A Good Rant Stopped

Yup, this comic could’ve been about me during the last 10 or 15 years. If it wasn’t “Arrested Development” then it was “Undeclared” or “Action” or “Get A Life” or “The Family Guy” (which they brought back). Basically, I have a love/hate relationship with FOX. They put up a show that I love, do a crappy job promoting it, move it around the schedule and then premempt it and then they cancel it. That’s the part I hate.

Hey tough guy, you’re going after FOX? This is something I have to see. Check it out here: www.room19comics.com

Today’s Blog is coming to you directly from our nation’s capital, Washington DC. I’m here on a business trip for a Disaster Recovery seminar. On Wednesday, I’m going to be in New York City. The city so nice, they named it twice. The other name is Manhattan. Ok, I swiped that joke, word for word from “The Office”.

Anyhow, back to the strip, I can’t remember if I wrote about this last week, but I’m getting to the point where I’m running low on Eddie Verde stories and I’m going to have to make a decision as to whether to keep going with them or turn the strip into a bunch of Random Memories.

Like I said in the first paragraph, this easily could’ve been an RM with me waxing about shows that were on FOX, but I decided to make it an Eddie because I felt that I had just done an RM and didn’t want to do another one. I’m not sure. The good thing is that for the next few days, I’m going to be on my own, so hopefully, I’ll be able to come up with some new ideas.

I have a ton of Random Memories, but I just have to come up with some more Eddie ones. By the way, Kurt’s shirt is in memoriam of one of the greatest characters to ever grace the small screen, Edgar from “24”. He was your typical IT guy; slovenly, great with computers, crappy with real life social skills, sort of an every-man with a gigantic gut. In last week’s episode they killed him and people are as upset is if he really died.

He and Kirby Puckett died 24 hours apart and I think some are more sad that the fictional character passed away.

I tried a couple of things differently with this week’s strip. For one thing I did the silhouette in the second panel. And yes, I purposely made Eddie look like Bart Simpson, with the whole FOX thing. I think that that panel came out pretty well.

The third panel is sort of flat to me, sure Kurt is saying a lot and is pretty much the meat of the strip, but there’s not a lot of action going on. And the way that he is in the right hand side of the panel with not much going on in the left only exacerbates that point. I’ve been trying to do the lettering before I draw the characters and while the words are more legible, I think that I’m losing something in the way the action is laid out.

There has to be some sort of happy medium.

This weekend, I’m going to go on a couple of comic message boards and really try to get my strip noticed. I really would like a lot of feedback, but I haven’t really been getting it from the usual places that I link the strip to.

Of course, most of those places are sports sites, but still cartoonists like sports too. Hopefully something will shake out. Even if a bunch of people told me my strip sucks, it’s better than not hearing anything. It’s like my friend Barry said, “The enemy of the artist is silence.” I’d rather have my work hated instead of ignored … that means that they at least noticed it.

The plane ride into DC sucked today, BTW. I was bumped an hour early, which was good, but after that everything went down hill; the plane was cramped and hot, the pilot couldn’t fly the thing worth a shit, the drinks were warm, the snack was terrible and some guy in front of me was ripping ass. If my ears popped, all five of my senses would’ve been punished. Just a rotten flight from start to finish, hopefully tomorrow’s will be better.

Ok. I’m getting tired. Maybe I’ll try writing a bit on Wednesday, but for now I’m going to bed.