Looks like it’s been a year already since I started this website. Things haven’t gone quite as smoothly as I wouldv’e liked, true. On the other hand I’m still here! Sporadically…

My original plan of a strip every day has first given way to something every day and recently not even that. Finding the time to work on the strip is my main problem right now. Those two hours I’d need every day are getting harder and harder to find. Even as I’m writing this I’m watching the clock!

I ain’t giving up though! Not that I’m one of those idiots who don’t know when to quit because I do know when and that was before I even got started. I’m not too proud to quit either! I’d quit in a second if pride was all that kept me going: SLOTH is the king of me! All other sins take a back seat to my awesome lack of giving an utter shit. No, only one thing keeps me going…

Spite.

I’m gonna keep doing this as much as I can for as long as I can. Maybe not daily. Maybe not dependably. But I’ll keep doing it with my last spiteful breath if need be. Because of spite.

So there.

Life’s about to imitate hackwork once again as my good friends Al and Ben and I are headed to Toronto’s FANEXPO Canada 2007 from August 24th to the 26th. If things go wrong, it was all Al’s brilliant plan. I’m just sayin’. We’ve got a table reserved in Artist’s Alley and we’ll be promoting the Loser Bros. and buying too much geek crap. Come see us and bitch about how the comic’s always late or how it’s dull and uninspired! Either way, we won’t care!

Actually, I’ve never been to a con as an (Cough!) artist (Cough! Cough!) so I don’t really know what we’ll be doing there. We’ve got nothing to sell or market… I guess I could draw some doodles for the yokels if I’m bored enough. What the hell though, right? It’s not as if I can LOSE some readers by going there or anything. It’ll be just like last year when we went except this time two of us’ll be stuck behind that table at all times and we won’t be able to leave even when we’ve had enough of the stinking, sweating subhuman crowds… Yeah, that’s going to be just great!

Oh, I can’t wait to meet those Klingon cat-girls and Storm trooper Spider-Men and Pirate Jedi and Darth Superman and Sponge Bob Pikachu and Vulcan James Bond and so on and so forth, all from behind the frail protection of a folding table. I don’t even like regular people! At least my good friends’ll be there with me, right? Sure, head-first in some quarter bins halfway across the convention floor! Holy Mother of Monkeys, this is going to be HELL! And not just regular Hell neither, no…

GEEK HELL HERE WE COME!

I’ve been running on empty the last few weeks, not getting a lot accomplished despite putting in the hours. I’m looking at what’s left of the summer and everything I have to get done in that time and I just… get… bleh… I did put a dent in the delayed spring cleaning of the apartment, with the help of my good friend Al. I started in on the summertime corrections too, although there’s way too much left and it takes way too long. Preparing the classes I’ve put off for another few weeks. The main problem is the comic.

I’ve been taking a break from the comic because I didn’t have time to work on in but now that I would have the time I don’t feel like it. I guess what I don’t like is just sitting down every day with no idea what to write or draw but coming up with something anyways just because I have to have it up the next day. So far it’s pretty much all I’ve been doing and I’m not getting a lot of satisfaction out of it. I think I’m going to take another short break, this time with the intention of writing up a few storylines ahead of time and hopefully drawing some strips ahead to make a buffer between me and the deadline.

Maybe a week or two?

I’ll keep up the cartoon diary every other day though, even if it feels like the quality’s gone down in the last while. The whole point of THAT is to come up with something on the spot every day, and it doesn’t take that long to do. I don’t know what I could put up on every other day, between the journal entries. I’ve pretty much run out of material from my old cartoon diary that’s suitable for internet exposure. Maybe I’ll try keeping a regular sketchbook? Anyways, I’d really like to have new content up every single day and it’s not really happening right now with the strip.

I gave it my best shot but there’s clearly no way I can get the strip done (even just three times a week) while heading into crunch time at school. I figured by spreading it out to every other day I’d only have to put in two hours each time but I can’t even spare those two hours a day. Let’s face it, my nights and weekends from now until early June are busy. With eighty students, PLUS some moonlighting for the second year 3D students, I’m stretched tighter than a Son’a facelift (NERD!). Like it or not, I need a new plan to get me there…

The plan is now to post two pages from the NEW, ongoing cartoon diary on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as well as two pages from the OLD cartoon diary on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and also some actual sketches on Sundays. That should take me about half an hour a day, and if I can’t swing that I might as well call it quits. This is only a temporary measure, for the next ten weeks or so. I really want this to be a real daily comic strip site but until I’m done with this semester (or else this semester is done with me), I’m just going to have to fill in as best I can.

With any sort of luck, this time out will give me the break I need to plan a bit ahead in terms of storyline. That last motherfucker eventually went nowhere and it sure took its own sweet time getting there! I think I need shorter stories that won’t spread out for more than a week or two.

