Leaving Lovecraft Country

     This is actually the last comic I made of Lovecraft Country. I've got the next handful written out, but I never got around to actually making them. Every once in a while I entertain the idea of going back to it, but that's a slim chance. I mean, it's certainly not the most interesting or entertaining thing I've ever done (and it's certainly the least popular of my blog posts), and my creative focus is on much different things these days. My vault of abandoned projects is filled with crap like this, and that's not likely to change.

     I still like having a mid-week post that's quick and easy, though. I might have to start throwing out some of my other old comics and stuff. If you think the art's bad on this, you should see the stuff I used to draw...

Landlines: Something Else to Make You Feel Old

Remember when people used landlines and it was possible to pick up two different phones in the same house (i.e. on the same line) and eavesdrop on others conversation? That's how little brothers annoyed their big sisters, it was classic. How do kids do it nowadays?

Happy Birthday Hastur

Sometimes I worry that humanizing evil cosmic entities will somehow make us unprepared for their return to Earth, where they will enslave us in madness and death. 

Then I have to remind myself that these things aren't real.

Then I have to wonder, "What if they are...?"

A Totally Convincing Graveyard

Begging pleading won't just get you sex, but also permission to desecrate corpses! There's a moral here somewhere, but I think it's just that I shouldn't be allowed to come up with morals for stories anymore.

I'm Sure You Could Make a Bong Out of a Flute

     I started this comic when I was in college. My sophomore year was spent rooming with a pothead and all his pothead friends. They were nice people, and despite what the PSAs suggested, they never once tried to pressure me into joining them. That didn't stop me from getting the occasional contact buzz from being around them, though. One notable incident involved me trying to write a theology paper one evening, only to have almost a full page of it in the middle turn into a transcript of the conversation my roommate and his friends were having about the Tony Hawk video game. This is when I learned to write my papers in the library, where the persistent pot haze was slightly less.

     My point is, I felt particularly inspired to make a stoner out of Azathoth. I mean, he's described as being "blind and insane." I mean, how's that for a descriptor of your leader?

Adult Scenarios

Okay, trying to get back into the regular schedule, which means it's Wednesday and comic day. This comic references the happenings in Lovecraft's story "The Dunwich Horror," possibly my favorites from his core Cthulhu mythos stories. If you read the story, I think it becomes much more clear why Yog-Sothoth should not be portrayed here as bubbly and goofy with an ever-present, endearing little half-witted smile.

Cthulhu, Sebek, and Jello...Oh My!

All I can think when I look at this comic is that I need more tomes. I mean, I have a lot of books, but I need some good old-fashioned, musty, yellow-paged, bound-in-human-flesh-and-inked-in-blood tomes. My library just seems incomplete.

Also, somewhere I used to actually have a chart written down which determined what floor/wall color scheme was supposed to indicate what house and/or room. I can't for the life of me fathom why that would ever matter.

I Certainly Do Love Crafty Puns

     Partially relevant to today's comic, I had the opportunity to finally sit down and play Miskatonic School for Girls last weekend. It was quite enjoyable, but I fear I was making quite the spectacle of myself for laughing uproariously at things I don't think the other players got. Since the game is supposed to take place in a school filled with Lovecraftian monsters and characters, it is full of puns and inside jokes about the Cthulhu Mythos (kind of like this comic...). One example that should be pretty easy to guess is Herbert West as being one of the faculty. My personal favorite was Asa Toth, the school's music teacher (complete with flute).

     Anyway, here's the comic, reinvigorated as I now feel about my own inside jokes.

Remember When Rat-tails Were a Thing?

I went through six years of having a ridiculous ponytail, not unlike Robert's (well, okay, it was pretty significantly not like Robert's, but still). And since Rat-things, according to Mythos lore, are rats with human-like faces and little hands, I still make the mental association to this day whenever I see somebody with a scruffy little ponytail.

Comic Day, Again

Last week my regular posting schedule shifted a bit because of the holiday, and plans I had did not exactly suit themselves to blogging.  But now I'm going to try to get back on track, which means it's Wednesday, and that's comic day.

I had a lot of internal debate about what song Cthulhu would have stuck in his head. I wish I could remember the entire list, but I know "Charles in Charge" was one of them. But then I realized that the song is only horrific and scarring to me...

