| A Sunny Day! |
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| 10:31am 11/12/2006 |
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Doc Tarantula is preparing for Christmas. Because he has a paying job and is (really truly) illustrating a children's book, he doesn't have a lot of time for his cartoons, which he misses. However, he does promise a special Christmas Cartoon for you entitled, "Kandy Kane Katyn," which will be a color study for an upcoming series of American folk-art paintings depicting wholesome scenes from around the world. He's given us a preliminary sketch of part of another in the series, "A Sunny Day in Palestine," the inset being an example of the style and color scheme he's trying to emulate (called "Lobster Cove," he says; he didn't send us the artist's name). We think there's a lot to look forward to:
( He hopes you enjoy it! ) |
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| The Horror of the Horse |
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| 08:56am 18/10/2006 |
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  The Chinese modified and modernized their character system beginning in the fifties under Mao and lasting several decades, into the mid-eighties, to help make China the vivrant, modern, and open society it is today. Not only were tens of thousands of characters removed from the system, reducing the number from about fifty thousand to about seven thousand, those that remained were simplified, as seen in the two characters above. The sleek, streamlined form in the upper lefthand corner of this post is the new version of the character for horsey. Notice how fast it looks; this is a horse that will carry you to the future. The clumsy, clunky form in the upper righthand corner of this post is the old version of the character for horsey. Notice that you can see its feet; this is a horse that will make a good stew.
But is that true? Is the new horsey faster than the old horsey? Look at its bottom: it has no feet. Look at the xiang qi and and shogi pieces below: the two on the left have fast, blurred feet. The simplified Chinese character above has just a line.
Chairman Mao, in the Great Leap Forward, cut off each hoof of every horse in all of China and replaced them with roller skates. This, he thought, would make them go faster.
It didn't.
Let this be a lesson to you: beware people telling you that they're doing somthing "for the common good."
Their plans never work out quite right.
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| Karl's on My Mind |
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| 08:26am 17/03/2006 |
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Brian Baird, who worked with Doc Tarantula a few years ago in what was an alt.punk themed Cafe Press store, has asked Doc Tarantula to send him a new picture, shown below. Baird not unpretentiously renamed his store Polymath Productions (all alliteration is pretentious) and kept two series of items from the original store there, the WWSD stuff and what he's calling "the politics of Death". Doc Tarantula is happy with what was done with the former, since most of the work was his, and a little unhappy with the latter. Although it's based on Doc Tarantula's first political work at a rather famous high school, Doc Tarantula thinks Baird's version is pretty schmaltzy. It's a cuddly grim reaper, suitable for children. The original scribbles have already been posted here, but are appended at the end for comparison; Doc Tarantula tried to find a copy of his original work for us, but cannot. A description is also given at the end.
Baird's new picture came with the following request:
I've decided I finally want to ressurect my "Drinkers of the world unite!" t-shirt idea. However, I need a picture of Karl Marx with a beer mug. http://college.hmco.com/history/west/mosaic/chapter13/images/karl_marx.jpg This pose works well. Extra points if you somehow work in Engels. The line style can be complex as long as we stick with line art - shading can be problematic. I will give you as many t-shirts you want/need as payment. Ditto for wall clocks.
And Doc Tarantula is going to do it in the same way that he did the pair of owls also included in the references section, below. First, he drew the fleshed out pencil owl, then traced its lines, and then filled in the rest. He thinks he can take this:
and turn it into the line art that Baird wants. When the final results are in, it will be noted here.
That being said, we haven't been keeping up with Albino Blacksheep like we should. Lack of time and headphones has reduced the amount of time we spend surfing the intarweb. But, with lovely contests like this one, and cool Jesus Christ Dynamite! features sitting in the backlog, it's still a lot of fun. Other than that, weird Japanese fashions still exist, but not in Houston. We're actually just back from Lancaster, and Amish chicks are hot.
( References ) |
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| How-To |
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| 08:04am 07/03/2006 |
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Doc Tarantula sends us his regrets that he hasn't been more forthcoming with new material, but his new job doesn't give him private access to a scanner. Last night, he decided he had enough furnature to put a scanner somewhere at home, though, so he bought one. Which, of course, lets him share with us his thoughts about IKEA:
Judging by this clock, many interneteers failed this test. That's perfectly understandable. After all, the internet is for porn, and too much porn leaves you so jaded that you have to fantasize about the breasts of characters from children's books.
Plenty of cartoon news happened while Doc Tarantula has been in hiding. He's obviously very disappointed that he's been overlooked in the fatwa, but that doesn't mean he won't stop trying. We do want you to look at the fallout from the current "crisis," which according to what we've heard on NPR, is still going on. None of any of these cartoon are anywhere near as good as this.
