blog: stuff I made

A Wee Announcement

Not many of my comics are autobiographical — I’d be very afraid, if they were — but a few do indeed comprise a category that might be called “verbatim transcripts of conversations with my wife.”

Are a few that I recall just off the top of my head. And, most recently, this week’s comic, #1269.

Indeed! We’re having a baby! In May! This doesn’t really affect you much, but I just wanted to share this cool image we made (my wife makes puppets for the TV show Robot Chicken):

this is scientifically accurate

Haven’t decided on a name for our baby boy yet, but I think “Quaid” is totally in the running.

Here’s my Election Day Bingo Card

I suspect we'll see 25 for 25 before 6pm Eastern

(Click for a closer look.)

Here’s where to verify the location of your polling place. You don’t need me to remind you, but just for that one dude who forgot, please go vote, Jeremy.

Here’s some Wondermark comics about voting from years past:

Participants in Democracy
In which Progress looks likely
In which Politics exhilarate
In which a Dog wants a Sticker
In which it’s All Over

…And a palate-cleanser about Daylight Savings:
In which the Time changes

 

I did a Wondermark-style page for the latest Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comic!

I was very pleased to be invited to make a Wondermark-style page for the latest issue (#9, in comic stores now) of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, written by my buddy Ryan North!

I’m really proud of how it turned out, so I wrote out a whole BEHIND THE SCENES breakdown over on Tumblr:

In the story, Squirrel Girl encounters the character Mole Man, who is super old. So, for a page where he’s recounting a flashback, Ryan and Erica thought it’d be fun if it had a correspondingly old-timey look…

With an assignment like this, I try to keep the conceit that the image is an authentic Victorian-style engraving – which means, rather than draw any image I want from scratch, I have to find a bunch of Victorian engravings that contain pieces of what I need, and then build the needed images from them.

It’s kind of like playing with LEGO® brand building bricks, except the LEGO® brand building bricks are drawings created by people who are now dead.

[ Read more at: The Making of an Old-Timey Squirrel Girl ]

whaCHA

The Joy of Mismatching Photo Captions

wrongcaption1

Unlike most clickbait-y websites like Buzzfeed or Upworthy, the article links on Huffington Post are special.

They’re arranged in a vertical format: a headline, followed by a photo, followed by a headline, followed by a photo.

This means it’s really easy to pair the photo with the wrong headline.

wrongcaption

I’ve started to read the whole website that way, now.

wrongcaption2

It’s a vast improvement.

wrongcaption3

I’ve been doing it a lot. I sort of can’t stop myself.

wrongcaption4

Unpredictable juxtapositions are funny. It’s the notion behind Cards Against Humanity or the Garfield Randomizer. (Or the Cyanide and Happiness Random Comic Generator, which is the Venn diagram intersection of those two things.)

wrongcaption5

Today, I started a new Twitter account to collect, display, and preserve in amber the best of these incorrect matchups.

It’s extraordinarily stupid. You can follow at @WrongCaptions.