Funnier Than People

     When I first started getting really into writing and drawing comics, way back in junior high, my first two series (that weren't just blatant Calvin and Hobbes or X-Men ripoffs) featured aliens almost exclusively. See, I knew that I wasn't much of an artist, and I figured that if I made all the characters aliens, it would be okay that they were funny looking. They're aliens, after all. Additionally, I could avoid the parts of human anatomy I had trouble with, like noses and ears, by simply avoiding them. 
     Eventually I got to the point where I could draw some recognizable humans, but I still hold a fondness for my nonhuman characters. Maybe I also think there is extra comedic effect in having these aliens and/or monsters doing mundane things and acting like normal "people." There's a bid of absurdness when an alien being makes references to things like Corn Flakes (for example). Obviously, Corn Flakes are a purely human convention, so why would an alien be eating them? Is breakfast cereal one of those universal constants of any civilization, like the need for shelter and the company of others? Or maybe it's the only bit of human culture that survives in the vast stretches of a futuristic interspecies galaxy. Maybe Corn Flakes are humanity's greatest, longest-lasting legacy.
     I also wonder if that's why it's so effective to anthropomorphize animals as characters in children's books and cartoons. It makes normal things seem hilarious. For example: if a human with a speech impediment and rage issues walked down the street wearing only a shirt and no pants, he'd be locked away. But a duck? Comedy gold. And would Wile E. Coyote be nearly so hilarious if he was just some sap who continued to injure himself with untested explosives? Probably not. Of course, there's the Three Stooges, so I guess slapstick is funny no matter what the species.
     Anyway, I'm getting a bit off topic, but here's the comic. I start to get into storylines that I think are actually funny here, especially with the GOOs (what I call the Great Old Ones). I generally like these ones better; maybe, as mentioned above, because they're the nonhumans. Because when Cthulhu is a drunken lout, it's funny. When it's your uncle at your birthday party, not so much.

Really, Though, She'd Roll 3d6

While there are a lot of things I don't like about the Call of Cthulhu system (as a roleplaying game), I can't help but appreciate some of the concepts. Such as, your Investigator (the player-characters) will inevitably go insane or die. You lose sanity points by rolling under your current Sanity on 1d100, which means the more you lose, the easier it is to lose more. It's a hilarious spiral of crazy. You just can't get that kind of fun with D&D.

Sometimes I Wonder About the House Floating in Space

It's comic day, and this one makes me chuckle even now.

As a side note, I started using the term "drunken shenanigans" again in the last few years, completely forgetting that I learned the phrase back in college. Serendipitous, I know.

Lovecraft Country Double Feature

Another two-fer comic day, just to move things along. 

In retrospect, a lot of my troubles with the humor level of these comics is that I have a hard time with punchlines. Some of my more "successful" comedic endeavors were more entertaining and amusing because they were offbeat and strange in the long run. I don't do well writing a series of punchlines, I don't think, but rather have a comedic style that depends upon unusual characters and situations and subtle running gags. I used to think this made me more mature in my comedy, but the continued prevalence of poop jokes and crude innuendo really counters that thought.


P.S. I love how easy it is to convey emotion in a comic with a simple tweak of the eyebrow.

Dammit, Now I Want Pretzels

Should "heads-up" be hyphenated? This is one of those crucial moments where my English major training has failed me.



Additional question: did anybody else go through a phase where they thought it was hilarious to answer the phone "yellow"?

Wgah'nagl fhtagn!

I guess I don’t have too much to say on this week’s comic. Just moving the story along…

Also, not to blow my own horn¹, but I’m actually rather impressed with my meager MS Paint skills. I mean, I made that phone from scratch. While it looks clip-art horrible, at least you can tell what it is.

¹ Which just sounds filthy.

Double Your Pleasure?

     There was another comic that went between the last one and these two. I decided not to include it for two reasons. First, the formatting got messed up somehow and it only exists as a quarter-sized JPEG that is virtually unreadable. Second, it wasn’t funny¹, and only was written because I felt like I needed to alternate between humans and Great Old Ones. Also to help make sure people recognized the GOOs and had names attached to the sprites. Here, it’s easy: the red one with the tongue-head is Nyarlathotep, and the bubbly one is Yog-Sothoth².

     Also, I am putting two down because I’m anxious to get to some of the later ones that are actually worth a chuckle or two. Although, I still laugh at the whole "call of Cthulhu" thing happening on an actual phone, which is almost sad enough to warrant a whole new post.

¹ And you know how low my standards are for that kind of thing, so you can only imagine…

² My spellcheck weeps for mercy.

Should've been "blood of a pomeranian"...I hate those things

     I'm thinking Wednesday is going to be "comics and/or other random crap I made a while ago because I'm running low on imagination in the middle of  the week" day. Behold:

     What I realize now, though, is that these comics are really inside-jokey. I mean, you have to know a lot about the Cthulhu Mythos if you want to understand the punchlines. For example, the Zanthu tablets are a type of "tome," carved onto jade that outline the history of the lost continent of Mu. In the world of Cthulhu, they would be obviously priceless, hence the comedic notion that some idiotic college kid would just have one stuffed under his furniture.
     Anyway, stay tuned for Friday's update, in which we will discuss something more intellectually stimulating. Class dismissed.

This comic would have been called "Lovecraft Country"

As threatened promised, I am running low on original creativity today, so here's a look at a crappy old comic I did. Check the copyright date on that bad boy; this is ten years old. And it still holds up as funny today as it was the day I whipped up a "paper doll" version of Cthulhu¹. 

¹ That is, not funny at all.