King Sheep Productions

Hello, everyone.  I hope you all had a good weekend, and your return entry to Planet Work hasn’t been an outright crash landing.  If you’re still recovering from your orbital zero-g party zone, then I can assure you this post will contain as few capital letters as possible.  I know how they can be jarring to the eyebones, and I’m pretty sure that’s why no one uses them in texting.

So, today I’m turning my focus to the comment I received last week.

“I remember really liking your artistic commentary on previous [Coming Distractions] strips. Perhaps you could blog about your favorite webcomics, or any attention you get from muses.”

I’ll start with muses.  First, I get so much attention from muses that my only relief comes from taking large doses of caffeine.  The resulting mental white noise drowns out most of the screeching and allows me to lead a relatively normal life for most of the day.  Night time is when the drug wears off and I can’t do anything except obey their commands, and that often leads to a hard choice between being productive or getting shut-eye.  On average, it takes me 45 minutes to get to sleep.  What doesn’t help is the fact that I have class in the morning, work until late evening, and share a bed with someone who gets up at 6:30 am.  My muses don’t know what to do with me 5 days a week, but we’re working through it.  No counseling yet, but it might come to that.

Edit: Now that I’ve been laid off and have run out of coffee, my muses are basically using me as a red-headed piñata.

As for webcomics, a list of my faves (more or less) appears in the Links section of the site, but I think more can be said about why they’re there.  First of all, this is a list of comic strips, not graphic novels or dramatic comics.  I’m more of a “laughs on the outside” kind of clown who enjoys short-format.

For me, when it comes to liking a webcomic or any comic for that matter, I usually look at the art.  When Travis Charest was doing Wildcats, I was in the local comic shop every other payday to get the new one.  The writing was secondary, and that holds true to this day.  My favorite comics, in order, are Three Panel Soul, Penny Arcade, Wapsi Square and Sinfest.  Ian McConnville, artist of Three Panel Soul and MacHall is phenomenal and snagged my interest from the first time I saw his work, same with Paul Taylor of Wapsi Square.  Anyone who can make a girl with a gigantic head and hands look not only good but sexy too, well he deserves respect.  Sinfest has such delightful linework and style that it’s almost like cartoon impressionism.  Lastly, Penny Arcade.

I love PA, but it’s complicated like a soap opera love trapezoid involving a doctor switching babies at birth who then grow up to fall in love, but their parents tell them they’re related just so they can have revenge on the doctor who plotted the romance from the beginning as a way to vicariously fulfill his own desires for their parents.  Crazy.  Paragon of style and artistic merit it is not, but it is incredibly funny pictures drawn with a tenacity and mirth that is unmatched in comics today.  But see, even that is unfair because it makes it sound like Mike Krahulik is a hack or simpleton who merely stumbled into success.  When you think about most artists, they spend time refining their work and their technique because they want it to look pretty for the masses.  But for a true cartoonist, the value of the artwork they create is determined by how much it makes you laugh, and Penny Arcade does that three times a week.  The writing’s pretty good too.

I’d like to keep going, but it’s already Wednesday which makes me two days late.  The authoritarian part of my chorus is doing this right now:

Maurice says, "Time and tide wait for no man!"

So, I’ll catch you all next week!

Getting the flock out.

-Major Sheep