Although my pre­vi­ous post went through all the dry facts of our Web­comics Week­end expe­ri­ence—what we did, who we saw, where we wan­dered—I’d like to take a moment to make a quick per­sonal reflec­tion regard­ing the week­end. If you’d rather not wit­ness my some­what grace­less thought-​dump, feel free to skip this post. It is the inter­net, after all: you don’t have to read it.

I can’t speak for John, but ever since I got back on Monday, I’ve found it very dif­fi­cult to con­cen­trate. This is prob­lem­atic, as I have a thesis I should be work­ing on; how­ever, it is also ener­giz­ing and excit­ing. It goes like this: there are a lot of really tal­ented people out there making web­comics. As a pre­tender to these ranks, this fact is very hum­bling. It’s incred­i­bly dis­tress­ing to look at top-​notch crafts­man­ship and real­ize to one­self, “Ah crap. I need to be this good.” It’s also kind of annoy­ing, since now it means I’m haunted by feel­ings of creep­ing inad­e­quacy every I see some­thing I really like. The trick, as I under­stand it, is to main­tain the humil­ity but excise the inad­e­quacy, a maneu­ver akin to how a sur­geon might extract some dis­eased and inflamed bulb from their patient’s swollen gut.

Strained metaphors aside, the expe­ri­ence left me with a new­found desire to get involved with the web­comics com­mu­nity, to try and con­tribute my meager abil­i­ties to what­ever the hell it is that’s already going on. Con­cur­rently, I’ve got school (and the afore­men­tioned thesis) (and an impend­ing job search) to cope with. It’ll be a bit of a bal­anc­ing act, but with some luck it’ll get easier in the coming months.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to express my deep plea­sure at being involved in this bur­geon­ing¹ com­mu­nity, even if only tan­gen­tially as a non-​artist for a teeny-​tiny web­comic in this little corner of the inter­net. And to all you folks who some­how man­aged to stum­ble across our little corner: thank you kindly for reading.

¹Because to say “nascent” kinda just seems con­de­scend­ing at this point.

The call came late in the after­noon. I soaked in the sun’s warm­ing rays and their glow­ing warm­ing glow, lazing in my ham­mock on the porch. My cell’s tit­ter­ing chirps almost went unnoticed.

“John! Are you there? Oh my good­ness, John, if you’re—” Some gar­bling static cut his pleas, but the voice sounded familiar.

“Greg?” I asked, lift­ing my sunglasses.

“Come in, John! Do you copy?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, sure. What’s up?”

“My thesis, John, it’s—” A horrid crunch­ing of metal against metal came from the ear­piece. “I don’t know what hap­pened, but it’s out of con­trol! I may not survive!!”

Scratch­ing myself, I sighed. “Well …… do you …… want me to write some­thing? For Monday?”

“John, tell my family I’m—”

Con­nec­tion lost.

So since Greg appar­ently can’t handle it—”it” being some unde­fined entity which is prob­a­bly really easy to handle, I mean come on—I’m stuck doing his job. The nerve! Hasn’t answered one of my calls. Not a one. Well I hope he drops dead. Yeah, I said it!

I am actu­ally being face­tious. Click to read more…