Take us for cola...

Today's new comic over at Let's Be Friends Again is based on an actual conversation between Curt and I that really stuck with me. I then told Curt we should make it into a comic. Such is the nature of the collaboration. The portions featuring crying, pleading, and more crying have, of course, been omitted so as to keep things as light as a summer's breeze around these parts.

Rob Liefeld was not the original funeral portrait artist, and even though making fun of Rob is like shooting apples in a barrel (full of apples), it was classier than Curt's original joke.
The original joke was probably funnier, but we are nothing if not classy.

The part of today's comic that features me requesting something of Curt is 100% true as it really is something I made Curt promise me.
Seeing how he's going to handle things though, perhaps I should try to institute some further stipulations.

It's the right word..

YES!

When I see..

Wired brings us Six Real Gadgets Minority Report Predicted Correctly.
What do you mean you don't remember that scene with the cardboard robots?

Bring me a higher love..

I'm sorry.
I know this is stupid, but I had to make it after I saw that old guy in Wal-Mart wearing a "Bach" sweatshirt.
I had to do it.

Part of the masterplan..

Lest anyone try to tell you otherwise, this is a TERRIBLE idea.
These were being eaten in my office, and people were throwing up.
Who's ready for lunch, yeah?

We've been on the run..

It ain't easy..

Although according to website statistics that Curt has shown me today, I don't even need to tell anyone, I'd still like to implore all of you to come join us over at Let's Be Friends Again.
We update with new comics on Tuesdays and Thursdays.. you know, the days you're not visiting Penny Arcade, and we generally have other content on non-comic days.
This week's comics were our vaguely related to the election comics, and they represent what I believe to be the best work of my comics career so far.
I've already made the "that's not saying much" joke, so no need for anyone else to chime in with that.
You can go back and read our entire original mini-comic that we produced for MOCCA 2008 that involves barbarians, monsters, shouting, naked anime people (so tasteful), cuss words, and Evan Dorkin.

Even though apparently things are taking off pretty swimmingly, you can still get in on the ground floor now and then you can tell people you were into "LBFA" (that's what you'll call it because you're so hip) back when it was good.
You can be the cool friend that told all your not as cool friends about it.
Everyone will be so jealous of how cool you are.
You're so cool.

No bed of roses, no pleasure cruise..

Wired brings us Postapocalypse Now!

Moments like this never last..

The first teaser trailer for the next sure to be wonderful Pixar movie Up has just been released!

You no wan' test me champion sound..

If Barack Obama being elected president Tuesday wasn't enough proof for you that dreams can come true, I would like to present you with this..



Boner-Man is getting his very own DC Universe Classics figure!

When you betray me..

Harpoon Man : The only dude who wields a big-ass harpoon.. and knows how to use it.
Like to learn more?

Have you ever noticed...

This is the funniest thing I've seen on SNL in a very long time.
This may be my favorite digital sketch ever.
I have no idea why it's so funny to me, but I've watched or listened to this probably 15 times today.

A murderous distraction..

Would you see this?
I mean, it's not happening, this is just some decent Photoshoppery, but would you buy her as Wonder Woman?

I thought I knew you..

This guy?
This is the guy.
Go watch the trailer.

Champion of the sun..

Someone has come to my blog by Googling the phrase "every single thing in the solar system".

This is awesome to me.

You know what else is awesome?


JEMMA!
Artist extraordinaire and SuperFriend, Jemma Salume drew this for me for my birthday.
If you're having a hard time even processing all of the awesome that's taking place, what you are seeing is me (chrishaley) riding on the back of a dragon in my rock 'n roll star-powered sparkle pants with my best friends Scott Pilgrim and All Star Superman after having just defeated God in a game of checkers.

I am certainly one of the luckiest people around to have friends like this.
Friends who are able to fully grasp my awesomeness.
Jemma is the best.

A door left open..

In an effort to get back to my usual fare around these parts just a little, I will tell you that I cannot wait to see this movie.
I think I even want to make the 3 hour drive to see it in IMAX.
Trailers here and here.

If you talk..

Could someone please get me this for Christmas?

UPDATE : A bargain has been struck already, so feel free to disregard this request. As much as I like it, I don't need more than one copy of this print.

We are and always will be the United States of America.

That guy is my president.

It's like some kind of amazing dream come true that I never even dared to dream.

He is our new president!

!!!

It's like.. I'm just so fucking proud.
So proud to be alive in what there is now no question, is the greatest nation in the world.

It keeps making me cry, but I assure you, I am happier than I have been in a very, very long time.
And more importantly, I am happy in a way I don't know if I've ever even been before last night.


That plaque is in my hometown.
"They said one to another,
Behold, here cometh the dreamer...
Let us slay him...
and we shall see what will become of his dreams"

This is not about black or white or Democrat or Republican.
This is about the power of hope and the ability of dreams to unify us, to strengthen us, and to lift us up and make us believe that we can strive for something more.
Something better.

