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.

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!

Oh man. I watched The Bourne Supremacy last week, and it’s still on my mind. Man, it was good, way WAY better than I expected. I remember liking the first movie alright, but I read and reread the book throughout middle and high school and beyond, and knew the story well enough that I was distracted from the movie by the adaptation, does that make sense? Robert Ludlum did write Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum books before he died, but if I’ve ever read Supremacy I can’t really remember doing so, and I know I never made it to Ultimatum. So going into the movie, I figured it was just the mediocre second chapter in a franchise, and I was looking to watch a loud action movie basically.

Which it was, definitely. But what was shocking about Bourne Supremacy the movie was how well it was told–literally, I was shocked. I’m not the most, or even the much, sophisticated movie-watcher in the world, and I kind of like it that way. I like not knowing enough about movies, so as to be genuinely transported by them, which I was during Bourne Supremacy. The story was, well, whatever–there wasn’t that much story really, just a continuation of the original superspy-killing-machine-with-amnesia plot.

But the telling! The entire story takes place on the hoof, with someone (usually Bourne) speeding or running or limping somewhere, being chased by the governments of a few nations and worse. But more than that, it’s how the director chose to show the story that made the movie so enjoyable. He moves the camera around at such a blistering speed, that you never have an opportunity to feel “placed” as an observer–it has the effect of keeping you as semi-confused and off-balance as the film’s protagonist. How easy is it for a schlub sitting on his sofa in Charlotte with Oreo crumbs on his chest to identify with an amnesiac master assassin in Berlin? I’m not really interested in violence or spies or all that, but there I was in the middle of the day with my heart in my throat. I love it!

I don’t know or understand much about cinematography, but I’ve been struggling lately in my comics with how to stage panels, how much to show, how to make the panels more interesting, change camera angles and perspectives, bring a reader into things instead of just merely reading. Watching the last big scene of the movie, the big car chase in Moscow, I was on the edge of my seat, and only afterwards realized that the reason was that I was in all the shots, I was being moved and jerked around just like the subjects of the shots. Whoever edited this scene below must have biceps in their eyeballs; I cannot imagine how long it must have taken to edit this movie.  BUT: pretty sure this scene is spoilery–it is after all the big climax. So don’t watch it if you haven’t seen the movie, or if you ever intend to.

Oh! I almost forgot, I put these three sketchbook spreads up in my Flickr set devoted to that sort of thing–I think I’m about 2/3 of the way to having that whole sketchbook up online, which is cool (maybe). I think so, anyway. Shutup.

This week’s strip is going to be a day late, as I’m, well, still working on it. I’m also struggling to finish my piece for the Covered art show going on in LA in March. So wish me luck on that badboy, I’ll be chained to my drawing board all day inking and coloring and likely ruining the very nice pencils I did for it. Oh and my strip too, it’s looking sweet as well–could be a good week for Dharbin comics!

Or an abject failure. TIME WILL TELL! In the meantime, here are some more diary comics, the entire set of which you can read in order at Flickr.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Coleman Hawkins lately. When I first got into jazz in high school, it was Duke Ellington, there was just something about him. While he’s easily most known as a “swing” or “big band” composer and bandleader, there’s something so SMOOTH about Duke Ellington. So smooth, in fact, that even a 16-year old kid could “get” it, not to mention the same kid almost 20 years later. Lots of range in there, you know what I mean? I think it’s part of what made him so successful in his day, there was enough range in his music for the dummies and the snobs alike.

But I wasn’t really into “swing” music that much, especially when that weird fad hit in the 90’s and people were actually wearing zoot suits and taking swing dance lessons? Remember that? Yes you do. You probably bought that Brian Setzer Orchestra album didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU? Anyway, by then I was living with The Piemaker and had been exposed to what I still think of as the apogee of American jazz, the period between 1950 and 1970, including the best of Coltrane, Davis, Mingus, etc. To a 20-something, swing music lacked the sort of raw spirituality, the passion, the searching quality of more “out” jazz.

But man–there’s something to be said for smoothness, even so. John Coltrane was an extraordinary musician, moreso an extraordinary composer and soloist. But the early guys, new as their artform was, had an impossibly perfect technique; they were the Bachs and Beethovens of the early 20th century–and remember that in a very real sense they just made jazz up. Bach and Beethoven had hundreds of years of development preceding them to take advantage of; Fats Waller and Art Tatum and Duke Ellington likely had living relatives who had been slaves.

Slaves! Crazy.

Anyway, check out my man Coleman “Bean” Hawkins, playing the standard “Body and Soul.” If you’re not into jazz necessarily, just pay attention to his breathing, how much air he puts into each note. Pretty amazing.

Oh yeah I almost forgot to mention, I put some more sketchook pages up in my Flickr set collecting my entire last sketchbook.

More diary comics! You can view the whole set to date (since January 01, 2010) here on my Flickr. Warning: excessively mundane. If you’re into the banal, then that should read: ADDED VALUE: excessively mundane!

If you’ve ever seen Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje on OZ, then you know what I mean.

I’ll tell you what it means Dharbin–not much. Yet. But soon it will mean something, I feel sure. I FEEL SURE.

Oh man well it looks like all this snow has cancelled my comics class. Or rather, I’ve heard from 75% of the class that they can’t make it. Looks like we’ll be NIGHT-SCHOOLIN it before too long. So instead of using the fact that I’m nearly awake to actually work on some comics, I’m just posting stuff. Ha! Take that, comics! Here’s a funny picture from last night:

That look is as close as I can get to approximating the utter desolation of adulthood. KIDS TAKE NOTE: enjoy your simple times while you have them, the freedom you think lies ahead does not exist! Look on my face and take heed!

