In which Leonard flashes back to less responsible times.

Depression, illness, exhaustion … oh, and a lack of financial incentive. These are all fine and valid excuses for me not to work on new pages of Scwonkey Dog. Indeed, the only thing that keeps me going, the only thing that keeps this train rolling, is guilt. Guilt that I am letting you, the reader, down, and guilt that I am letting pal Evan, who has put a certain amount of faith in my ability to produce comic pages on a semi-regular basis, down.

Thing is, you people out there who are reading this, I figure, have invested some time in reading the previous forty pages and deserve some sort of continuing payoff for that. So here I am again, scribbling out the art and klacking in the words to wrap this chapter up and get the next one out.

I still intend to get Chapter Three done ’round late May or early June, which will require an accelerated schedule — but since all I’ll be really doing with late May is hunting down a new job in another part of the country, I think I’ll have plenty of time to crank the pages out. The only problem will be motivation — something I haven’t had a lot of a lately. We’ll see if I can keep this fire lit through May. I think it’s burning now. As always, we’ll see, eh?

That number at top, by the way, is the amount of stupid fees I wound up with on this month’s credit card bill, on top of the usual interest and whatnot. Stack that on top of this month’s utterly ridiculous cell phone bill (roaming scams, boys & girls), and I’m just drowning in idiotic charges I could have easily avoided if I wasn’t such a moron. Once I’ve demonstrated that I’m actually back on a real schedule I’ll probably start one of those Starving Comic Artist Begging Drives you see all across the web, but until then, if you don’t mind, could you click a Google ad here or there? Or hey, buy a print comic and help me get some money in the ol’ PayPal account? It’d certainly be appreciated.

Things I’d be buying if I had any money right now: after two years or so, Mirage Publishing has finally released the new issue of the ongoing black & white Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book series. And it’s a limited edition that costs ten dollars. Mind you, it’s, like, forty pages, so that’s not so horrible — most Marvel Comics titles are now four bucks for twenty-two pages off the bookstore spinner rack — but it’s still a bit rich for my blood right now.

Also: it looks like Paramount has finally stopped being stupid and has decided to release at least one of the Transformers cartoons they own the DVD rights to in a box set. According to TVShowsOnDVD.com, Transformers Cybertron, the last of the three modern Transformers anime shows, will be coming out in a box set in July. This one actually had a halfway decent English version, as I recall, though a lot of the casting and performance decisions were kinda odd — even with most of the same cast providing voices, I think every role outside of Optimus Prime and Megatron was recast and many of them were given bizarre accents that bore no resemblance to the characters’ previous portrayals. However, the scripts weren’t as sloppy as those of Armada and Energon and I think all the characters were properly identified throughout, so that’s a definite improvement. And Levi tells me that the Japanese version, Galaxy Force was pretty solid, so I think if it’s not too pricey I might check it out.

But for sure I’m buying the current show, Transformers Animated, when it comes out on DVD. Heck, I’ll probably buy the silly single-disc release that’s coming up soonish. As long as the Autobots aren’t dealing with silly human enemies, it’s pretty darned near-perfect. Last weekend’s episode, bringing members of the Autobot Elite Guard onto the scene — Sentinel Prime and Jazz, commanded by Ultra Magnus — was solidly fantastic; Magnus was impressive, if a bit dull, and Jazz was a pitch-perfect recreation of the classic Transformers character. Phil LaMarr hits the nail right on the head with the voice, and between his performance and the way the character is written, it’s like an old friend has finally come home.

If he turns out to be the big bad Autobot traitor at the end of the season, I will hurl things at the TV. But as Levi remarked to me, it’s probably Sentinel Prime, who is a big fat jerk, because that’s the obvious route to take. This show has had some phenomenal writing at times, but I have to admit, it’s still a kids’ show. It’s probably going to take the easy path and make the entirely unlikable Autobot into the bad guy. No redemption arc for him, nooooooooo.

More talk about the things I’ve been taking in lately to come Thursday when I plan on getting the next page up.

–Jonathan

… at earliest. I BURNED MY HAND (it is bright red and is pretty much useless) spilling hot, hot soup all over it at the Chinese buffet, so there won’t be any drawing going on until it STOPS HURTING. So, Thursday or Friday night.

… I would like one of these production companies to acquire the rights to a fantastic property that’s been done BEAUTIFULLY in comics and animation SOLELY so that someone ELSE doesn’t do something STUPID like ACTUALLY MAKING the inevitably awful live action movie.

