Radio Free Babylon

Dinner with Barack

2012-05-08T09:20:00.005-05:00

Not dinner with the President. Not dinner with Obama. Nope. Just Barack. Your buddy, up against a brick wall like so many promising young bands and hopeful comedians. Barack. You and Barack. Dinner. That will be special.

I have no doubt that the skillful and shrewd tacticians of the Obama campaign are totally in touch with their audience (See that Google+ icon? A sure sign that they are on the cutting edge. Not that anyone really uses it - but it's the cutting edge.) and they will most likely outwit the Romney camp this November, but I wish they could reign in the coolness just a touch. We're talking about the leader of the most powerful country on earth - not Justin Bieber. Reality TV has overtaken us and the lines between entertainment and politics don't exist anymore. The President's cool; that's a given. We get it. So as long as we're getting so familiar with him, why don't we just call him Barry like his old friends in college did? Step up the cool factor one more notch. Go all the way.

What will you and Barack talk about at dinner? My guess is he will feign interest in whatever you want to talk about and probably laugh at your lame jokes. He will also be familiar with your favorite music. He's cool like that.

But be aware that once you enter this contest to dine with Barry, the email account you register with will be bombarded from now to election day. They like to be in touch.

Time to Get on That Book

2012-04-10T10:48:00.000-05:00

Plenty of people have suggested and/or asked that the "Coffee with Jesus" comics be put into a book that they can purchase. It's time to seriously tackle that project.

Of the 300 or so comics created thus far, quite a few are duds, so we're going to pare it down to the best 150. Then the real fun begins of recreating each strip to be sure the images are high-res enough for print. Also, we'll be getting rid of the title panel, because you'd be like, "Duh! I know what I'm reading! I don't need it to say 'Coffee with Jesus' on every page!"

So they'll probably end up looking like this:

...with the only branding being "Radio Free Babylon" vertically in the fourth panel.

This is one of those "strike while the iron is hot" opportunities that we plan to knock out in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

People Love a Bunny

2012-04-09T15:02:00.000-05:00

This chart tells the story of how over the Easter weekend people started sharing our "Big Weekend" comic featuring the Easter Bunny and Jesus making plans for Sunday. The blue bar at the bottom represents around 20,000 people reached per day, holding steady at that baseline for a good while. That little bunny is responsible for the drastic rise at the right, topping out at 700,000 in the last couple days.

But stats can be a trap. Based on these numbers, it would be so tempting to start pandering to the bunny people. We can't do that.

What we might do is make Phase II of RFB a priority. (Phase II is not to be confused with Phase XXII.) With an audience apparently pleased with some aspects of what we're doing, it's time to offer them other diversions and pleasures. But don't worry, "Coffee with Jesus" isn't going anywhere.

After we have debated internally about just exactly what Phase II will be, you'll know it too. Meantime, buy a shirt or something.

A Cursory Scan

2012-03-27T08:28:00.002-05:00

Comments are becoming so numerous on the "Coffee with Jesus" comics that we've stopped bothering to engage the people and have adopted the policy of "it's better not to know." Most of them are positive, we think, but a quick glance indicates that many of them are not; people getting offended, defensive, argumentative or just annoyed. And good or bad, it's better not to know. Too much praise goes to your head - too much ridicule and you start doubting yourself.

So now we are going to just make the comics and post them. If they get a bunch of likes and shares, we figure the balance is in our favor and we'll leave it at that. To monitor the dialog they create is not our business anymore. That they are creating dialog is cool, but for us to have to defend each and every comic against every argument against them - well, life's too short for that crap. Charles Schultz would've gone mad if he could've read everyone's thoughts, good or bad, on Charlie and Snoopy's latest exploits.

And when we speak in the plural, we are talking about this pair of kids, who would prefer to keep some sense of childlike wonder intact rather than get bogged down in the angry noise so common online these days.

The Mayans Nonsense Made Simple

2012-01-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

This is a very nice explanation that lays bare the stupidity of the "world will end in 2012" crowd.

Saturated Street Scenes - Hershey, Pennsylvania

2011-12-21T12:36:00.000-05:00

Behind the Scenes of a Clip Art Comic Strip

2011-12-16T10:03:00.006-05:00

The process is a two-person operation. I, Dave, pick a topic and have Jesus and either Ann, Lisa, Carl, Kevin or Satan, talk about it. Then I hit Katie on a chat window and ask her to come and approve it. (She works in the back of the building, looking out over the canal, while my stand-up desk in the front has a street view. We stopped working in the same area a few months back as being on the phone in the same room can be very distracting.) It's about 50/50 as to which comics get approved. If she laughs out loud, up they go. If she makes a face that says, "Hmmmm, I don't know," then they get refined. If she walks away in disgust, I pursue her, asking indignantly, "WHAT?" That's pretty much how it works here in the comic studios of RFB.

