See? Funny as shit. Completely takes the piss out of the Bat. I’d give this guy a hearty kick in the jewels if he came up to me all “I’m batman” in his throat cancer voice, wanting to start something.

See that? Now her crazy-ass eyes completely distracts from her massive anti-feminist boobies. Power-Girl problem solved!

Oh wait…this one doesn’t work so well…hang on…

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There you go. Takes a little suspension of disbelief — but would you care what this guy has to say about you as you rob a bank? All those quips at your expense are merely an attempt to preserve his own, non-existant dignity. Stupid Spidey.

DONE!

Jason

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This is part of my thesis package. Cartooning school is awesome. Share/Bookmark

Six LIES About Porcupines That Are Not True.

1. In turn of the century Canada, sheep were in fact quite rare. Thusly, condoms had to be made from the skins of the Porcupine. Of course, this led to a stiff decline in the birthrate, with some historians going so far as to say the porcu-phylactic caused the downfall of the Third Great Canadian Empire.
2. Never introduce a Porcupine to your lover. Porcupines live to sew dissension among otherwise happy couples. They are watching you through your windows. They know you don’t do enough dishes.
3. Porcupine is Sumerian for “Nettle Pig”.
4. An age old war has been raging for eons between the Porcupines and the Sea Urchins. Both claim the title of “Nature’s Pokiest Animal.” Thankfully, skirmishes are rare…except on the coasts.
5. Porcupines are filled with a grape-like drink rather than blood. Go ahead, lick one. They taste amazing.
6. If a porcupine mistakenly made love to a pineapple, the offspring would be the size of a bus, just like a liger. Strangely enough, it would have a silky coat like a mink that shampoos with Pantene. Poky is a double-recessive gene. Sort of like how two wrongs make a right.

1 FACT About Porcupines ( I Think…My Memory Is Hazy. )

1. My step dad totally shot a porcupine, like, twenty times with a pellet gun this one time. I think it got into our car engine when we were camping. Either it lived, or died a horrible death. I can’t really remember which.

(All of this is crap. I just had to draw a lot of Porcupines for a job, and decided to recycle some art. Then I drew something new.)

(Oh well.)

Later,

JasonShare/Bookmark

Along with a many other Center for Cartoon associates, (including Alec Longstreth, Nomi Kane, and Joe Lambert) Billy the Dunce got picked as one of the best comics at MoCCA for 2010 by the New York Daily News!

So there you go.

Now that that’s out of the way – rest assured there will be something new and sort of funny going up later tonight. About Porcupines.

Later,

JasonShare/Bookmark

But I digress. Point is, tonight you get filler.

But good filler. Every one of these videos made me  laugh in the past week, and I want to share that with you, sweet reader.

Enjoy.

Jason

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Oh shit…

Dear god no.

When I first came up with the idea for this series, Twilight was the first thing that popped into mind as the ultimate example. I bag on it constantly. I had never read the book, and never seen either of the movies. Yet somehow I’ve managed to wax eloquently on it’s shortcomings ever since I first saw it mentioned on facebook flair. I know the gist of the thing – sparkly vampires, misogyny, mormonism – but is it alright to really hate something you’ve never read? Probably. But I’m a guilty man, and this allows my conscience to sleep at night with the rest of me. Which generally sleeps pretty well. Keep in mind, this is coming at you in segments spaced out by my ability to actually read the book.

So far I’ve made it through two chapters.

I guess it’s not as bad as I expected. But then again, there hasn’t really been any sparkling or staring as of yet. What it is so far, is a pretty aggressively mediocre book. The writing is bland, but clear and serviceable. The characters are, well – boring. But they’re not annoying to the point of angering me. Well, Bella’s getting pretty close. I’m a bit too old to enjoy reading about such a petulant, arrogant teenage girl. She’s somehow simultaneously self-depricating and superior, sharply intelligent and stupidly unaware.

Actually, so far Bella Swan is basically the equivalent of literary astrology. She a big bag of good qualities every teenage girl would like to be, a few manageable negative ones, and nothing unique or specific enough to keep her from being a mask for the reader to wear and say “she’s just like me!” Hell, even I can put myself in her place. I’m clutzy. I’m smart. Unfortunately, I like snow and rain, so the similarities end there – because all she ever does is complain about the weather.

On the other hand, Edward Cullen is basically an Edwardian stereotype filtered the hot-gentleman-jerk lens. Well, at least that’s how I read him in the two pages out of fifty that’s he’s actually said something. I’m finding myself motivated to read more just because so little information has been given out so far. I want to read about sparkles, and anti-feminist ramblings and all the things I hear everyone talking about, but so far it’s just a medium boring book about how much rain sucks and old trucks rule.

Which I guess is a positive thing for me to say about twilight.

I’ll keep you posted.

Left: How I picture Edward Cullen for maximum erotic effect. Right: Casting directors – you're doing it wrong.

Choice Quotes and Idle Observations:

Twilight’s equivalent to a joke: “I never looked a gift truck in the mouth — or engine.”

Bella describing the vampire kids when she first see them during lunch: “They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel.” Does anyone else see the dissonance in lumping these two examples together? Anyway you slice it, these are the kinds of comments that make me dislike Bella.

Deviation into mixed unnecessary metaphors: “Last night I’d discovered that Charlie couldn’t cook much besides fried eggs and bacon. So I requested that I be assigned kitchen detail for the duration of my stay. He was willing enough to hand over the keys to the banquet hall.”

Bella on snow: “Sure it was drier than rain — until it melted in your socks.” My dear, I’m afraid that if you’re stuffing snow in your socks, you have bigger problems than the weather.

The science teacher’s name is Mr. Banner. I keep hoping for him to get angry about being in this book, hulk-out, and smash all the annoying teenagers to goo.

-JasonShare/Bookmark

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Have you watched the video?

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If you haven’t watched the video, Do not scroll past this point…

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Ready?

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Okay,  NOW.

I made this almost three years ago. That’s right, Hot Chip stole my idea. They burrowed into my hard drive using nefarious means, saw this clumsy, early attempt at using photoshop, and said – “one day we will make a music video for an awesome song, and we will steal this idea from Jason.” Actually, they’re english, so it was probably more like “Bloody hell, this digital photogram is the dog’s bollocks! We ought to nick these ideas for a musical pop-storie on a forthcoming cd-album.”

[disclaimer: I don't know anyone english. I never have. But I assume this is what english people talk like.]

Well Hot Chip, the joke’s on you. I totally stole this idea from 4Chan. It’s roots are, however, horrifyingly racist (like pretty much everything on 4chan) so I’ll just leave you with this example, which is relevant to my interests:

Later,

Jason

ps; hotchipisawesome.

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#5: Many, Many Yo-yos

Obviously, the whole thrust of this list is to demonstrate the effect that these toys had on my adult self. We all were influenced by the way we played as children – drawing in particular has defined my personality since I was a toddler. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be extended to the toys we played with — and I’ve played with lots of Yo-yo’s. I’m not terribly good with them, mind you — but I love playing with them. I have precisely three tricks in my repertoire: Around the World, Rock the Cradle, and Walk the Dog. But man, do I have fun showing them off while I saunter  to work. Nothing occupies a bored mind quite like a yo-yo. Every year or two, I have to buy some fancy new one with ball bearings and some transformative feature and rock the shit out of it until the string breaks and my $20 toy flies off into the street, never to be seen again. So they make the list mainly on the strength of being a toy I still regularly play with. 

#4: A Lack of Transformers

I grew up pretty poor, but somehow I still had more than my fair share of toys. However, Transformers weren’t one of these. They were all waaaay too expensive for what was a normal sized toy. Who wouldn’t balk at a twenty to thirty dollar price tag in 1984? My mom, that’s who. I can’t say that I blame her, considering that we ate pretty well. Yeah, I had some go-bots, and one of the really little transformers –but once you played with Optimus and his trailer there ain’t no going back.

So I did what anybody else would do in my position. I obsessed over giant robots — I drew them in my notebooks and made friends with anybody who had a decent sized collection. I still hadn’t gotten over it by the time I was old enough to hold down a job, and Transformers had just been rebooted as Beast Wars, so, I bought the new toys for my nephew. And then played with them myself because he was four and couldn’t handle the brain-melting difficulty of transforming a flying silver wolf into a robot. Ultimately, I just bought my own, and now I have a box full sitting in a closet. They’ve kinda started to bore me. But for a decades long obsession, transformers makes it to number four.

#3: Masters of the Universe

I probably had seventy percent of that picture. Castles included. Like I said, I was poor — but these were my guys. My number one toy. If you were my uncle in 1985, you knew damn well what to get me. That’s right, Castle freakin Grayskull. I must have been good at looking sad or something.

All of the swords, sorcery, laser guns and flying metal bird ships had some weird after-effects on me. I spent most of sixth grade reading an endless series of Conan the Barbarian novels. Junior high is a blurry haze of various fantasy and science-fiction books. I used to spend my weekends from morning to midnight reading (I was very popular). And I still draw overly muscled men with bad anatomy with little to no provocation. For some reason I think it’s awesome.

And now I make a webcomic where a scientist feuds with a magician. Thank you, He-man.

#2: Various Horrifyingly Inaccurate Dinosaur Toys

I’m a bit of a nerd for dinosaurs, and have been ever since that one episode of reading rainbow. I spent age five until age fifteen absolutely convinced that I would be a world famous paleontologist. Then around ninth grade I decided artist would be a better profession, and promptly spent over ten years working in grocery stores. Awesome judgement.

All this dino-love boiled over into a reasonably sized collection of t-shirts, books, and of course — toys. Unfortunately, dinosaur toys were, and still are, a dicey proposition in terms of scientific accuracy. And I damn well knew what those dinosaurs were supposed to look like. I was a serious proponent of the warm-blooded dinosaur theory as a youngster. I knew deinonychus had a bad-ass hooked claw long before that pygmy velociraptor was a part of the pop-cultural consciousness. And brontosaurus is NOT A REAL DINOSAUR. Stop selling me it’s toy.

