"Hurry!" shouted the bear's friend The little bear grunted. His footpads were getting sore, and his back ached. "We're almost there." said his friend. The little bear gave his friend a sidelong look as they walked. His question was clear. "I can't explain it." The little bear smiled at his friend. "I know, not even now, I cannot explain it." They had their claws interlaced, and the little bear was getting tired of being pulled by his arm. "But it will make sense." They walked for a time in silence. "When we arrive, be nice." The little bear snorted. "I know you're nice! But you always do that thing with new people." The little bear thought for a while longer, thinking of how many times they'd met new people. Not many. "Just, don't show it your teeth or anything. Be nice." The woods were growing darker. The Little bear and his lifelong friend were used to catching fish in the sandy shallows of the river and sleeping in low brush. They did not go where the needles were deep and the trees towered overhead. The little bear kept peering left and right. It was quiet, this deep in the woods. "I know, but don't worry. Don't worry my friend. We must go on into the woods. We have to find it again. You'll be nice, because I know you can be so nice, and you'll change. And when you do you'll be like me. You'll see and you'll understand. You'll speak. We must go on. And then we will be together."
I've been trying to cut down on framing devices for these comics but now I see they're all in one line like they run together.
Listen, nobody in this comic is going to advocate the taking of drugs. But on the other hand no one's going to lie to you either. Did you notice I'm doing comics in different styles? How are we all feeling about that?
I've got a box of money. Doesn't do it justice to call it a box, more like a shipping container. Full of money. I know a lot of it's hundreds, but if it were ones it'd still set anyone up for life. And their kids.
There's just one little snag: the money was supposed to be destroyed. They take money out of circulation, sometimes because it's worn, sometimes just as part of a large-cap market initiative. In this case, this money was pulled because it didn't have certain security features new money has. Sill perfectly good legal tender, just that Treasury didn't want it around.
So they dyed it. Dyed it pitch black. Company that sold them the dye told them it was permanent, more fool-proof than shredding and more environmentally friendly than burning (do you know how much plastic a greenback contains? It's not like Australia, but still you wouldn't want to smell it burning).
They soak it in dye, they ship it to a dump in Kentucky. Once it's loaded, nobody knows anything about it. It's paper, it's black, dump it. That's all anybody knows. A friend of mine, he works... you know what it's better you don't know where he works, but he puts it together. We get another friend of mine calling other chemical companies, turns out they're not so confident that this dye won't come out. Turns out there's a chemical, a special chemical that can take it out, melt it off like sand in a river.
Now me, I've been seen at the dump, in Kentucky, using a backhoe to load the paper so supposedly I can recycle it, grind it up for mulch at my sugarbeet farm. If I turn up with all these greenbacks, the story won't hold. You though. Nobody knows you. You've got nothing to do with any of this. Nobody in this bar knows me, nobody is gonna notice us talking, and this'll be the last time we meet in person.
That is, if you're interested in a box car full of money.
It is hard to find a good picture of Ben. The best I found was a statue, which looked pretty good. I have questions, though, like was he really such a dandy in real life. Once you start drawing a picture of him based on the statue, you realize he had a lot of layers and textures in there
I've decided to start titling all of my comics with common questions, as I get a lot of hits off of it, and I love confused people.
Some background: My cat is also named Toby, though over time he came to be called Kitty Toby as I got irritated when Sara said it was dinner time and then THERE WAS NO DINNER FOR HUMAN TOBY.
On the show carrier they spend all that time sending bombers to fly over Iraq, but they never actually get to drop a single bomb. After a while it's all they talk about, whether or not they're going to get to drop.
Jon Baker and I were in history class together. I was doing this series of art workshops where I taught block printing or bookbinding or whatever. Jon came and taught spray stenciling. He was great at it, and produced beautiful stuff. After we got done he showed me how he'd like to teach another workshop on how you can use a walkman, a bic pen, and a guitar string to make a tattoo gun. He'd already used one to give himself an inkless tattoo of Bob Ross.
For whatever reason I have trouble forgetting about Jon.
A couple of people have been mis-directed to one of my old comics, 'Scritch', by mis-spelling the name of Screech and searching for 'Saved By The Bell' cast pictures. I decided that these visitors deserved to actually get to see that guy.
"Maman is far gone in this story, though she isn't in reality - I often see her,
on the opposite side of her husband at the picnic table, flicking ashes from her lit cigarettes into the Folgers' Coffee tin between them."
By Nicole Ritzer
TO START, & ON A FAIRLY UNNECESSARY NOTE : I am aware of the finer points of coffee-brewing, aware in the sense that I can tell how a cup will taste the same way someone more eminently French than I (fallacy, impossible, will not last -) will loudly suck in a gulp of wine (hint : sniffing the cork is Patrick Bateman-style bullshit devised as a way to impress and shame your table-guests, no matter what anyone says to try & convince you otherwise) : by holding it up to the light, clinking a spoon against the French press, smelling the spent & now-useless grounds. I no longer strive for perfection, & instead have started a slow clog on the fine mesh of the Ikea French press (finding the percolator untrustworthy) - reduced in price from $25 to $16 in the newest catalogue, of which two arrived in my mail - as it continues to accumulate stuck-on residue of the shit I have sprinkled in with the grounds which doesn't just rinse off the way fine-grind rinses off, with a splash of hot tap-water (it travels everywhere, up the sides of the stainless-steel sink like mud rocketed up by the tyres of a car to hop a kerb & soak bystanders). Nutmeg n' black pepper, or shavings of Godiva Easter chocolate truffles from my very own mother - ones that crossed the Michigan Border (undeclared-at-customs food products) & that were falling apart and oozing when I opened the package at the post office in the early & abnormal spring highs of 25 or 30, whatever-Fahrenheit, unusual even here, more becoming of Los Angeles which is, according to David Lynch's weather reports, becoming "ambitiously balmy". The chocolates went directly into the freezer and, since using the vegetable peeler & shaving strips of them to mix with the aromatic grounds, I have not checked to see if their remains - now-lopsided & freak-looking lumps - are still as-of-now uneaten, but my intuition says they're gone and I'll never know what happened. And finally, the best combination yet, with the black-black hot-wet grounds & Ottawa tap water : real truffles, or their shavings - aromatic like wet soil, freshly-shorn deep-green grass, a hike in the forest, subtle like the smell of tree-bark, natural and good.
