Here is my big meaty meat-head. Is it just me or is my jaw freaking huge? Maybe I've just been watching too much anime with characters who have tiny wee pointy chins.
Anyways, this was the last frame I had left on the roll of film so I held the camera out and snapped a picture of myself.
Note my green and white veranda in the background and how much better it looks that the delapitated porch of the neighbouring house. The house next to me is owned by a corporation that rents specifically to low income, government assisted tenants. In other words "white trash". You can spot all the houses on our street that are rentals and which ones are owned by the occupants based on how well the house and yard are kept. Apart from the nice family that lived there when we bought the house (who moved away once their children grew up and left the house) every other family to move into that house have been a bunch of drugged up hillbillies who pay first and last months rent and then see how long they can dick the landlord around before they're kicked out. Since the properties are corporate owned that tends to be several months. The most recent family of druggies was the most dysfunctional of the lot so far. I have a feeling they'll be leaving very shortly. I'll be glad to see them go, but part of me dreads what might be moving in next.
I can't begin to tell you how much I hate these landlords who rent out properties like this without giving a crap about what it does to the neighbourhood. I think there should be a law prohibbiting people from buying properties to rent out in neighbourhoods that they themselves don't live in. Maybe that would prevent these slumlords from ruining so many of our inner-city neighbourhoods.
It's the corporate owned properties that are the worst of the bunch. With the private owned properties they tend to either get pissed off with delinquent renters trashing the place and/or not paying rent and either give them the boot or sell the property to people looking to occupy the house. When people own the house they live in they generally tend to treat the property with a little more respect. The corporate owned properties are much different. First they don't care if the place gets trashed and they sure as hell don't maintain the property since they care more about the plot than the house that is on it. Secondly their beurocracy tends to let the renters get away with more crap before they're finally evicted.
I built my porch myself. The old one was about to fall over as I discovered one day when I noticed the roof of it was begining to pull away from the house in one corner. From across the street I could see how the one corner of the veranda was sinking into the ground. Upon further investivation I discovered the porch was structurally unsound. The one corner was completely unsupported. The brick pier that was supposed to hold it up was laying smashed on the ground under the porch. One of my neighbours (a nice old man who passed away a few years ago) told me that not long before I bought the house a car went out of control and crashed into my porch. It would seem the people who owned the house before me pocketed the insurance money and did a lick-and-a-promise cosmetic repair to the porch since they were planning to sell the house soon anyways the damage would be someone else's problem.
Once I discovered the problem I rushed to the lumberyard and bought some 2"x12" planks to hold the roof up while I tore down the old porch and completely rebuilt it. The new porch is quite lovely and much better looking than the old one was. I built the whole damned thing myself and my alderman sent me a letter saying he was in the neighbourhood, saw my porch, and wanted to thank me for doing my part to make the neighbourhood look better.
Anyways... back to the convention.
I bought some other comic books while I was there. Two issues of Asylum Squad, one of Hog Town and a comic book called Hello My Name Is Ficus.
Asylum Squad is a canamanga, written by a teenage girl, about a group of insance anime cliches... er... I mean superheros who pop meds and fight crime and shit. It's not bad, really. The artwork is pretty good and the stories are pretty cute and light. I really have only three pieces of advice to the creator on how to improve her work.
1) Comic Sans MS is without a doubt the most hated font in all of comicdom. I'd really suggest going with another font. Give Blambot or Indigo Productions a boo for some really nifty free fonts. This will improve the look of your comic a lot.
2) Don't have people refer to themselves with the suffix "chan". In Japanese one never refers to oneself with the suffix "chan", "san", "kun", "sama", etc. Other people refer to you with the suffix but you never introduce yourself as "Hello, my name is Lisa-chan" unless you're chinese and your last name is Chan. You see Jackie Chan could get away with it. But Jackie Chan kicks ass and thus can get away with a lot of things you and I cannot. I know you see a lot of westerners on the internet refering to themselves as "so-and-so-chan" but it's wrong. It's like in 1998 when Fushigi Yuugi was really popular and girls all started adding the suffix "no miko" to their names. You know the ones, her name is Linda so she'd start calling herself "Linda no miko" thinking it meant "Priestess Linda" but what it really meant was "Priestess of Linda", so you'd have all these girls running around online being their own priestesses. Talk about the height of self worship, eh? Anyways, ixnay on the anchay.
3) Don't make all your speech balloons rectangular. For one, rectangular speech balloons tend to be used for inanimate objects or machines like robots and computers because it lends a cold and sterile quality to the text. Rectangular speech balloons will suck the life out of your dialogue and nothing but rectangular speech balloons will become very tedious, very quickly.
Other than those three points the comic wasn't without it charms. Hell, it's light, it's cute, it has a gender dysphoric, and all the gals have great tits. What more can you ask for, eh?
Hog Town was a compilation comic. Compilation comics are a double edged sword. On the one hand they expose you to a number of different comics. On the other hand you have no guarentee that they won't all suck. The comics in Hog Town wern't bad at all. Captain and Lepito and The Loon were my favorites of the bunch. The other comics I wasn't all that hot on.
Hello My Name Is Ficus is just fucked up... it's fucked up, man. Fucked... up! But I loved it. The artwork looks like something Edward Gorey would draw if he spent his life in a mental hospital on chemicals. Besides all the the author ends the book with an ode to her wee breasts. How can you not like that. I remember as I bought the comic thinking, "Hell, her breasts are small, but damned if they don't look mighty fine."
