Take a look at these pictures I took near my home, in the parking lot of a defunct Hollywood Video. Inspiring, huh?
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Just look at all that triumphant asphalt, squeezing the life out of those plants! Who knows how many of those green fuckers there were at the beginning, but now only two remain! Eventually even they will be gone, leaving a pristeen, uninterrupted carpet of black!
Go home, nature. War just isn’t your game. Â
Deep Fried is back on the attack! Thank you all for your patience as I took the last month off to get my various flavors of shit together. Behold what it has earned you! I brand new website color scheme, I nifty new feature, more frequent updates and a brand new copy of the Deep Fried comic book! Hooray for me! Let the hills ring with the news of my wonderfulness!
As you should all know by now, I have been planning to debut a new Weapon Brown saga for a while. I had part of it completed last year and I began shopping it around to publishers at the 2007 San Diego Comicon. Well, no one has taken the bait yet, but I am undeterred!
So, while I continue to play society’s games, I have decided to make Weapon Brown a regular part of the Deep Fried experience. I will now be updating the site three times a week, and there will now be two features for your enjoyment: the trusty Deep Fried strip, and Weapon Brown.
At present, I am resisting assigning certain days to certain strips, since sometimes it will be advantageous to have more of one feature than another in any given week. But for the moment, they will tend to switch off every other day, and I will be continuing my format of making each page part of a larger story instead of a one-off, although I will still do stand alone strips once in a while.
But even better: with all the material I have been squeezing out, I finally have been able to construct a brand new issue of Deep Fried for your purchasing pleasure, and things look good for a fourth issue in a couple of months. Deep Fried volume 2 #3 features the first 14 page chapter of the Weapon Brown story that I have just begun on the website (see? there it is , right above you), as well as the recently completed “Funny Business” storyline, and some individual strips as well. My plan is to debut a new issue for purchase just as the material it contains is ready to be put on the site. This way, you can get the stories all at once, or enjoy them on the website in weekly installments (although why would you want to read them for free when you could be helping me buy health insurance and shaving cream?).
These new issues of Deep Fried will only be available through this site or at my convention appearances. My plan is ultimately to collect Weapon Brown and Deep Fried into separate graphic novels and start selling them through shops beginning next year. Shrewd, huh?
But don’t torture yourself by waiting that long! Grab them up as they become available, starting today! I am also selling two sizzling new prints this week! You can see what those are all about by visiting my products page. Don’t be shy! I really need that shaving cream!
There are two sure fire ways to experience the sensation of living in the Matrix: pop a fistful of Marinols and watch Groundhog Day with the sound off and Stairway to Heaven playing backwards on your stereo, or visit Apple Movie Trailers.com.
At least, that’s the sensation I get when I see so many cloned movies masquerading under different titles. Observe this week’s selections:
| Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden | Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull | |
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Morgan Spurlock: the man who proved that if you eat nothing but McDonald’s people will pay ten bucks to watch you throw it up, is now going to prove that our government is hiding an incredible secret. Indiana Jones: the man who will prove the government is hiding an incredible secret and then appear in McDonald’s ads until you throw up. COINCIDENCE???
| The Hammer | The Grand | |
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Two ads for what appears to be Cheerios: the Motion Picture? The machines have definitely tipped their hand this time!
| Sex and the City | Wanted | The Incredible Hulk | ||
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Centered text against a black background might be seen as merely lazy. But each of these posters boasts a fade effect as a substitute for artwork. That’s two levels of laziness, which points to one overworked NSA agent who can no longer conceal the LIE!! Either that or these posters are part of the Mandelbrot Set.
I will continue to explore the mystery behind these Shyamalanian messages from the stars, but you should continue about your day as if the rational world were not a gossamer curtain that could fall away at any moment.
 Eva Hopkins, my frequent girlfriend, has finally seen the seed of her darkest dream blossom into a black rose called…Dark Ivory!Â
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Dark Ivory is Eva’s new comic, created in collaboration with the rather talented Joe Linsner, and stars a sexy teen vampire who has just earned her wings. It’s “My So Called Life” meets “Harry Potter if Harry were a girl and drank blood”. It’s in comic shops now and if you don’t pick up a copy then you must be a vampire, because you would definitely suck.  Â
 I have been getting mad penis spam lately. It’s just one “Subj: Help your little friend” after another this past week. I mean, I know a daily dose of this shit is now a staple of the American breakfast, like toast and coffee, but I haven’t been this bombarded for a while. I’m starting to question my wang a little too, like maybe Tiny Elvis isn’t good enough for spreading my frosting onto all the female layer cakes out there.
I might have to buy some of their product after the president of Nigeria finishes that money transfer he’s been promising.
Flipping through a comic book recently I, a full grown adult enjoying children’s literature, was nonetheless galled to come across this boastful endorsement contained within a video game advertisement:Â
The ad included these screen shots from the game:
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The fact that this “mature” war game features a cousin of Ash Ketchum facing down a tripple-turreted goof tank made me wonder what the makers of Advance Wars consider “maturity” to be. A visit to their website, however, confirms that their game does indeed take a stern, adult look at the grisly realities of war, as reflected in the following screen captures.
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Remember those 80s-era ads of marathon runners, astronauts, Green Berets, etc. getting the winning edge from a Snickers bar? Here’s the next generation of clinically unsubstantiated miracle candy:
From the website: “Get charged, stay energized. It’s the peanuts, nougat, caramel and chocolate you love with an added kick to help get you through the day.” (the “added kick” happens to be the active ingredient in ox bile.)
A Snickers crossed with a Red Bull, then. Moloko Plus can’t be far off now. Of course, this isn’t the first experiment in candy “supplements” that has ever been attempted. Snickers Charged isn’t likely to fair better than other recent attempts, either:
Fanboy Face-Off, the comic podcast for people who like robust podcasts but without all the caffeine, has just reviewed Deep Fried. Their compliments reflect perfectly the roller coaster ride that is the Deep Fried experience!
“Not something I would directly seek out.”
“‘Aww cool’ and awesome at the same time!”
“This is OK.”
“Hilarious!”
“Ehh.”
Deep Fried: the coin toss of comic books! Hear their review.
Dark horse day-dreamer Dennis Kucinich has ended his second bid for the presidency and is now repairing to Ohio to raise dough to fight off a primary challenge for his congressional seat.
It should be remembered of Dennis that, his desirability as President aside, he was the only true liberal running for the job. He is the only Democrat who has called the Iraq War bullshit from bomb one, a man who fulfilled the country’s collective birthday cake wish when he initiated an impeachment effort against Dick Cheney, and one of the few people in Congress to vote consistently and unapologetically against every new infringement on civil liberties that the White House has cooked up and that the Democratic party has bent over to take.
Because he actually stands for something it was not surprising that Kucinich was instantly relegated to the leprous “third tier” of candidates, where dwell the Tancredos, Gravells and Hunters. Candidates like these do not put a twinkle in the eyes of Wolf Blitzer or Tim Russert because they don’t “fit the mold” of what the Fourth Estate expects from a president, namely their ability to compete for the public’s attention with the other topics that pass for news these days, like Paris Hilton’s traffic violations and Britney Spears’ gash. If you don’t have the cache of being a Mormon demi-billionaire, a former first lady, a Tiger Woods or a walking glob of New York sleaze, you may as well not show up at the debates. And if you try to, well, eventually the doors must be locked for the good of the nation.
Kucinich might not have been your man for the job, but the manner in which his campaign was torpedoed from the outset by the likes of NBC, whose parent company General Electric could not have more of a stake in quashing the ambitions of someone who believes in such notions as a Department of Peace, should give everyone pause.
My boy and America’s sweetheart Matt Taibbi was on the Colbert Report the other night discussing the primaries. Matt’s the smartest voice in campaign coverage, and one of the funniest. View him with eyeballs!!I have also posted a thoughtful essay in my Touch of Ego section about a novel counter-propaganda campaign that anyone can participate in to help destroy the Bush legacy. Decontaminate your brain and read it!