Okay enough of that, let’s look at some harpies with gun-boobies instead. NOW THAT’S ADULTHOOD!

My friend Richard Wright has tried again and again to get me hired by his various movie and commercial projects over the years, and I love him for his tireless efforts, which have been universally rebuffed. The spread above is for GENTLEMAN BRONCOS, the recent Jared/Jerusha Hess movie starring Jemaine Clement as Dr. Ronald Chevalier. Richard, who was art director on the movie, asked me to do some sketches for these gun-harpies, which are part of a montage where you see Dr. Chevalier’s own weird drawings and paintings. It is pretty hard to try and draw beneath your level–i.e., make it look more stilted/childish than it already does. So much of drawing for me is trying to avoid that stuff, it’s hard to shift your muscles in the other direction. I suspect that a better cartoonist could do it better, or maybe one with a less rigid approach than my own.

I used to try and draw pretty much-on full-on sketches for comics in my sketchbook, but then I realized that most of the time I used up my interest in drawing it by doing it the first time. Weird, huh? But my current practice of super-tiny thumbnails isn’t the best either, so maybe I’ll end up with some hybrid version one day.

I need to take some sort of master class in drawing women, I’m the worst at it. They are showing up more and more in my diary comics too, not to mention my upcoming memoir comics. Hmm.

Hey looka here, some more pages from my last sketchbook, these date from early 2008, I do believe. Ah, the memories. You can click the images to open them in Flickr, where there are more robust descriptions and so forth, and where you can (maybe) see them bigger, if you’re into that. They’re part of a growing set of sketchbook pages, which will eventually comprise the entirety of that sketchbook, presuming the sketchbook doesn’t get Raptured before then.

Oh man did you guys watch LOST last night? I was so excited about it I even watched the boring catchup episode beforehand. Although I will say that having Ben Linus narrate it gave it a pretty creepy vibe. I wonder if that guy reads audiobooks? Because WHOA, those would be some creepy audiobooks.

I’m not entirely sure what I think of the episode, it was way better in my mind while I was watching it than afterwards, and the last episode of the previous season was so AMAZING that it’s a hard act to follow. BUT, I definitely thought the best line of the night was the Japanese dude (no spoilers, don’t worry, unless knowing there is a Japanese dude in the episode spoils anything) saying “I don’t like the way English tastes in my mouth.” Haw! Snobby old Japanese dudes! How they do carry on.

I used to want to learn Japanese, one time in high school I found  a “Learn Japanese In Six Weeks” (or some similarly tiny timeframe) record set at the Union County Public Library, and was told everyone I spoke a little Japanese for the week and a half I made it. Amazing language, especially when girls speak it. That’s probably true for most languages, actually. When I hear people speaking Japanese it makes me think of abstract art a little bit–the language is foreign enough that there aren’t really any common word roots (other than television brands or whatever), but there’s a sort of underlying organizing principle that’s barely perceivable; it’s like listening to someone say a mathematical equation out loud.

Mm, Japanese. Mm, math. Mm, abstraction. Mm, Lost.

My entry for Hourly Comics Day. Kate Beaton suggested that people actually do something interesting so that their hourlies wouldn’t be totally dullsville. I’d been meaning to visit the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, which just opened last month. It was pretty amazing; I think I’ll write about it later in the week here.

But anyway! Hourly comics dudes. Kind of exhausting, to tell you the truth. I made them a little more “finished” in honor of the day, even using pencils! Which means they took forever, which sucks. So. There you go. Begin the minutiae!

Oh man I just reread those, they’re so boring! Oh well, sucks for you! BUT, because I love you, here are some much better ones I have seen, mostly people I follow on Twitter:

Nathan Stapley
KC Green
John Allison
Matt Wiegle
Meredith Gran
Raina Telgemeier
Britt Wilson

Those are just the ones I could find quick. I haven’t read any of them, but just glancing at them to find the links, I’m pretty much regretting putting mine up at all. C’EST LA VIE, THE INTERNET!! Also, note that several of those come from the Hourly Comic Day forums, where there are a bajillion more from all over the country.

I recently finished up my Moleskine sketchbook, filling up the last page–pretty sure that’s the first time I ever actually used a whole sketchbook up. Whatever part of my brain that’s tricked itself into aspiring to OCD loves this, and has convinced me that I should post all those sketchbook pages, here on the “Internet.” So I am. I love my OCD brain; I do whatever it thinks is best generally.

I think I’m going to put them up 3 at a time, in this ever-expanding Flickr set. There’s 105 or so total pages, a little less than half of which are already up there, so it’ll take awhile. I’m basically filling in holes, so it won’t make much sense probably. Haw! Sucks for you!

The drawings aren’t always particularly good–or even interesting–but I feel like there’s something going on in this sketchbook. It basically takes up the last two years or so, which is when I really got serious about cartooning, started doing a weekly strip, etc. Plus on a personal note, there’s a quasi-diary hidden in there, or at least there is to me, who actually drew or wrote or scribbled all the stuff in here.

Hope you enjoy it! Feel free to NOT comment on any personal stuff you see; while I enjoy occasionally exposing myself like this, I don’t particularly enjoy discussing it. I know I know, it’s crazy.