So I was stuck with my bright red, walleyed, fat, upright, three fingered t-rex. At least it had a mouth you could shove star wars guys into. But I wouldn’t hesitate to correct anyone who got a fact wrong about any dinosaur. I’m not nearly as big a prick as I was as a seven year old, but I still obsess a bit much over accuracy. And am equally as likely to throw accuracy out the window in favor a particularly cool looking monster. Thank you for teaching me about hypocrisy, ugly toy tyrannosaurus.

#1: The Nintendo Entertainment System

C’mon, you knew it was coming. And for those of you who think that this doesn’t qualify as a toy, keep in mind, it was originally packaged with a toy robot so it could trojan horse it’s way into the toy aisle when it was released in america in 1985. Video games weren’t exactly a sure thing at the time, having undergone a big time crash just two years earlier.

Even though I didn’t get mine until probably 1988 or 89, I had already spent countless hours playing with friends and relatives. When I finally had my own, it was like an explosion in my head. I got a subscription to Nintendo Power soon after, netting a free copy of Dragon Warrior in the process. This only reinforced an already He-Man sized love of anything with swords in it. Every game I played was an epiphany, even the horrible ones. Bad games then were like cheap booze. Yeah, rotgut vodka sucks and you’ll feel terrible later, but you can still get drunk, and that is good. I know video games have warped me in many, many different ways. I’m writing about them right now. I can pull a book of game art off my bookshelf from a specific game that shall remain nameless, and tell you how I spent a decade in it’s thrall. Alright — it was Final Fantasy IX. I didn’t have access to the european cartoonists that I love now, I only had super-deformed monkey kids. And little girls with horns. Oh crap.

Actually, I designed her before that game came out. So I’m safe.

Later,

JasonShare/Bookmark

Godzilla is an avenger,
a passionate God;

Godzilla is an avenger,
expert in wrath.

Godzilla is an avenger against his foes,
he seethes in anger against his enemies.

Godzilla is slow to anger,
but massive in strength:
he will not remit punishment.

Mothra is in the whirlwind,
her path is in the storm,
clouds are the dust on her many feet.

Ghidorah the King rebukes the sea, and dried it up,
he made all the rivers dry.

Kyoto and Osaka languish,
the bloom of Tokyo languishes.

The mountains quaked before him,
the hills fluidified.

The earth became a waste in his presence,
the expanse, and all who inhabit it.

In the presence of his fury, who can stand?
Who can withstand the heat of his wrath?

His anger is poured out like lightning,
rocks are dislodged before him.

Godzilla is good to those who wait for him,
a fortress on a day of distress.

He takes care of those who find shelter in him
in the overwhelming flood.

He makes a full end to opposition,
and pursues his enemies into darkness.

What are you thinking with regard to Godzilla?
He will make a full end.
No adversary
opposes him more than seven times.

This has got to be fifteen shades of sacreligious, right? Oh well, its for the greater good. And by greater good, I mean the next century’s fantastic new religious faith:

Godzillacism!!

The people have been clamoring for a new, more violent and natural disaster packed way to worship for years. And while there are many cranky gods in the history of the human religious pantheon — none even comes close to Godzilla. Even when he’s trying to do good, pagodas are toppled and people run screaming through the streets. He’d cream Zeus and Thor with one burst of atomic breath, and make Buddha a light snack. Let’s face facts people, a god is only as good as the repertoire of special moves they can pull out in a pinch, and godzilla has quite an extensive list.

POWER OF FLIGHT!

I honestly can’t think of a reason why we shouldn’t be worshipping Godzilla right now. You’ve got loads of dualism (Godzilla is both creator/destroyer, mother/father, hero/villain, force of nature/creation of man), an amazingly cool heavenly pantheon, and a ridiculously vengeful god to justify any act of aggression you might need an excuse for.

And if the flying spaghetti monster gets it’s own fake religion, why not Godzilla? It’s just foolish.

We’ll hash out the details later.

JasonShare/Bookmark

First off we have this sassy little number – most likely from some form of mummy or zombified corpse. I think that the browns add a real feeling of antiquity, while the patches of flesh and hair create a sense of dread and unpredictability. The fly, of course, is there to make certain that the comics code authority doesn’t approve our website. (not kidding. flies + corpses = bad for the kiddies. If you ever see Steve Bissette on the street, ask him about that one.)

Next up we have the man who may be at least partially responsible for my love of all things skullish, the lovely Mr. Skeletor. Nothing much to say here other than how fabulous it is that they modeled the character of Screech from Saved by the Bell so closely on one of the beloved toys of my youth.

Is is just me, or could you make a model of Carrot Top, send it back in time to some 6 year old kid in 1984, and it wouldn’t even cross his mind that it wasn’t meant to do battle with He-Man? That toy-line had such a cross-section of muscle-bound freaks that good ol’ Mr. Top would fit right in.

I can see the play sessions now: “Fisto, meet Carrot-top. He fights the forces of evil with his flaming red hair and suspiciously texture-less face. Oh, and props. Lots and lots of props. People actually pay to see him. What a horrible world we live in.

Now that you’re sufficiently sickened, I bid you good day.

JasonShare/Bookmark