Twenty Years Ago Today

Thank you, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Thank you.

Game Informer Braid 2 joke makes it to the official Braid blog!

As everyone who reads this blog surely knows, once a year we draw an illustration for Game Informer's April Fools edition, "Game Infarcer". This year, as luck would have it, the topic was Braid, a game that I absolutely loved, and I was thrilled to draw a parody of it. Better yet, the guys over at GI just let me know that Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid, put up the image to joke about a sequel to Braid. Nice! Here it is on the official Braid blog, and here is the image without all that dang copy.

Chris Ware + Andrew Bird = Awesome Short

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

Stella on Hulu

Stella's on Hulu now! Go watch!

Fan Club: Avatar: The Last Airbender

A while back Kevin and I were asked to do some samples to audition to draw the Avatar: the Last Airbender comic stories for Nickelodeon Magazine. We weren't enough on model, but I thought the drawings came out pretty well. Enjoy!










Needless to say, these characters are copyright Nickelodeon.

Official Armitage Shanks Fan Club!

Welcome all! Kevin Cannon has finished his latest magnum opus, Far Arden, to rave reviews. Here we can all show our appreciation for his incredible project and steel ourselves for his next one.

Want to submit your own homage to the great lonely pirate? Email it to zander at this url, bigtimeattic.com.



Jason Rainey
jae.imperialotter.com


Dan Boyd
onepoundfire.com


Dan Olson
bewilderedkid.com


Carl Nelson


David Steinlicht
allsmall.net davidsteinlicht.blogspot.com


Bud Burgy
musclesandfights.com


Zander Cannon
bigtimeattic.com


Christopher Coffey


Danno Klonowski
staplegenius.com


Ryan Dow
ryandow.com


Holly


Mike Sgier
msillustration.blogspot.com/


Jon Sloan
sa-bomjimcomic.com/


Steven Stwalley
stwallskull.com soapythechicken.com

Fan Club: Austin English

Seemingly beyond all reason I'm a big Austin English fan. I first saw his work in Project: Romantic, and since then I occasionally stumble across his work on the net. Not hard to pick out of the crowd, as you can see below from the image I've culled from his blog.

I'm not smart enough to know what English's motivations are for making drawings that are so blatantly juvenile, I just know that I enjoy what I see.

Click on the image (above) to go to English's blog.
Click on the image (below) to read Tom Spurgeon's interview with English.

Fan Club: Stella

Here are two truisms about Stella:

1. Stella is hilarious.
2. You won't get it.

Or maybe you will get it if you think that comedy gold means using a "shattering glass" sound effect on a broken trowel, or having a park ranger refer to the female deputy as "the female deputy."

A quick history (as I understand it): Stella is a three man comedy troupe that started as a stand-up act and moved into television and films (although the films aren't technically "Stella," but involve all or most of the players). The triumvirate (shown above) are (L-R) Michael Ian Black (currently a Sierra Mist spokesmodel), David Wain (director of The Ten, coming out soon, presumably the big screen sequel to ABC's Emmy award-winning series "The Nine"), and Michael Showalter (currently starring on the really small screen in The Michael Showalter Showalter).

Watching Wet Hot American Summer (Wain and Showalter's camp masterpiece) a few years ago with my roommate Zach and his friends was the closest thing I've had to a religious awakening. After accepting WHAS as The Truth, I then converted my brother, who then converted most of his high school friends. I admit, I got a little over-zealous back then, and even hid "WHAS" in braille in a homecoming t-shirt commissioned by my brother's high school. That furvor culminated in a short friendster message conversation with David Wain himself, an exchange that boils down to:

ME: Mr. Wain, I really enjoyed WHAS.
WAIN: Thanks.

I don't normally get this stupid about movies or directors, so I thought Stella was a natural choice for this "Fan Club" category that Zander devised.

Fan Club: Reinhard Engels

Here is a person who is a bit of a personal hero of mine. Reinhard Engels created the No S Diet and the Shovelglove Workout, as well as a number of other systems at his network of websites, Everyday Systems.

The main reason I think he's cool is that he has a very appealing philosophy of simplicity in his ideas, all wrapped around an even-easier-to-understand metaphor, pun, or visual image. To a person who multitasks so poorly as to almost consider it impossible, simple ideas that don't need to be thought about very often are like gold. Heck, you can tell his ideas are simple just by going to the websites; they're delightfully unencumbered by design.

I've been doing the No S diet for about a year and a half now, and I lost about 10-15 pounds (I wasn't that heavy to begin with), and best of all, I no longer consider myself to be on a diet. I've also been doing Shovelglove for a couple weeks, and I'm ever so slightly burlier. What I appreciate more than any particular progress, however, is that there's a built-in set of rules that are simple, precise, easy to follow, and easily scheduled in. As he mentions on one of his podcasts (also charmingly low-tech; you can hear his cats in the background), habits are there to reduce your time, effort, and thought, not increase them.

Last of all, for a de facto (but not self-proclaimed) diet guru, he's refreshingly self-effacing. He's not the sort of diet coach that pumps you up to make a herculean effort to get skinny for swimsuit season, he's the guy saying, "I was lazy and fat; here's a ridiculously simple way you can be just a touch less lazy and gradually lose weight (or get stronger, or drink less, etc.)." Check out his site. You may find a system that makes sense to you, as well.

Fan Club: Garth Marenghi

Those Cannon boys! You'd think they just sit in their ivory tower, disseminating wisdom and edjimacation to all the boys and girls of the world, but the truth is, they love the culture around them, pop and otherwise. Here they get the chance to express their admiration for something, someone, somewhere, and try to convince you that it's totally cool.

Garth Marenghi



Welcome, traveler!

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is a British horror show that aired last year on the SciFi channel in the US. Darkplace is a show within a show-- supposedly the brainchild of a Clive Barker/Neil Gaiman/Warren Ellis-like horror writer named Garth Marenghi-- that was "too damn scary" to be released in the decade it was produced.

"Only now, in the worst artistic drought in broadcast history," says Marenghi, Darkplace has been rereleased, with the episodes interspersed with interviews with the cast, including the mystery of what happened to the female lead. Any fans of Peter Jackson's older low-budget horror work will dig this very self-conscious, very funny send-up on 80s drama, the horror genre, and charmingly self-important horror writers. I was hooked from the moment I saw the first episode-- I love it so much I can't even see the wires!

Unfortunately for those of us in the US, there is no Region 1 version of the DVD, but you can watch the first episode on the SciFi website, and the other episodes are available on YouTube.