Also in the news La Comandante Ramona is dead, ending years of speculation about herearwax type.
( Your Smiling Friend ) |
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| EVERYTHING MUST GO! |
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| 05:05pm 21/11/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula is moving in a week, and he's decided to throw out any art that's appeared on his site, so if you'd like anything, just drop us a line before noon on Wednesday, and if you're the first one to ask for it, we'll have him send it to you. He's moving a mere 1,500 miles, and with that, the new job, and visiting people before he leaves, it might be awhile before you hear from him, but if he has your address, he'll send you a nice card as soon as he arrives. Doc Tarantula is very glad that he has a car, so he doesn't have to deal with a bus:
( Unrelated Bus Strip )
Good Luck! |
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Read 1 - Post |
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| Pubic Toons |
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| 09:33pm 14/11/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula has decided that too many of his recent cartoons have revolved around things eating other things. Therefore, he will do what he promised from last week and justify the rating he gave Keenspace by printing the cartoons that go with some of his "interests" on the info page, such as "fetus rape." So please practice safe browsing this week, or you may end up with this fellow as your new friend:
( Pthirus Pubis )
Doc Tarantula also promised someone that he'd add text to a WWI prototype strip that he'd worked on when he was in San Jose. He couldn't find the original, but he's approximated the dialogue, here:
( Time in The Trenches )
Doc Tarantula intends to bring you some of the funniest bits of ritualized nonviolence from the middle of the First World War, right after he opens his dance club for engineers.
We hope Doc Tarantula never gets to the point of this strip (despite its obvious appeal), if only because computer generated art always seems mildly autistic to us. Piss poor art like Ghastly's, we think, is much better just because there's so much more emotion in the strip. Of course, the funniest things on the web are real.
Albino Blacksheep has archived a very flattering picture of Condoleezza Rice, and has also given us the best game ever. We're not sure if we've given out the link to our favorite music site which has, not coincidentally, a French version of Jezebel and other exceptionally cool songs, from bands like the Monks and the Wailers. |
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Read 4 - Post |
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| Pigs, Cows, Sheep, and Goats |
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| 09:15am 07/11/2005 |
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Fairy Tales for Little Monsters showed Doc Tarantula the financial advantages of writing sweet tales with happy endings for all ages. He has therefore decided to produce only anodyne scenes of bucolic bliss, such as this:
( Suckling Piglets, Not Safe for Brains )
Of course, if that doesn't work, he'll actually post the cartoon that gave us this wonderful t-shirt and the full tales of Raggedy Strumpet, whom we've met earlier.
Doc Tarantula has just returned from San Jose, and he has accepted a position in America's fourth largest city at an eponymous institution. There he will the putting cool nanothings in people's bodies. If you do not hear from him for some time, it's because of the move.
We'd like to recommend Captured! By Robots! to anyone who hasn't seen them, and in case you didn't know, we're all going to die.
Have a nice week! |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| Can You Deny Mephistopheles? |
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| 05:55pm 18/10/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula has given us some good news. He's been approached to illustrate the story of a holiday he's never heard of, and he's going to put up a few of the Fairy Tales for Little Monsters comics next week if he can figure out how to make comic gen's new interface work. He's given us some rough sketches for the t-shirt:
( Mephistopheles )
It was probably one of you we found it from, but we loved the grow cube puzzle. We had a lot of fun trying to figure out what was going on with it. We thought we'd saved a bunch of cool links for you, because we don't want to send you to sudoku puzzles or rather standard shogi sets on e-bay.
Doc Tarantula is still pissed off because he wasn't able to get any money from his account in Japan last April (unlike his peers). He was even in Tendo, which is a beautiful mountain town whose main industry is making shogi pieces. The international shogi museum was wonderful, and the shogi shops were full of wonderfully crafted boards and pieces. There are various styles of writing, engraving, and so on. But since he only had 20,000 yen to last him two weeks, he couldn't get any of the cool boards.
The bassist for Guitar Wolf (very sadly) died just before he went there, and so his trip to Tokyo was wasted. He would have liked to go to Department H in Shibuya, but it was the wrong weekend. Seeing stuff like this, he thinks, would have been cool.
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| 08:34am 19/09/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula has given us a preview of one of his upcoming strips, designed to give a quick, five-page story in a week format, just like the previous strip. He's a little up in the air with this project right now, because he doesn't like the way the inks are coming out on top of his pencils, but he's going to try to manipulate them into something suitable for the intraweb:
( Fairy Tales for Little Monsters )
We would like to welcome a new batch of fake lesbians to our fanbase, but we'd like to remind women that having sex with women in order to attract men isn't really lesbianism, it's just slutty. It's approximately as slutty as this, although not as slutty as this. So please, girls, have sex with women because they're cute, not for the edification of a horny frat boy.