Hasbro has begun running a series of meta-ironic magazine ads for their classic G.I. Joe masculine indoctrination toys from the 80s. Yes, they have finally caught on to what that snickering over “knowing is half the battle” was all about. (Click the pictures for full size)
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Retro-hip kind of loses its fizz when the product being mocked tries to get in on the joke. It’s like your Dad asking if you’ve been “YouTubing on the Internets” in your grandfather’s voice. Nevertheless, I am not ready to surrender one more icon of my youth to the ash heap of recuperation. What’s needed is deeper, more self-conscious irony, something that says “So what if I choose to give the last fuck? Fuck-giving is the foam on life’s latte, you pro-corporate poseur-hag.”
Call it “full circle jerk”, a new cynicism that is already an homage to itself, like Joan Crawford using a wire hangar to beat a Cabbage Patch Kid wearing a Rachel’s Vineyard T-shirt. Here is my contribution to the G.I Joe campaign. Feel free to send me your own Photoshopped indifference.
Deep Fried fan par excellence Elka Bong has done the next best thing to purchasing all of my back stock: She has ruined her flesh in my name!
Thank’s to Elka’s alcoholism and poor choice in friends, Beepo will be juggling kittens on her shin forever!
My only hope is that someday Elka falls over dead in an Irish peat bog so that her mummified corpse can be put on display thousands of years in the future, where the cerebro sapiens will undoubtedly conclude that Beepo was either Elka’s slave brand or her deity.
My girl Eva Hopkins (sweet, sexy, pink…you’ve seen her) is the demoness responsible for writing Image Comics upcoming vampire brat comic Dark Ivory (with art by the insurmountable Joe Linsner). It is available for order in this month’s Previews catalog (available at comic shops), which features an interview with Eva as well. OR, you could just order it here!
I’ve been peeking over the shoulder’ of Dark Ivory’s creators for years, and she is one child of the night any vampire/goth/action fan will want to play with. Buffy won’t be slaying this Princess of the Damned, but Ivory take you on a tour of Evil’s precincts that you won’t soon forget!
Feel like you need an intense rush of addictive cinnamon excitement?? Er, I mean…are you ready to quit smoking over a period of twelve years? Then chew what all the sexxxxy young adults are chewing ! Um, that is to say…methadone maintenance just got a brand new ad campaign. Try NEW Nicorette Action-Flavored sports gum! By which we mean, make Nicorette Cinnamon Surge a part of your doctor-regulated stop-smoking regiment. It’s the needle in the arm that does your lungs no harm! The chewable drug that gives your habit a hug! Urhmm…please limit consumption to 15 pieces a day. Consult our FAQ before giving Nicorette to children under four.
If you have had your faith in cinema eroded by years of high-velocity movie trailers that cut and splice all the movie’s best bits, creating what appears to be pure nitroglycerin out of the Aquafina the studio committees have passed through their bladders, Hollywood has finally heard you.
View this trailer for Ice Cube’s upcoming comic tragedy “First Sunday” (the movie appears to be a comedy, but giving Ice Cube another movie role is always a tragedy). The heroes at Screen Gems have decided to forego any attempt to sex up your expectations by eliminating the musical barrage that would normally back up the trailer’s scene montage and instead let the hilarity of the cuts speak for themselves.
It’s a risky move. For instance, when Ice Cube tells his baby momma that he wants to give his son “something I never had” (wait for it)…”a father”, without a musical cue I was left to ask myself , “will this movie be too bittersweet for me?” A few chords of Beyonce would have come in handy just then, but I’ll let you decide.
The cool, well groomed young men at the Comic Book Noise podcast have featured me in their Indie Noise segment. Prick up your ears and listen to my custom-designed self promotion 25 minutes into their program (okay, listen to the whole thing, but pay special attention at minute 25). By the way, that music is “Forever Heavy” by Black Moth Super Rainbow.
Thursday, speaking at the George Bush Presidential Library, Mitt Romney–governor, billionaire, Mormon– took the lectern and assured a confused Christian Republican base that although we may wear different underwear, Christ alone girds our loins.
“Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America’s greatness: our religious liberty. I will also offer perspectives on how my own faith would inform my Presidency, if I were elected.”