THE POINT of all this is that tonight, this-night, is my third French press of coffee in the twenty hours of today's wakefulness. I am over-scooping the coffee grounds and dropping the heaping piles in fours and fives, covering them in an ounce of cold-cold water & then pouring the steaming-not-boiling stuff from very high up. (A coffee that isn't strong enough will appear translucent in front of a bright light : brown water, which funnily will also do well enough to describe its taste and texture. A coffee that is too strong will look opaque in front of a bright light : black paste. It will taste burnt & as close to carelessness as one is physically able to perceive with any one of the five senses, six if you count the tingling of yer "Mickey Rourke sense", but perhaps it's just the inborn instinct to find cover whenever cigarette-breath, unwashed hair & sweaty n' sour comes appearing. You are supposed to grimace when you drink a cup of too-strong coffee, but forget about pouring it down the sink - drink the whole thing up very, very quickly to ride out a body-buzz and speak like an amphetamine addict for the rest of the day. Coffee-drinking is a pissing contest between the purported strong coffee enjoyer (henceforth referred to as "The Pretender") and the true, strong coffee-drinking "the way I always do it at home is run this already-brewed coffee through these new coffee grounds with the percolator" line-stepping tester-of-boundaries (henceforth referred to as "I feel kind of wasted right now. Do you? I haven't been drinking. It must be the air. Maybe I snorted up too much salt-water at the beach today. Are you sure you're okay? Because I feel wasted."). The result of all this is that : my coffee has come out of the pot like the scene in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas in which Johnny Depp goes on the Gator ride with Lacerda - who doesn't even look Portuguese - thru the dunes of the Mint motorcycle circuit : before the elevator scene, "written-with-Benicio-in-mind", but after hallucinating The Film Tropic Thunder, Duke pours his sand-riddled beer out onto the ground & it makes the splattering noises of a not-quite liquid. Mud.
I REMEMBER all the bad habits of the country of France & microwave my favourite blue mug, over & over again, as it fills with my ever-cooling sludge. I feel kind of wasted right now. Do you? I haven't been drinking. It must be the air.
If you want your sweet taste, you're gonna have ta click through, baby.
This is the first comic on TBTB that was wholly written by somebody else. Jordan Anderson wrote this script, copied exactly except for two words removed and whatever typos I have added.
It was fun and kind of complicated to work from a script, and of course to work from something so long. I drew homer off a bust of him, which is why his skin is gray.....
Oh my god it's like Magnolia up in here with the disparate plotlines joined by a single emotionally unstable dude with sideburns.
I decided not to include it here, but it will come up later that our cat's name is Toby.
you know sometimes doing stuff like this isn't actually very easy. I work at it all the time, and only like, 10 or 12 people ever read it. Sometimes I spend hours trying to draw somebody's face and it just looks like garbage by the end.
But that window in the background? Man that looks good.
I remember reading 'the natural history of the far side' where Gary Larson does a DVD commentary 5 years before its invention, he points out interesting stories behind certain panels, stuff that had to be redrawn, stuff that got tossed out for being objectionable, panels that no one ever understood.
But there's one, which I think is two sea captains showing each other unlikely parts of their bodies that have been replaced with pegs, anyway, all he writes about it is:
"I'd just like to say that I drew a pretty cool ship in the background here"
Sometimes it's like that.
Also, my love has been legal for three years today. Tonight I get to find out what our fourth ring will look like.
Thus begins the first instance of a plotline on TBTB. By the way, if you have a boss or an accounting department, a styrofoam ball filled with dowels on which are impaled tiny pieces of fruit cut into attractive shapes is actually a pretty nice thing to get them.
Edible Arrangements does a pretty great job of this. They used to sell skewers containing 1/8th of a pineapple on the street in Beijing, but I was never brave enough to eat one.
By the way Firefox don't bother me I ain't capitalizing styrofoam no matter what you say.
Laugh if you must, but Chocohubris is the number one cause of spoilt dresses in the tragedian trades. But did you know that Chocohubris does not even appear in the Word 2003 spelling dictionary? Write your alderman today.
Why the eff should I care whether people like a news story? 87 people liked this, thanks so much, now I'm really gonna read instead of just pretending like normal.
Do you just want to be like Netflix? it takes two hours to watch a movie, it's not good, that makes sense that I would care what people thought of it.
But this is three G.D. paragraphs! In my own news feed! Even if I cared what other people thought of it, how would I act on this information? There's no 'don't like' option, so it's not like I can skip a story.
Anyway, thanks for adding clutter to the best news and information thing since the book.
Also I'm not an expert on race and crime in America.
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