Not that it means much, but this is the 50th “humor” strip of Hero Is … Um! … That’s if we’re not counting the new Mondegreen Mondays but are counting the strips that weren’t actually funny. At this pace, I’ll be able to publish a book by lat 2011!!

If we count the comic book story, we’re well past 100 individual comic pages, though. And that brings me to a question that I’d love to have feedback on: Because it’s got to be terribly confusing to new readers, should I take down the comic book pages and keep only the humor strip? Or does the comic book story provide a little bit of insight into the characters?

Please leave me a comment if you feel strongly about this.

And thanks for reading!

As any regular readers of this site and my Twitter feed know, I am working toward a master’s degree in business communication with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. Right now I’m halfway through my first of three eight-week classes focused on entrepreneurship, and one of my assignments for this week requires me to find five potential customers for my business idea and ask them for feedback.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through my degree program with a 4.0 GPA, yet I’m dumb enough to be using this webcomic as my entrepreneurial business idea. There are any number of better business opportunities out there, but my heart is in being a cartoonist.

There’s a long road ahead of me before I will feel like my work is worth spinning into products (aside from the one token t-shirt design in my Cafepress store), so please don’t confuse this for anything other than an academic exercise. Here’s what I am asking for help with:

Let’s pretend I have developed products related to this comic strip and have a store with, say, a book collecting the first 200 comics, t-shirts, stickers, posters, fake Interventionist dreadlocks, and green-and-yellow Marv-style trucker caps. I need the following market research questions answered:

• Why would you be willing to purchase Hero Is … Um products?
• How and when would you be more likely to purchase products (at a convention, through a secure web store, through a local store)?
• What actions could I, as a new-on-the-scene content producer, take to make you one of my first customers?
• Why would you be willing to take the chance on a new product from a new seller?
• What could I do to make you feel secure in buying products from me (promise discounts or freebies, use a secure third-party transaction site, promise fast delivery, offer deals from affiliates, etc.)?

That’s five questions for which I need five sets of answers from potential customers. Each of the first five people who email me legitimate answers (no goofballs, please) to all five questions will be able to choose any one of my 100-plus strips/pages in the Hero Is … Um archive and I will mail you the original, inked art on Bristol board, free of charge (note: I color and letter the strips digitally; you’ll be getting black-and-white finished artwork, but no words – I just want to be clear on that). Obviously the original art will be given away on a first-come, first-served basis.

This is not a gimmick for me to jump-start sales or collect email addresses for some crazy list. I’m nowhere close to having enough strips to even put a book together, much less think about that until well after I graduate. I really just need this information for an assignment that I need to finish by Saturday, March 13.

If you want to jump in and answer these questions to get extremely rare and hopefully one day valuable original art, please email them to this address: jason(at)heroisum.com.

Thanks in advance.

- Jason

If I had room or time for a second panel, the second verse could have been included:

So March 1 will be the first Mondegreen Monday, starring Mindover Man, and the weekly strip will move to a Thursday morning release.

Let me know what you think!

- Jason

Now, as it’s the duty of all tech nerds to weigh in on the device, here’s my take: It’s exactly what I expected and hoped for. It’s a big iPod Touch, with extra attention paid to books and periodicals. I want a nicely portable device that will serve up anything I want to read, save me the trouble of having paper copies of any of them, allow me to surf the web, play music, fire off an email, tweet, and watch video (plenty of others will want games, but I personally hate almost all games of any kind). That’s what the iPad will do. Great. Just what I wanted. And I’ll never have to worry about a broken H key like I do with the laptop I’m typing on right now.

One thing I’m really expecting to see and enjoy is a way to never have to buy a print comic book again. I don’t live terribly close to a comic shop and frankly no longer care to have to store all those dead trees. Now I know some comic book fetishists are going to think that’s sacrilege, but I’m already past that argument. I’m a former newspaper journalist who knew it was time to get out of the business before it forced me out because of declining economics, mostly due to people moving to the internet for their information. For a long time, I resented that. I love newspapers and think there are few more noble professions that journalism. But I finally realized there was no point in fighting technological progress: The medium does not make the message. I haven’t subscribed to a daily newspaper for more than a year, and even though it still bothers me to say this, I don’t really miss newsprint. I’ll gladly embrace that same paradigm shift for my magazine subscriptions and comic books.

As for ease of use as pertains to the iPad, especially versus the laptop, I think that will prove to be a no-brainer. Think of how you sit, recline, lie, roll over, and repeat that process for an extended period of time on your couch while reading. Most of us change to all kinds of positions. Can our laptops adjust with us? Not all the time. But the iPad will. And the coup de grace, of course, is the ability to sit on the toilet with it. Guys, especially, know I’m right. Admitting it may not be our proudest moment, but we cannot deny this truth. Our iPhones broke that ground, and now the iPad will help us avoid eye strain (so we can focus on other kinds of straining, of course). Sorry. Had to say it.

Back to more socially acceptable uses, though, I have to think one of the biggest cash cows Steve Jobs is expecting to milk is the education market. Say goodbye to textbooks and the one, lonely, eight-year-old PC in the classroom, and say hello to a 30-unit charging station/cubby — which will free up lots of room in every class, too.

Is this iteration perfect? No. But, typical of Jobs-ware, it has room built in for “great new add-on features” to make everyone gasp at each of the next several semi-annual Apple events. Upcoming versions will get what was purposely left off this version so more people will buy and/or replace their old ones: a webcam for Skype, USB connectivity, a kickstand, an OLED screen, an even lower price, and probably most important of all — less weight. You know it’ll happen (just don’t expect removable memory or batteries); it’s part of the long-term, pre-planned product cycle.

And it’s why I’ll likely wait until iPad 2.0 to buy mine.

One more thing: I’m sick of hearing the tech press whine, whine, whine about AT&T. Here in Colorado, I hardly notice a difference in AT&T coverage versus what I used to have with Verizon. And Verizon is staffed 98 percent by jerks. Can’t say the same for AT&T, with its adequate customer service. I’m going to guess I’m not alone in this view, judging by the numbers of iPhones continually being sold. AT&T just needs to upgrade its service in San Francisco and New York, and all these pack-minded, echo-chamber dwelling tech journalists will stop 90 percent of the whining that’s going on about Ma Bell.

Great work, Apple. You had me at hello.

And also please stop by Ms. Innes’ site to check out her comic, The Dreamer. She put that fantastic work on hold for a month to run the CCA fundraiser. Let’s give her a hand by helping expand her fanbase!

Thanks to all, and God bless.

- Jason

Hero: Tommy Kelly, defensive tackle for the Oakland Raiders.

After making an almost-goal line stand tackle late in the game, Kelly stood up with his uniform pants and compression shorts around his ankles. Luckily for TV viewers we only got a glimpse of his black jock strap and not the backside view. Kelly is a hero for pulling his pants up in record time. It’s a good thing he, as a pro athlete, has quick reactions and well-conditioned, fast-twitch muscles. All those squats came in handy.

Given the importance of not mooning tens of thousands of fans in person and millions on TV, perhaps this is a skill that should be added to the NFL Combine in the springtime. Pre-draft 40-yard dash times, bench press, Wonderlic scores, high jumps, cone drills and drawer hikes; that would be a good addition. Although, like the Wonderlic, I would hope they wouldn’t televise that test. …

Zero: Laser-pointer wielding fan seated in the end zone of Invesco Field at Mile High (dishonorable mention to Kelly for not buckling his belt).

Some almost-certainly drunk fan, right before the Kelly moon, caused a five-minute stoppage of play because he had to be an idiot and shine his dorky laser pointer at players on the field. Who uses laser pointers anyway? I mean, other than morons looking to make their equally dumb and drunk friends laugh when they make little red dots appear on people’s crotches.

It is poetic justice, though, that the chucklehead was too quick to pull his dork toy out of his pocket. Had he waited one more play, he would’ve gotten the chance to point the ultimate laugh maker at Kelly’s bare butt. Cue trombone: Wah waaaaah.

Granted, the Big Blue Boy Scout’s silver screen presence is in development hell, mostly thanks to a blood-sucking attorney who’s snookered the heirs of Superman’s creators into a lawsuit that helps almost no one but the former ambulance chaser himself.

Still, as long as Singer keeps his dumb ideas (Supes being a deadbeat dad, a peeping tom, and a wuss, among them …) in the Marvel Universe, I’ll be happy.

Zero: Forty-one percent of the people polled recently by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, who have a favorable view of the “Tea Party.” This compares to 35 percent who favor Democrats and 28 percent who favor Republicans. My first question is whether this means it’s safe to be a Republican again. …

The GOP is better off without the masses who are gullible enough to fall for the hype machine built primarily to raise the profile (and bank figures) of self-aggrandizers such as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and any of their penny-ante wannabe acolytes at the local level.

My submission for the actual name of their band of self-assured zealots is The Dogmatic Party. These are people who would gladly cut off their noses to spite their faces, ears, and the bald spots they’ve worn into into their scalps from repeatedly shoving their heads into sandboxes (the ones with big walls meant to keep out nasty government overlords). I live in a town teeming with them. There’s not a tax on the books they look kindly upon. In recent years these wise, wise people have chosen not to pool their money through minor tax increases to improve their own crumbling streets or put textbooks in all their children’s classrooms (full disclosure: I work for the school district, and this is all I’m going to say on that subject). What I’ve observed of the Tea Party types is an irrational disdain for all taxes, complete distrust of anything quasi-governmental, and an ironic and/or paradoxical fervor for one-sided talk radio types.