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| 10:22pm 13/09/2005 |
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As Doc Tarantula waits for Comic Genesis, formerly Keenspace, he's sharing with us a page from one of his projects, almost complete:
( Zues the Cat )
If Doc Tarantula didn't have jury duty this week, he assures us that he'd do a special comic for talk like a pirate day. He also tells us we should all listen to this weary philosopher about the situation in New Orleans; for $20,000 and a letter of marque from Our Pal George, Doc Tarantula promises the federal government that he'll raise the Jolly Roger, waylay Cuban bound vessels, and contribute a portion the booty to the relief effort. Inspired by this video from Albino Blacksheep, he intends to crew his vessel entirely with Legos.
Update (9/15): We forgot the best reason for being a pirate. We also refer you to this site because we know we'll forget it by the time we update again. In fact, we'd already forgotten it.
We would also like to mention how much we love "Baby, Don't You Do It" as covered by The Wailers. The Who version? Sucks. That's not something we say much about The Who, but eight minutes for a four minute song isn't cool (it could still be shortened a bit).
We had to wade through a bunch of Bob Marley and the Wailers shit to find that link, so you'd better appreciate it. The Wailers' earlier stuff isn't that great, either. Livewire is the only album of theirs worth owning that we know of; if you know of a better one, send us a line.
If you thought of Bob Marley when we said "The Wailers," this is you. |
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| The Perils of Labor |
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| 09:01am 02/09/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula wants to remind you of some of the dangers facing labor in the modern American workforce, in celebration of the upcoming holiday. Some might think that workers rights are , but Doc Tarantula knows differently. "Earlier this summer," he told us, "this very catastrophe happened to me!" And now, he's asking you to spread the message so that no one ever has to go through this existential suffering again:
We would like to remind people of how good we have it, today. The most prevalent forms of discrimination are xenophobia and ageism, and this only occurs because foreigners talk funny and old people are disgusting. This has been scientifically proven by economists who watch "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" And of course, there's a lot of discrimination against economists, because they're bald.
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| Quiz! |
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| 04:14pm 23/08/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula has just sent us this wild rebus, taking time off of his busy schedule to bring you a little happiness on a warm summer's afternoon! Doc Tarantula has many important projects going on, but there's very little he can share at the moment. That's why he took a half an hour out of his day to bring you this smile:
( Something to mull over! )
Since the file with Doc Tarantula's revolutionary ideas for internet cartoons and our intern stole a cord for our scanner, we haven't been able to update this month, we want to make sure you're all celebrating anal sex month correctly! Batman is! August is a slow internet month, so we hope you've all been keeping yourselves busy with beach parties and wild sex! We know we have!
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| 09:52am 21/07/2005 |
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As promised in yesterday's super-secret, eyes-only entry that we can't even admit exists, we're going to show an old Max the Juuggling clown cartoon that he didn't finish in time:
( Max the Juggling Clown, 11/3/2004 )
Doc Tarantula also gave us a couple of previews for his christmas cards. This was a preliminary sketch for the inside. Doc Tarantula thinks the current clean version isn't menacing enough:
You'll note that Santa does not look at all like Doc Tarantula or his father. |
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| 01:48pm 19/05/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula has decided to use the former Flamboyantly Gay Stalin site to try to have his denounced as a vile heretic by muslims, hopefully to be considered so evil to induce them to proclaim a well-advertized fatwa against him. He thinks this will be good for business. He has also told us that he is writing a book that he plans to have the Christian Coalition burn, but he doesn't think that will be quite as profitable.
He will introduce the scheme next week in a five part series of Max te Juggling Clown cartoons like the one below. Max will describe the reasoning behind his very American plan to bring peace to the Middle East in easy to digest installments, then he'll carry it out with ruthless abandon. We support him in this, and we hope you will, too.
( very large cartoon )
In other news, there is something seriously wrong with the internet. Where has all the stupidity gone? This is the best we've been able to find in the past month, and it hardly seems worth it. If you're reading this, please, please, get your friends really drunk and do something stupid on video, and post it to the internet. You will do more good than you know. |
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| Other People Never See You As You See Yourself |
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| 01:00am 10/05/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula just gave us a few previews of his latest work. Most of it is for larger projects a long way off, but this first is one of several completed pictures for a quick-and-dirty internet cartoon he's planning based on some characters he knows. This particular case is based on some other person's impression of him when they first met:
"Hey baby, what's goin' on? I just wanted to remind you that I have Mad Sexual Skills. Now, don't get me wrong darlin': I don't want to marry you, and I don't love you; but honey, winter's coming up, so the days are gettin' colder and colder, the nights are gettin' longer and longer, and I've got a special Yuletide present just for you. Just keep me in mind this holiday season, okay, baby"
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| Funny Guys with Big Ears |
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| 01:32pm 22/03/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula has informed us that Flamboyantly Gay Stalin will be suspended for an indefinite time due to chronic lameness and a stint in Japan. We're very sad to here that, but he has also seen fit to give us the panel below from an upcoming comic that will, hopefully, replace FGS's spot soon. The panel was originally intended for inclusion in the comic, but after replotting the piece, it probably won't be used, at least in the webcomic version.
