Hey folks! Just the other day, I was chat­ting with my esteemed col­league Mr. Poulos. “Look!” I said. “Look, I drew something!”

“That’s nice, dear,” he said with dis­in­ter­ested dead­ness. “Why don’t you go show your friends?”

“You mean like on the Chronil­log­i­cal blog?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.”

I don’t know if this will become a reg­u­lar fea­ture. It might! This piece o’ fanart could’ve been time­lier, but the moral is simple: read Octo­pus Pie—read and enjoy. Then share and enjoy. And read some more. This comes from a recent(-ish) strip that has already spawned its own web­site, even!

They might say I drew the wrong panel.

They might be jerks. (Giant jerks! Per­haps jerk­ish giants.)

[For infor­ma­tion on the cur­rent status of the comic, please click here. Oth­er­wise, keep reading!]

Let’s start strong, won’t we? Of the pic­tures that I can find and dis­trib­ute in elec­tronic form, this is the most fin­ished. I asked myself one night, “John, does the world have enough people shaped like candy apples? Does it, now?” The answer was appar­ently “no”!

High-​tech living just isn’t as excit­ing as it used to be. Get your standin’ shoes ready for the day when Hall Wait­ing becomes a favorite pas­time. (The phrase “national pastime” would fool­ishly archaic in this con­text, since we will of course have no need for the nation-​state in the future. Star Trek doesn’t lie—nearly two decades have passed and I’m still reel­ing from the Eugen­ics Wars.)

Here it is! The End of the Week Sketch Dump. Thanks for stick­ing with us through these tough times, every­one. Our homp-​jompies wouldn’t be nearly as shib­bing with­out you.

First on the sketchpile—women play sports. It’s true! No ref­er­ence mate­r­ial was used in the making of this image, so who knows what she’s up to. There­fore, by default: Mur­der­ball. (I’d say Calv­in­ball, but, you know … no mask.)

More scrib­blins await after the cut!

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…

Greg had been bug­ging me to read up on Tom Siddell’s Gun­nerkrigg Court for some time before I finally decided to sit down and dip into a chap­ter or two. Fel­lows, I am decid­edly better for having dipped and sub­se­quently immersed, though to what degree I am better for having done so I’m not going to tell you. A decided degree, at any rate.

A hand­ful of adjec­tives come to mind when trying to describe the series, and they are all prob­a­bly inac­cu­rate.² I do remem­ber at one point think­ing, “I bet Neil Gaiman would get a kick out of this.” Soon after, I found out that such is indeed the case! So if you like the things that Neil Gaiman likes, all the better, but I still encour­age you read Siddell’s work³ regard­less of your feel­ings for Mr. Sand­man.⁴ Come on, mon­sters and robots—what’s not to like?

There is a Ver­i­ta­ble Cast of Char­ac­ters⁵, but I decided to draw only one of them. I am a fan of Kat the Buildy-​Scientist.

Get read­ing! And come back tomor­row, also. There will be a comic to read.

—
¹ There are other web­comics I have been mean­ing to write about as well, but there are so many of them! You prob­a­bly already know this.

² Having writ­ten down and sum­mar­ily deleted this hand­ful, I will say simply that it is “charming”^2.5—pretty much every­thing about it—and that you are seri­ously better off choos­ing a chap­ter that looks appeal­ing if you’re not ready to con­quer an Archive. I am per­son­ally a fan of this chap­ter because it fea­tures a ridicu­lous person.

^2.5 Some people say say “charming” with a bit of con­de­s­cen­tion, but I am not doing that! Please do not read it that way.

³ Online or in print. Dude’s sell­ing books!

⁴ I rec­og­nize that “Mr. Sandman” is a cutesy nick­name (face­tiously cutesy?), but I think I will keep it where it is.

⁵ Cutesy cap­i­tal­iza­tion, now! I might write more like a normal person next time.