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Cleaning some old images off my computer and realized that if I didn't post this to Tumblr, where else should it go?

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“Eventually, you can only make pants so wide,” a JNCO exec told The Hundreds. “That became our Achilles’ heel.”

https://thehustle.co/jnco-jeans-goes-bankrupt

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This is good silly Tumblr shit.

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It’s the nice, down home way to tell people to suck it.

Check my Patreon out if you’d like to support the comic, even a little bit helps. Or just to check out the reward tiers, I tried to make them fun: https://www.patreon.com/waitingforthet 

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As a child who drew so many weirdly gridded, checkerboard, plaid-lookin' rectilinear-ass Spiders-Man, I feel this.

marvel asked me if i wanted to add anything to the back of their sketch variant cover

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Looking it up, it's a 2003 comic, which makes it hilariously on-trend slash somewhat late for the late 90s early 2000s poker boom.

All they needed was for this story to create a Poker-Man character who then just popped up for the next 20 years, and it would be Dazzler's origin all over again.

When you ask most people what the best story Marvel has done with Kingpin as the villain

They will probably go with Frank Miller’s Daredevil work

This is because they are FOOLS

Because I can tell you right now that this is the best thing ever done with the character

Kingpin finds out that a bunch of heroes regularly get together to play poker and proceeds to crash their SUPERHERO POKER NIGHT…like literally just knocks on the door and strolls in like a baller

(Sidenote I love how the Human Torch is like ‘WHAT THE HECKIE’ at how surreal this is…the most infamous mob boss in new york, a man who regularly employs supervillains, RHINO PEOPLE and killer robots has just shown up at their front door like “I heard you guys were having a poker game and wanted to come hang out”…like he’s just their Weird Supervillain Neighbour)

But this isn’t what makes this story the best oh no

That’s what Kingpin will do with his winnings if he beats them

What would a depraved supervillain do with all that money you wonder?

Bribery? Fund some grand criminal enterprise? Use it to purchase illegal firearms or in some seedy druge deal?

Nope

He’s going to legally purchase a boat and give it a name that’s a fuck you to the heroes And then just to rub it in their faces he’s going to ILLEGALLY BUY A CUBAN CIGAR THIS IS AMAZING This is like something right out of the Venture Brothers The heroes arch nemesis, a man who regularly tries to murder them to death, shows up and is just like “And if I win…I SHALL USE YOUR MONEY TO ILLEGALLY PURCHASE A CUBAN CIGAR!” I BET HE’S GOING TO SMOKE IT IN A MOVIE THEATRE TOO OR THE NON SMOKING SECTION OF A RESTAURANT THE FIEND

This is legitimately like something The Monarch or Marik from Yu Gi Oh Abridged would do…I cannot stop laughing at this scene okay it’s amazing

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In a pursuit like rock ’n’ roll, which is entirely devoted to redemption, Cohen’s ideas were not only old but radical. His peers all insisted that salvation was at hand. To go to a Doors concert was to stare at the lithe messiah undressing on stage and believe that it was entirely possible to break on through to the other side. To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and fuck one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen’s heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward.

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There is both an alternate universe where this happens and there is a social-philosophical underpinning and justification for it, and also one where it just happens without explanation.

i love the infinite multiverse theory bc that means there’s a universe where ive pulled every single fire alarm ive ever seen

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Got a Watchmen™ Series Smiley Belgian waffle at Eat ‘n’ Park. #ButterBlood #Pittsburgh #alone

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Sometimes the end of a Wikipedia article gives you a real gift.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulent_diplomas

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We might end the Passover seder with “next year in Jerusalem,” but our horizons are fixed in Brooklyn and Brookline, in Bethesda and Berkeley, where we tend to our kids, our careers, and our libidos, and by means of these commitments sustain our beautiful Jewish souls.

I did not expect to get emotional at an A. O. Scott review of a Foer novel, but I also did not expect him to neatly encapsulate the almost homophonic journey of one side of my family in a half-sentence.

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Or it was a 35 year dream project passed from father to son!

The "Great American Pyramid" was conceived originally by Mark C. Hartz, a Memphis artist in about 1954. The project originally included three pyramids located on the south bluffs of Memphis overlooking the Mississippi River. The larger of the three would have been 2/3rd scale of the Great Pyramid of Giza near Memphis, Egypt; the flanking structures would have been scaled at 2/3s the size of the main pyramid. The project languished for three decades until Mark's younger son, Memphian Jon Brent Hartz, resurrected the concept. Mark C. Hartz, who was well known for his architectural renderings, rendered a new bronze glass-glazed pyramid. After years of negotiations, the younger Hartz's concept was adopted by entrepreneur John Tigrett as a symbol for the city of Memphis. The groundbreaking ceremony was held on September 15, 1989 and the building was opened on November 9, 1991.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Pyramid

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I love this

I was really excited to contribute a page to the latest issue of @unbeatablesquirrelgirl​ by my buddy @ryannorth​! (Issue #9, at your local comic shop now!) 

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.

If you’re familiar with my comic Wondermark, you know that I am ALL ABOUT  old-timey drawings of nonsense. If you’re not familiar, well, it’s a comic strip that I make like a collage, using illustrations from Victorian-era books and magazines! (Here’s a quick example of how it works.)

I’m really proud of how the final Squirrel Girl page turned out, and Ryan gave me the OK to share some BEHIND THE SCENES INFO with you. 

Here’s how the page looked when I turned it in to Marvel:

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.

Here’s a close up of Panel #1:

Ryan’s script for this panel called for a “portrait” of Kraven, and as everyone knows, old-timey + portrait = ovals, baby.

At the top you’ll also see a little Russian crest that I found on a postage stamp. I left it off the final version because I figured it might get in the way of the lettering, but now, looking at the final, it wouldn’t have! OH WELL. It’s a bit of gilding the lily anyway.

I have a lot of Punch and Harper’s and similar general-interest magazines, and they are filled with illustrations of well-dressed people standing around talking with one another. Which is great for Wondermark, thrice-voted “Talkiest Webcomic That Isn’t ‘Subnormality’.” (Winston knows that I kid.) For this action-packed assignment, though, I knew I needed to tap a much more action-packed source, and I found what I needed in the pages of The Illustrated Police News.

The Police News was one of Britain’s very first tabloids (later spawning a Boston edition as well, which is where I pulled material for this project). It was a broadsheet that luridly reported on crime, murders, skeletons found in pits or in armoires or in wells, serial killers being put to death, fires in convents and orphanages, horses found mysteriously dead, houses of ill repute being set upon by ghosts, and the like.

And because this was before the time when photography could easily be reproduced in mass media, every picture they wanted to print had to take the from of an engraved illustration! (Often using photographs as reference, as in the portraits below, but not always.) Meaning, the pages of the Police News are full of drawings of fights and scuffles and escapes and all kinds of horrible things, making this the perfect resource for a Squirrel Girl comic.

Below, you can see a few of the pieces that I combined to create the portrait of Kraven. The muscular body is from a boxer (the other thing the Police News contained a ton of was boxing profiles, quite handily for me), and the head was the result of paging through quite a few issues until I found a murderer headshot that made me say “Yup, that’s Kraven.” 

I believe the tiger is from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, a London magazine. It has reared its head once before, in my piece on Mysterious Homicides.

Panel #2 features Doreen riding off “in an elaborate dress, riding a penny-farthing, while Kraven gives her a salute.” (Ryan’s script, paraphrased from memory.) This was the panel I was most nervous about, because Doreen is literally the star of the comic, and I had to figure out how to find a Victorian illustration of someone everyone would recognize, even though that person was not alive in the Victorian era and also is fictional.

Here are some of the scans I pulled. I’ve wanted to use that weird-looking bicycler for a while; he’s from Punch. I’m glad that some very small parts of him have finally found a home.

I found a lady’s head that I thought looked a bit like Doreen, and then set about trying to make it an even better match by reshaping her face a bit, redrawing some of her features, and of course adding in the necessary squirrel-ear and acorn accessories!

The final piece that really tied it all together was the bang of hair across her forehead. No one in Victorian times had that hairstyle, so to represent it, I looked at a bunch of textiles and drapery, and eventually found the perfect little wave in that cricket player’s pants. When I am on the hunt for shapes or textures I don’t care where they come from.

Panel #3 features Kraven fighting Gigantos, the whale-beast beneath the waves that Ryan invented in an earlier issue! This was a great panel to do because this character didn’t really exist anywhere else, so I could do whatever I wanted.

Now, I trust this representation of him is OFFICIAL MARVEL CANON. 

The submarine is made of some parts from a steam boiler and a locomotive grafted onto a ship’s hull. Kraven is built around another of those boxer profiles – more on that in a bit.

I knew the fun part would be building this crazy underwater whale-beast. For source images, I pulled a bunch of lizards and creepy creatures with scales, and I already had this sort of rotund boxer dude on hand (I believe this is a political cartoon of some kind; that may be a likeness of a specific 1870s politician) to build the body around. Even if not much of that actual body is visible in the final, it can be useful to start with some sort of skeleton or base reference pose so the body proportions don’t start drifting out of whack.

I asked Ryan if I could give the final version of the beast giant boxing gloves and he said YES.

Creating this illustration was almost more like sculpting than anything else – because it didn’t have to look like anything in particular, just cool, I would paste on a scaly wrinkle or a chunk of lizard meat as if it were wet clay on top of the image, and then blend it all together with soft brushes on layer masks. 

In Panel #4, this backwards lunge-dodge of Kraven’s is exactly the sort of pose that the Police News is equipped to provide in a way no other periodical of the era (that I have found) can match.

I also really lucked out in finding another lady’s face (a different drawing, from a different angle) that, when paired with The Famous Cricket-Pants Bang, ends up looking like the same character we already saw earlier on this page! Finding matching characters between poses can sometimes be really hard, since I work with a fundamentally limited pool of source material – that’s why most the key features of Kraven’s face in this panel are just redrawn on top of the original source guy.

Panel #5 is where those boxing profiles came in real handy. Ryan’s script called for Kraven to be in the same pose here as he was when fighting Gigantos, but it would have been fine either way because I now have a vast collection of people in old-timey boxing poses.

I cast these particular two boxers for this panel mainly because of their pants. I knew Kraven had to wear a leotard, and the reference drawings Ryan sent me of Mole Monsters all showed them wearing little loincloth things. These two particular fighters were wearing the correct pants for the needed roles.

You can see in this exploded view a dark outline layer (at far right). The engravings copied from photographs do a really good job of mimicking light and shadow, so they don’t always have the sort of edge definition we expect from line drawings. I had to go in and shore up the edges a bit.

Panel #6 called for a “big line of people throwing away various old-timey things” (again, paraphrased from memory). The detail’s a little small, and a lot of it in the finished comic is covered up with text, but there is a lady throwing away a box marked “MONOCLES”, and a guy with an open valise full of snake oil. The chair in the lady’s hand is missing a leg, and I presume the grandfather clock is cursed.

Landscape stuff is hard for me to do, because it’s hard to find really specific things in my source material. Creating something from scratch is easy, and making up whale-monster nobody has seen before is easiest of all, but making something very particular that has to fit a certain size and shape can take a surprisingly long time.

But it ended up being fine! 

Thanks for joining me on this trip down Mole Man’s Memory Lane. I hope you pick up Unbeatable Squirrel Girl at your local comic shop or on Comixology or wherever, or if you’re coming to this post from having read it already, I hope you check out Wondermark, where I do this same sort of thing every day! 

Many thanks to Ryan and Erica for inviting me to share their sandbox; thanks to Rico for adding great colors to the final product; and thanks to Bostonian boxers and murderers from a century and a half ago, for causing these artists to draw these particular pictures for me to use to illustrate a tale about an old man trying to marry a rodent lady.

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Great job, person who photoshopped the sign from "His favorite music".

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This is a great stupid Pittsburgh nerd joke.

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Witnesses said the Klansmen used the point of a flagpole as a weapon while fighting with protesters.

Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim erupts in violence; three stabbed, 13 arrested

Jesus.

(via merlin)

Reminds me of this iconic photo from Boston busing fights in the mid-70s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soiling_of_Old_Glory

Racists using the flag as a weapon has been as much a literal thing as a metaphorical thing for a long time.