( Cartoon Panel )
We'd also like to inform you about some very interesting products. In addition to Doc Tarantula's new Cafe Press designs, none of which were inspired by women he's recently met or by his upcoming trip to Japan, we've learned of a great new trend from the other side of the Pacific: breast-enlarging gum.
The Florida capitol is one of the best buildings ever, but it's Iowa that wins this month's prize for its novel legal doctrine, as seen from the subheadline of this piece. We assume that this article (or rather, the one it's quoting) has left out a relevant detail, and the irony of this photo is clear. When we made these products, we were assured that nobody ever wears Che merchandise, anymore.
Also, here's something to do when you're bored on a space station.
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| Concept Art |
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| 04:55pm 07/03/2005 |
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Doc Tarantula has just given us some panels from up-coming projects, and we're presenting them to you here first. Both are panels from stories that will appear in Doc Tarantula's Internet Playhouse when it opens this summer. The first is for a story he's been planning for some years and just hasn't found the right forum for it.  The major plot elements aren't open to us, but it involves naked people killing each other, and so it must be good. The second is part of a story dealing with the adventures of Raggedy Strumpet and a blue teddy bear to be named later. It will be even geekier than the first and will spend its time adolescently offending anyone it can possibly find to read it.
Doc Tarantula will also be producing some other stories in the near future that will be presented under his real name. The first is entitled "The Bridge Over the Danube," a ghost story set during the Dacian Wars, and the second will be about a young girls fight for individuality at her school under Communist rule. We'll announce when the work is available here, but you'll have to contact us if you need a URL. These will be larger works which will be written in such a way to be a little less offensive than most of Doc Tarantula's work, but we think that the quality will keep people reading it, nonetheless.
[Although, we'd really prefer it if it were rude.]
( Raggedy Strumpet )
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| Gay Russian Barista Spies |
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| 04:48pm 01/03/2005 |
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 Doc Tarantula has sent us this cool Max the Juggling Clown cartoon talking about the horrors of living in the nation's capital. The long story has died twice, so here's a short one:
When stopping into a strange Starbucks he'd never been to before, Doc Tarantula was accosted by a barista/assistant manager/whatever who was trying to get him to draw menus for Red Lobster. It seems the the barista guy had seen Dr. T. working on some drawings of crustaceans at his regular coffee shop. Doc Tarantula said no, left the Starbucks, and never went back there again. However, last week, the barista came into Dr. T.'s regular coffee shop and started doing the same thing.
"You really should contact the guys at Red Lobster and do some work for them." When Dr. T. tried to convince him to go away by saying, "sure, I'll get in touch with them, who were they?" the barista guy said to give him his number and to call him on Thursday.
Doc Tarantula got in touch with a friend, who then started to tell him stories about Washington. In particular, a gay, soviet, heroin-addicted spymaster of his acquaintance from the '80s. "Have an escape route handy," he said. "And whatever you do, don't look at the cars that are following you. These are the sorts of things you have to worry about in Washington, D.C."
Obviously, the barista wasn't a gay, Soviet, heroin-addicted spymaster.
He was just gay.
We think that you'll like some of these products, although they aren't ours:</dd>
Helpful sin removers.
Church approved medicine.
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| Lesbianism and Videogames |
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| 11:58am 17/02/2005 |
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Over the past several years, it has been discovered that videogames affect human behavior powerfully. It has been proven that crime rates soared in the 70's and 80's because of Pong, Space Invaders, and Tempest, and that they dropped again in the 90's because that's when
videogames began to suck.
There is, in fact, only one type of videogame that is still creative enough to induce anything but a stupor in our children, and that is the fundamentalist videogame. We will illustrate this with a single example.
Little Mary Cheney was a normal, well-adjusted Wyoming girl until her parents bought her a Playstation. Being good Christians, the Cheneys didn't want her playing heathen, immoral games like "Mario Bros." with its subliminal tortoises that would teach their child to maim and kill. Instead, they bought her good, God-fearing videogames that would teach her the ways of the Lord like "Super Monkeytrial" and "Rapture Madness."
Little Mary Cheney is a lesbian today.
This cannot be a coincidence. I urge you, for the sake of our children, to help put a ban on both fundamentalism and videogames.
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doctarantula's journal
