2015

2015-11-25

Feast of the Dead p.2


Transcript

It’s an average Saturday night on Main Street. People stroll around taking the night air, shopping, and visiting restaurants. But one group coming down the sidewalk…as they slowly approach…they’re…they’re zombies! They reach out, their mouths gaping hungrily, and the air fills with shrieks as people panic and flee.

In a restaurant, rotting arms break through a window. The couple at the table next to it run away in terror, but zombies flood in through the door. A group of them surrounds the table and with horrible, sloppy, smacking noises, devour the poor couple’s dinner. One zombie lifts a plate of spaghetti and dumps it as his open mouth. Two more hunch over a plate on the table and greedily feed. A zombie leaning in the broken window stabs a sausage with a fork.

At the counter, a dessicated corpse in a suit orders an “Extra-large…with everything…please…”. The eyes of the man behind the counter bulge with fright; he looks like he might faint. Nearby, a long-haired dead woman pours a fountain drink at her mouth, spilling half of it on her burial dress. Two zombies tear apart a pizza, and another sinks its teeth into the side of a hoagie.

Outside, the sorcerer glares at the dead as they wander around chewing hamburgers and gnawing legs from buckets of fried chicken. “This is **not** what I had in mind!” he says angrily.

But as he watches the townspeople dashing about in fear, he decides, “Well, I guess it’ll do.”

“YES!” he shouts, “RUIN THEIR DINNERTIME! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!“

Next: DESSERT OF THE DEAD (“Caaake…”)


2015-11-25

Feast of the Dead p.1


Transcript

It is night. In a cemetery, a black-robed sorcerer declares: “I will have my revenge on this town…I will bring upon them THE FEAST OF THE DEAD!”

Standing in a pentagram with candles, he chants:

Arise, O corpses long at rest!
Aid me in my vengeful quest!
Shamble forth from gravebound gloom
to bring the wretched townfolk doom!

Hands reach out from beneath the ground, and the zombified dead pull themselves from their graves and stand moaning before the sorcerer.

“We have slept so long…”

“Our hunger…is terrible…”

“You shall eat well!” cries the sorcerer. “Go into the town…and feast!” The zombies turn and shamble away as the sorcerer laughs maniacally.


2015-05-01

Text Wizard

              A          + .   
             / \       .     +
            /-  \     +  (+)  .
           /--   \     .  =  +
          /---    \      +|.  
      ——————————————————  |   
          @$ .| .$@       |   
        __$$$/-\$$$__     |   
       /---$$$$$$$   \    |   
      /---- $$$$$     \  !O   
     / ----- $$$       \(%O)  
    /  ------ $        (%%|%) 
   /    ----- :      | |%%|%| 
  |-   |----- :      |- \%|/  
  |-    \---- :      |- _\|   
  |--    \--- :      |-/  |   
  |---    \===&=======|   |   
  /--      \ /:\      \   |   
 |__________\ :       |   |   
     | ''''-- :       |   |   
     | ------ :       |   |   
  ~-~~--~--~~-~~--~-~~-~-~~--~
  ============================
   *  T E X T  W I Z A R D  *
  ============================

I don’t know why I felt compelled to make this.

2015-04-30

New digital minicomics site

Curated, non-profit comics-sharing site zco.mx (zee comics) launched this week. You can read and download minicomics and give money to their creators there, and one of those creators is me! I’ve uploaded Square Dance #6 to start with. Heidi McDonald finds zco.mx “exciting”.

I haven’t fully explored the other offerings yet, but I see a lot of good-looking stuff. I recommend Fear of Flowers by Jason Viola, Jubilee One by Joel Orff, and Graxa Gamgasher: Teen Girl Sleuth by Andrea Tsurumi.

2015-04-10

PVZF Collaborative Zine Projects talk

Here’s the talk I’m participating in at the Pioneer Valley Zine Fest tomorrow:

Managing and Sustaining Long-Term Collaborative Zine Projects:
A round table discussion about the challenges and rewards of publishing collaborative zines. Hear from old pros including Colin Tedford, who has produced a slew of collaborative comix zines around themes like “water,” “shelter,” seeds,” “woods,” and “time,” under the Trees and Hills imprint, and Victoria Law, the driving force behind Tenacious: Art and Writings by Women in Prison and others. Share your own ideas and experiences!

I’m also tabling, of course.

2015-04-10

Pioneer Valley Zine Fest

Tomorrow I’ll be at the Pioneer Valley Zine Fest in Easthampton, MA (details), workin’ the Trees & Hills table from 10 AM to 3 PM. After that I’ll be giving a talk/workshop about collective zine projects, based of course on my experience with TnH. Later, Flywheel will host some featured speakers/performers including TnH stalwart Anne Thalheimer.

PVZF is happening in conjunction with the Easthampton Book Fair, so if you like readin’ you best come on down!

2015-04-08

Debunking “Bunny Rabbits”

My mysterious animal photos receive analysis in this guest post from leading pseudocryptozoologist Bruce Fort. — Colin

Blurry photo of what might be a brown rabbit lurking at the top of a driveway

What we have here today are photographs of what Colin believed to be “bunny rabbits”, a creature that surprisingly many people believe in. For those who may not have heard of them, bunny rabbits are supposed to be like a cross between a mouse and a frog, but much bigger than either, with strange elongated ears like antennae. They have a reputation as the bane of gardeners, with a voracious appetite for vegetable crops (especially carrots, for some reason) and a virus-like rate of reproduction.