Needless to say, this whole thing is a blow.

It fucking vexes me.

I’m just gonna hafta do what I always do when I fall off my horse: I’m gonna shoot that dumb animal dead and then keep KICKING and SCREAMING at it until I’m good and calm again. Then, I’ll steal a goddamn car.

So on Sunday my old monitor finally blew out and I couldn’t get a new one until Tuesday night. Ideally, I should’ve kept on doing the non-computerized part of the strip (writing, drawing, cleaning up and lettering) every day anyways but it turns out I didn’t have time. I’ve been doing school stuff all week and now I’m heading into another busy week even though it’s spring break.

The crap part of the semester for me? It starts right now, with nights and weekends doing corrections. I made it without missing a day last semester because I had over a month’s lead, which I ate up to get to X-mas. No such luck now. I would really, really like to have something new up every day on this site but I can’t do it at this point.

I won’t be able to update this weekend either, actually.

This is very depressing.

I don’t know if I should switch to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday format (ugh!) or else post the rough blue-pencil strips to save on time (meh…) or just keep updating when I have the time or what…

Very depressing.

At least this weekend I should be able to write and draw the strip.

Turns out it’s a day early because of that strip I forgot to post and then retrofitted in a while back. Granted, I still haven’t written, drawn or even started thinking about it yet so it could still flop between now and then. Don’t sell the bearskin rug before all your eggs are hatched or something, I know, I know. Barring poetically just misfortune though, it’s going to be some sort of accomplishment for me here… An occasion of some kind, like a birthday (where all you’ve really done is not die again) or, I don’t know, a new karate belt or a level up or something.

I guess that’s how you know when your life’s taken a wrong turn at some point. You know: Like it’s your hundredth day without a date or your one-year anniversary stone cold sober; something gruesome along these lines. It makes you think is all I’m saying. I guess it’s no more idiotic than your hundredth miniature ship in bottle or your hundredth tattoo, if infinitely less impressive… Don’t get me wrong! This is what I’ve always wanted to do but never had the guts or the opportunity before (well, that and a giant monster rampage) but, I mean THIS is what I’ve aspired to my whole life? A daily comic strip nobody reads (excepting you, always excepting you) that takes up all my free time? Clearly there’s something furiously wrong with me!

I was going to be a rocket scientist or a rabbi, maybe both! Man alive, I trusted that sweet, sweet path of least resistance and this is where it led me? The middle of my life’s journey and I’m teaching cartooning and moonlighting as a cartoonist! It ain’t like the poet Virgil was taking me on a road trip here. Is this the sum total of my hopes and dreams?

Huh.

Guess so…

Maybe I can build up a better freak-out over strip 1000 (not quite three years from now!).

So wow, in the final stretch for my 100th daily update here, a week from now! Not the actual 100th comic strip now; that’s on February 6th (if I make it) because of the Sunday sketches. Still!

Anyways, my good friend Al, who’s taking care of all the computer stuff, showed me the stats for the Loser Bros. website this week. The good news is that with the plug I got on Fleen.com my visitors DOUBLED on that day! Since then it’s gone back down some to about half again what I was getting before (still fantastic). The crap news is that it doubled from around twenty visitors a day up to 40 and then back down to nearly 30… We can all agree that’s pretty fucking pathetic! Not that I’m not grateful to those of you who do check the strip every day and of course yes that’s still 30 more people than would get to read this otherwise, I know I know.

It’s just that I’d like to be reaching something in the three digits by now, y’know? I guess I’ll start on getting some publicity happening or something. I got the plug on Fleen.com by sending the guy an Email so I’m gonna send more to all the other webcomics sites I read daily. I don’t really have time to go on message boards or anything but I’ll see if I can get those banners that link back to your site happening. What I’d really like to do would be to put something up in that Multimedia section over there. I guess the easiest thing to do would be desktop wallpapers so I should start with that. I was supposed to attend a Flash animation class all this week but it got canceled… I wanted to see if I could do a little animated Loser Bros project and maybe put it up but no luck.

In any case, if you ARE reading this none of the above really concerns you. Just keep reading every day and everybody’s happy. One thing you could do though, if you’re not one of my students (who HAVE to read the strip or they fail my class, and at 60 students this last semester I’m seeing a lot of attrition here) or a friend or someone I know personally, if you could please send me an Email just to let me know there’s someone out there reading this that I can’t punch in the face.

Thanks!

So, someone gave me a box of chocolates. VERY nice chocolates: an assortment of sugar-free Laura Secord chocolates (for diabetes). They left them on my desk in the teacher’s lounge with a nice note wishing me a prompt recovery (from a kidney-stone busting procedure I went in for last Friday, gruesome stuff). The thing of it is, they didn’t sign their name or anything. Hm.

