Yet another example of how strangers just love to say whatever is on their mind when I’m nearby. Anyways, embarrassed and slightly blushing, Tara and I did our best to distance ourselves from this lady. And before you jump to conclusions: No, I don’t beat her up. In public or behind closed doors.

Or do I?

Er, moving on. Some things to post about today:

Thing 1. I’m starting a new fictional webcomic called Fortuitous Twist, but the site is mostly empty for the moment as I’m just in the baby stages of getting it together. I don’t know. I’d like to think if you’re a fan of my journal comics then you’ll like what FT is all about. I’m not gonna lie and say it hasn’t been swimming in my brain for a very long time. Who really knows? How about you just be super awesome and favorite/bookmark/RSS it so I feel loved?

Thing 2. The Girlfriend needs some help. Her laptop is overheating and just not doing generally well. She’s put together a petition that explains why she needs a solid, working machine (comics don’t make themselves, people!). Go sign it here and show your support!

Thing 3. I swear there was a third thing I wanted to post about, but I can’t remember it now. Grrr. I must be getting older or something…

Snapple Real Facts #168: One brow wrinkle is the result of 200,000 frowns.

He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody
- “Nowhere Man” by The Beatles

Yup, it’s a Tuesday filler post! And a meme at that! (Side note: I learned over vacation that one can pronounce that word as ME-ME, where all along I’ve been saying it as if it rhymed with the word femme. Oh wells.) I feel like I’ve done this one before…or one eerily close to it. Anyways, feel free to play along or just even fill it out in the comments section. I’m always interested in seeing what books folks have/have not read…

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read six and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Um, parts of it? Never the whole thing though.)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (only The Golden Compass so far, but I have The Subtle Knife on my to-read-pile)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (Never even heard of this one.)
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Er, no. Not yet.)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien (Quite possibly the only book I’d ever punch someone in the neck to defend.)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (I know, I know! I need to read this sooner than later.)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis (Well, only the first three books at this point. More later, I’m sure.)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis (Um, why is this a separate item on this list when, above, there’s already a spot for the entire series?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (Hmm, I can’t believe I haven’t read this one yet.)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (Loved the movie!)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (I should experience some of the classics.)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (What a crazy, loony, great writer.)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Thanks, French classes!)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Okay, your turn!

Well, I’m back. As shown below, vacation has been had:

(Copyright goes to Bitsy, sneaky photographer extraordinaire)

So yeah, I’m back and burned and bummed about no more vacation and brimming with ideas for comics and new thingies and whatnot. There will be no update tomorrow as I…well, cause I said so. But come Wednesday, y’all will get your MyLifeComics fix for sure! I hope everyone had a nice Fourth of July weekend or if you aren’t a fan or inhabitant of the U.S.A. a really swell weekend regardless. It’s back to the daily haul…

Seems the time has come for banging our feet to the ground
Seems the time has come to see if the world is round
Sweep the smoke away
Reach the earth today
But if the world is all wrong
I won’t be staying long
Keep it cool inside, if it’s strange, outside
- “Outside” by Nick Drake

So, back in 2007, there was an open submission period for this anthology called Missed Connections edited by Julia Wertz (of The Fart Party fame). The theme of the book was both simple and imaginative: look up some Missed Connections posts on Craigslist, find one that called to you, and illustrate it however you pleased. Sounded like fun so I gave it a shot. I searched and searched and then drew and drew and then, when push came to shove and the deadline loomed nearer, I got scared and never submitted the thing. Yes, I rejected myself. One day I’ll do a post on why this is a big no-no (as well as a major hurdle) and how it applies to both the art field and the writing field, but for now I’ll just say that I didn’t think I had what it took and rather than be told that by someone I admire I just sat in the dark and pretended like I never put pencil to paper in the beginning. Okay, enough of me talking here, this is what I did (excuse the bad scanning job):

Yeah, so that’s that. I apologize for the lack of MyLifeComics this week, but I hope you’ve enjoyed Tara’s guest comic, the small taste of The Zane Lane, and the above work of art. I promise to return with a bundle of comics about Bitsy winning at Scrabble, D doing battle with Murphy’s Law, and Momma Dukes pounding back some wine like a true champion. Plus, girlfriend moments! All I ask is that a seagull doesn’t shit on my head again. So yes, for now, this is where I’m heading to and I couldn’t be more excited:

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it’s all right
Little darling it’s been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling it feels like years since it’s been here
- “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles

Momma Dukes, look away! And Lisa really didn’t want me to draw this misunderstood happening, but alas, she’s off gallivanting in Las Vegas at the moment, probably marrying some random poolboy RIGHT NOW before the chapels close for the evening, and there’s nothing she can do to stop me. Yes, I like the power I have very much so. Just consider me the journal comic version of the Hulk: “You wouldn’t like me…when I’m drawing.”

Two more workdays to go! TWO!

Question of the day: How many more workdays to go?

We all know someone who’s always hurtin’
The sun is shining they draw the curtain
One thing for certain
The pain ain’t gonna stop
You get right down to the bottom of the barrel
And then you float back on top
- “Bottom of the Barrel” by Amos Lee