Hey everybody! (hey Dr. Eli!!) It's the holidays, at least here in America, and I'm going to let this strip carry us through to the new year! If you are taking time off, may you enjoy it. If you have to work some of the days in the next couple of weeks (as I do) may you get lots of stuff done. May you all find 2009 to be a peaceful, prosperous, and productive new year!! See you next year!!
We here, now, present the next installment in the prestigious and very critically acclaimed "Search and Research Saga", the online comic strip which the New York Times called the, "What? Get out of my office and don't come back unless you're bringing me a cheeseburger!" **
Ok, on with the strip! I've started experimenting with some gray toned markers in rendering the strip (see #104 to see the first experiment)to kind of help add some better shading than I can add simply with lines. I am still trying to decide if I like using them better than trying traditional pen and ink shading techniques...and this strip is, for me, all about artistic experimentation and growth. As always, your thoughts on the strips are always appreciated, and your thoughts about the addition of grays to the strips are particularly of interest to me. Enjoy!
Hey! Two weeks in a row! Let's see if we can keep this up. Tell your friends! Invite your neighbors!
Phew! I think this has been my busiest fall ever! From illnesses to weddings, to helping my wife stay sane while getting a MLS, to doing whatever I can to make a little extra money in this crazy economy I've felt swamped. I can honestly say that all of that created a situation where I didn't have any ideas for new strips and didn't have time to collaborate with my buddy and co-writer Jason (who is also insanely busy). Things look like they're sort of calming down though and Jason and I have been able to chat a little about ideas for new strips so hopefully we'll be able to try to find some regularity in posting. Thanks for reading!
Yes. Yes, it feels good to gt this idea out of my head and on paper...and now online. I have tried in the past to make the color strips the sort of things that are worthy of rendering in color. I really liked the idea my friend Bryan had of blending works from the history of art into the library setting, such as Strip #30. I'm a big fan of the surrealist painter Dali (and most of the rest of the surrealists actually) and so for this one, I settled on his The Persistence of Memory as a subject. It is not an exact copy as the Magritte was, but more like a homage to the painting. This strip is my tribute to the mind numbing and ongoing task that many student workers perform called Inventory.
Yeah, it's been a while. And, as the strip indicates, I've been super busy. Things have calmed down though, so hopefully the weekly strips will be back on schedule soon. Enjoy!
How about these Olympics huh? Yeah...I'm really into 'em too. I've had this idea for like, 2 weeks now, but all my evenings turn into an "All Olympics, All the Time" situation. So, yeah, I'm finishing this strip a little later than I wanted.
Hey! Here we go with a new strip. I had my week as a camp counselor, and a week of recovery, and I've got a couple of funny ideas for upcoming strips, so the strip is moving along. After I scanned this strip in, I realized that I really made a mistake trying to put lips on Marc from this angle. I've never tried to draw Marc from this angle, but it's how I envisioned this strip working so I had to try. I don't think I'm going draw him from this angle again.
As promised, here is a new strip! I'm going to go ahead and confess that I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to keep a "strip a week" schedule through the summer. I have a lot of stuff going on that keeps my free time tied up, but I will try to put up more strips than I did last summer. Here's to eating watermelon, raising tomatoes, and reading online comics. Enjoy!
Here is a warm-up sketch of Marc that I did to get back into the groove of drawing him. It is also a promissory note that a new strip will be up Monday! That's right, I've written a drawn a new strip. It has taken a while, but my buddy Jason has sort of caught up on stuff at work and I've had a few funny ideas, so we're going to get rolling on this strip again. Thanks for being patient and hanging in there with us. We appreciate it.
Yay! It's done, this colossal strip is done! I had wanted to do something big and special for the 100th strip, but really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I thought about doing a super long strip with maybe 12 panels or something, or one that was just one big image. i decided that one image appealed to me more, and the initial image I had was SCOM, having just watched the Transformers movie, tearing through the library having constructed a body from the office equipment that had been laying around.
Hey! I want to thank all of you who became fans of the strip on Facebook this week! If you haven't seen it yet, I've created a 'fan page' on Facebook for Search and Research and there is a link to it in the links section of this blog. I'm in the process of scanning some of the sketches I've done for this strip that haven't been posted online which I will be posting over there, and there's also a discussion board feature which I'm hoping to use. So, if you haven't already, I'd like to invite you to come on over and join the fan page.
I can't imagine having to digitize microfiche. I'm all for it, but I am not the kind of person who could do that and not go crazy. That's why I think that we need robots with built in telescopes who can digitize this stuff for us.
Why is it that microfiche seems to be in the darkest room of the library? Anybody else feel that way? It's always a little hard to find, it's got those old machines in there. I can't blame SCOM for being a little nervous around those machines. I'm actually in charge of the microfiche and I am frustrated by it to no end. Despite working with it, I never thought about microfiche as a comic strip subject until my mom suggested it to me, so big thanks go out to my mom!
Well, this was an experiment in adding gray tones with a ballpoint pen. But...I think I wound up overshading it a bit. I'm trying to work out the best way to do this whole gray tones thing with ink. I've tried doing straight cross-hatching with my marker pens, but I don't like that for these strips for the most part. I've also tried ink wash but it wrinkles the paper on which I draw these strips. I could use markers, but they're pretty expensive, especially for a set of all the tones I'd need. Anway, I think I may be able to use a ballpoint pen to do background stuff but not pervasive darkness like this.
I want to thank everyone for bearing with me last week. It feels good to get this next one out. Enjoy!
And now the explanation for the big reveal last week. After we initially revealed that SCOM had guns, even though it was pretty funny to me, it sort of bothered me that he had them. I mean, nobody is going to let anybody, even a machine, into a library with a gun. It's true that reality is suspended in that we have a walking, talking, abbreviating office machine in our strip...but we do try to keep everything else somewhat grounded in reality. So, this was a perfect solution for the whole gun thing. Enjoy!
What! What's this? A salad shooter and a caulking gun? Where are the machine guns? Tune in next week to find out! Enjoy!
I have to say, I'm glad I didn't commit myself to getting a strip up last week 'cause I came down with a pretty bad cold last week and couldn't draw anything. I'm better now though.
It always feels good to get one of these strips done, especially when I've been putting it off unnecessarily. I spent most of my weekend, and my evenings this week, playing video games with my wife and losing track of time. Here's a tip for you aspiring artists out there...it's hard to feel creative with a video game calling your name (especially if you have to sit on a very comfortable couch to play said video game, which happens to be my situation). But, I managed to overcome my propensity toward laziness and get this strip done. Next one is a color strip, so we'll just have to see how long that takes! Enjoy!
It feels good getting this strip up each week. I wanted to try to get this one done yesterday, but watching the Packers lose to the Giants (talking football here for those of you who may not know...) really sort of ruined the rest of my evening artwise; I just couldn't seem to find any creativity in me the whole rest of the night.
Welcome to the first strip of the new year!!! The new year is a time to reflect on our lives, make changes to our habits, routines, and in some cases, personalities. :0)