I brought my finely-honed detective skills to bear on the mystery all week. Meaning, I asked everybody if it was them. Nobody admitted to it. Double Hm.

Now as I see it, ONE thoughtful person cared enough to get me something they knew I liked after a medical procedure I had been dreading and NOBODY ELSE did. Being a bit of a misanthrope here, I’m used to loathing, despising and resenting everyone I know and most people I don’t but now I can’t do that for ONE mystery person and it could be ANYBODY! I mean that’s pretty much my definition of Good: Putting someone else’s happiness (I’m happy I got those chocolates) before your own needs (They couldv’ve used that money for something they needed) without expectation of reward or recognition (the anonymous part). It’s not like someone died to save me or anything, but as a token gesture it’s still touchingly altruistic. Maybe they HOPE I’ll find out who it was, but if they know me well enough to know about the sugar-free chocolates, they pretty much know I’m not that bright.

The Machiavellian torture part of this is that now I can’t go around loathing, despising and resenting anyone indiscriminately without thinking, somewhere in the back of my mind “Well maybe it was THEM who gave me those delicious chocolates…” MY CAPACITY TO HATE HAS BEEN SOMEWHAT DIMINISHED! It’s a Goddamn Christmas Miracle!

Thank you for your kindness, mystery person!

No thanks for cutting into my hate skills.

(That kidney stone-busting still hurt like a bitch, though!)

-Dan

Well, looks like the strips are still going up! DAILY! Mind you, it’s a good thing I had a head start and worked up a couple month’s worth of strips before I went online because at this point there’s no way I can do this on a daily basis. What with putting the classes together and correcting the assignments, I can’t really spare the 3½ hours a day it would really take me. Hopefully, the head start will see me through to the holiday break when I can put in double time again. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that part’ll work out but I’m more worried about the winter semester heading into spring… I’ll have an extra class then and even less time to work on the strips. I’m seeing a rough spot ahead in late March. Maybe I’ll go to three days a week from then until mid-May or something. I’ll worry about it when I get there I guess.

The thing of it is I’m really enjoying this now that I’m getting the hang of it.

The stories mostly write themselves; I pick a topic and let the characters loose. Dialogue still gives me a hard time but the more I write the better I'll get, hopefully. The drawing part is just a good time. The best part is that when one doesn’t turn out as good as I’d like, and I can just go on to the next and maybe that one will! Scanning and compositing is now a matter of minutes and coloring’s easy as long as I stick with what I’ve already got.

I could see a number of years down the line (should my liver last that long) when I’ve had it with lazy, rowdy, hopeless students and correcting the same idiotic mistakes over and over, where I could figure out a way to make a living out of this. Mind you, teaching’s pretty much a dream job too. Dream on dream, like our dearly departed friend Pierre quoted in the old yearbook.

Mine was “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after.” I got it from Mad Magazine, who got it from Groucho Marx, who got it from Mark Twain, apparently. You can see the swift decline of the Empire right there.

-Dan

Hello and welcome to my mid-life crisis. Long story short, I’m starting this web-comic out of spite. That’s fine because spite is the reason behind most of my actions. In this particular case, it’s to spite my good friend Nick on the happy occasion of the animated series he created (My Goldfish is Evil) being broadcast last month. See, the Loser Bros. used to be a pitch for an animation show too. Oh, it got some development money, a few scripts written, a series bible, blah blah blah. I even have a professionally animated 2-minute teaser lying around on VHS tape somewhere. Bottom line, my stuff just wasn’t good enough. No. I wasn’t good enough.

At this juncture, a man could either get back on the horse and try harder next time or else give up and walk away, cursing bitter fate. If you’ve known me for even one paragraph, you’ll have guessed correctly that it’s sour grape time! Oh yeah, studio animation is a debasement of the creative spirit, TV producers are willful imbeciles and all that bridge-burning stuff. If I never work in this business again and so on…

Still. For my constant bitching and moaning to have any weight, action had to follow. I figured I could always take my half-assed ideas to the masses directly, through the magic of the internet! Play it indie and authentic, no compromises, while my good friend Nick whored his babies out to the corporate media. Sour grapes? I’m self-righteously offended he’d even bring that up!

Anyways, I was going to doodle a few weeks’ worth of strips and plead off on account of technical ineptitude but my good friend Al (at Expression Multimedia) volunteered to design, host and basically take care of everything about my website. Now I have to put up or shut up, which I know for a damn fact was his plan. And so to spite HIM I have to actually get this show on the road and probably keep it going for a while. Man. I also wanted to use the words gall, bile and rankle but I guess this is enough to fill up that RANT section my good friend Al designed into the site. Al’s known me for many, many paragraphs, see.

Spite.

It makes my world go round.

-Dan