This is not to say I don’t find myself agreeing with some aspects of their passion for freedom, liberty, small government, and personal responsibility. I probably have just as much in common with The Dogmatic Party as I do the Democratic Party. I’m very much middle of the road. Rush Limbaugh would call me wishy-washy, but it’s more of a case of being willing to listen to all sides before making up my mind — I don’t live with the delusion that those on the Right get to claim all definitions of the word. This probably comes from my born-and-bred Nebraska values mixing with an artist’s heart. Some things are black-and-white; many others are an array of gray tones.

The Dogmatic Party needs to wake up the fact that there is such a thing as nuance in this life and that only a fool thinks s/he is right all the time. No one gets things done well by alienating people with whom they could find common ground — if they tried.

Yes, end-of-the-year lists are a tired, hackneyed, predictable trope for any and all publications.

Yes, they’re subjective to a fault.

Yes, they’re invariably filled with elitist snobbery to trumpet the painfully precious sophistication of the writer(s).

But can we force ourselves to stay away from them?

Oh, no.

Actually, I’m getting pretty good at avoiding the annual lists of pop culture tripe. I think the older I get, the shorter a mere year seems. So these December check-ins with coolness really aren’t much different from the dozens of Top 10 lists that circulate through the Twitterverse on a given day.

That said, best-of-the-decade lists are something else altogether. I’m not old enough to think a 10-year span is too short, and in many cases, this kind of list can take me back to events that I remember well and fondly. This is especially true of music lists, because nothing comes so close to a functioning time machine as a well-stocked iPod.

Rolling Stone’s latest edition features not only the top 100 songs of the aughts, but also the top 100 albums, the decade in review, and the top eight artists (don’t know why they picked that number; maybe newly standard-sized mag is on a page budget). There’s something there for just about everyone. I liked the fact that U2 got so much love, skipped right over all the R&B and rap, and scanned quizzically their reasons for rating Bruce Springsteen so high. Sorry, I just don’t get him at all (they did call him a “working-class superhero” so there’s a nice, if obligatory, tie-in to the zeitgeist of this site, yada, yada). I also got to realize how the decade that brought me into my 30s also brought me to a stage of diminished hipness: I only recognized about 35 percent of the artists on that list (mainly from their appearances on Saturday Night Live), and probably own the music of less than 10 percent. I am so not cool.

Y’know … thanks a lot, Rolling Stone. You should get a zero designation, too, for making me realize this.

Zero: Mel Gibson, for being a crap-tacular father. MSNBC’s gossip columnist reports (yeah, yeah, I know; gossip …) that ol’ Mel — and I mean ol’ — somehow managed to sire another child, who’s now six weeks old, and goes days without so much as seeing the baby, much less deigning to change a diaper or help feed her. What a stud.

If he happened to be away because of work, that would be one thing — as long as it was temporary, short-lived and unavoidable — but reportedly this is the way his SEVEN other children were raised: by someone else.

How much do you wanna bet a collection of “Lethal Weapon,” “Mad Max” and “Braveheart” DVDs was among the personal effects hauled to the trash by one Kate Gosselin?

Just saw “Terminator Salvation” and wondered about this yet again …

Once upon a time, I had a big problem with Batman: The Brave and the Bold, because it’s so Silver-Age-y and diametrically opposed to what Batman has been over the last 25 years, but I’ve come to terms with it. The show is played more for camp and fun than it is brooding darkness. I still think they could have chosen almost any other DC character to go Silver Age with and I’d have been much more OK with it, but taking the show for what it is — and no, I’m not going to say “It is what it is” because that is the single most meaningless phrase since “government spending restraint” — it’s a well-made show with clever writing, interesting character design, and great voice acting. Although I still can’t get past Diedrich Bader as Batman when all I can think of is this or this.

Overall, though, I’m exceedingly pleased to see DC doing great work on its direct-to-video animated projects as well as the fact that they’re getting some love at Wired.

Excelsior! … Oh, wait, that’s for someone else … .

Zero: Today’s Zero goes to my own lack of geographical and geopolitical knowledge, which prompted me, upon reading this headline — Abu Dhabi Bails Out Dubai With $10 Billion — to ask: “Wait, aren’t those two places the same thing?” Duh.

Today, I think the president pulled off the amazing trick of making Americans proud both of him and our country, and making the world proud of us by extension of our leader’s vision. I’m not a big Obama guy (I think we should only elect presidents who are over 60 years of age because any younger, and people are still in mistake-making mode rather than enjoying a position of wisdom for having made those mistakes and then risen above them), but today I am pleased to agree with him.

Apparently CNN doesn’t see things that way. Barely 15 hours after the big speech, the “Worldwide Leader in News” doesn’t have a single link to a story about the president’s speech on its home page. Oh, sure, there’s worthy stuff in its place, such as “Amazing Race success secrets” (because we all need them), and “Whatever happened to Hitler’s body?” (as if anyone cares).

Thank you, CNN for quickly reminding us that we Americans are vapid chasers of gossip, trivia and reality TV. We needed to be put in our place before we got all respectable again.

Zero: Anyone who uses a font in their email signature that supposedly resembles hand-written script, such as Bradley Handwriting or Lucida Handwriting. These are ridiculous, hard to read, and on some level patronizing. This represents, for me, an expansion of my annoyance with bad type such as Comic Sans. If you use any of these, you’re a typographic dullard. In fact, here’s a top 10 list:

Basic Fonts That Make You Look Like A Doofus

1.       Comic Sans (see www.bancomicsans.com)

2.       Times New Roman (unless you’re hopelessly devoted to generic foods and dressing like an ’80s IBM employee, too)

3.       Arial (see No. 2)

4.       Cooper Black (unless your run a Mom and Pop tire store)

5.       Bookman (good only for podunk weekly newspapers)

6.       Bradley Handwriting (it’s NOT your handwriting)

7.       Lucida Handwriting (see No. 6)

8.      Impact (so over-used and ill-used, it’s actually an oxymoron)

9.      Papyrus (unless you’re trying to evoke pharaohs and pyramids, stay away; this is not “exotic,” just dumb)

10.   Courier (unless you, too, are an arcane relic. If so, please sell your computer to someone who will give it a better home)

Life is all about choices. Just as you choose to clothe yourself in something respectable, if not stylish, why not treat your own words with the same care and respect?

HERO: Bruce Wayne, who is making his way through time, back to Gotham City to (we assume) take his rightful place again as Batman. USA Today covered DC Comics’ announcement that second-best modern comics scribe Grant Morrison (barely behind Geoff Johns, if for no other reason than Johns’ work has more wide-eyed optimism) is going to take Batman on a journey like he’s never had before.

In case you missed it, Morrison’s dense, hard-to-comprehend, and ultimately off-target mega event from last year, Final Crisis, ended with Batman being hit by by Darkseid’s Omega Sanction eyebeams. These were obviously different from his usual Omega beams, which hit and kill their targets every time. The Omega Sanction was never fully explained and left us with a big question mark as it appeared both that Superman was left holding Batman’s instantly emaciated corpse and that Bruce also was sent back to prehistoric times, with a final panel showing him sans cowl, cape and shirt making crude cave drawings.

Well, now comes word that indeed Bruce was transported back to the “Late-Paleolithic Era,” according to Morrison. In Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, a six-issue mini-series beginning in April, “Each of the stories is a twist on a different ‘pulp hero’ genre — so there’s the caveman story, the witchhunter/Puritan adventurer thing, the pirate Batman, the cowboy, the P.I. — as a nod toward those mad old 1950s comics with Caveman Batman and Viking Batman adventures,” Morrison told USA Today. “It’s Bruce Wayne’s ultimate challenge — Batman vs. history itself!”

Caveman Batman

On the surface, this sounds like it could be a cheese-fest that’s harder to swallow or follow than Final Crisis. But we have to remember Morrison is also the writer who gave us the modern masterpiece, All Star Superman. That mini-series, too, had some outlandish sounding concepts, but the way Morrison told them was sheer brilliance. And I think he has a greater affinity for Bats than Supes, so this is guaranteed not to be Weird Morrison. It’ll be Genius Morrison. After all, he’s been working on the larger story arc for Batman for four years now, including writing the new Batman and Robin title — which will bring its own interesting factor to the story now that Dick Grayson has more or less embraced being Batman, and Bruce’s bastard son (all definitions apply) is the new Robin, while Bruce’s old Robin — and adopted son — Tim Drake is now Red Robin. And he’s the only one keeping the faith that Bruce is really still alive.

There are so many angles to this story that, in my mind, it can’t miss. And I can’t wait.

ZERO: Most of the climate-change “warrior zealots” gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, this week. I’m not going to go where all the right-wing conspiracy theorists or science deniers keep going. Reading ALL the information about the stolen emails reveals that glaciers were made out of snow hills. And saying that man has no culpability in the changes to the atmosphere is irresponsible, flat-Earth talk. BUT that’s not to say everything should be taken at face value. This is a big planet, and we humans are a small, small part of the ecosystem.

