I recently replaced the synth I built myself for that band with a Kawai PH50 a friend gave me in exchange for fixing up his computer. It's got some really neat sounds on it. I'm going to hack it into a rackmount chasis though and maybe use the keys on it to build a little VCO controlled analogue synth. Just for fun.

Now, back to the e-mails. A lot of people have noticed I've been running a little late at times recently and putting up filler art a lot more often than usual and have seemingly stopped work on Apophenia 357 and have been wondering if this all adds up to the end of GGC. Let me just say the answer is most definetly NO!

I have no plans to end GGC. A lot of people have probably been spooked by the end of, in my opinion, the best webcomic ever Sexy Losers and have been wondering if the end of my comic is near too. It is not. I'm just very busy. It's summer. Next week the kids will be off school meaning I'll have even less free time. What little free time I have I might not want to spend in my dark and dank basement studio hunched over my drawing table. Readership always takes a dip in the summer as the college students that make up the bulk of my readership struggle away at summer jobs trying to earn enough money for the next year's tuition, and also may not have internet access if they're back home with their unwired parents. Plus other people may not want to spend free time in the summer hunched over their computers surfing the web. Back when my comic only had a few thousand readers I used to notice I'd typically get one or two hundred fewer readers a day during the summer months and then a huge dramatic spike in readership once the new school year started. This year with my readership being much larger I've noticed that one or two hundred fewer readers a day during the summer lull is now two or three thousand fewer readers a day.

I have to say I got a pretty big kick out of it when my I realized that my lull was bigger than my readership for about the first year of my comic's existance.

Anyways, I may miss more updates during the summer. Just remember, this isn't my job. It's just my hobby. Sure it's a hobby that makes more money than it expends (which is the best kind of hobby to have) but it's still just a hobby. Were I to be doing this as a job I would promise you I would not be one of those artists who makes his living off you and then gives you filler art and shirtguy days several times a month.

So don't panic when you see no updates. I appreciate the concern but when the time comes to end GGC I will let you all know ahead of time. As for the end. Well, let's just say my comic is no longer a teenager. It's aware of its own mortality. The end is coming, but not today. Of course the end of GGC won't mean the end of comics for me. I have more ideas for comics than one man can draw in a lifetime. To be honest, sometimes the idea of ending GGC and doing a comic that is far less popular really, really appeals to me. I know everyone always says they're doing their comic for themselves and what not and for the most part that is true. I definetly do do GGC for myself because I enjoy doing it. But once you do a comic and it becomes popular and you build up a large readership there begins to come expectations and a sense of obligations. I really don't want to let my readers down. It's very important for me to try my best to actually do my best. This is one of the many reasons why I've stopped slacking off on the artwork.

Sometimes I think it would really be great to blow all that stress away and just start doing a comic that nobody will really read. Maybe something with less than 2K total readers who are really into it. I really like the idea of not doing a series anymore and just doing little one-shot comics that are complete stories in under 40 pages. Ones with no update schedule where I just take my time. Maybe I only get one done a year. Maybe more. Comics where I can work on a page or two of this story and then work on a page or two of that story and so on so that I never get bored or burned out or feel pressured.

Of course the truth is I'm probably too much of an attention whore to have that appeal to me for too long. Kind of like the way sometimes I think the best thing in the world would be to scream "fuck it all" and take some minimum wage McJob somewhere ala American Beauty. That sort of midlife crisis retreat into an occupation of absolutely no responsibilities. Man, that movie really made that seem like a sweet deal, didn't it? You know, except for the getting shot in the head by your closet homosexual neighbour part. That would kind of suck the joy out of it I think. Of course in that movie he'd also blackmailed his boss into a year's severence pay so he could easily afford to take a minimum wage McJob. Flipping burgers would be pretty fun for awhile if you didn't have to worry about mortgage payments and braces for the kids (thankfully so far all my kids have good teeth). Truth is though, I know that I'd last 6 months tops before I got bored out of my skull with it. The novelty of that sort of pressure free job would wear off fast. It would be a fun ride though. Likewise the novelty of doing a pressure free webcomic with no readership to please would probably wear off after awhile too.

And speaking of being an attention whore, that brings us to the next little item of e-mail. Yes, I know, I'm doing it wrong. Thank you for telling me this but I was pretty sure I was doing it wrong. In fact, I specifically made sure I was doing it wrong on purpose.