NOTE TO SPIELBERG AND HIS ASSOCIATES: YOU WILL NOT MAKE A BETTER GHOST IN THE SHELL THAN THE TWO STAND ALONE COMPLEX TV SHOWS, SO YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN’T EVEN BOTHER.

YES, I KNOW I’M YELLING. I HAVE TO. IT’S THE ONLY WAY ANYONE WILL HEAR ME.

In other news, two pics penciled and inked this afternoon. WOOT! I just hope tomorrow night I’m not up ’til four a.m. again coloring ‘em …

So I sit down to scan the new art after setting up my sister’s old scanner to use with my Mac mini. I look at the model of the scanner, try and track down the drivers, and discover to my frustration that the scanner is too old. There is no OS X driver for it. So I try and see if there’s any way to get around that. Hey, there is! Only it’s for, like, two or three revisions back and none of the particulars that the workaround talks about are present in the files it’s telling me to modify.

WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO BE SO COMPLICATED?!

Anyway, so I said, to hell with this. I’ll scan it all at my place tomorrow afternoon after work, and see if I can get the page done tomorrow.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another …

Just inked about half of page forty-one. I think it doesn’t look half bad. At most it’s a quarter bad. I’ll let you decide sometime this evening.

Had a dream on Tuesday, when I was enjoying an afternoon nap. No, wait, it must have been Monday — Tuesday I was hanging out with Levi all afternoon and considering the ramifications of America taking on this country and that country and bitching about the sorry state of anime and going through the entirely typical routine of complaining about Gundam SEED. You know, it happens every once in a while.

Anyway, the dream. It’s a dream I have every once in a while, and the surroundings are different, and the class is different, but I have this dream where I haven’t gone to one of my college classes all semester long and I tell myself, “Okay, I guess I’m going to have to take this over,” and so on. And so as I’m waking up I’m running in my dream, and I open my eyes and my feet are still moving quickly, and I find that I’m short of breath and my heart is racing and I just feel terrible. And I still feel terrible — maybe a different kind of awful, but awful nonetheless. Now that part, that’s atypical. That’s new. But the dream of the fear of not being ready, of completely screwing up an entire semester’s worth of school, that’s something that I’ve been having for years now and probably will continue to have until the day I die. I screwed up some semesters of school, and I didn’t attend my graduation ceremony, so I understand why my psyche keeps throwing that thing at me — I never had a satisfactory concluding note to my schooling, and spent a lot of it just farting around and missing classes and not really giving it my all. This is something I was anxious about for a long time and it never got a proper cap on it. But I’ve also been anxious about not getting the pages out lately. I’ve been depressed and tired and just feeling lousy for weeks and it’s finally really getting into the depths of my head and manifesting as visions of my last great anxiety. (Well, maybe the anxiety before my last great one; you know, one of the key reasons I left my last job was because my anxiety about that began to manifest itself in bad dreams.)

Well, enough of my problems.  The page will be up tonight. The page after will be here on Tuesday, and the one after that? Next Thursday. That’s the plan. We’ll see how it goes.

–Jonathan

Sorry there’s been no material this week. I feel terrible, like my head’s been stuffed full of cotton; Tuesday, I even went home from work because I was feeling dizzy and nauseous, soooooo … yeah. I penciled in the first few panels of page forty of our ongoing adventures sometime last week, but I’m really dissatisfied with most of the artwork so far — one or two of the panels are OK, but … you know, I don’t want to force any of the art out. If I do something, and it turns out bad — or at least not to my satisfaction — I’m just gonna have to draw it over. And I just don’t know that with this weird fuzzy feeling I’ve got that anything would look any good. I’m gonna try and get rolling on a lot of art tonight and this weekend, but … we’ll see. I still want to get all this done before spring break; that’s still the goal. But we’ll see. Really, most of my time has been spent sleeping and watching Transformers music videos on YouTube and playing Another Century’s Episode 2 — the Battle of Saturn’s Rings from Macross comes off kind of strangely when you’ve got the three pilot girls from Nadesico battling the Battlepods; for some reason they didn’t give me but one Valkyrie for that stage. So, huh. But anything of a creative nature? Hoo boy, no, my head’s a little too cloudy to get any ideas out.

Funniest thing I’ve read all week: this tongue-in-cheek article on manga reviewing at the Otaku USA website courtesy of Jason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide. I swear, I keep thinking I really need a subscription to Otaku USA … it’s always full of neat stuff like that.