The Rev. Al Gore

There are plenty of credible scientists out there who rightly continue to ask questions about our effect on the planet. So many, in fact, that for people such as Al Gore (who’s not a scientist but sure likes to play one — and cash in — on TV) to say it’s a closed issue is either hubris or mirror-image, reactionary zealotry.

For questions as big as these, any scientist truly committed to the scientific method would shy away from granite-encased proclamations — on either side of the issue. Scientists question and keep questioning. All the people on the left who like to make fun of End Times zealots who are inalterably convinced that scattered, disparate and unrelated verses in the Bible can be put together, jigsaw-puzzle style, to reveal all the secrets of the future need to take a look in the mirror at their own tectonically solid “convictions” about global warming.

What each side should realize is that they are the Bizarro versions of each other. John Hagee is Al Gore, and vice versa.

Religious nuts, meet your parallel-universe selves, the climate nuts. Each of you needs a new hobby.

I humbly suggest preparing yourselves for the imminent coming of Bruce Wayne, who will surely heal all that’s really, truly wrong with the world. Beginning in April.

HERO: Peter Gammons, for reportedly leaving ESPN in favor of the MLB Network. I’ll admit there’s a part of me that isn’t happy about a real journalist leaving an “independent” network for one that’s the mouthpiece of the a sports league (hello, NFL Network and your bunch of sellouts), but I’m frankly tired of ESPN’s over-hyped, too-glossy-for-their-own-good, catchphrase-centric, constantly cross-promoting, every-segment sponsored by a beer company, aren’t-we-cool cheapening of my sports-watching experience. Now, if I want to learn what Peter Gammons has found out about the Yankees and Red Sox the big leagues, I can just turn to the MLB Network. And I won’t have to be force-fed soccer.

ZERO: The bloodsuckers that run World Wrestling Entertainment. Edward Fatu, who most recently wrestled under the stage name Umaga, recently died of a heart attack. CNN reports that he had lots of issues with substance abuse and was kicked out of the WWE in June for flunking out of its wellness program. And at 6′4″ he didn’t really carry his 350 lbs. all that well. Clearly if anyone was at fault for his health problems, it was Fatu; we’re all responsible for ourselves before anyone else is. That said (and that’s enough criticism of someone who’s no longer living, anyway), my view is that for all the lip service the WWE pays to its wellness programs, drug testing, and “running a clean ship,” it’s clear to all but the dumbest of us that there’s a certain lifestyle that wrestlers live outside the ring, and even if they try to stay clean, I’m guessing there’s plenty of opportunity for falling off the sturdiest of wagons. Just look at the body count over the years.

I think the WWE owes some amount of guaranteed lifetime health coverage to anyone who ever makes it to the company’s big stage. The fact is, even though the “fighting” is choreographed, you don’t fake the jumps and falls and crashes through tables. If playing in the NFL does the physical damage of multiple car crashes, what does performing in a WWE ring three and four nights a week do?

After Fatu was cast aside last summer, he had no health insurance. Who would cover him? And with the damage done to his body, the bad habits he picked up while on the circuit and giant face tattoos that served him well in the ring  but don’t exactly allow for easy crossover into the rest of American life, what, exactly, was this guy going to do but spiral downward? And the WWE says, “Thanks for posing for those posters, helping us sell t-shirts and boost ratings, but now we’re washing our hands of you completely.” That may be legal and even defensible on a “we tried everything our policy manual calls for,” but it’s not right.

WWE, you get a zero.

Theory disproved. We’re all just created dumb.

Along with dozens of other webcomic creators, I’m asking my readers to take a minute to check out The Comic Creator’s Alliance and consider helping to fight human trafficking.

According to current estimates, there are more people in slavery now than at any time in the 1700s or 1800s. Most of these slaves are girls in Southeast Asia who are forced into vile prostitution rings. Many end up in this situation by being kidnapped. Obviously, they never get the chance for anything resembling a free, happy life.

According to the anti-trafficking organization Love146:

• 2 children per minute are sold into this sick form of slavery
• 1.2 million children are trafficked annually
• 27 million people are enslaved worldwide
• $32 billion is generated annually by human trafficking

But it’s not just a sick problem halfway around the world. Take a look at the Gracehaven website to find out how bad things are in the U.S.

After an incident that hit too close to home for her, Lora Innes, the creator of the web-and-print comic The Dreamer put together a project to seek the help of webcomickers in raising money and awareness. I found out about the project after hearing an interview with her on the Comic Geek Speak podcast and wanted to help in any way I could. Lora’s project is to enlist creators to submit an original drawing of one of their female characters for inclusion in a special-edition jam piece, which will be sold as a computer wallpaper with all proceeds to be donated to charity. Even though this is a young comic with a slight following, Lora was gracious enough to allow me to participate in her project, and I sent an image of my character Aerobat in flight.

I ask — no, beg — you to get involved in some way to help combat this scourge that our detached, uninvolved society blithely ignores. As a husband, a father, and relation to someone who was raped, I am vehemently opposed to any and all human slime who would so enslave, violate and destroy. Get informed. Get involved. Literally millions of people need help.

You can contribute by purchasing the webcomic wallpaper when it’s ready, and you can support Love146 and/or Gracehaven as they help fight traffickers directly. Another suggestion is to sponsor a child through Compassion International. The Love146 website says that organization does not offer child sponsorship because they see that as not much different from the “commoditization” of humans that they battle. While I can understand and respect that view, I know from my family’s sponsorship of a girl in Indonesia, this is an organization that works to feed, clothe, educate and nurture children in the third world. These children are treated as valued individual creations of a loving God. We trade correspondence with our sponsored child in a carefully managed, transparent and respectful way. In a part of the world where darkness and evil make it dangerous to be a child, our sponsored friend and her friends are shown a better, brighter, more hopeful path. Compassion gives us the opportunity to share goodness (full disclosure, I have a close relative who works for Compassion).

However you see fit to help stop the soul-crushing evil of human trafficking, please find a way to contribute.

This is basically my nightmare: My daughters making the sudden shift into becoming sullen teenagers.

Is it inevitable? I hope not.

Yet, if it is, please, God, let them stay away from the goth vampire thing.

If I’m lucky, maybe this whole Twilight thing will have blown over by then. By the way, does anyone else think Robert Pattinson’s look is just a ripoff of Robert Smith’s look? I bet he could stand in as the lead singer of The Cure and no one would notice.

This strip picks up where the second-to-last one left off. I had to interrupt myself last week with the H1N1 comic because it was terribly timely.

This one also was subject to a last-minute change as I realized I could change the last two panels from being a two-person conversation to an unwanted three-person talk. It made more sense to have Marv butting in rather than having The Interventionist be the guy who says ALL the inappropriate sayings.

This strip is based on an ongoing true story from our family’s life over the last week. Novel Influenza Type A (H1N1) 2009 — or whatever the proper name for swine flu is — knocked my daughter for a loop, and as of this writing, she’s still not over it. Well, she’s technically over the flu, but not the secondary infection that caused a howlingly painful earache.

Just a tip for anyone who hasn’t yet gotten H1N1: If you go to the doctor within the first 48 hours of symptoms, INSIST on Tamiflu. The doctors will try to tell you you’ll just have to let it run its course and put you on ibuprofen and maybe some cough syrup, as one did with my daughter. Only, she didn’t get over it fast, and it got worse, forcing us to head her regular pediatrician later in the week and then on Sunday to a different Urgent Care doctor, who was irritated that she hadn’t been given Tamiflu by the first guy. And then he said there was no point giving it to her now that she was testing negative for Type A flu. He said if you don’t get that kind of medicine within the first 48 hours, it’s not going to do you much good. So be aware of what you need and when.

It really is a helpless feeling when you can hardly console your child, much less make anything better for her. The best I could do was carefully mind her meds, help her go back to sleep, keep her hydrated, and, when possible, try to make her laugh.

She did laugh when I told her I thought of this strip during our third trip to the doc, and didn’t mind that I was making light of your unbrushed-for three-days teeth and rank breath. Not that hygiene would or should be on a sick person’s agenda, but as soon as she started feeling better, it was time to break out the toothbrush!

You did a good job being a strong kid, T! Thanks for the inspiration!!

This strip was extrapolated from an actual conversation with my daughter. She was having some friend trouble — nothing even as bad as depicted here — but distressing enough. My actual advice was to just wait it out, as kids her age change their minds about their friends roughly 17 times a day, and through all this she’ll figure out who her real friends are.

But as I kicked around what I wanted to say, what I should say, and just how honest I wanted to be, I thought of saying what The Interventionist says here. It would have been the most honest reaction, if also the most cynical. I remember junior high and high school girls in my school being downright vicious with each other at times, then acting as if they were best buds with these very same people a day or two later. It never made any sense to me, so I asked my wife if this was common or just my odd perception. She said this was the case for her and pretty much any female she’s ever known — they all had stories about their emotionally traumatic early teen years.

And, come to think of it, didn’t the late John Hughes base much of his directing career on that kind of conflict?