I am, of course, referring to possibly the stupidest psuedo webcomic ever, The Chronicals Of Assdip-chan. Allow me a moment to recap. There is a place of great wrongness on the internet where even degenerates such as myself fear to tread. It's called 4chan and the evilest part of 4chan is a forum called /b/. It's an imageboard and some of the images that get posted there are the stuff that nightmares are made of.

It's a very very wierd place and my experience with it is pretty limited. Let's say if /b/ was a country I would be the tourist that never strayed more than 8 blocks from his hotel. Now in my own little forum, in fact in my own little world IRL, I know many who have explored /b/ more bravely and some who could even be considered its citizens (who dub themselves b-tards). The bulk of my knowledge of this strange land where there be dragons comes from them and their tales that delight, shock, and terrify.

I want to be clear about one thing. I do not now, nor have I ever laid claim to the title of b-tard. When I am "doing it wrong" you have not outted me as a b-tard poser because I am not pretending to be a b-tard. I fully accept and expect that there is much of the cultural phenominon of being a b-tard that I am "doing wrong". I admit fully and freely that my understanding of /b/ is superficial and mostly second hand to say the least. I'm fine with that continuing to be the case. I will continue to leave /b/ to be /b/ and I will continue to be amazed and horrified by the exploits of my aquaintances who brave that bold frontier.

The last page I did the very stupid Assdip-chan ended up getting me a lot of e-mail telling me I was doing it wrong when I revealed that the matredee's name was Gaston yet did not draw him in the image of the Gaston from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Um... sorry? I just picked the name Gaston because it was a stereotypical french matredee type of name. I didn't realize I was stomping on some sort of 4chan meme. Frankly, well, I don't care. This is just a stupid freaking comic that I'm drawing because someone paid me some money to draw a stupid freaking comic.

I've also gotten a lot of e-mail over this comic asking me why the comic is not following the actual Assdip-chan and Gym-chan stories that were originally posted to /b/. Well the answer is pretty simple really. I don't want to.

Even though my knowledge of /b/ is very limited (and believe me the anthropologist in me does see the ripe research potential for a field study of this virtual community) I think I know enough to realize that the reality of /b/ exists in a quantum superstate where everything posted to /b/ is at once both 100% truth and 100% falsehood. When some guy posts an account of how he fucked his cousin's dog's favorite chew-toy it suddenly becomes Schroedinger's cousin's dog's favorite chew-toy. So when the original tales of Assdip-chan and Gym-chan were posted on /b/ they were 100% truth and 100% falsehood. That simply makes me uncomfortable with drawing those tales in comic form.

It's one thing to draw a fantastically stupid lampoon of a farce of a comic with some impossible adventures in rape exagerated to idiotic extremes. I mean that's why tentacle monsters are such a rich field of comic potential. Nobody in the real world has ever had their lives destroyed by being raped by a tentacle monster. It's completely outside the realm of the possible. Sure, you might be unlucky enough to be ripped to shreds by a school of humboldt squid (which are something on the order of a billion times more scary than sharks) but the day to day likelyhood that great tentacled beasties from another world are going to violate the passion of your innocence with their sinuey lusts are pretty much next to none (much to the disappoint of a surprisingly large number of people I am sure).

So even though the Assdip-chan and Gym-chan stories were posted on /b/ I can't treat them as works of fiction because of that whole quantum superstate thing /b/ has going on with its versions of reality. Besides, I just prefer writing my own stuff, even when it's stupid, silly, and pointless stuff. So thank you for your concern. I realize that from the perspective of a b-tard I am, indeed, "doing it wrong". But like I said, I'm not claiming to be a b-tard and if I've given that impression than I am truly sorry. So really, if I'm not actually trying to be a b-tard then I can't really be "doing it wrong".

And don't get me wrong. I love you guys, you know in that sort of way the bible tells me I'm supposed to love and yet fear god at the same time. Like I said, I have friends IRL who are b-tards, and it would seem I have no small number of readers who are b-tards too. There's something very comforting in knowing that should I one day slip and suffer a massive head injury and convert to some fundamentalist, right wing, fanatically conservative evangelical faith that there will be a group of people out there like the b-tards who will hound me everywhere I go to preach my gossple and remind me of the fact that I once took perverse pride in drawing tentacle monsters getting it on with dick girls.

Anyways, back to the subject of the comic. There should hopefully be an update this weekend. Likely a little late on Sunday. I've got it inked, it just needs to be coloured and lettered. It takes about an hour to colour each panel so I'll need to get at least 4 hours free time sometime this weekend which is actually going to be a bit of a challenge since I've got a lot on my plate, but I think I'll be able to manage 2 hours on Saturday and 2 hours on Sunday. Finger crossed.