Stories about bunny rabbits have been with us from time immemorial in many places around the world. Proponents of bunny rabbit theories use this fact to bolster their claims, but of course there are plenty of old stories about things that aren’t real. Often these reflect some sort of universal experience or common societal concern. In the case of the bunny rabbit, their crop-devouring symbolizes our anxiety about the destructive whims of nature. Their rampant fecundity connects to that (tapping into the same fears of epidemic plagues that zombies do), and to our culture’s repressive attitudes toward sexuality.

But with so many stories about them, it is inevitable that some people are prepared to think they have seen bunny rabbits. These reports can be hard to debunk because there is usually little evidence to work with, but when a determination can be made it is not unusual to find that the witness has merely misidentified a groundhog.

Blurry photo of what might be two brown rabbits in a snowy driveway
Could these be bunny rabbits?

This photo is pretty typical in that regard; it is blurry enough that no one can say for sure what it shows. I can’t make any positive identification from such an image, but if I had to guess I’d say we are looking at some large snails.

Colin thought the “bunny rabbits” were foraging for birdseed in his driveway, but this is clearly incorrect; the driveway is paved with gravel. Birdseed is found in bird feeders and is not used as a paving material.

Blurry photo of a possible brown rabbit in grass near pavement; its visible eye appears to glow magenta
This creature appeared in the heart of a bustling town.

This next photo was taken on the rail trail in Northampton, MA. Again, the blurriness makes positive identification impossible, but look at the eyes in this one. There is no mention of glowing magenta eyes anywhere in global bunny rabbit lore, so clearly we are looking at something else. Most likely it’s a mischievous goblin or imp, or a secret government cyborg designed to play on people’s mistaken beliefs for some unknown reason. It could also possibly be a UFO alien or some kind of spirit.

I hope you have found this informative and interesting, and that it has helped clear up some erroneous beliefs. I’d like to thank Colin for inviting me to share my knowledge.

– Bruce Fort, pseudocryptozoologist

2015-03-12

I just noticed that John Platt included Square Dance in his list of “Five Mini-Comics Series You Like That Have Gone On For More Than Five Issues” at The Comics Reporter last July

I just learned that John Platt included Square Dance in his list of “Five Mini-Comics Series You Like That Have Gone On For More Than Five Issues” at The Comics Reporter last July (it’s the next-to-last list). Thanks, John! Those of you who’ve missed out so far can still buy copies of Square Dance #4, 5, and 6.

2015-03-11

If you love breakfast

Groo exclaims to his dog that breakfast kissed him.

If you love breakfast, it’ll love you back. (from Groo #88 by Sergio Aragonés)

Transcript

Nose to nose with his dog, Groo the Wanderer happily exclaims, “That was breakfast, Rufferto! Did you see that? I just got kissed by breakfast!“

Grinning back, Rufferto thinks, “So what are you waiting for?”


2015-02-04

Winter Depression Fashion Secret

2-panel strip

Transcript

Winter Depression Fashion Secret

A woman in a bathrobe with very messy hair and bags under her eyes looks in the bathroom mirror and sticks her tongue out in dissatisfaction.

Too blah to wash your hair?

Don a warm hat and pass your bed-head off as hat-head!

The same woman enters a cafe from a snowy outside, removing a winter hat and smiling and rolling her eyes wryly at her hair as if at to say, “Winter hats, what are you gonna do?” An attractive man smiles and waves at her.

2015-01-16

Oops

Oops, accidentally reposted a bunch of stuff to Facebook while experimenting with Twitter. Sorry about that!

2015-01-15

I have shortlinks now

I have shortlinks now! You’ll see one below this post, next to the permalink which is next to the tags. WordPress currently shows them like colintedford.com/s/3142 but you can use my short domain cted.us like cted.us/s/3142 (making WordPress use my short domain in the links requires rooting around that I don’t feel like doing now, and the plugin that makes it easy has a bug that wrongly reroutes some posts).

Why shortlinks? I want to put them on some comics so people can easily reach the web version, plus I might use them to link my silo posts back here.

2015-01-11

Redid the site header

Redid the site header:

– Shrank and bolded site title.
– Brought vertical spacing in line with rest of site.
– Adjusted horizontal spacing.
– Made header max-width same as main content area.
– Search box has new, single size. Would like to make it more elastic but it’s good enough for now.
– Put search above nav in the source file so I could fit it next to the title on small screens instead of squashing in the nav.
– Fiddled w/ search box corner radius.
– Fixed an annoying, seemingly intractable bug where the title and nav sat on different baselines in certain views; turned out the nav list items were set to display: block & float: left; changed ‘em to unfloating inline-block and *mwah!*

It could still use some tweaking but I’m really pleased with the header now. It occupies a single line even on 7″ screens; takes two on phones but looks better doing it than it did before. I eventually want to make the site title handwritten but I dread the image-sizing issues it may entail.

2015-01-05

I started using Firefox years ago because it was a better browser than Internet Explorer

I started using Firefox years ago because I liked it better than Internet Explorer, the only major browser at the time. I’ve come to further like it because it’s made by a nonprofit devoted to keeping the web open and free, against the trends of centralization and surveillance.

“Mozilla makes the only popular browser that is open source, uncompromised by commercial parentage and on the side of the individual.” — Doc Searls, “Hats Off to Mozilla” (h/t Tantek Çelik)

2015-01-04

More site updates

More site updates:

* On Comics: Fixed broken links, tidied markup, changed from double column to single w/ section links for better small-screen experience (eventually I want to have it be 2-column on larger screens again).
* Marked up my “About” footer as an h-card so machines can dig it too.
* Enlarged page titles after noticing they were same size as second-level headings.