This is the question I often ask out of self-interest in the finding the answer; I think I’m often that guy.

I listen to the Internet Business Mastery podcast; I’ve bought The 4-Hour Workweek and read all about virtual assistants, search engine optimization and building quick-money websites; I bought and read 33 Million People in the Room and learned about the concept of micro-celebrity; and I’ll probably soon buy Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book. But with all I’ve learned about the how-to of building an internet “personality,” But in each case, I think these gurus are missing a key point: What if you’re just not likable or just can’t be bothered with trying to interact with people?

I actually like the kind of interaction that happens on Twitter; I’m far less interested in Facebook. There are some people I’m glad to connect with via FB (what’s up, David?), but there’s so much virtual flotsam that runs into you like a dumb dog with heatstroke that I just want to avoid it. For some reason, it doesn’t help Facebook’s cause, in my mind, when everything I’ve read about its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, says he’s exactly the kind of a-hole I’m talking about. Of course, he created the platform; he doesn’t use it as a major communication tool the way the above-mentioned ‘prens do.

With social media, we’re supposed to be as active as possible, networking constantly to get more and more followers and friends, then turn them into fans who’ll be willing to buy some kind of product from us. I get it. It makes sense — for a lot of people. But where’s the internet equivalent of that grumpy old shopkeeper who, even though he mistreats his customers, still sees plenty of business because of what he offers? I kind of wanna be that grumpy old man.

Maybe it’s just not possible to be involved in social media and be a butthead. If you’re into it, you’re going to be having fun with it and will give up your churlishness. And if you insist on being irascible, then you probably aren’t even going to mess with social media. Perhaps they’re mutually exclusive. Webheads have to be outgoing, and hermits can just keep to themselves — unless they want to be forum trolls, in which case we wish they would just get off the net.

Pardon the near-vulgarity here, but it just wasn’t as funny to me without that line.

You, the reader, may disagree, but I think I’m starting to get a good feel for who these characters are and what can make each of them funny at times.

The Interventionist is the embodiment of my own cynical side (hopefully I don’t turn him into a Mary Sue); my wife would say Mindover Man represents my own erratic oddness and occasional lapses in the ability to make sense, but I just don’t see it; and Marv is a hybrid of all kinds of inappropriate-comment-making Nebraskans I grew up with. And it’s OK that I’m cracking on Nebraskans, because, according to Google Analytics, no one in that state reads this comic.

Of course, if I go by that standard, I could make fun of people from many states.

And that’s fodder for lots more comics!

My homage to “The Empire Strikes Back” … . This was a ton of fun to draw. Don’t know if anyone else will find it funny, but I do!

What’s funny to me is that I wrote this strip weeks before the whole health care debate went nova nationally. Now it looks like I’m trying to be topical, which isn’t bad, per se, but it wasn’t my intention.

Ah, unintentional humor. …

For the last three strips, I’ve used a brush-tip pen for inking. I really like the results, even if they’re a little heavy looking as I try to figure out how best to use this tool. One thing I won’t do anymore is use the combination of the brush pen and a non-photo blue pencil. The pencil makes it hard for the ink to soak into the paper. That’s the reason for all the spots messing up this strip.

If NFL games were on every day, I could do this comic much more often. Sitting and watching the game while multi-tasking with my laptop and Wacom tablet is a great way to spend part of the day — and it allows me to start and finish the strip almost without interruption!

Yet another reason to love football!

I have to confess that I was a bit cynical as I wrote this strip. Last week was my biggest week of traffic for this comic in the year-and-a-half it has been in existence. I believe it’s all because last week’s strip mentioned Facebook (and I tagged it), and then because I posted a note about an SEO (search engine optimization) site which runs fake news just for the sake of traffic. So I decided to push it a little more and introduce my own version of SEO into the strip, because I know all the sites and services that crawl the web for those three magical letters will love this post.

And then I had to take it a step further and make a little comment about the current political landscape, with President Barack Obama and conservative talk radio folks such as Rush Limbaugh butting heads. I don’t intend to drag my comic into the slimy mud of politics, which I detest completely, but I figured if I’m being underhandedly cynical in the strip, I might as well go all the way.

So welcome all of you who ended up here thinking you were getting something else entirely. You won’t find poorly written fake news here, just an honest attempt to entertain you — along with some coincidental abbreviations every now and again … . I hope you come back regularly and get your head out of the morass that is SEO marketing or the equally morassic (have I coined a new word, too? What a busy week this is already!) underworld of politics. There’s a whole other world of geeks out here … welcome!

One of my Google News custom categories is “Superman” (yeah, yeah … I know …), and tonight the first headline I encountered said, “Marvel Comics could soon own the copyright to Superman.” Yeah, and I could be commissioned to resurrect “Calvin and Hobbes.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “could” so over-inflated.

The catch is that the headline is from Examiner.com (I’m intentionally not bothering to link to it; read on). After reading this tripe, I had to post my disgust in the comments section:

This article is a weak, idiotic attempt at journalism. The fallacious, inflammatory headline alone is enough to remove any doubt I may have had that examiner.com is anything other than a slick, SEO-driven, traffic hog of a website. It pretends to be a “news” site but is filled with speculative writing that makes fan fiction look credible. This site exists purely to entice people to click on ads, not inform. Wise web surfers will avoid it all costs as long as it counts affiliates such as this hack (factual errors, leaps in logic, willful ignorance of copyright law, unsubstantiated claims, thin sourcing — what little there is comes from press releases — and spelling errors) to write for it.

Please don’t bother to go to Examiner.com. It’s a waste of time and boil on the backside of journalism.

OK, I feel better now for sharing … .

Men, Facebook is dangerous. You have to think sometimes as you use it. You can’t just go clicking “confirm” (or is it “accept”? I can’t remember — it’s been a while since I shut down my Facebook account: I’m sure you can’t guess why) all willy-nilly. Just click “ignore.” Don’t even think about it. Just do it.

Wait. First, I said you have to think … but, then, you shouldn’t think … See why this is so confusing?!?

Just stick to Twitter, where all you get is spammers for followers.

Yes, the color scheme of Aerobat’s costume changed between her first appearance and this one. I blame the colorist. … Oh, wait, that’s me … .

This was one of those strips where I wrote one thing I thought was kind of funny, and then another line seemed obvious, then another. So it’s either naturally funny or just cheap.

Yours truly, while avoiding work on my master’s degree no doubt, posted a comment earlier this week on Wired.com’s Gadget Lab and, out of the blue, won a cool Leatherman tool. The page detailing the commentary about a Apple tablet, my two cents’ worth about its potential, and Wired’s cool Leatherman giveaway, can be found here.

Thanks to Wired (my favorite magazine even before today) and Leatherman Tools.

Any and all geeks reading this comic (which is likely all of you) should check out the Gadget Lab for great content and thoughtful, useful — and well-maintained — commentary.

This strip is basically fan service for my brother, who helped inspire me to write the Spleen Lantern’s oath, obviously an homage to the Green Lantern oath. We were talking about how basically everyone our own extended family has that annoying midwestern habit of saying “I don’t want to be a bother; I’ll be fine; I’ll take care of it; You don’t need to help.” — and then when you take their word for it and don’t give whatever help you offered, you just know you’re being resented.

Again, I didn’t plan for this strip to show up here on the exact release day of Green Lantern: First Flight, but it’s certainly a happy coincidence. I haven’t seen it, but based on DC Comics’ previous animated DVDs, I guarantee superhero fans will love this iteration of Hal Jordan, Sinestro, the Guardians of the Universe, Oa, and the whole Green Lantern Corps. Can you tell I’m a little excited about this?

For anyone who stops by this site every week, I’ll note that I have to take next week off because my family is moving to a new house. Hmmm … and I suppose this strip now obligates me to NOT act like a Spleen Lantern with anyone who offers to help, doesn’t it?

So, am I going too far with the hick cliches by calling this guy Festus?

Naw, there’s no such thing when it comes to hicks … .

It’s a nice coincidence that my Lantern-style character makes his debut this week, just after DC Comics’ “Blackest Night” kicked off (of course, not living in a town with a comic shop, I have to wait to get my copy) as well as the news of Ryan Reynolds being cast to play Hal Jordan in the “Green Lantern” movie! The last two bits of news are WAAAAAY more important than this semi-mysterious brown(?) Lantern, but I’m excited about all of them.

“Blackest Night,” if it’s even half as good as Geoff Johns’ “Sinestro Corps War” will dwarf any of the recent “summer events” that either DC or Marvel has manufactured over the last several years. And that’s because it’s a natural — and incredible — outgrowth of an ongoing storyline, not just a sales gimmick.

And I think Reynolds is a great choice for Green Lantern. He’s a guy who has name recognition, which, as a friend pointed out today, is more necessary with a character that most of the public is unfamiliar with, as opposed to Superman or Batman. He’s got the geek credential, having been in a Blade movie, as well as playing Deadpool in the unfathomably awful Wolverine movie (he’ll certainly have a better vehicle in his solo Deadpool movie — it’s impossible to get anything worse than Wolverine). He’s got the “leading man” qualities that you want in a superhero movie, the ability to be funny on his own and with script help, and has the physicality to make it work. Finally Warner Bros. does something right!

And as for the guy at the dirt-color end of the spectrum, above? Well, I’ll unwrap that in the strips to come. And, yes, the brown does have a meaning. …

This strip was an exercise in patience created during an exercise in futility. Drawing patches of farmland are frustrating enough: “Will it look like farmland when I’m done?” was one of two constant questions going through my mind. You see, I drew this poolside at a downtown Denver hotel on the evening of July 4 while my daughters swam and waited excitedly to be able to see fireworks shows from all over the city. All the while I was fatalistically wondering how I could have been so idiotic as to propose this idea for a micro-vacation.

My thought was that if we could get a hotel room high enough and facing the right direction, we could see the fireworks shows from Invesco Field at Mile High and Coors Field. Both stadiums were scheduled to have big blowout displays after it got dark, and, from the right vantage point, I thought we’d be able to see them both. The only problem was that the people who answer the phones for the Crowne Plaza in Denver don’t know jack about what’s visible and what’s not visible from their building (and probably don’t care). The outdoor pool on the sixth floor is too low to see over other buildings — especially the Hyatt, which mocked us all night from two blocks away with its taller structure that just happened to be in what should have been our line of sight toward Coors Field.

When I had this hare-brained idea, the first thing I asked when I called various hotels was “can you see Invesco and Coors Field from your building?” “I think so” was the best I could get. And “I think so” didn’t cut it. Maybe if they’d heeded our request a little better and put us on a higher floor, but I doubt it.

So, a word to the wise, if you want your kids to be able to see a cool fireworks show emanating from a sports venue, be smart enough to think about buying tickets before they’re sold out. And don’t try to make up for your lack of foresight by trying for a hotel with a view among a city’s skyscrapers. That’s just dumb; dumb as a lighthouse in a landlocked state.

This strip was partially inspired by a lighthouse at a small lake (scroll down when visiting the link) near where I grew up in Nebraska. Why it’s there, I’ve never cared to learn; I just always thought it was pretty stupid. But after this weekend, I am humbled by my own stupidity.

It is with great pride and honor that I present to the world the first comic strip written, drawn, colored and lettered by my older daughter. Because she’s a pre-teen, I’m not going to use her name on the mean ol’ Internet, but I can’t help but share her amazing work. She drew this on Bristol board, I scanned it and converted the pencil lines to nice black lines for her, then she colored it in Adobe Photoshop (her first-ever use of the program — taken to like a duck to water!) and then she added the text and word balloons in Adobe Illustrator (the first time she used that program, too).

I pride myself on being a pretty decent writer, but I am unable to fully, eloquently express just how proud I am of my little girl. She truly is gifted. Beyond that, though, the fact that she looks up to her old man, sees him wasting time working on his comic, thinks it’s cool enough to try for herself, and wants to use comic creation to connect with me is enough to bring a wistful tear to my eye. As I said, I am proud and honored — humbled, in fact, by my amazing, wonderful daughter.

And in fairness and equanimity, I must say I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m debuting her equally-yet-differently amazing sister’s work here, too. She is just as wonderful. Life may be hard in many ways, but a beautifully talented family makes every struggle worth it. I am blessed.

Not a lot to say this week. I have waaaaay too much reading to do for my class. I really shouldn’t have even taken the time to work on this … .

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

So now we know about Cap Zap and his down-home origin. There’s more where this came from, such as the mysterious simpleton standing behind Marv.

A quick update after I recently posted that I nabbed the Facebook URL, facebook.com/webcomic: Not long after that, I decided to close down my Facebook account as a manner of streamlining my life. Facebook is too often nothing more than a time-suck to me, with all of those idiotic quizzes and top 5 lists. I need to focus first on my family, then grad school, then this comic. Facebook contributes nothing to any of those, so it had to go. I haven’t totally abandoned social media, just the annoying aspects. All two or three of you fans can still follow me on Twitter there in the right sidebar. —>

Lastly, I’m trying to be a little smarter about when I post new comics. I often don’t have time to get these done until the weekend and post them ASAP. But few people go fishing for webcomics on the weekends, so I’m going to shoot for a Tuesday (or so) upload for now in hopes of adding a fourth and fifth fan!

As always, thanks for reading!

Having gotten ahead of the game with my grad-school work, my brain began notifying me early this morning that it was time to get back to creating. After scripting several strips in my head, I figured I’d better get up and put it all to paper before I lost it all: An excellent way to start  a Saturday — even if I would have preferred to sleep in.

We’re going to get to know the Just-Us League over the next several strips. One challenge to writing country-bumpkin types is how many articles and prepositions to shorten to “th’” and “an’” rather than “the” and “and.” All those apostrophes can start to make the text hard t’ read.

Oh, and another bonus this morning, after having forgotten to grab my own name on the Facebook ID free-for-all, I can now be found at facebook.com/webcomic. I sort of feel unworthy to have it while so many more talented, successful, funny, prolific and just-plain-deserving webcomickers are out there, but it’s a “name” I fully intend to grow into.

Anybody see that coming? Did you think it was going to be a traditional “bad guy?” They are in tornado alley, after all.

One thing I haven’t decided is where in the midwest these hicks are. Nebraska? Kansas? Oklahoma? Missouri? Should they be farther east, like Kentucky? Being from Nebraska, and glad to be in Colorado, I’m torn between using the strip to make fun of the Cornhusker state (I mean, really, Cornhuskers? What kind of name is that?), or to make fun of Nebraska’s arch-enemy, Oklahoma. But the Sooner state hasn’t really done anything bad to me, and they have no love for the Empire … er, Big Red Nation … . Any suggestions?

This strip features a couple of minor firsts for me: One is a first-person angle from Mindover Man’s point of view, the other is a break from three same-size panels. Not a big deal, but I want to stretch my ability to tell the story. It’s all about experimenting, right?

And to whom does this sinister, sneaky hand belong? And why and how can s/he affect The Interventionist? All will be revealed … .

OK, so this particular mondegreen seems a little self-serving, what with my own name in it and all, but as I recall it, this Chicago song came out when I was a mopey teenager. At the time, I found it oh-so-ironic. In another era, the song and the pimply-faced kid both could have been very “emo.” But as history has shown, both are instead quite cheesy. Emo just another flavor, isn’t it?

For anyone interested in checking out the songs Mindover Man is messing  up, check out the Amazon music sidebar I’ve added. I list each of Mindover Man’s mondegreens and, if one of them turns into an earworm for you, you can use the sidebar to purchase the song and enjoy its oldies goodness over and over again.

You’re welcome, and please don’t curse me!

It’s been a loooong time since Mindover Man hit us with one of his ’80s mondegreens, why not another post-”Wedding Singer” revival? 

I’ve often wondered why it always falls to speedsters and/or flyers such as the Flash or Superman when it comes to stopping tornadoes in comics and cartoons. Why can’t somebody else try to handle it, like, oh, a telekinetic doofus? The real question is whether this will work.

With what The Interventionist was told to do by the insurance company while “fighting” a tornado, I thought about calling this strip “Extreme Cow Tipping,” but that seemed a bit much. …

I’ve been trying to update at least once a week, but after I sketched this week’s strip I watched Scott Kurtz digitally draw and color a “PVP” strip on Ustream and decided to try to do mine all digitally. While I think I came pretty close to replicating my paper-and-ink work, it took three times as long while using my Wacom tablet. It was difficult trying to get used to moving my hand on a flat surface and seeing the lines I produced on a vertical screen in front of me. I sort of got used to it but think I would need a LOT more time to become a fraction as good as Kurtz. Trying to do that and thinking of how effortlessly smooth his line work is gave me a whole new respect for the modern master of cartooning. 

And just when the tedium has me pretty well convinced that I shouldn’t color my strip (“after all, Kurtz, Straub, Eliopoulis, et al., don’t”), he starts coloring his strip after 10 years! Jerk!

So if an insurance company were to hire superpowered individuals, it makes sense that the hero would be sent to the midwest to chase tornadoes, right? Especially at this time of year, they could be quite helpful.

But what should a superhero do in the face of a tornado? The cliche tactic, used by Superman and the Flash through the years, is to circle around it at super-speed, going the opposite direction. Any bets on what these two will try?

I was going to do a different strip tied to the story, but listening to CNN this morning gave me an idea I had to do today, while news of North Korea’s Taepo-dong II satellite missile launch over Japan and into the Pacific Ocean. 

It seemed like the perfect current-events story for The Interventionist to jump into action.

Now he’s going to have to get extensions for his dreadlocks!

My own girls have always been good about saying something sweetly — sometimes painfully — hilarious. Any readers out there have some equally ill-timed quotes from kids?

I wonder how common this is beyond conversations I’ve had. Anyone out there willing to admit web surfing while, uh, seated for a while?

Come ooooon, you know you’ve done it. …

The Interventionist needs to re-assess his position way up there on his high horse. Is he now a hypocrite?

All those high-minded ideals conflict with his simple need for a job. Hey! What are real-world issues doing crowding their way back into this comic?!? Don’t worry, though, I’m not going all “Watchmen” … yet!

