petetoms

[petetoms]

My exceedingly unpopular though likely cherished weekly comic that I’ve been posting on Instagram for the past eight months or so is now available in a reformatted (or really un-reformatted), expanded, and much more readable digital collection. You can get it on my gumroad or itchio for “pay what you want” dollars. I don’t think you necessarily need to read the first issue to follow the second, but you can get that on the same sites for the same price if you'd like.

Here’s the synopsis:

The widely beloved alternative comic book characters are back!

Tick!! Tock!!! Twenty-four tiny hours, but a single page on a day calendar, that’s all the time young Ritzy Rhubarb and her little brother Eli – two kids who couldn’t afford one wristwatch between them – have to come up with the fifty dollars they owe Buddy Wooden, a beloved pillar of the local arts community and notorious violent criminal. Their only ANGLE so far? A possible ANGEL they found washed up on the beach. Has their way out been heaven-sent or are little goons gonna end up buried in more than debt?!!

34 full-color pages in two critically-acclaimed file formats.

[petetoms]

My new comic is a reformatted, somewhat redrawn, and slightly expanded digital collection of the first chapter of my popular (among a very small group of discerning readers who are also friends of mine that have instagram accounts) webcomic, GOD’S LITTLE GOONS. You can get it on my gumroad or itchio for $3.

Here’s the synopsis:

Freed from the awkward cropping and algorithmic whims of Instagram for the first time! The glittering mountain of American show business is a metaphorical sight to behold. At its peak, success, money, all your fantasies realized. At the bottom, poverty, the abyss, all your dreams dashed. And clinging to its rocky base are fast-talking Ritzy Rhubarb and her tap-dancing brother Eli. Little kids with big aspirations! Eli thinks he’s got what it takes to make it – ankles, diligence, a belief in something greater than himself, but Ritzy knows there’s only one way to the top – the crooked escalator of grifts and swindles. When our vaudevillian heroes run afoul of a tough crowd that includes scheming seagulls, fallen angels, and pillars of the local art community, they soon discover that the biggest scam of all might be existence itself!

Full color! At least 35 pages! Many words!

[petetoms]

As of now this remains the final Satan’s Boy strip. I will probably draw more of them eventually though I did read an article this weekend about how almost half of the earth’s potable water will be gone within the next 6-7 years so I’m not going to make any promises. I have enjoyed using Tumblr again anyway so I’m gonna try to keep posting here for a while.

Thanks for reading!

[petetoms]

I think I mentioned this before, but for a while I had an idea to do a subplot where this band of free jazz-playing angels makes Satan nervous that God is taking over the music business (with the joke being that they’re a small band that isn’t popular), so he pushes Frankenstein into “selling out” and making a contemporary pop album. I still think this could have been funny, but as usual, I think just this one strip was probably enough of an exploration of that idea.

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[petetoms]

If I was currently still drawing this comic, I’m sure I’d be drawing a strip where Bazooka Joe is negotiating a bubblegum bailout.

When I quit smoking years ago, I started chewing gum instead until I got jaw pain from too much chewing. I then switched to lifting a barbell every time I wanted a cigarette until my arm was hurting too much. I replaced that with Wii bowling which injured my already carpal tunneled wrist and finally settled on an iphone game where you make a frog hop around. So if you’re trying to quit, maybe go straight to the frog game.

[petetoms]

This is a spoiler for a future that may never come to pass, but the final Satan’s Boy strip that I worked on that’s like 3/4ths done, shows what happens to Pleather Patience and the lessons she learns once she becomes a cactus.

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The purpose of Pleather Patience’s investigation is revealed and my idea, when i drew this, was that Iguana Donna would use her underworld connections to track down the cartoonist behind the anti-Bazooka Joe comic strip, and discover a hidden, cross-species, political organization that even has operatives in heaven and hell, but I didn’t bother to draw that.

[petetoms]

Obviously I was drawing my own “version” of a scorpion here, only inspired by the real animal, but a couple of months ago I saw pieces of dead scorpions where I was staying in Joshua Tree and now I feel like I didn’t go far enough to capture the scary alien vibes of of an insect that feels like it came out of a primal nightmare into our reality. 

[petetoms]

I drew this strip not too long after I had watched the Josef von Sternberg movie Dishonored so I purposely tried to make Iguana Donna look like she was being played by Marlene Dietrich. 

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Here’s the first mention of desert crime boss, Iguana Donna, and the beginning of revealing a broader plot to the strip. The scaling of the armadillo is something I witnessed in a p horrifying nightmare a few years ago, though in the unconscious theater of my mind the armadillo didn’t have a name or musical ability as far as I know. I think there’s some consolation that if your brain is constantly trying to scare and terrify you, you can make fun of it in a comic.

[petetoms]

The worms here were part of my attempt to push the strip back towards its original idea - a light satire of Instagram comics - and stoner worms felt to me at the time like almost stock web comic characters (also a worm with a face is always funny). I realize now they have a lot in common with the two teen stoner characters who have appeared in many of my comics (I know I’m the only one who knows what I’m talking about rn, but it’s nice to have a somewhat polite conversation with myself for once). I think at the point of drawing this one, I had decided to give in finally and start an ongoing narrative story that I plotted out which reveals what Pleather Patience is investigating and why, and what a bunch of the characters are actually up to. 

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I still think this strip is funny, but it can’t hold a candle to the message I got on Instagram when I posted it that said, “No too sad.”

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The trials of The Cactus Critic continue. 

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Beyond being an evil company that has done its small part to erode culture at large and drive many of my friends insane, Instagram is a pretty awful site to upload art to because of how small you have to make everything and how it awkwardly crops everything that’s not a square (it also randomly crops square panels though too sometimes). By the time I drew this strip, I was very tired of drawing only 4 square panels for every layout so I added that wide panel at the top, making it almost completely illegible on the Insta app.

*I decided to solve this problem, later, by drawing a comic that I purposely formatted for the Insta app and spent a lot of time gazing into the distance and imagining my eyes as two tiny squares that could either scroll down or swipe left. What could work on the app, but still allow for me to not feel boxed in and able to use the comics vernacular that was being denied me? How could I escape a torturous 4-square-panel grid? The answer I came up with was a 6-square-panel grid. This, somehow, didn’t work either.

[petetoms]

I think my initial idea for The Cactus Critic was that he was going to be like a manly, Hemingway-esque blogspot blogger that had quit his blog to walk the earth and expound critical interpretations of previous Oh Hey It’s Satan’s Boy comic strips, not from reading them, but from pieced together evidence he found at different scenes. At the time, though, I thought it’d be funnier to make him an ex-lumberjack who moved to the desert to review cacti (this was, I believe, another idea I got from Blood Meridian - the part where The Judge reveals that he has a blog). Not 100% sure this was the correct choice, but I do think attempting to make a blogger look like a  beautiful Yasuko Aoike character was a good decision.