If You Think of the Interlocutor as a Changeling

I'm not sure whether this one works, though I like the point it raises, and I really like the way the demon looks in the final panel.

When I say I'm not sure it works, I mean I'm not sure it really "reads" in and out of panel 3 the way it should. But here we are, and there it is.

We're guest artists at PARTYKA this month

We are honored to be this month's guest artists for the Daily Drawings feature at the website of the Partyka collective, a group of talented and award-winning young artists whose numbers include one of Isaac's former students, Shawn Cheng (The Would-Be Bridegrooms; The Monkey & The Crab), and Shawn's college pal Matt Wiegle (Seven More Days of Not Getting Eaten; Is It Bacon?). You may have seen their drawings of Isaac himself for the postcard announcing his 2008 move to Vermont, but you are hereby urged to see some of their other drawings as well, as featured on the Partyka website or in some of their beautifully rendered comics.

The Partyka site doesn't just showcase the work of its members; for years, now, it has also featured the work of guest artists, fellow travelers in the worlds of comics and drawing. Our contributions this month feature a typically collaborative approach with material that is somewhat more haphazard than usual. Our series of images, called Satisfactory Lecture Doodles, began with a selection of doodles that we absent-mindedly sketched into our various notebooks during classes, conferences, and meetings during grad school and after (which of course meant we had YEARS of material to draw from). Please note that none of these images was intended for later viewing, not even by each other; indeed, I think some of them predate not just our collaborative interest in comics but our very acquaintance. Each of us then sent his own favorite doodles to the other guy to color digitally. The titles of the finished color images reflect the original circumstance of the particular doodle; thus yesterday's drawing, which you might think is called "Terrible Threat!", would appear in the catalogue as "Plenary Lecture."

Keep checking in on the PARTYKA website later this month for further thrilling images such as "Driving Directions" and "Modern American Literature." And for your convenience, here's a glimpse of the first image, the unforgettable "Faculty Meeting":
(You can also check out some later images in the series by clicking the first link in this post, but where's the fun of that?)

PS: And while you're here, don't forget our BIG SUMMER SALE, featuring both comics work and sketchbook projects by this month's Guest Artists at PARTYKA.

The True Face of Satisfactory Comics

Behold...and tremble!!!

The Ten Doctors by Rich Morris

Like many a young nerd who watched PBS back in the day, I was once a pre-teen fan of the BBC science-fiction classic Doctor Who, featuring a long-lived, time-traveling alien from Gallifrey, a canny Time Lord known only as the Doctor, who moved through space and time in what looked like a '60s-era British police call box and who could regenerate his body when catastrophe threatened him with death (which coincidentally tended to happen whenever an actor was leaving the title role). So taken was I with the program, and particularly with the seemingly definitive performance of the great Tom Baker as the fourth incarnation of the Doctor, that I briefly took up knitting in order to begin my own version of the fourth Doctor's trademark extra-long scarf (I never finished), and for many years I wore a version of the fourth Doctor's trademark hat (which sadly went up in flames in a car fire during college).

More to the point of this blog, I even made a bunch of Whovian doodles back in the day. Here are some selections from a page full of Fourth Doctors, K-9 robot dogs, and TARDISes I drew in fifth or sixth grade:

I even made a pitiful stab at Chris Ware-style toy construction (long before I ever heard of Chris Ware) with these notes on how to make a model Dalek out of washers, dowel, and a container of Dry Idea deodorant, while the Fourth Doctor himself could be fashioned out of dowels and cotton balls:

Anyway, time travel to my own misspent youth is profitless, especially when I really started this post to shout this joyous news from the laptops: not only has Doctor Who been revived in a successful and entertaining new BBC series—which I think is fantastic—but Rich Morris, Who-fan and cartoonist extraordinaire, has now completed his mammoth feat of comic-strip fanfic, the 247-page magnum opus The Ten Doctors, featuring all ten incarnations (thus far) of the Doctor:

You can read the first nine pages here, and you can download the whole shebang here. I still haven't read the whole thing myself—I've read it off and on since last spring, checking in every now and then to see how much further the story has advanced—but I'm confident that Rich Morris has kept the mix of humor, action, and convincing characterization intact to the end. His cartooning is sharp—sharp enough to make for compulsive reading even though most pages are scanned direct from pencils, with no ink or color—and his caricatures of the various actors are economically recognizable without designy cheating. This story has appealed to fans of both the classic Doctor Who series (1963–1989) and the revived series (2004–present), whether or not they are familiar with all ten iterations of the Doctor (usually termed "regenerations," though that seems off for the First Doctor). If you've enjoyed official BBC Doctor Who adventures, chances are you'll enjoy these, too—and it's one of the only ways you'll ever see ten Doctors together in one story.

Happy birthday, blog

To my great surprise, I note that we launched the Satisfactory Comics blog a year ago today. Most of our posts have aimed at the topics I raised in my inaugural post, though predictably we've fiddled about with the occasional non-comics post or general silliness. I think, though, that with over 160 posts in 365 days--most of them by my colleague--that we can, in retrospect, laugh at Isaac's modest remark (in response to Derik Badman's comment to that first post): "...may[b]e this will develop into something more than a post or two; who knows?"

I also note with some amusement that the image I chose to illustrate that first post is the cover for the only comic of ours that you can't read about on this website. There's some irony there in that it's nonetheless one of our most well-received comics by those who've got their hands on it, and further irony in that we have long had a plan afoot to post the whole comic online. Why haven't we done so yet? I'm sure there are other reasons, but part of it is the judgment of one of its cartoonist-protagonists that his caricature doesn't look sufficiently like him. This offers an interesting context for the question raised at the end of Isaac's recent post about his moving postcards. Regardless of how that question shakes out in general, I do hope that one thing we manage to accomplish with the blog in its second year is to put our last missing comic online at last--even if Isaac has to get all Al Plastino on my Jack Kirby Superman, so to speak.

At any rate, this blog has certainly been useful for us as cartoonists and wrestlers with comics, and I have appreciated every comment (even the snarky ones). Thanks for reading.