How many of us have had this kind of job interview, dealing with a pencil pusher who is completely incapable of thinking creatively? Then again, it IS an insurance guy. By definition, they can’t comprehend goodness and altruism, right? But they’re still saints compared to politicians.

I couldn’t help myself on this pun — er, one. Certainly it’s not nearly as good as what the master, Brad Guigar, is able to write on a regular basis, but it was something I couldn’t get out of my head. Ever since the Madoff scandal, every time I hear or read “Ponzi scheme” this joke pops into my consciousness. I grew up watching The Fonz and probably have seen every episode of “Happy Days” over the course of my life, so this was a bit of a tribute, too. Now, hopefully, I can move on!

You may be beginning to notice a pattern here: What do superheroes do when they don’t have a secret identity? What kinds of jobs do they go for, and can they keep them? 

Of course not.

Hopefully that’s where the fun begins.

My vote is still for Tom Welling to play Supes … .

Because it’s impossible to keep up the comic-book style, I’m shifting gears to a humor strip. While I’m taking classes, it won’t be updated regularly, but this gives me the flexibility to try some new things.

Mindover Man and The Interventionist return in a full page of action.

I’ll probably be updating less frequently, but I intend to tell more story per update. I’m also working on learning a faster way of coloring … well, faster when I don’t have all these rock spikes and water sprays, that is.

Thanks for your patience. And hopefully while you’ve been waiting for this update, you’ve been keeping up with the podcast novel, which I’ve continued to update every week. You can listen here on the site or download it through iTunes. The story, for those who haven’t been listening, is related to the comic but the storyline is completely independent (i.e. it happens at a totally different time in a totally different place).

Feedback is ALWAYS a good thing: Check out the forum — we’ve actually had some conversation going on in there!

This one took a while to finish, for obvious reasons. It’s also the end of what’s intended to be the first issue of a comic-book series.

And it represents what could be a stopping point. Looking at my traffic numbers vs. my podcast’s download numbers, I think I need to focus more on the podcast novel and can let the comic go on hiatus — and maybe not come back to it.

If you’re a fan of the comic, please give me a reason you think I should keep it going. Honestly, I want a reason to keep it alive: It’s some of the most rewarding, exciting work I’ve ever done in my life. You can comment below, put something in the forum or send an e-mail to me at jason@heroisum.com.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my plans. For everyone who sees this, thanks for reading!

You can probably guess, so this isn’t really a spoiler: Fight’s over. But who won? Did Mindover Man prove the scope of his power enough to say that eventually he’d have found some way to put The Interventionist down for the count? Or did Inty win by proving that not even a tsunami could stop him? He did get his hand around Mindover Man’s throat again … and what’s with him going for the throat all the time, anyway?

Art-wise, I tried a couple of different things this time. I learned from way back when I had it raining on Graeyven that I needed to make the rain be white or just off-white. So this time, with the water cascading off the boys, I made sure to get it the right color. I’m pretty pleased with that. I’m not so sure about my attempt at more “traditional” inking on this page. I tried to use more line work to define some shading. The problem with that is that it takes a lot longer to color in Photoshop. Let me know if you have a preference.

They’re the newest Olympic sports: The Tidal-Wave Throw and the Swimming in Mid-air.

This one was a weird piece to draw, because I really didn’t draw much at all. It was more about Photoshop and the big wave. I didn’t know if I could pull off the continuous panel that also serves as three individual panels idea, but I think it worked as well as I could have hoped.

So who’s going to prove to be the hero out of this? Mindover Man? The Interventionist? Both? Neither? Let me know what you think by heading over to the forum.

I’m doing a lot more work to get the word out about the comic, so if you’re a new reader, thanks for stopping by! You can hit the “first” link to start at the beginning of this story to get caught up.

Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it.

I need that western gunslinger showdown music for this panel.

With today’s and the last one, I’ve just made it that much more difficult to put these into a comic book-sized page whenever I get around to trying to print this. Oops. But I’d rather go with what I think helps tell the story rather than always have the same (rather arbitrary) size.

On another note, a show of hands, please: How many are sick of the Brett Favre saga? Everyone? I thought so.

Who knew “Come On, Eileen” was such a powerful song? Who knew Mindover Man was so powerful?

Hopefully this big panel makes up for the not-so-good previous one.

On a totally different subject, I just saw another one of those “spoof” movies that supposedly makes fun of a bunch of recent films. I’m not going to mention the title because I don’t want its name showing up in ads, but I am going to ask “who goes to these cinematic equivalents of dog vomit?” Lame. Lame. Lame.

Oh yes, the media begin shaping public perception of The Interventionist and Mindover Man. From here forward, they’re at the mercy of the fickle image makers. Great news for them, huh?

I actually had the panel series scripted a little different originally, but decided the next one needed to be on its own, thus this huge panel.

Check out the new box on the right, it’s an affiliate box from Amazon where I’ve listed all the songs that Mindover Man has messed up and included the page numbers where it happened. Isn’t technology cool?

Ah, yes, like a Green Lantern reciting his oath to charge his power ring; like Billy Batson yelling “Shazam”; like Apache Chief saying “Enukchuk,” all that Mindover Man needs to unlock his power and provide his mind the focus it needs is an ’80s song he doesn’t know that well.

This song is one of the first I thought to use when I came up with Mindover Man’s crazy “power enhancing mnemonic.” I still don’t know the real lyrics to that song.

This page was a tough one to draw because I simply had two shots of Mindover Man. I completely redrew the second panel because originally it looked too much like the angle of the first one. Going with a different angle and a tighter zoom made a ton of difference.

Check this out: The podcast has been downloaded 550 times as of this post! That is just crazy! Thanks for the attention, and please tell others about the comic and ‘cast.

Check this out II: I can’t believe it but www.superherowebcomic.com was available. So I snapped it up and it now forwards to this site. Don’t know if it’ll be helpful, but it can’t hurt.

Maybe The Interventionist is beginning to realize something about himself, huh?

And the worst part of all this for Mindover Man? Getting sand stuck in that costume. That can’t be fun; he’s going to have to put up with it being stuck inside his suit until he gets home. Poor guy.

This was my very first attempt at drawing/coloring/digitally painting ocean water washing in on the beach. I have to say it doesn’t look too bad. Maybe I’ll switch to a “Lost” comic … .

Maybe a future subject for Hero is … um: Origins can be The Interventionist’s days as a baseball player … . Naw.

Oh, and on a note of historical significance: What The Interventionist says in that last panel is NOT a paraphrase of Spider-Man. It’s actually from the Bible! Luke 12:48, to be exact. Was Stan Lee influenced by the Bible? Hmmmm.

Maybe I have an over-active imagination or just a cruel streak, but I’ve always thought if I ever ended up in a fight, it would be cool to be telekinetic and just throw the other guy around without laying a hand on him. Just throwing him around like a rag doll. This is where I wish I were an animator.

I watched all three hours of G4’s San Diego Comic-Con coverage tonight. I can’t imagine how cool it would be to go there. I have to go someday.

And maaaaan, I can’t wait to see “Watchmen.” The G4 coverage had lots more information than what we saw in the trailer before “The Dark Knight.” Looks more than promising.

Ahhh, the return of the background images. I figured the boys have been high in the air for a while now, and it was time to start putting them back near the ground.

And …

Ahhh, the return of the normal-sized panel. Sorry if the scrolling on page 50 was a little annoying. But I figured it was worth blowing out the “anniversary” page. Plus, when I collect this in a book, I’m gonna need a splash page here and there.

Wow, fifty pages of this comic. Hard to believe I’ve gotten here.

Hard to look at some of the early posts. Hopefully these are getting better as I go.

Thanks to everyone who’s reading and listening!! Now, if only you’d let me know what you think!! Comment or hit the all-too-silent forum, if you’d like to voice your opinion.

Those may not have been the most well-chosen words from Mindover Man.  … I’m just sayin’.

It’s hard to believe the next page will be my fiftieth! Holy cow! I’m one of those people who doesn’t understand why so many others get crazy about milestones or holidays — what makes certain days any more special than others just because of the calendar or numbers? That’s not enough of a reason for me … — but for the sake of those who do get all milestone happy, maybe I’ll do something a little unique.

As I type this, I’m less than three hours from going to see “The Dark Knight” at a 12:01 a.m. showing. CANNOT WAIT! I need some Mountain Dew to make sure I’m awake.

Hey, everyone, I’m back after a long weekend break. Hopefully missing Monday’s update wasn’t too much of an irritation. Thanks for hanging with me.

As I type this, I’m watching a great little standoff of a Major League Baseball All-Star Game, currently in the 14th inning. However it turns out, at least the two representatives of my Colorado Rockies acquitted themselves well: Matt Holliday hit a solo homer for the first run of the game, and Aaron Cook pitched three scoreless innings and out of several jams in extras. Nicely done, boys.

I got my 12:01 a.m. Friday ticket for “The Dark Knight” today. The countdown is on, and I can’t wait.

All right, enough babbling, time to get this thing posted.

Lesson No. 1 for Mindover Man: Think before you use your mind.

I’m technically on vacation from my day job right now and learned my lesson about a month ago, when I took another week of vacation but kept grinding on the comic: It’s not really a vacation if I keep working. And I owe my family some attention. So no new comic on Monday. But come back on Wednesday as the standoff continues!

