Baby Birds.

Unfortunately, this happened. I was walking up to CVS after a torrential rainstorm this past summer, and there were these birds. I tried to get them off the road, but the other birds came flying at my head to protect them from getting help. That's gotta be a metaphor for something.

It's an interesting time. I'm glad that I'm thirty and still very active in these projects I'm working on. The comics, the writing, Workhorse Kings, it's all fascinating stuff to me. Even the failures. I was reading through the proofs of the Rotten trade paperback, and groaning at how amateurish some of my art is. I felt really embarrassed and vulnerable, which isn't a bad thing. I think about being in my early 20's, and having such high standards about visual aesthetics and storytelling and all this. Having high standards sometimes equates to "not making anything because you're afraid that it won't meet them." So to have this book coming out, warts and all, is a step forward.

In a similar theme, a recurring thought for me is to "George Lucas-ize" Beardo Volume One. Meaning, draw it better so that it looks and feels more like Volume Two and the material for Volume Three. However, I kind of like the rough-ness of it, it almost makes the comic more about the idea than the execution. I don't know.

In other news, I've had this idea of drawing a simple animation showing people cheering on Beardo in a sort of political arena, with signs saying "four more years." This idea obviously came about when I realized that I've been making Beardo for four years now. Hard to imagine that I was so worried that I'd run out of gas after having only drawn a dozen strips in Matt's condo back in 2006. I still worry about that, and one day I might legitimately run out. But every time I get that feeling, I start feeling crappy, which is the perfect mood to be in when making Beardo strips. So this vicious cycle has its perks.

End ramble.