Search and Research #139

Another one that is inspired by my real life. Something happened to the water pressure on my street, and I couldn't shower before work, and the only hat I had was a stocking cap kind of hat. I wore that thing all day, feeling super self-conscious and hoping my boss didn't see me. When I took it off at the end of the day, my hair looked like Marc's. I had fun drawing that hair. Enjoy!

Search and Research #138

I have found pens in our laptop bags upon their return to the desk. I have found keys. Once I found $11. I think it must be the pockets...people are trained to put things in pockets, no matter which pockets they are. Usually the pockets around us belong to us, and when we check out a laptop and a bag to a person, it feels like that bag is now theirs, which includes the pockets by default. I dunno, just thinking out loud here. Anyone else found weird stuff in laptop bags when they're returned?

Search and Research #137

We actually did get a request from a guy who accidentally "mailed" a letter in our book drop. Anybody else get weird stuff in the book drop accidentally? Also, I'm pretty proud of these word balloons...they're less misshapen then usual. Enjoy!

Search and Research #136

This strip was completely written by my buddy Jason. That is a rare occurrence because he is a computer programmer and doesn't spend much time in libraries. He'd like to spend more, but the library in his town had the roof collapse over the summer, rendering the town library-less. True story. Due to the fact that I work in a library, I usually come up with scripts about library situations and then shoot them over to Jason who adds a zing to the dialogue that I don't naturally possess.

That's when the movie Avatar came on the scene (heh heh...scene...bad joke. And...cut!) and blew both of us away with the awesomeness of the 3-D and the general sophistication of the computer animation. If you have not seen Avatar yet, please make plans to do so with all haste. Avatar succeeded in inspiring Jason in a way that library's never have, and the result was quite enjoyable. Thanks for reading!!

Search and Research #135

Ok! Here it is! Thanks again to everyone for waiting patiently while I worked this one out. I really stretched myself in coloring this, and I'll go ahead and admit that I'm very pleased with the result. I've done some photoshop coloring of individual pictures, but never tried to tie multiple panels together with similar colors and other stuff. I don't think I could have achieved these results with my markers, so I'm glad I went with the computer coloring route. I do like the process of coloring by hand though, so I will probably revert back to hand coloring with the next color strip unless I just really come up with something that would be better on the computer.

A couple things that may be of interest to the nerds/film buffs out there. I shamelessly stole the design of the "machine" from The Princess Bride, particularly the little headgear thing, but we'll call it a 'homage'. I also colored the "Facebook Angel" in the facebook colors on purpose, although she is very blue looking because I wanted to add some shading to her body, so there isn't much white on her. The "M" on Monotonoy's shirt is there on purpose, and his costume is colored in gray tones on purpose as well to accentuate his character. I presumed that Monotony would have stolen Super Marc's cape, so it doesn't make an appearance here.

As I mentioned before, I'm already done with the next strip, so be on the look-out for it next week. Because the image above is really, really large, I'm including a smaller resolution image for anyone viewing this on a phone or something. Enjoy!

More teasers...

Ok, so maybe the updates weren't as frequent as I had previously envisioned. Sorry about that. Every time that I thought about posting something I got nervous, as if any of the inked images would give too much away about the strip or something. It seems sort of silly now. So, just to prove that I am actually making progress on this strip, I'm posting a panel that I've finished coloring. I've removed the text, but clearly this is one of the characters that appeared in my previous post, now appearing in his inked, and colored final form.

This strip is really too large to color with markers, as I have done in the past, so I'm venturing into the arena of computer coloring. I think that so far it's looking okay. I'm not sure when I'll have it ready to post. Ironically, I've got a couple more strips that are already inked and ready to go after I get done with this one. It seems that inking the regular strip is far less intimidating to me than a super large one. I say that because this color strip sat on my desk, penciled and un-inked, for about a month while holiday visitors and the busyness of my library work kept me from finding the initiative to ink it.

Thanks to those of you who have been following along. Regular viewers are probably aware that my library work gets so busy at the beginning of each semester that I'm not able to find the mental energy to draw this strip once I get home, and thus there is a lag in January and August. I'm going to do my best to not let this lag extend too far into February.

- Eli