What followed, in what was promoted as Romney’s “Kennedy speech” (referring to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 address clarifying where his Catholicism ended and his own mind began) did anything but illuminate the particulars of Romney’s sect. It did, however, make quite clear how religion itself will influence his presidency. Lest anyone think that seven years of having a born-again Christophile at the wheel of power had sobered our nation’s oligarchs, Romney left no doubt that America’s holiest days were still to come.
“There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us,” spake the Chiseled One. “If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator.”
Compare these sentiments to Kennedy’s, who in his speech said:
“While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida–the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power–the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills, the families forced to give up their farms–an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space.”
Quite the contrast. With Kennedy, matters of religion were a distraction from communism, poverty and America’s future in outer space. With Romney, it is distraction from religion which looms dark on our horizon . It is not hard to see that, pledges of being autonomous from Church prophets notwithstanding, things like space exploration would probably not rank high for a president who would first ask if the moon had enough gravity to make kneeling possible.
Romney waved off any notion of going into the heretical nitty-gritty of Mormonism by saying such would amount to a “religious test” and that “no candidate should become the spokesman for his faith.” But he had already agreed to such a test moments earlier when he said: “What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.” Is he not speaking for his faith when he declares Jesus to be overlord of humanity’s soul?
Of course he is! Romney simply elucidated what his faith has in common with the rest of America’s batshit believers. It is only where his faith diverges and takes a path through Polygamyland and the Valley of the Cursed Negro that the religious question suddenly turns into an SAT.
Romney went on to compliment the dimples on the cheeks of every faith in America he could think of, none of which would pass the absurdity test any better than his own (so back off, Seventh Day Adventists!) and reminded his audience that America’s steeples are pointed to the source of all life’s blessings…the Sun. No, wait! Heaven! Where God lives! In the sky, with the Sun! (It’s like His lava lamp.)
Having established his bona fides with his audience, Romney then lined up their common enemy in his sights: skeptics, AKA, “secularists”.
“They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.”
It is a curious thing, this attempt (hardly new) to yoke free-thinking Americans with the same slave collar of “religion” that the faithful proudly display as though they were sporting silk ties. As a firm believer in our nation’s secular roots, I don’t recall ever trying to convince myself that a glass of burgundy was magic carpenter’s blood, nor have I ever participated in a cross-country caravan to set up a desert settlement where I could marry as many teenage virgins as their fathers would sell me. But if refusing to participate in a collective effort to stick an imaginary police officer in my head qualifies as religion…
Waitaminit! It’s still not religion, you fuck! But this is the deadening of thought that religion itself brings: the inability to think outside of your faith, the conflation of free inquiry with dogma, until finally you are spouting Oceanic gibberish such as Romney did when he said “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” This is the nation Romney sees himself leading, one where “freedom” means coughing up new contagious fallacies to infect the mind and keep it lumpen, not as an inexorable drive to slip the shackles of ignorance, of subverting the lockstep belief in the unjustifiable to create a society based on reason.
Romney’s speech did not materialize out of nowhere. Had he his druthers you would know nothing more about Mormons than that they have a kick-ass choir. Indeed, his speech discloses far less than even that. But Mitt Romney is at pains to clarify why his religion should not be considered a kookfest, and why he alone is the rightful heir to the Southern Strategy and not Republican insurgent Mike “faith is my life”Huckabee, who bluntly states that he recognizes no demarcation between religion and politics. That Huckabee is not already seen as far outside our country’s norms only goes to prove that America will embrace any lunacy, only pausing to consider if it was revealed by a leprechaun or a gingerbread man.
The address was heavy on quotations from our Constitution’s fathers who, far from endorsing the intellectual convictions of the fathers of our bible, are today considered wise only because they broke from the tribalism and dogma which preceded our civilization. Those qualities we consider most sacred in our culture and in our law–equal rights for all, regardless of religion, gender or race–are principles which are despised (one or more) by every faith Romney singled out for praise, his own being a chief offender. That Mitt Romney should be allowed to hold the highest office in the land while worshiping under such a creed should be laughable, except that every President of this country has been given a similar pass, so long as they did not attempt to justify their hypocrisy at the expense of another’s. This is the omertà of American politics.