Now I know that putting words in the mouth of Jesus, even a clip art Jesus, will give some devout people pause, and there was a time in my life when I might've found the notion a touch on the sacrilegious side, but only a touch, and only for a very brief period in my life when I thought I had a good handle on what was "godly" and what was not. (People who are super-sure of their righteousness are anything but righteous, I've come to believe. Spiritual pride is the most deceptive of all the prides.) But there are some people who find a clip art Jesus saying anything other than the words he spoke in the New Testament to be an affront that they must correct. One email that took me to task for "using the Lord's name in vain" (with a long and twisted explanation of what "vanity" really is) signed off with a line that suggested that the writer had done his duty to God by letting me know where I was in error.

The negative comments on the comics are far outweighed by the positive ones, but the sincerity, passion - and in some cases, vitriol - of the negative ones makes me think I might have really pissed some people off. The comic is called "Coffee with Jesus," not "Thus Saith the Lord," and I think most people understand that they are only comics, though occasionally they might be teaching tools, perhaps even a small soapbox. There is truth in all humor, or so the saying goes.

Without the Internet this comic would've never caught on, of course. The potential to reach millions is there, and that's really cool. Another beauty (or curse) of the Internet is that we can all fire off our opinions quickly and easily about everything. Don't like it? Let the person know! Right now! While your passion is hot! Bang that keyboard and give them a piece of your mind! It's a two-way street. If you had to write me a letter, in longhand, and put it in an envelope, then spend money on a stamp and put it in the mailbox, I'd never hear from you. But now...so easy. Another curse (or beauty) of the Internet is that you can do a "who is" search on a domain name and find out who registered it, what their phone number is and where they live. So I just rented a post office box and changed the contact info on all our websites. The email and phone number are still there, and that's fine, but I will rest easier knowing my family won't ever get to meet a person so stirred to anger by a clip art Jesus that they felt the need to confront the author. (I considered purchasing privacy protection for all our websites, but at ten bucks a pop and a growing list of domain names, the post office box was cheaper.)

People are passionate about their gods, some to a scary degree. I have a hard time not responding to the angry people on Facebook, and Katie says "Let the community police itself." She's right. If I let the negative comments sit there and not jump on to debate them, other readers will quickly take control. It's cool to know that people are getting it. One gentleman from North Carolina got in touch and offered to try to get the comic distributed in some independent weekly papers; you know the kind - left of center and a bit edgy - usually free. We took him up on his offer after speaking with him by phone. We'll see what happens. Meanwhile, as I type this, I can hear the server that hosts our main site restarting itself every ten minutes, which I assume is due to increased traffic arriving there from Facebook.

You know how giant ministries (we won't name names) are really mega-money-making corporations disguised as ministries, jealously coveting that tax exempt status? Radio Free Babylon has always taken the opposite approach. We intend to someday be a mega-money-making ministry disguised as a corporation, gladly handing over to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

Broadcasts Removed

2011-11-07T11:15:00.000-05:00

All of the old Radio Free Babylon broadcasts have been scrubbed from the site. Dated, antiquated, sedated and overrated, we felt it time to rid the Internet of this dross. Some people were kinder in their reviews of our old show:

I'm searching for a way to protect my family in the wake of the ensuing anarchy when this hits the airwaves. If you were to shop this around, you wouldn't have any problems getting it on the air.

-Josh, Michigan

We have aspirations of creating a much more engaging and enraging format from which to spout our nonsense that will involve a cavernous studio, six cameras, make-up and wardrobe experts, unappreciated and overworked interns, catering people and the clashing egos associated with such an operation.

Someday I Will Beat Comic Jesus and His Coffee Gang

2011-11-04T08:38:00.000-05:00

The Unappreciated Stepchild of Coffee with Jesus

The disgruntled creator of "Saturated Street Scenes" is jealous of the success of "Coffee with Jesus."

It's not laugh out loud funny, but I'm sure it's actually much harder to create the Saturated Street Scenes that are featured at Radio Free Babylon than it is to make Carl, Lisa, Ann and Kevin have a four-panel discussion with Jesus. That stuff is child's play. I'm making art. I travel the world for the perfect image while the jokesters sit in their studio and get all the glory. I will take you through the grueling process.

