GARY PANTER BLOG

I am almost always hard at work, part-time with long breaks, on a new collection of JIMBO cartoon drawings. For now that means writing and drawing the ten new eight page stories, or chapters, that will make up the next eighty page JIMBO book. Hopefully, it will be a fancy book and comic and art collectors will crave it and want to take it home with them. I hope they do.

But that is still years away. It takes more than a month for me to draw a page or to think one up, even though I burn the midnight oil. Yet, only a moment from here, you can find conversations frozen in cyberspace where crowds of unappreciative people, mostly dudes of indeterminate age or description beyond ‘erudite’, are crowded into some virtual moist pipette complaining about how badly I draw. If only they knew how hard it is for me to draw this crummily and not like Alex Raymond, which comes more naturally to me, they would show a little more love and mercy.

So, in the meanwhile, occasionally, when I finish eight pages, I make spiffy little mini-comics on colorful cardstock and send them to a few friends and sell them for too much money on the site to discourage  people from ordering them, because I can’t make enough money folding and stapling mini-comics to live in New York. And sometimes I don’t bother to put them in my site shop and just give some to my friend Dan Nadel to sell on the PICTUREBOX  site, which just happened. You can see a picture of the dandy new mini-comic at:

http://www.pictureboxinc.com/products/754-jimbo-party-ball

When you Orcs are through fighting, you can clean up this tell, it is a pig sty and a disgrace. Do you hear me? Just look at this mess– skulls and guts everywhere. Do you act like this at home? Pick up those snakes. Put those truncheons in the iron maiden. Don’t look at me like that. STOP THAT! When will you two ever learn? Oh my god, this runnel is destroyed. What were you thinking? I should brain you both. Stop sniveling and stand up straight. Where are your pants???? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? You think that I can afford a new house? I am calling the ENTS to put an end to this mayhem. They can squeeze you out like toothpaste, for all I care. Yes, they will, they will take you away to a nuthatch, the two of you and you can boozle and pummel yourselves  senseless and sleep in a mire. A MIRE! A big fat stinking swill of a mire! I bet you would. I just bet you would. Come here, you wretched maniac. I’m not through with you. Strew those reeds on that bloodlump. Put that ham back in the icehouse. My, my, you REALLY had a time here, didn’t you. You are SO going to regret this. Why do you make me punish you? Orca, put more coal in the BAAL and Orkin, pump the bellows. Put those ingots of lead in the hopper. RIGHT NOW. Because I said so, that’s why. I’m not doing this for my health. Momma momma momma. I am not ready for this. DON’T MAKE THAT FACE AT ME!

The doleful sirens are beginning to wail over on the ziggarat. Feeding time. Time for us to drop our baskets and playthings and head straight over to the manna pit in the clearing. Oh, Xupi is already there. I can see her waving her fronds and dancing bowlegged way down there. She is so beautiful and free. They all are. Milling around throwing flower chains and shouting by the splashing fountains. The laughter  piercing and giddy. Long haired ponies frolic and jig. The muscles in their legs jitter. It makes them seem so very real as they drag their sparkling manes in rainbow traces through the chilly clover. Sniffling and munching, stamping, flipping their extravagant tails back and forth, batting at butterflies, stirring up airbrushed balls of pixie dust. 

The Morlocks are coming out with buckets of carrots and nuts and edible flower stalks and meatballs from Ikea. They are so ugly, with their HUGE buck teeth and snow white chest hair.  RED EYES and  RED NAILS. You would think that they are a million years old, or never go outside, or something, plus, their odor is REALLY BAD, just like rotting flesh. Makes me want to projectile vomit. I wait for them to leave before I start to eat, because I lose my appetite around them, as previously indicated. Who is paying them to feed us? Who’s asking? The food is not bad. We used to get little potatoes and cranberry sauce with the meatballs. Brgyr thinks the Morlocks are eating the potatoes and cranberry sauce, but I never saw it. I don’t think they are. I don’t even want to look at them. 

Zephyr is late for dinner. Where can she be? She must be hungry. Maybe she followed a pretty pack-pony into the gingerbread forest like I told her not to. More for me is the way I look at it. If she is lost forever it is her own stupid fault. She is a ninny. Uh oh, the head MORL is climbing down into the pit. I hope he doesn’t choose me. I have the smallest carbon footprint of all.