With Mitt Romney racing to prove that he will get coat hangers into the uteri of poor women faster than the next leading snake-handler, you should thank Zeus, DNA or whoever you think is running the great cosmic carnival that history spit forth the great secular minds who wrote the laws and promulgated the apostasy’s that allow a man like Mitt Romney to even make a claim to the mantle of leadership of the United States. And you should embrace also the responsibility that comes with the knowledge that this right flows not from any Deity who today presides over a world of disease, totalitarianism and genocide without moving one atom to end any of it, but from the American people, who still hold in their breast the belief that merit, not wealth, blood or faith–or the having of it– is the criteria by which a man comes to command a free people.
Looky! Jazma Online has an interview with me. I seem to remember them doing an interview with me back when I began this site in 2000. Am I in a wormhole or something?
The mist clings to the ground, obscuring the glistening, bony ribs of the cave floor. Condensation forms inside your space helmet as your breathing quickens. No one on the skyhook attached to the surface above you has ever descended this deep into the Internet.
No one dared.
Suddenly, a gust of air from deep in the cavern scatters the mist (is it air? Your wrist analyzer isn’t working. Something about the minerals in the cave walls). Rows of slick, ovoid shapes appear. Some sort of stalagmites, or…
No, these aren’t natural. Their surfaces are…odd. Like spongy leather. And unless your eyes are deceiving you, that one just pulsed.
There’s no denying it. Egg sacs! There must be hundreds of them! But the terraforming conglom swore that this region of cyberspace was devoid of life. It’s the find of two millenniums!
You bend over to examine the pod closest to you. There appears to be a crescent shaped orifice at the top. A sealed slit with spiny hairs protruding from it. From the top down, the egg sac looks like a closed eye.
The eye opens.
You are thrown backwards, as if a cannon shell has struck your face. Why is it dark? What is that creaking sound? You feel your helmet…something is there! Attached! Gripping the visor! That sound is the plastic slowly splitting. You can feel the thing thrusting obscenely, trying to force something sharp through the visor. You grab at the creature…it grabs also! Legs or tentacles on its back intertwine with your fingers, breaking one, then another. You pull back your hand in agony. The thrusting continues.
A sharp crack, like breaking ice. The atmosphere outside the suit (or is it the creature’s breath?) fills your nostrils with the smell of Listerine and engine oil. It’s in! Unseen, only felt: a spiny, snaking tendril, looking for–then finding–your mouth.
And then…Oh God! It’s down your throat! DEEP FRIED’S OVIPOSITOR IS DOWN YOUR THROAT!!!
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Welcome back to web comics’ dark little secret! God, how I’ve missed you.
So, do you like what I’ve done with the place? Think the pink works? I thought the soft pastels might make a nice contrast to my “mature” content. But the color scheme is the mere tip of the iceberg, as you can surely see. Finally I’ve got a proper archive and comments capabilities just like I’ve wanted since I was a little boy. I’ve even got RSS, whatever the hell that is! Help yourself to as much of it as you want, though!
A whole lot of effort has gone into this transformation, and a whole lot more will go into keeping it interesting. This week’s offering is a brand new Flash cartoon, “Gooey Bag” (scroll down) which will be followed next week by the first of three Boogie Bunneez short stories. After that begins the new format for the Deep Fried comic strip. Rather than self-contained one page strips, I will be bleeding out new, long format stories with a couple installments per week, broken up to make them as self-contained as possible. The first arc will be one that has already been published, the “Scent of a Pancake” story from Deep Fried volume 2, #2. I have always considered that to be the kick off to a new chapter in the lives of Beepo, Roadkill and Squints, and the subsequent arcs will pick up where that story left off. If things go well, this format will continue until I have enough material for a print collection. I look forward to getting as much feedback as possible from you, my starving fans, so don’t be bashful about telling me what you really think. And you’d be helping me out a lot if you could spread the word about my pretty new site, blink blink blink.
The new Whatisdeepfried.com stands spread-eagled against the wall, waiting to be probed by the latex glove of your approval. Look around, drop a comment, and welcome back!
And now…
