Everyone loved the Monster Box (they call him the Candy Monster) so much they didn’t want to put him away for the season (honestly where would they put him? He’s enormous and he no longer folds flat) so now he’s dressed for Thanksgiving and collecting donations for the canned food drive.
I honestly cannot tell you what the Monster Box is all about. The front office staff just asked me to make this for the PTA. They wanted a large box that looked like a monster and you could put candy in the mouth. They did not explain anything beyond that. I gather someone saw a similar project on Pinterest or something. I will have to go to the Fall Festival to divine the true meaning of the Monster Box.
Getting the box was a bit of a chore, and then I had to rebuild it because it didn’t have a bottom, and the top was kind of weird. After I cut the mouth I realized that they wouldn’t have any good way to get the candy OUT of the box, so I cut another access panel in the back. Then I made it look like the monster was wearing novelty underpants.
If I had to do it again, I would do a lot of this differently. I’m not use to working in 3 dimensions or with cardboard.
This project took about 7 hours, and used 1 1/2 bottles of Elmer’s glue. There was also a lot of tape involved and a little of my special bookbinding plastic adhesive. I might go back and hit the horns with the hot glue gun just to be sure. They are the number one thing I would do differently if I did this again. I’m not sure they’re stable.
For some reason, some people don’t appreciate the beauty of a giant beetle flying into things and dying tragically in your swimming pool filter.
The ASDM webpage on which I found the reference photo of the larval beetle offers this statement of caution for desert motorcycle enthusiasts who don’t wear helmets: “Being hit in the face by a beetle this size can be quite painful.” That’s probably an understatement; one flew into my head earlier this month and I wasn’t even coming toward it at 60 miles an hour and it still felt like being hit by a rock.
Anyway, I think these creatures are fascinating, and, for whatever reason, they don’t feel like cockroaches to me. My response to cockroaches is visceral and immediate; if one crosses my path, I feel compelled to smash it as if it’s a vicious, carnivorous alien (even though cockroaches are harmless, vegetarian, and have been around longer than humans). My response to giant palo verde beetles is, “Cool! It’s a giant bug!” And then I take a picture and send it to my nephew or something. He’s at a prime age to appreciate giant bugs.
My first script had the final panel as some snarky remark about how maybe these insects had it all figured out and maybe we’d be better off if we spent our childhood and adolescence underground and then had thirty days to mate before dying, leaving the next generation to figure things out on its own. Then I thought I’d go for a straight biology story, with only a little snark. Then I finished the artwork and thought the panels looked kind of blank, so I put the snark back in, in word balloon form. That’s why the text doesn’t quite fit the space.
What’s the use of feeling blue?
How do people build entire careers on drawing political comics? I can’t even look at a photograph of our new kleptocratic overlords without wanting to vomit lately. There is so much material–so many things that are clearly not OK and therefore in desperate need of mockery–that picking 1 thing out of the day’s new is overwhelming, and by the time you get to the end of the list it’s not funny anymore, if it ever was. There’s too much of it, legions of alleged humans working with all their might to make the world worse for the mast majority of its inhabitants and acting as if it’s perfectly reasonable to watch other suffer and die as long as corporations profit. Who am I even supposed to shame?
It was another hard day. My sister probably had the right idea, getting her Canadian citizenship, but apart from the racism and most of my elected officials, I really like where I live. Still, running away has its merits.
Warning: Monster Bomb has been found to cause cancer in giant mutant laboratory rats in the state of California.
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that certain real-life experiences informed this comic. As it is a comic, the retelling of the story shall be shaped to be more palatable than it was in real life.
Recently, we hired a contractor to relocate our laundry facilities from the utility room to the the front hall closet, and to turn the utility room into a bedroom. Unbeknownst to Man or Dragon, the contractor neglected to adequately seal the drain in the old utility room.
In addition, although he was asked repeatedly to leave the futon cover on the futon, a certain human insisted on removing the futon cover from the futon and throwing it over the not-sealed-up drain, for reasons which have yet to be revealed.
Then came the rains.
In this part of the country, desperate monsoons dump inches of water on the city in short periods of time. This, naturally, causes the sewers to temporarily become engorged. This of course, inspires certain creatures–for the sake of my readers’ comfort, I shall refer to these subterranean terrors as “marshmallows,” although anyone who has lived in a city knows what comes up out the sewers when it rains; however, let’s just say it was marshmallows–these marshmallows are inspired to come up out of the sewers through whatever means of egress they find.
So, when the marshmallows came up out of the sewers through the drain, they found a lovely little marshmallow habitat in the form of the wadded up futon cover, which was much nicer than the sewer. The marshmallows thought it would be more pleasant to relocate to the futon cover than return to the sewer. It was not until a few days after the rain that this development was discovered, by which time a truly nauseating number of marshmallows had infested the house.
The Man handily obtained a Marshmallow Bomb, which is an effective tool for murdering marshmallows without getting ones hands dirty, except that its use reveals the true extent of the marshmallow infestation; more than a week later, dead marshmallows, lying on their back with their horrible dead marshmallow legs in the air, still appear in the corners.
But this comic puts it all into perspective. Marshmallows are less dangerous, and easier to dispose of, than dead devils, wyrms, wargs, yetis, blobs, giant spiders, trolls, and weird alligator things with inexplicably long legs.
Some monsters have a lot of chutzpah.
Maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration, but in general, I don’t think I’m the only artist who deals with bizarre distractions coupled with an attrition of art supplies. If I had a dollar for every time I had to stop what I was doing to figure out what happened to the stylus for the Wacom tablet, I could buy a new stylus every single day, and while I own literally hundreds of pens and pencils, laying my hands on one when it’s needed can become a bit of an ordeal. Poor Dragon has so much more to contend with.
Just what you want to hear first thing on a Monday morning.
A more comical weapon than a scimitar did not come immediately to mind. It’s sort of funny looking and the name sounds slightly amusing. Can anyone think of funnier weapons? Actual weapons that look or sound funny, not ridiculous things being used as weapons. The first person I asked suggested a typewriter on a chain. That’s funny. But it’s not a real weapon. You might use it in a pinch, but you would never take it into battle.
You don’t take a typewriter on a chain to a scimitar fight.
See? It doesn’t work.
qwertyvsdvorak 