I also need time to watch “Batman: Gotham Knight” the new animated DVD that’s tied to next week’s big movie release. I’ll post a review at some point.

Thanks for reading!

It looks as if Mindover Man has messed up one too many times for The Interventionist’s tastes.

I had a lot of fun drawing and coloring the bigger-than-usual panel; maybe I should do those more. …

Today I got the chance to walk through the comic with one of my wife’s students (Hi, John!). He’s augmenting his reading homework with David Petersen’s Mouse Guard, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Comics are how I developed my expansive vocabulary — and appreciation of art.

It’s hard to believe some people still look down on the medium as lacking in value. Please. This is such a rich genre that can go so many different directions. And because it’s so visual, it’s especially good for teaching boys how to read because that’s how our brains are wired.

I hope the use of messed-up lyrics is obvious enough (The Police several weeks ago, and Metallica with this and the last strip). I hear them with the music clearly enough in my head, but wonder if that translates, sans music. If anyone has an opinion on that, let me know.

On a drawing note, I have to say I’m so happy I won’t have to draw that building again! Woo hoo!

Get ready, the smackdown is coming!

I love the sky backgrounds. They came on the supplemental disc in Brian Miller’s book “Hi-Fi Color For Comics: Digital Techniques for Professional Results” which I should find the time to finish reading in 2012. From what I’ve read, this book does a great job of explaining how to color properly (which I do not yet, so don’t judge the book by me).

Can’t wait for this weekend’s trip to a nearby airport to see vintage WWII bombers. I love seeing those old birds. It’s amazing how simple, small and fragile they were. And I love taking my girls, too, so they can see some living history. Maybe the visit will spur another tale from Reilly’s grandpa, as featured in this week’s podcast. Take a listen if you haven’t!

Finally, and most importantly, Happy Independence Day. Let’s all remember to thank God for all the truly heroic people who have served our country to give us our freedom and opportunities. And if you meet a veteran while out and about, make sure you thank him or her.

For all its faults, there’s no better place to live than here in the good ol’ US of A.

And be safe with all the fireworks!

Yep. She’s crazier than he is.

I hope you liked the pause, the lull over the last three days, because things are about to get a little wild.

This strip was a bit frustrating because I had to totally re-letter it because I’d forgotten to change the size of the artwork. I draw it at 14 inches wide by 5 1/2 tall. Usually I shrink it to 10 inches wide before taking it into Illustrator to letter it. Why? I’m not sure, other than that’s the way it was when I was drawing it on smaller Bristol board and I didn’t want to have to try to figure out what font size would be comparable. So rather than doing some math once, I force myself to remember to make the switch every time — and occasionally forget and have to redo everything.

Anyway, I really liked how much room I had in the panels when the image was so much larger. Oops.

Can’t wait to start drawing the new several days’ action!

Don’t forget to check out my podcast audiobook!

We’ve seen how messed up Graeyven is, and now we’re seeing that his sister, as vulnerable and seemingly weak as she is, also is a psychopath: Just a very weepy one.

I thought about leaving out the TV chatter, but thought maybe this was a good spot to help get new readers caught up a bit without having to reader through the archive. Then again, maybe it just makes the panels too crowded with text. If you have an opinion, let me know.

This last couple of days have been a pain to draw, because I’ve really started to like drawing both Mindover Man and the Interventionist. The mask and cape for the former and the dreads on the latter. The more I draw these two, the less I like them. To me they’re villainous just by being there and making me draw them!

If you’re a reader of the webcomic but not a listener to the podcast, check it out. This week’s installment is my favorite thus far. Just scroll down a bit to Chapter 4 of Heroisum: Origins.

This page was a lot better before I put the long-winded TV report balloons on it.

I have to say … now that I’m inking again and reasonably pleased with how that’s working, I’m tempted to stop coloring the strip. I just takes way too much time.

Thoughts from anyone on what’s a better choice?

It makes me laugh to think about how much time I put into the building (again!), only to blur it into the background and throw word balloons over it. Yeesh.

Finding the right song with the right lyrics for The Interventionist’s reaction to what he’s seen was a tough one. At first, I thought about Metallica’s “One,” but that didn’t fit well. I thought about a mopey Morrissey song or another one by the Smiths. But I finally settled on Depeche Mode because there’s a slight change someone will know it.

Ooh. Two panels of “decompressed” storytelling. I used to think artists had it easy when they got a long scene in which they could duplicate panels. I no longer think that: Whatever time is saved on one panel ends up used on other panels. At least that’s what happened with me on this one. If you want to read about “Decompression,” look for the forthcoming Issue 3 of Comics Now magazine. I designed the article about Decompression in that one. It’s a well-written look at the style of comic storytelling. The mag should be out within a month.

Special thanks to the welcoming and helpful webcomickers at Halfpixel for the tips that are helping me round out my inking. This may be some of the best inking and cleanest lines I’ve had yet, and it’s because of the tips got there.

Finally, I’m done with this strip. It’s necessary to the story, but the heaviness of it and the work it has taken to make it LOOK heavy and horrible has put me in a really bad mood. Don’t be surprised if the next strip is all sunshine, flowers and rainbows just to counteract this one.

Or not.

After seeking help from other webcomic creators at the Halfpixel forum, I bit the bullet and forced myself to actually ink this piece and color it a bit differently. It’s great to have a way of asking better, more experienced cartoonists how to do things.

I also decided to draw on a bigger Bristol board than I had been using. I thought that might be a big help, and it was. I just had to force myself to finish using the first, smallish pad because I can’t allow myself to waste too much. Cheapskate.

And I gotta say, it’s really tough forcing myself to stay on task with this (even after taking Father’s Day off) when the weather is so nice. I’d much rather have been outside. Hopefully this, too, will be a sacrifice that will prove to have been worth making.

I couldn’t resist. In a couple of my earliest panels featuring The Interventionist, I put him is poses inspired by some of the earliest Superman action drawn by Joe Schuster — lifting a vehicle over his head and rushing in a blur toward a bad guy. This time, I couldn’t resist giving him a line of dialog from the Superman radio show of the 1940s.

A little background: Two years ago, my family and I took our first major driving vacation and headed from Colorado to California. Before we left, I loaded up my iPod with dozens of podcasts of the old Supes radio show. We listened to episode after episode as we crossed the barrenness of Utah and kept ourselves amused listening for the line “Never mind that” or “Never mind that now.” It was in literally every episode. Our assumption was that was a common turn of phrase in the ’40s.

The line in this strip originally was “That doesn’t matter.” But when I realized I could easily trade it for the Superman line, I couldn’t not change it. It’s probably funny only to my wife and me, but I’m exceedingly pleased with it. … I’m a cheeseball, what can I say?

And on a much more serious note, given the name of this comic, I have to salute the Boy Scouts in Little Sioux, Iowa, who sprang to action to help each other after a tornado struck their remote camp on Thursday. Tragically, four teens died in the carnage. My prayers go out for their families. The survivors are a great testament to why every boy should be a Scout at some point.

Forget levitating groceries (see Page 10), Mindover Man can do some seriously heavy lifting when he throws his medulla oblongata into it (wow, I checked and I spelled that right on the first try!).

I’m still experimenting with a variety of ideas for drawing. After the last several pages being penciled only, then converted to an inked look in Adobe Illustrator, this time I sketched the drawing with a non-photo blue pencil, then inked with a super-fine Micron pen. I’ll mull it over and see which way works better.

Any of you who are iPhone users and readers of Hero is … um can access my strip with several others via the web app somewhat unfortunately named Stripr (comic strips, get it? Boy I hope that doesn’t bring in the wrong kinds of Google Ads). I added my feed to their list yesterday. If you add it to your phone and use it access this comic (and blog!), please bump me up with the arrows that accompany the listing. As for iPhone news, I’m drooling and likely to keep doing that until mine dies. No upgrade for me, what with the extra $10 a month for service with AT&T. I’m surprised no one in the media has put two and two together and noted that that extra fee technically makes the $199 3G iPhone more expensive over the full two years than my contract price for my first-gen 8GB version. Duh.

Now, I need to go back and re-read DC Comics’ Final Crisis number 1. I listened to the Comic Geek Speak review of that issue and heard about several things I apparently missed. Gotta love Grant Morrison’s non-linear, multi-layered script-writing.

Yes, that’s our Mindover Man, messing up song lyrics to use his powers effectively. He’s a prize, folks.

On a different superhero note, everyone needs to go see “The Incredible Hulk” next weekend — not so much for the Hulk’s sake, but for Superman’s sake. Hang on, it’ll make sense in a minute. Reports out there say the moronic execs at Warner Bros. are looking at how this Hulk does, especially in comparison to the Ang Lee “art film” from five years ago. That movie, just like the atrocity that was “Superman Returns” failed to meet the high expectations of the studio. That’s because in both cases, the directors had to indulge in their own “creative vision” and warp the characters and stories from what made them beloved by fans for decades. Marvel’s film studio went out on a limb and rebooted the Hulk franchise, and Warners is reportedly looking at Hulk’s results to see if that’s what should be done with Superman.

Thus, for the sake of a GOOD Superman movie, we need a big box-office run for the big green guy.

Mindover Man, the Interventionist. Interventionist, Mindover Man.

Not exactly cordial, huh? These are the kinds of times I wish I had the time, not just in real life but in the pacing of the comic, to put a lengthy scene together with these two sniping at each other. Ah, well, I have plenty of time to have them not get along in the future.

The podcast is now available on iTunes! Download and share it with everyone you know!

Not exactly inspiring entrance, eh? No “Mighty Mouse” music comes to mind … . But we have to give Mindover Man the benefit of the doubt, right?

Here we go. Now things are going to get really fun, with the Interventionist springing into action along with a certain someone else soon.

I finally got the podcast posted and the website looking a little more the way I want it, including having the blog posts actually show up. I’m waiting to hear back from iTunes, hoping to get the podcast listed there. And I’ve got Feedburner serving up the RSS feeds, with a ton of options in the right sidebar now to help everyone add the feed to their favorite reader. Hopefully this site is getting to the point that it’s super easy to navigate and use. It’s all about serving up the content.

Call it a breakthrough! I’ve figured out a way to sidestep my total inability to ink my art! As long as I tighten up my pencils a little more than normal, I avoid having to ink them at all. After scanning the pencils, I take the art into Adobe Illustrator and use the “Live Trace” function, set for “Comic Art,” and it converts the pencil art to black line art. It’s making a HUGE difference.

And it’s a timesaver, too, which opens up some time to color.

Now it’s time to get back to working on the Heroisum podcast. …

It’s weird, but every time I think of stopping the coloring of this thing — because that takes longer than all the other steps combined — I end up with a shot of The Interventionist and his leather jacket. Coloring and smudging it to get that leather look is too much of a fun challenge to want to stop. But eventually, I may have to.

So, if you’re one of the two people who reads this strip (Hi, family member!) please take note of the “Share” button I added. With it, you can notify all the big social bookmarking sites and let other people know what you think of the strip. Hopefully you like it and let others know and we can start building an audience for this bad boy.

And if you do hit del.icio.us, digg, reddit or the others, I say in advance “thank you!”

This one took FOREVER to color and letter — mostly because while I was doing that, I was watching the Science Channel and the NASA Channel as the Mars polar lander was hitting the Red Planet’s surface and then waiting for images to come through.

On one hand this is always cool because of the science, but the nerd in me always thinks of the multiple movies I’ve seen of Mars probes transmitting images of something knocking out the camera. I’m drawing a blank on the most recent one as I type this, but there have been plenty. I’m especially fond of the stories both in print and on the “Justice League” cartoon, featuring Martian Manhunter.

Even though I know it’s guaranteed not to happen, I like imagining the anticipatory feeling and the sense of fear and dread that would arise if something like that would ever happen. It’s weird , nerdy fun, but  what can one expect from somebody doing a superhero webcomic?

Kind of a depressing night of creating this piece. While I was coloring all the damage to Groanco Studios’ headquarters, I was watching the news from a town near where I live, where an F4 tornado blew through today. Much of the town was badly damaged. So damage and destruction was all around me. Almost surreal … .

I did manage to put everything out of my mind for a couple hours and saw the new Indiana Jones movie on its debut day. It’s a really fun ride from start to finish, is beautiful to look at and gets carried away with plausibility, but that’s part of the attraction for me. I really liked this one.

And now Graeyven makes it hard on all of us, including me as I try to make mud on his face look right.

This one took a while to put together, thus I’m too sleepy to write a post that makes much sense. Guess I’ll let the comic speak for itself, which is probably for the best anyway.

Enjoy!

Graeyven’s a man on a mission now. What’s he gonna do? Ya gotta keep reading, and I gotta keep not sleeping.

I now need to get back to working on the magazine design for Comics Now! — a great, new magazine, I must say.

Sorry for no post on Monday. Mother’s Day trumped my comic for the weekend.

Cross your fingers that I’ll be able to get the Friday update done. I’ve got a big project and a short deadline that may get in my way. We’ll see!

Graeyven’s outburst probably would have more impact if he didn’t work for a home demolition reality show. I toyed with the idea of a long shot visually explaining that he’s on location at a home demolition site, maybe with half the house already torn up and a bunch of backhoes and dump trucks around it. But because I’m only doing two or three panels a day, I need to keep the story moving. And since I didn’t draw that part, you have to infer that we’re looking at a demolition site from the fact that there’s a wheelbarrow on the last page and a bit of a backhoe on this one. I guess I’ll save that for the print edition or director’s cut someday.

Yes, I’m aiming high. A little too high? That’s not for me to decide. It’ll happen if this comic takes off and develops an audience, and that’s only going to happen if readers like you tell your friends and you all visit the site regularly.

At my non-dream job today (this, full time, being my dream job, of course) I got to hear children’s author/illustrator Mark Ludy give an inspiring talk to elementary school students and fired me up. Here’s a guy who has had great success as an artist — and whose talent makes me feel like an ant looking up at an elephant — who has honed his craft to the point that he’s been able to publish six amazing books, give talks to kids all over the nation, open a coffee shop/studio and plow ahead on five new books, including a novel. He’s a brand unto himself. And he told the kids in a hilarious, engaging, eloquent way to chase their dreams no matter how hard it gets; to give their best; that everyone has a story to tell; and that each of us is FULL of potential.

Well, here’s my dream. Is it perfect? No. But I’m working to hone my craft, doing my best and putting my heart into it.

I looked back at the last couple of days’ comics and noticed I needed to back way off on the thick lines for foreground characters. Honestly, I wish I could make my thinnest lines thinner, but the size I’m drawing isn’t a lot different from what’s posted. Something to play with, I guess.

I have no idea how I was able to get this one done. This was a HUGELY busy weekend for us.

A quick follow-up from my last post: I did hit Free Comic Book Day at Mile High Comics in Thornton, Colo., and found myself underwhelmed. I saw greater variety (i.e. more independent one-shot books) at smaller shops in northern Colorado last year than I saw this year at the great and mighty Mile High.  But the service by the staff was excellent, I must say. I need to do some research, because I kept hearing artist Michael Turner’s name get mentioned over and over. I don’t know if he was making a personal appearance, but my family and I had to get to a big birthday party, so we didn’t have time to find out what was up. My daughters each got a giant stack of kid-friendly comics, and I talked my wife into getting multiple copies of “DC Universe 0″ for her students, only to read the issue later and find a couple things that likely preclude her from using them.

Stupid DC. Can’t you use a little better judgment than that? If this is supposed to be the big “everybody can jump on” book, then edit it accordingly. I did it for today’s strip, using the word “stinks” instead of something else. If a start-up clown like me can do this, then why can’t they?

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah, I saw “Iron Man” this weekend, contributing to a HUGE open-weekend box office for the movie that’s making me rethink my top three list of best superhero movies. It has to be in there. I just need to see it again to make sure of where to place it. Everything was just about perfect. I do have a problem with the telegraphing of the climactic action sequence, but that’s not a huge problem.

And we got to see the Rockies FINALLY beat the Dodgers this year. We have upper-deck tickets in the shade. I really liked the view of the field, even though we were up high — that didn’t really bother me.

Good, fun, BUSY weekend. And still I kept this comic on schedule. I hope I’m not setting my sights and expectations too high. Oh well.

Next time, the you-know-what-starts to hit the fan.

Whoa. Somebody tell my characters to shut up!

This page took FOREVER to letter. And it pained me because I ended up covering a lot of the work that I had spent time trying to make look good. Oh well.

Nonetheless, if you have to have people standing around and talking, I guess it’s best to get as much as you can into those panels so you don’t need a dozen of them, huh?

Enjoy Free Comic Book Day on Saturday, May 3, everybody. If you don’t know what that is, check out www.freecomicbookday.com to see all the many, many comic books you can pick up for free — yes, really, no strings attached — at your local comic book store. And if you don’t know where one is near you, there’s a shop locator on that site, too.

I think I’m heading to Mile High Comics to see what a big store does on FCBD. And I’m hoping we’re able to pick up the “Maximum Ride” free book (I gotta find out if that’s an ongoing series!) because my daughter has started reading the books and really likes the first one.

One tip: If you do go, try to go ahead an buy some comics, too. It’s the right thing to do for the shop owners, because even though the FCBD comics are free to us, they’re not free for the shop owners — they’re paying to give them away to us in hopes that we’ll spend a little money there, too.

OK, one more tip: Get “DC Universe Number Zero.” It’s a special issue priced at only fifty cents, and it’s been advertised as a great jumping-on point for people who aren’t familiar with the wider cast of characters that inhabit the universe that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman live in. It also kicks off a huge event that supposedly will change the DC Universe forever.

All right, one more: Pick up the Free Comic Book Day edition of “All-Star Superman” number one. It’s the first of a 12-issue series that’s going to go down as one of the greatest Superman stories ever told.

Please note that while I’m focusing a lot on superheroes, Free Comic Book Day is great for readers of every genre, which are all well-represented on the above-mentioned list. But kids need to make sure some of those titles are OK with their parents — there’s a lot of comics out there that are written for anyone but children.

Anyway, enjoy!!