As is often described in my diary comics, on Monday nights me and my friends Dylan and Anida get together for Sketch Club, which sometimes is us drawing and painting, and sometimes is just us watching television and talking. Last night was a productive night for making stuff, although we also managed to squeeze a lot of talking in there too. It’s nice to start the week out that way, hanging with friends. On the other hand, it usually leads to a bleary Tuesday morning (like right now).

I’ve been trying to get better at drawing women, I’m pretty bad at it. So Anida has been loaning me her fashion magazines, and I’ll pick interesting photos in them (almost always ads for stuff) and do brush sketches. It’s a pretty fascinating process because unlike everything else I do, there’s very little control, no pencilling, and I’m trying to use the brush less as a mark maker and more as a DARK-maker, does that make sense? So it’s been educational on a lot of fronts. The one above is one I did last night that didn’t look too bad. That hand is pretty mangled, but there are some good lines in there.

Ha! But this one got away from me. Models are pretty crazily long in these things though, good gravy.

Anida worked on the underlayers of a painting that will almost certainly be awesome. When the conversation turned to women with two vaginas (as it always inevitably does), she asserted testily that she thought “I could handle it. I could own having two vaginas.”

It was Dylan who brought up the double-vag thing, while he was painting this thing of me sketching. He always makes me look so good, I love it. I’ve talked about Dylan’s photographs and paintings plenty of times before, but just in case you haven’t seen them you should go check out his Flickr. My man is uber.

This is one I did earlier in the week. While I totally mangled this poor girl–is her neck broken?–she really was this skinny, the whole time I was drawing it I just wanted to feed her. Won’t someone feed these poor malnourished models? New York must be a wasteland, they have no food there. Please help New York!

Hey guys check it out I’m in the new Cloudy Collection! JIGGY-WHAT-WHAT??

The Cloudy Collection is a somewhat quarterly series of prints by cartoonists and designers, organized by head honcho and Drawn alum David Huyck. I met David last year at SPX (you can see him here at left toasting it up with me and Scott C. and Kate Beaton. Man that was a good time. I made a comic about it if you remember. This parenthetical aside is running on forever though, better close it up), and he was super cool, a class act with great taste in glasses.

So what to my wondering eyes should appear a few months later but an invitation to participate in the next Cloudy Collection! Previous partipationists include the aforementioned Scott, Steven Weissman, S. Britt, John Martz, Meg Hunt… oh man there are way too many to list, but they’re all primo, which makes me blush all the harder to have been included. This new set had a theme of “Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood?”

As the son of a carpenter, I’ve spent pretty much no time in life building anything, which is a pity. So I built up some two-dimensional birdhouses for this little guy, and then installed a noisy neighbor to annoy them. Noisy neighbors = the worst neighbors. Maybe a single step up from like serial killer neighbors, but it’s a close one for sure.

Guys I think you should go buy a set of these–they come as a set of 7 for $35, letterpress prints on fancy-dan paper in two pleasing colors (light blue and a warmish grey). The set includes me as the least famous person, just check out the others:

Scott MacDonald (I think his sea captain is my favorite SSHHH)
Laura Park (who I love and who is SO AMAZING holy cow how can that much raw awesome live inside one little person?)
Claire Robertson (artist and maker of handmade things and sewer and whoa)
Dave Taylor (preposterously amazing designer)
Bob Flynn (insane inker and Spongebob artist and tons of other stuff)
David Huyck (who is an awesome dude and fresh illustrator and amazing designer–I love the layout of the Cloudy site, it reeks of good clean informative design)

And a portion of the proceeds goes to charity–you want to help charity, don’t you? Sure you do! Okay that’s enough talk–go get on that thing. These little guys are going to look SO GOOD on your wall, or be JUST PERFECT as a nice little gift for someone, or really DO THE JOB cutting cocaine or whatever it is you do in that sloppy apartment of yours with the blinds drawn all the time.

Hey you guys! A couple of things really quick. First of all, I’m still fiddling with my new strip page’s layout, with the help of a CSS ninja. So pardon my progress, I’m still uploading old strips so that they all get in there, although I’m having troubles with that Wordpress theme’s category sorting. I’ll figure it out though. In the meantime, you can still cold kick it with the old style right here.

Also! Some time later today my bro David Huyck will announce the lineup of the new Cloudy Collection series of postcard size prints, one of which is by me. He’s already mentioned the lineup on Twitter, so I think it’s okay for me to mention it here. I’m excited about it, there have been some amazing people involved in this, and I was very flattered to be asked to participate. I’ll post more when the official release goes out. For now I really just needed some type to go between these two images, just to satisfy my incessant (and weirdly intermittent) need for order.

These three spreads here are part of my soon-to-be-completed group of sketchbook pages, comprising the entirety of my last sketchbook, about 108 pages total. We’re at page 87 now, so not long before it’s all wrapped up. You can see all the pages to date at the Flickr set dedicated to it.

My internet bro Phil McAndrew had a contest on his blog that finished up last night, with people drawing scenes from movies. I deliberated a long time on what to draw, and tried to draw part of the amazing opening scene of Once Upon A Time In The West, but it looked like butt. So I took a photo of this scene from The Third Man with my phone, and then drew it during Lost (and a couple of hours afterward, stupidly). You should go check out the other entries into the contest, they’re pretty amazing. I have no chance of winning, and frankly I’m not even sure what the prize is–but Phil’s a cool guy, and it’s a good exercise. And probably the last time I’ll have the time to do something like this until July or so, due to HeroesCon.

And if you haven’t seen The Third Man, well. You need to see it–heck just buy it. It’s just amazing. Plus! Anton Karas, First Man of the Zither!

