Mirror mirror in my hand! Bring me more subscribers! Wouldn’t that be grand?”

D’oh! I wanted to get two strips done this week, but I was cursed with paying work: a birthday tribute to Mad magazine’s centennial satirist Al Jaffee! Your loss is his gain!

But now, here is what you were waiting for that WASN’T the cartoon! Announcing:

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APRIL FOOL’S MONTH!

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People, I gotta tell you: I have been in a real funk lately. This Covid thing and all it’s attendant nightmares is stressing me, my political outlook is bleak, I’ve been shooting my mouth off online and burning bridges left and right, and I don’t even know if I get the comic book industry anymore– the very star I have set my entire life by.

And now as I consider all my unmade projects (many of them gelded-at-birth by my less than ambitious efforts at self-promotion) I’ve recently added  “what the fuck have I done with my life?” to that list of woes (a pretty self-indulgent attitude for a guy who has always prided himself on setting the terms of his own existence).

Well, a man can’t sit in the dirty diaper of his despair forever. Man’s gotta find a way to bust through his  blues and either reinvigorate his love for comics or go stir crazy and then die in a hail of bullets as he tries to bust into prison to deliver the Q-Shaman an organic veggie burger.

And so for the month of April–that glorious month when bunnies and marshmallow fowl and Jesus and sexy, linen-clad Eastre and the holy Fool himself herald the arrival of better days to come–I am going to depart from Weapon Brown and deliver a grab bag of eclectic cartoons, including the next portion of The Idiodyssey, a whimsical new strip called Fat Data, concept art for some unrealizable dream projects of mine, and at long last the beginning of the next chapter of Clarissa’s saga. That oughta clear my mind of doomthink for a while!

There may be some additional surprises too, so I hope you folks who don’t normally go for my silly stuff will keep checking in. I think you’ll like what I have in store for you!

I remain,

JaSoN

Private eyes are watching you! Watch them back by subscribing!

Pussycats, with none of that “Josie” chick! Why not subscribe??

Be mice and subscribe!

Subscribe! What are you…chicken??

Woot! Two pages this week! I knew I had it in me!

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Not a subscriber? Socks to be you!

Sigh. Only subscribers see it all!

Happy New Year, folks! How about a little director’s commentary?

I’m riffing on Frank Miller for this story, and I sure hope it is a passable rip-off by the time I am done! I thought that working with simple, abstract shapes would speed-up the drawing the process (as well as looking dope), but all this extra black is a bitch to lay down!

I am also realizing that I have to think more about the shapes that are being created by the negative and positive spaces. With less detail to distract the eye from my draftsmanship, those silhouettes have to do a lot of heavy lifting. Odd shapes will mislead the reader as their brain tries to figure out what kind of bullshit I am trying to get away with.

I am pretty psyched to finally be showing off designs for Chuck’s former comrades. I am keeping their cyborginess™ kind of simple and clunky, but I have never before imagined how the other members of Project Peanuts turned out (except for one quick shot in the original Weapon Brown arc showing another subject in the same lab where Chuck was created, I have never even sketched them).

In keeping with my theme of making sure every character in Weapon Brown is an actual comic strip character, I will have to decide who Weapons Green, Blue and Red actually are. Since I am imagining them as ancillary characters from Peanuts, and since they are mostly stripped of distinctive features, it’s really a non-issue. For the record, though, let’s say that Weapon Green is Harold Angel, Weapon Blue is Larry and Weapon Red (who I should have made Shermy, but that ship has sailed) is Joe Shlabotnik.

(Robotic? Shlabotnik? There’s a joke in there somewhere.)