Can we make this the United States of America again?
Can we make this a better world for ourselves and for our children?
Can we be the light in the night that never tires and knows no fear?
Can each and every one of us stand up and help fight the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way?

YES! WE! CAN!

I'm going to lay down in the sun..

If you don't already have Sloan's album, "Never Hear the End Of It", you can get it from their label's website for 2 more days for only $5.

Do they want tea?

Make me feel better..

I found this picture last night after I'd already equated Obama's win to the part in The Dark Knight where Batman says, "..sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded."

This is what I believe.

This seemed like an important day to post this.

I know this is going to seem silly to some of you and like too much information for others, so bear with me. I'm not trying to tell you what to do or how to think, I'm just telling you about myself.

Whether you've known it or noticed or not, I'll tell you that I've been going through some "stuff" lately.
And to be honest, there are times when it seems that my entire life has just been a series of "going through some stuff" moments.
The details aren't really important, and the full extent of these "moments" are unknown to even those closest to me.
There have been times when these "moments", or what amounts to the "contents" of my life, have left me with a kind of sadness that I would not wish on anyone.

But..

I have always found my way out of those times, and I am very thankful for that.

More than anything else, there has been one constant in my life, that, in my expert opinion (as I am the world's foremost expert on myself), has instilled in me an unshakable belief that no matter how dark it is or how bad things seem, there is always a way.
That there is always hope.

For my 28 years, that constant has been Superman.

I've tried, ultimately in vain, for years and years to explain what it all means to me. Not just what the character or idea of Superman means, but what he represents to me.

It hasn't been until these last few months that I've really started to understand what I'd previously only felt.
This is due in large part to the work and words of the first person I've ever heard who I feel like understands exactly where I've been coming from all these years.

I've basically pulled the most personally important (to me) quotes from Grant Morrison's recent interviews with Newsarama and strung them together in the way that I feel my brain has retained and latched onto them. (All bold emphasis is mine, not necessarily Grant's.)
I hope you'll take the few minutes to read it.
Last time for a while, I promise..



I see Superman in this series as an Enlightenment figure, a Renaissance idea of the ideal man, perfect in mind, body and intention.

...if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine ? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let’s face it.

So we can choose to be the astronaut or the gangster. The superhero or the super villain. The angel or the devil. It’s entirely up to us, particularly in the privileged West, how we choose to imagine ourselves and conduct our lives.

My own work has been an ongoing attempt to repeat the magic word over and over until we all become the kind of superheroes we’d all like to be.



It’s a pretty high–level attempt by some smart people to do the Superman concept some justice, is all I can say. It’s intended to work as a set of sci–fi fables that can be read by children and adults alike. I’d like to think you can go to it if you’re feeling suicidal, if you miss your dad, if you’ve had to take care of a difficult, ailing relative, if you’ve ever lost control and needed a good friend to put you straight, if you love your pets, if you wish your partner could see the real you...All Star is about how Superman deals with all of that.

In today’s world, in today’s media climate designed to foster the fear our leaders like us to feel because it makes us easier to push around. In a world where limp, wimpy men are forced to talk tough and act ‘badass’ even though we all know they’re shitting it inside. In a world where the measure of our moral strength has come to lie in the extremity of the images we’re able to look at and stomach. In a world, I’m reliably told, that’s going to the dogs, the real mischief, the real punk rock rebellion, is a snarling, ‘fuck you’ positivity and optimism. Violent optimism in the face of all evidence to the contrary is the Alpha form of outrage these days.

I have a desire not to see my culture and my fellow human beings fall helplessly into step with a middle class media narrative that promises only planetary catastrophe, as engineered by an intrinsically evil and corrupt species which, in fact, deserves everything it gets.

Is this relentless, downbeat insistence that the future has been cancelled really the best we can come up with? Are we so fucked up we get off on terrifying our children? It’s not funny or ironic anymore and that’s why we wrote All Star Superman the way we did.

What I hope is that people take from it the unlikelihood that a piece of paper, with little ink drawings of figures, with little written words, can make you cry, can make your heart soar, can make you scared, sad, or thrilled.

That piece of paper is inert material, the corpse of some tree, pulped and poured, then given new meaning and new life when the real hours and real emotions that the writer and the artist, the colourist, the letter the editor translated onto the physical page, meet with the real hours and emotions of a reader, of all readers at once, across time, generations and distance.

And think about how that experience, the simple experience of interacting with a paper comic book, along with hundreds of thousands of others across time and space, is an actual doorway onto the beating heart of the imminent, timeless world of “Myth” as defined above. Not just a drawing of it but an actual doorway into timelessness and the immortal world where we are all one together.



My grief over the loss of my dad can be Superman’s grief, can trigger your own grief, for your own dad, for all our dads. The timeless grief that’s felt by Muslims and Christians and Agnostics alike. My personal moments of great and romantic love, untainted by the everyday, can become Superman’s and may resonate with your own experience of these simple human feelings.