Sometimes I start by simply dropping that little, yellow Google maps man onto a roadside and seeing if there's anything interesting to look at. It never happens on the first drop. If I find that I've landed in an area that was photographed in the early days of Google Street Views, back when the cameras were crappy and every part of the world looks like a grainy, hazy horrible day, then I back out and find someplace new, someplace where the Google Car was fitted with that nice high-def camera that makes you feel like you're there. Still, I end up dragging that man up and down the streets, turning and looking, hoping to see something interesting. Sometimes the name of a place will grab me and I say, "I wonder what's there." I was looking for a Vermont scene one Sunday when I saw a place in Quebec called "Magog." Up and down the streets of Magog I traveled on what appeared to be a beautiful weekend where flower baskets hung from the lampposts and window shoppers walked the sidewalks, beer gardens were filled with happy patrons and all the world was a sunny day. Nothing stood out, so I took a side street and found the part of town that didn't cater to tourists. Sitting on the steps of a beat down old corner store were two girls and what appeared to be their father and perhaps a grandmother. They stared at the Google Car in the late afternoon of summer, frozen in time.

What I'm looking for is human interest, usually, slice of life with a twist, maybe the unexpected or simply the pastoral. Sometimes it's accidentally perfect, such as the shot I found in Queenstown, South Africa, where a uniformed school girl walks down a dirt road past decrepit houses on a sunny day, her head shielded from the glare by a colorful umbrella.

Framing the shot is always a challenge as the Google Street Cam usually has fuzzy areas that are way out of focus, or telephone lines mar the perfect scene. I abandoned a beautiful scene in the deep interior of Mexico that I labored over for an hour at least. It featured a bricklayer working on a building as two boys ducked into a neighboring tortilleria, but the distracting crisscrossing telephone lines were unable to be Photoshopped out or cropped away. In the Queenstown shot, the telephone lines work well to frame the scene, but "Tortilleria" had to be scrapped.

Once it's framed, cropped and properly saturated - I want surreal and dreamlike - then it's time to decide if it needs an added feature. Sometimes it's perfect, as in "Schoolgirl," other times the addition of Major Mike Adams is in order, perhaps an entirely different sky, or the stealth bomber in this latest shot from Dublin, Ireland at a place called Glasnevin Cemetery. In this instance, I had a title in mind before ever finding the shot, and I scoured London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and other cities looking for an old cemetery with people in it in order to create an image called "The Living and The Dead." (Click it for the large)

These aren't mildly funny, base, crude or sarcastic. It's funny how these scenes are bypassed on our Facebook page as people flock to the silly clip art comics, giving them the coveted thumbs-up "Like" that passes for praise these days. "Saturated Street Scenes" are intended as art, to be studied, inspected and eventually shown in a Manhattan gallery, the opening of which I will attend, wearing a scarf and a loosely fitting but still devilishly stylish black suit, sipping a mineral water with lime. The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Art World will talk to me in those Manhattan accents and they will ask me questions and we will talk about inspiration and motivation, meaning and philosophy and what can we do to help the Third World from here in Manhattan. Then they will purchase one of the prints, or buy the expensive coffee table book bound in leather and trimmed in gold. We will laugh at the silly "Coffee with Jesus" comics, of course, and admit that "they have their place," but we will know where the real art is. Those comics, we will agree, were a passing fad, while I - they will tell me - I have created lasting beauty. Then my agent will whisper to me, "Your dinner guests are waiting in the private dining room at The St. Regis."

At dinner, I hope to meet a very powerful attorney who will offer to represent me against the giant and evil Google, the faceless beast that let me have these images for free now trying to sue me for using its copyrighted imagery to make personal profit.

We Give Up on the Coffee With Jesus Updates

2011-11-02T20:15:00.005-05:00

There's no sense anymore trying to keep this blog updated with the latest "Coffee With Jesus" comics coming down the pike. We're up to 150 at this point and the last one we put up here was #121. If you want them, you know where they are. Here and here.

It's sort of looking like, at least for this comic series anyway, that "the web" is actually Facebook. We'll watch as one particular episode in the series gains traction and then falls off the radar. Then it comes back again, gaining a new audience among a different group of people. Facebook, as it turns out, is not so much a community, but a whole bunch of little communities, criss-crossing, intersecting and diverging. ("Like a million little crossroads...") And the people drawn to "Coffee With Jesus" continue to amaze us in their diversity. We've got church goers and church haters, Christians and Atheists, people who like Bill Maher and people who like Sarah Palin, and every brand of Christian that ever dared kneel before a cross. One particular rabbi from San Francisco we are honored to call a fan, along with soldiers, seminarians, pastors, theologians, pilots, artists, musicians, advertisers, college kids, housewives, old men and women, and many others who've found that this thing resonates for them in some way. (Or at least one within the series did anyway. You can't please everyone all the time.) But really, nothing could be cooler. We've been called "blasphemous" and "insulting," among other things, while others say we are "nailing it." We would honestly have it no other way. This is exactly the audience we have always hoped for in the eleven years since RFB was formed.

It looks like this blog might now become a place to just talk about what's happening at RFB rather than one more repository for the stuff we create. There are at least two of those already. Why be doubly-redundant?

Wow - that's a relief.

Trick or Treat

2011-10-31T09:25:00.000-05:00

Herman Cain's New Ad: Smokin'

2011-10-26T07:00:00.000-05:00

Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan, which vaulted him to the lead of the pack of 87 Republican hopefuls, was a nice soundbite at first, but has since been quickly gutted by all the other candidates, not to mention the pundits as well as the poor people who can't afford 9% of nothing. But Cain has taken that early jump in popularity to produce the strangest, perhaps coolest ad a presidential hopeful has made in years. It's nearly avant garde, it's so different.

There are no gloriously billowing flags. Cain is not featured with his sleeves rolled up, engaging in tough talk with farmers and laborers or happily mingling with families and babies. The Statue of Liberty is absent, along with the stirring narrative of one man's rise from nothing to a powerful and rich man.

All we get is Cain's Chief of Staff, Mark Block, looking haggard and road-weary, talking to us head-on in a nearly too close close-up in front of a city building. And then! AND THEN he takes a drag from his smoke and exhales. It is the last thing you'd ever expect to see and yet it is perfection. It might even be a subtle dig at the rumors that Obama has never really kicked his nicotine habit.

And they finish the ad with, as expected, an image of Cain himself, and yet it is not at all what you'd expect in the end-of-spot image of the candidate. The background appears to be simple, vertical window blinds, and a slow, nearly eerie smile creeps across Cain's face.

I think Cain's people have just changed the game of political advertising. Shepherd Fairey was a game-changer with his "Hope" poster, but this thing is nearly an indie film. I expect to see some unexpected people taking a fresh look at Cain after this.

Crossposted to Where's My Jetpack?

And Still More (117-121)

2011-10-18T13:55:00.000-05:00

Dreams

Coexist

Coexist II

Brah

Bieber Cut

Comic Dump (112-116)

2011-10-18T13:52:00.000-05:00

Chicken or the Egg?

Distance Yourself

Middle Aged

Boost Their Spirits

Paradise

Not Sure Why I Bother

2011-10-18T13:17:00.000-05:00

Blogs are so 2008. I guess I'm just super OCD about keeping this thing updated with the latest comics. And I've missed a ton of them in the past two weeks.

Cool New Logos

Aliens

Awfully Chipper

Carl 2.0

Japanese Elvis

A few more on the way. Blogger only lets you upload five at a time.

104, 105, 106

2011-10-07T09:30:00.000-05:00

Madonna

British Accent

Gonna Be Sick

101, 102, 103 + We Blew up on Facebook

2011-10-06T09:53:00.000-05:00

"Dutch Country"

"Crazy at Work"

"Crimson Tide"

Someone shared one of these on Facebook, and before I knew it, we went from 100 "Likes" on Monday to nearly 300 at present. But like most things viral (and this is very small growth as far as true viral goes) it will all be over by next Monday after the backlash hits. Already we're seeing theological debates and criticisms breaking out over these innocent little drawings.

Fatwa, anyone?

Why Do We Celebrate Century Markers?

2011-10-04T21:03:00.000-05:00

I don't know - I guess it just seems like a big number. This is the 100th "Coffee with Jesus," called "Delusional Charlatan."

Standard Earbuds vs Bose

2011-10-04T13:19:00.004-05:00

Ladies' Fellowship Potluck

2011-10-04T12:24:00.002-05:00

This is #98.

96 and 97

2011-10-04T09:25:00.002-05:00

In this latest pair, the guys want to see a tougher Jesus.

Reincarnation

2011-10-03T07:47:00.000-05:00

Jesus Don't Play That

2011-09-30T15:30:00.002-05:00

Where's The Love? (Numero Noventa y Tres)

2011-09-30T14:25:00.000-05:00

Just seven more of these and I hit 100. Not that that's a particularly large number, but it seems like the perfect amount to include in an expensive coffee table type book, where every other page features a large comic and the facing page is covered in rambling copy written by the author, wherein I bore the reader to tears with an explanation of what I was thinking and why I chose certain topics, thus ruining the jokes. To further entice the buyer, I will tell them they are going to hell if they don't buy a copy.

Autumn Up Here

2011-09-30T07:23:00.000-05:00