Yeah yeah yeah, I know it’s been seven months since the last page was posted. Of a multi-page story! Whatever. You knew what you signed up for when you decided to follow this webcomic.

That’s right, 14-year-old Pj–two can play the time-travel game!

And yes, this is going somewhere. Stay tuned!

I apologize for the awful title of this comic.

This is another one of those comics I drew while at a comic convention table, probably at Long Beach Comic Con last year, and then finished up months later. As made evident in the past, I have a love-hate relationship with exhibiting at comic book conventions (and other similar events). A big part of the “hate” side is attending these cons as a publisher, versus as an artist. That’s probably why I have no events booked for this year. I’m trying to slowly morph back from “publisher” to “creator,” and I guess making comics like this helps that along? Kinda?

Basically, the next time you see me behind a table at a comic convention, it’ll be because I have a new book of my own work to hawk. Possibly including a collection of these strips. If I get around to making more of them.

This is basically an adaptation of a Twitter thread I posted while reading Glen Weldon’s  Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. It’s a little more serious than what I usually post here, but probably compared to a few strips in particular, it ain’t that bad.

Promise, the next strip will get us back to semi-ludicrousness.

This is one of those comics I started drawing a while ago–like, possibly a few years ago–and came back to finish recently. It was probably conceived when I was a full-time freelancer/entrepreneur, at a point when there was really no such thing as a day off, even if I felt like death.

The irony is, my current day job is so intense that even though I HAVE paid “sick days” available, I can’t really even take them when I’m sick. Go figure.

This is all I’ve got, folks. I had to somehow work out some of my feelings about this pretty awful year, and, well, this barely scratches the surface.

The thing is, personally, this has been a pretty good year for me. Work’s good, marriage is solid, house is finally together, band broke up but we put on terrific shows before that happened, I’m not in a total financial hole. We’re all relatively healthy and free of major tragedy.

But everything outside that bubble feels kinda off, and it’s not just 2016. It’s the specter of 2017 looming ahead. The uncertainty. I dunno. So, yeah, I dashed off this comic unscripted and roughly rendered in response. Again, it’s all I can do.

I don’t know if it’s this way for anyone else, but for me, buying and listening to music just isn’t the same as it used to be. It used to be more like a ritual, an immersive experience. Whether it was holing up in my bedroom (as pictured) with headphones and accompanying booklet or wearing out the tape in the cassette as I drove around, listening to both sides over and over for days or weeks, buying a new (whether actually new or just new to me) album of music was much more than just an acquisition of new media. These days, it goes pretty much as shown on the right. I still don’t think I’ve heard more than one song from P.O.S.’s latest album, We Don’t Even Live Here, despite buying it last fall. And I love P.O.S. But, for the most part, music serves merely as a backdrop for work or a run or in rare instances a commute (that’s what NPR is for, right?), whereas in younger years, it was more like the soundtrack, the score.

A lot of this has to do with the way we have changed all media from individual works to merely indistinctive “content.” We amass digital collections of stuff, with which there’s not that visceral reaction or interaction. This probably explains why I can point out iconic comic book, magazine or album covers from the 1970s, ’80s and even ’90s to an extent, but everything now just seems like a blur. Some of that is just age. Some is the reality of adult life. But the fact is, even in the early 2000s, when I was very much living an “adult” life (wife, job, 99 problems, etc.), I still interacted with music and other creative media in essentially the same way I did pre-internet. I was slow to adopt buying commercial music digitally (even though I was on the forefront of producing and selling it in the late 1990s); I didn’t even own a CD player not attached to a computer until 2001; I’ve never owned an iPod or dedicated digital music player save for the Shuffle I took from Sara a few years ago to use at the gym.

But I have become an iTunes music listener/buyer (though I prefer Amazon MP3 for a variety of reasons, price and portability among them) in the last decade, and the only way for me to listen to new music purchased digitally in, say, my car is to burn it to a CD (because, yes, I have an old-school car stereo with no USB ports or audio jacks – a step up from my previous car, which still had a TAPE DECK). And because I primarily only drive to commute, I mostly listen to NPR in the car, because that’s also the only time I have in my life to get caught up on news and world events. It’s why I rarely know what’s going on in the world of pop culture, my own city, or anything else not covered on Morning Edition or Here & Now.

However, I think I’ve digressed enough. Besides, I have work to do. It’s the only way I get to hear my music, don’t you know?

This is one of those instances where the concept for a comic seemed much funnier in my head than the final product.

HOWEVER, this was actually inspired by a real story I heard on, um, The Story, about a woman whose recently passed husband was driven to become a firefighter (and eventually fire chief) because his family’s home was destroyed by fire when he was a child. So, in my head, this guy was like Batman, only fighting fires, not criminals.

So, this one’s in memory of Freddy Gerik, and, by extension, the victims of the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, where he lived.

So … I just got back from Emerald City Comicon. Well, OK, technically, I got back to Las Vegas on Sunday night, but I’m still playing catch-up from being up in Seattle all weekend. Every time I do a comic convention — which is usually at least four times a year — I go through the same cycle of emotional highs and lows. This comic oversimplifies it, because as much despair as I feel by the end of the show, I also feel incredibly inspired to do more cool stuff with comics.

It just so happened that at this weekend’s show, I was seated next to a quasi-popular mainstream comic artist, who had a short queue of people waiting all weekend for free sketches.* Some of them blocked half my table for hours at a time, leading me to definitely have a few “why am I even here?” moments. But outside of that, the show was a lot of fun (a little too much on Saturday night) and I got more of my dumb comics into the world. One of these days, maybe I’ll have enough of THESE dumb comics to actually put in a book. But at the rate I update this webcomic, that will probably take another five years.

However, while at my table in Artist Alley, I DID draw THIS comic, so there you go.

This scene pretty much plays out about five times a day. If only I could teach the cat to draw backgrounds or something, she’d be really helpful.

And it literally just happened again while typing the last sentence: