Roll-a-Sketch drawings from San Diego! And NEXT WEEK: Gen Con!

Here are a few of the Roll-a-Sketch drawings I made for folks at San Diego Comic-Con last week!

Next week I’ll be in Indiana once again for Gen Con, and if you’ll be there as well, you can grab one of these sketches from me there! My cartoonist buds and I will be at booth #2129, around the back.

I’m quite happy with these drawings and I can’t wait to do some more at Gen Con! (Click any of the pictures for a closer look.)

CHRISTMAS + PANDA:

DISNEY + INSPECTOR GADGET + CATFISH + KNIGHT:

CAVEMAN + CAT:

ELEPHANT + ROYALTY + SULTAN + SUPERMAN:

FANCY + WHALE:

And finally, a special roll for Juneau’s own Pat Race, MOOSE + ROYALTY (and he won the moose honestly, I should add):

I asked TWO DIFFERENT CANADIANS for caption suggestions for this one, and they both independently answered the same thing. Sometimes the obvious thing is the best thing.

Thanks to all who came by this year!!

A high-flying commission

Recently, reader Julie M. contacted me to ask if I could make a commissioned portrait as a gift for her husband’s birthday.

I rarely attempt portraits — and I’d never tried to make an actual likeness in the Wondermark collage style, where one is limited to the source material one can unearth — but in this case, I happened to get lucky in my search, and was able to create something approaching a resemblance from chunks of about five different source images and judicious use of the Photoshop warp tool.

Plus, Julie’s husband is a pilot, and there are few things that can get me more excited about a commission than the prospect of making a weird Victorian airplane collage.

I think it turned out quite well! (Click the plane for a closer look.)

All that is well and good, and I would have been happy to leave it there and chalk it all up to a lovely experience.

BUT HISTORY HAD TO SHOW ME UP.

The other day I saw this tweet from the fascinating account @SovietVisuals:

A vintage postcard, reading “Greetings from Leningrad” on the tailplane; “Country of Soviets” betwixt the wings.

Everything old is new again, it seems.

My favorite part is how it appears that the pilot is sticking his head and arm through a canvas, upon which the airplane and landscape have been painted as a backdrop.

Julie, perhaps consider this technique for his next birthday. Everyone at the party can take a turn!

Wondermark at San Diego Comic-Con, #1229

It’s time once again for San Diego Comic-Con, and as per usual, I’ll be at the TopatoCo booth, #1229 (right next to #1234, which is how you remember it!).

I’ll be sharing that space with Ryan North, Brandon Bird, and, in his long-awaited return to San Diego after many years banned from entering the building, Sam Logan!

I’m sure we will come up with many excellent jokes in the many punchy hours we will spend standing next to one another — feel free to ask us what the current running gag is, at whatever time you see us.

On Sunday, I’ll also be participating in this panel:

Comics of the Internet: The Memes, the Myths, the Legends

Have you seen that one comic online? You know, the one that’s everywhere? What if you could talk to the creators behind the comics that broke the Internet? Now you can! comiXologists Matt Kolowski and Kiersten Wing chat with meme comic scholars and creators Hope Nicholson (Bedside Press), Megan Kearney (The Secret Loves of Geek Girls), Shen T. (Owlturd Comics), David Malki (Wondermark), and Nick Franco (Nuzlocke Comics) about the creative genius and little bit of luck that make these exceptional comics go viral!

Sunday July 22, 2018
2:00pm – 3:00pm
Room 29AB

I think they are going to ask me about that comic about the otter, or whatever it is.

Check out: Brahms’ Lullaby (Trance Mix)

Apropos to comic #1405, “In which a Beat drops”, astute Twitter follower @Subb4k found this trance version of Brahms’ Lullaby, by Full Trance Panic:

Tremendous.

Each Wondermark comic is always posted to Twitter, you can follow us there @wondermarkfeed if you like! (Mouseover text is only here at the site, but at least you’ll be notified.)

Here’s an animated GIF of one of the key panels from the comic in question. I’m sure it can have many uses.

Three (More) Podcasts Well Worth Your Time

Here are three more individual podcast episodes from my recent listening that I really enjoyed, and thought you might too!

(For those who don’t listen to podcasts, I have linked to transcripts where available.)

99% Invisible: “Breaking Bad News” (Overcast / Website, including a text version) 

When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient — that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery, with potentially serious consequences if things go wrong. If the patient doesn’t understand their prognosis, for example, they could end up making uninformed decisions about their treatment.

That’s why many medical schools now offer training for students on how to break bad news, bringing in actors to help them learn how to navigate this critically important and very high-stakes moment.

And that’s not the only connection between acting and this particular facet of medicine. It turns out that one of the first doctors to recognize the challenges of this particular kind of doctor-patient communication wasn’t just a physician — he was also a comedian. And he drew on that experience to transform the way that doctors break bad news.

99PI (as it’s known) is a show about the design choices that we overlook in daily life. This episode talks about the deliberate design of a typical, but fraught, human interaction — and how, for example, none other than John Cleese tried to help it go more smoothly.

Hidden Brain: “When Everything Clicks” (Website / Overcast / Transcript)

There can be a lot of psychological noise involved in teaching. But what if we replaced all that mental chit chat….with a click?

This week, we explore an innovative idea about how we learn. It will take us from a dolphin exhibit in Hawaii to a top teaching hospital in New York.

It’s about a method to quiet the noise. The sort of clutter that can turn learning into a minefield of misery.

Hidden Brain is an NPR show that (like 80% of all public radio podcasts) is about sociology and the what we can learn about the strange ways people think.

It’s always interesting, but this particular episode I found particularly fascinating for its description of an unusual way that humans can teach and learn new things: using a dog training clicker.

Listen to find out how this sort of teaching might help learners of a new skill bypass various psychological blocks.

Waking Up with Sam Harris: “The Kindness of Strangers” (Website / Overcast)

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the arms race for human attention, the ethics of persuasion, the consequences of having an ad-based economy, the dynamics of regret, and other topics.

I’m not a regular listener to this podcast (and I listened to another episode I didn’t particularly enjoy), but I read an interview with Tristan Harris about his particular area of expertise, and went looking for other interviews to learn more. (Here’s yet another.)

His area of expertise is distraction, or more precisely, attention control – how apps and websites are increasingly designed to play our neurology like a fiddle to capture as much of our time and attention as possible. Tristan has also done a couple of TED talks on the subject.

While it’s a bit obvious in the broad strokes, it’s disturbing to learn about the details — but like my read of The Righteous Mind a few years ago, I found it was the sort of idea that sat in the back of my mind to help contextualize other things I saw and did (like Facebook, Netflix, and YouTube’s specific and purposeful decisions to autoload new videos after you finish watching one).

Related to that, I have since installed Chrome extensions to block the autoloading of new Facebook posts on scrolling (Social Fixer) and block YouTube’s recommendations from ever appearing (Remove Recommendations). The destructive power of YouTube’s recommendation engine is another, wholly different topic, but it’s no less dire.

I have a new podcast too!

It’s on Patreon. Here’s a teaser. I’ll talk about it more very soon!

[ Previous things well worth your time. ]