In the one Mythic moment we’re all united, kissing our Lover for the First time, the Last time, the Only time, honouring our dear Dad under a blood red sky, against a darkening backdrop, with Mum telling us it’ll all be okay in the end.

This is what I believe in.
And that's why I voted for Barack Obama.
Because I believe in Superman, and because I believe in him..
I believe in myself.
I believe in hope.
I believe that we can be the people we've been waiting for.
I believe that if we're willing to, that every one of us can make a difference.

Welcomed with open arms..

Speaking of presidents and elections and whatnot and such and such as that, it is my most sincere hope that you have been following the online publication of Curt and I's original tiny comic, Let's Be Friends Again over at our website, http://letsbefriendsagain.com/, as it was a prelude to today's full launch of Let's Be Friends Again in all-new,all-original webcomic form.

With out first comic falling on Election Day, we even went so far as to make today's comic about the election!

Please come join in the fun with us.. and by join in, I mean, help us get Penny Arcade rich.

That's what makes us...

Pretty much exactly how I felt.

But if it's not so bright..

I drew this for my friend Liz.
The lines the two animals are saying are lines I recalled from songs on a mix cd she made me for my birthday. It was great.
I have no idea why I drew what I drew, but I knew I wanted to use those two lines.

Simpsons characters on the election..

Your disguises and your tricks..

We've been having horrible dreams..

If anyone knows where I could get complete sets of these comics (which from the looks of them appear to be the greatest comics of all time that don't involve Superman), tell me immediately.

We are the end..

I ask you now and definitively :
Who is the greatest monster of them all and why?

You're gonna get yer blood sucked out..

Now that all of the pictures have been taken, I had to take it off.

Set in his ways..

Teenage monster, sole survivor..

The fact that I already own a DS Lite makes Nintendo releasing this the cruelest thing they have ever done.

Wait til you see..

As the spirit of Halloween involves dressing up, I thought I'd post this caricature of John McCain as Rambo a guy I work with paid me to draw.
That's right, paid.
I'm now a professional political cartoonist as well as being a professional bad dude.

Why don't you take care of me..

Don't wanna see that monster no more..

Is Dylan a master of mixtapery?



Go check out his Halloween release, Spooky Scary.
Ghost Rider wouldn't lie to you.
And neither would I, so believe me when I tell you it is awesome.

And it's too tense..

I seriously cannot wait for this show!
More here.

What I'm trying to say..

I immersed myself in Superman and I tried to find in all of these very diverse approaches the essential "Superman–ness" that powered the engine. I then extracted, purified and refined that essence and drained it into All Star's tank, recreating characters as my own dream versions, without the baggage of strict continuity.

In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We're all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super–pets, our own "Bottle Cities" that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.

I felt I'd really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That "S" is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.

Batman is obviously much cooler, but that's because he's a very energetic and adolescent fantasy character: a handsome billionaire playboy in black leather with a butler at this beck and call, better cars and gadgetry than James Bond, a horde of fetish femme fatales baying around his heels and no boss. That guy's Superman day and night.

Superman grew up baling hay on a farm. He goes to work, for a boss, in an office. He pines after a hard–working gal. Only when he tears off his shirt does that heroic, ideal inner self come to life. That's actually a much more adult fantasy than the one Batman's peddling but it also makes Superman a little harder to sell. He's much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman.

He's Everyman operating on a sci–fi Paul Bunyan scale. His worries and emotional problems are the same as ours... except that when he falls out with his girlfriend, the world trembles. - Grant Morrison via Newsarama

My reason for sharing this with all of you is that I feel like Grant Morrison is not only giving you an excellent explanation of why Superman is the best and greatest superhero, but also because he's bringing up the themes that I was trying to come to terms with and expound upon in my Responsible Adult = Secret Identity post back in July.

It is my belief that if something I was thinking on my own is lining up with something Grant Morrison thinks, then I am doing something intrinsically right in the universe.

Take him home..

I got an email from an older relative yesterday titled (I kid you not) "What are cookies?"

It turns out that the computer had told her something about "enabling cookies" and thus this was a computer question and not a food question, but I sat there for a moment just staring at the screen, reading and re-reading the title.
Frightened to open it for fear that upon reading it I would learn that she had lost her mind.

The little "dance" of this, complete with the train of logic I started following for her having lost her mind is now humorous to me.

Man, freeze..

Final Crisis #4 tomorrow!

Why don'tcha help me..

I sketched this up quite a while ago and then April and I colored it and it's just been sitting, collecting digital dust in a folder ever since.
I'm sorry, Batman.

Don't you want me..

With the loss of All-Star Superman last month and Final Crisis ending in January, I felt like there might never be another sunrise, but now I know, that like Superman has taught me, there is always hope..



This is already my new favorite comic.

European markets plunging..

Not to be a dick, Alex Ross, but what the hell am I looking at here exactly?

You don't have to be alone..

Joshua Middleton delivers another incredible Supergirl cover.. only this one features Superwoman.
Via Newsarama.