Hey guys I’m screwing around (a lot) with how my site is organized, using a new webcomics plugin that should make navigation 1000% easier for you. Sucks for your productivity (hopefully).

In the meantime, my existing strips can be found at their individual URL’s still, and the most recent ones are listed as a group here. Things will probably be in flux for a week or two while I add all my diary strips to date–there are like 80-something of them, holy cow–and then get some help with the visual side so it’s not ugly like right now. Thanks for your patience!

HEY GUYS! Okay so I am going to take your (very kind and enthusiastic) advice and start posting these as a daily/semi-daily strip. Maybe a little nicer, a little more “made.” But still with the shoddy sloppiness you have come to love! So here are the last ones like this. The next ones will look almost precisely like these, actually, but will deal more with individual moments, not just the great unwashed mundanity of my life.

And as always, you can see all of them to date here on my Flickr.

Guys, that storyboarding test was hard. I had to reshuffle the whole way I think.

So guys, I’m looking for your opinion–

Since December of 2008, I’ve been doing a regular weekly comic, what I think of as my “strip,” the one found here. It’s extraordinarily time-consuming, although I love doing it. I’m not going to stop or anything; but as I have oft-referred to, I’m about to start a lonnnggg memoir project, and posting a page a week is going to prove tricky. And possibly incredibly boring.

On the other hand, for some reason people seem to enjoy my diary comics, which I really only started doing not even three months ago because Kate Beaton suggested everyone try to do Hourly Comics for a month. Well I couldn’t do that, but I do like doing these little comics, and am slowly working around to a style that’s half hurried and rushed and half thought-out, so that even when they’re boring I’m getting cartooning practice.

So, the point: I’m thinking of trading places, essentially running my diary comics as my main strip, and working on little memoir stories (like the current “Poison Ivy“) on the side, posting them in their entirety as they are finished. I’m wondering if this is a mistake? Do I endanger the scant readership I’ve developed? If you’re reading this, you may even be that readership, so I thought you’d be the best person to ask.

The benefits to me are 1) an easier work schedule through con season (besides going to a few of them, I am one of the organizers of one); 2) a way to smooth out my process a little, make my stories a little less haphazard and more made; and 3) a nearly daily update schedule. Possibly 7 days a week, at least 5 days. So there’s that.

Thoughts? I am listening. Thanks in advance!

New diary comics dudes! You can click on any of the images to see them on Flickr, along with the rest of them going back to January 1. Or just click here to see the whole set!

I cannot overstate (so far) how much more awesome the State Employee’s Credit Union is than Bank of America. Or any other bank I’ve ever had an account at. Although SECU has now messed up my checks twice, but on the other hand I have yet to get charged for pretty much anything. OH EXCEPT THE $1/MONTH SERVICE CHARGE WHICH IS IT THAT’S ALL THE ONLY CHARGE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I love it.

Oh man. This week’s strip is up. Warning: it’s super-mortifying if you have allergies to ponytails with the sides sort of half-shaved, or chin beards, or any of a number of other problematic choices I made throughout my life. God only knows what I will think of how I look right now in another few years.

I’ll probably be like, “GORGEOUS!” though, actually. Gorgeous.

Well heckfire, no one showed up for my comics class this morning. I wish I could have seen myself hanging around the (locked) classroom door for half-an-hour before I left; I would have stayed asleep instead of waking up and finishing my class notes through a fugue of hangover. Well I’m awake now. Time to get productive Dharbin! Or at least continue waking up, because boy oh boy, that is a work in progress today.

I have been thinking this week about the Oscars: I just don’t get them. Is there a reason for them? I understand the awards part, but isn’t it just a reason for movie studios to promote their movies, get more people to go see The Hurt Locker or whatever?

And even that isn’t bad, that’s how our government is run too right? People spend millions AND MILLIONS of dollars to get into office, then spend their time their struggling to raise more money so they can stay in that office. Somewhere in there they make a lot of speeches cynically aimed at the stupidest and most impressionable parts of their perceived constituencies, and at least once or twice they vote for or against something. Afterwards I think there’s a party, with a lot of backslapping and cigar smoking.

But the thing that KILLS me about the Oscars is all the money that’s spent on the actual event. Not just the production costs, swag bags, all that–it’s the clothes baby, what’s the deal with all those clothes?? In a time when the entire nation of Haiti is more or less a pile of treeless rubble, sprinkled with tarp lean-to’s, and the rainy season about to begin… the best thing we as a society can do is throw a party for the movie industry.

And just to remind us of how important this party is, everyone should show up in $20,000 designer dresses or Versace tuxedoes, casually displaying their fancy shoes or handbags or dogs or whatever, as they pause to endure 2 minutes of flashbulbs on the (tented) red carpet before entering and practicing not looking directly into any of the hundred or so moving cameras.

Afterwards, they will complain bitterly about how celebrities have no privacy, how fame ruins everything, how “regular” people just don’t understand the incredible pressure.

That sounds pretty negative, I guess. But it’s gross, honestly. The idea of spending tens of millions of dollars on a big party when there are starving people literally everywhere is just nuts. Or sending a rocket to the moon for… for what? I love space, I love astronauts, NASA is like a codeword for “awesome.” But worrying about sending a manned mission to Mars when we have two very foggy wars going on, 10% unemployment, an increasingly monetized political system, and natural disasters all over the place.

Well, pardon me for saying that it sucks. But it does. SUXXXXX2000

Oh! I nearly forgot to mention that I put these three spreads up in my Flickr set, which will eventually comprise this entire 108-page or so sketchbook. You can click on any of the pictures to see them in Flickr, or here for the whole set. Hope you like it yo!