20100121 (14) – Replaced the coffee cup logo with the DCR logo.

20100131 (3) – Rewritten. As with some of the sparser pages, the existing type was cannibalized into the new type. Only one piece of actual dialogue change on this page – I decided to leave the “tails” in the last panel alone. Part of that’s being lazy, part of that’s due to the fact that my upstairs neighbor – a long standing thorn in my side, with all the grace and elan of a pregnant herd of hippos – seems to be either moving out or being robbed. In either event, his God Damned Dog has been barking for the last fifteen minutes straight. This has made concentration supremely difficult – and as such, I’ve decided that rather than play video games, I’ll try to “work accordingly.”

While evidence points strongly to a move-out (there’s a minivan out front that is slowly filling up with stuff, paced against the Pregnant Hippo Ballet upstairs), I’m hesitant to celebrate. While the possibility of nights without the neighbor’s dog barking and whining from roughly 8pm to whenever he bothers to come home is tantalizing, while the hope of not being concussively knocked around by irregular doses of gangster rap is exciting… and while I’ll probably have a couple of weeks of Quiet (if not more) before a replacement shows up, well… my lease is up at the end of February. I might have to move myself soon, though I hope to remain here for at least a few more months. And there’s always the possibility that this guy’s replacement could be just as obnoxious, if not more so.

So while today is probably going to be a scratch – at least until the van is loaded and they run off to wherever and the dog eventually calms down and I can meditate on a photoshop document without YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP preventing anything that resembles concentration… it looks like this coming week will be Mercifully Quiet. Which in context explains why my first weekend in this apartment was Torture By Stereo – if this guy took residence in February, he had February and the first couple of weeks of March to get settled in and to be Loud without complaint.

Am I whining? Probably. Does an apartment without nearby dogs (here), stereos, nightclubs, front door pissers, pot smokers or road crews (south side) exist in this town? Almost certainly. Can I afford it? Not at the moment. What I can tell you for a fact is that the majority of the mental “heavy lifting” done during the High Production Period of ATC was done between roughly midnight and six in the morning – a period in which people – and their God Damned Dogs – are notoriously quiet. The last year and a half or so, I’ve been required to exist on Normal People Time and as such, I’ve lost contact with that Quiet Space in which large amounts of work is accomplished. Production has suffered, mental health has suffered, and as such the prospect of even a brief respite (punctuated by the landlord’s maintenance crew straightening up the upstairs) is met with bridled enthusiasm.

20101225 – Original page metadata:

More deviations from the strip form – the fridge has lost the Peter Weller bits. Other bits and pieces other people own the copyrights to are also gone. Better safe than sued, or something.

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2008.04.19 – Cropped and tweaked, with the biggest change being Whitehouse’s glasses in panel five.

20101225 – Original strip metadata:

Strip 034, 20051020 –

SAFE! AS! COFFEE!!

Strip 035, 20051021 –

[ It’s Tuesday. You’ve got mad crazy time to think up something. ] # Or not.

Funny thing about working ahead is that I almost always wind up getting very little else done during the course of the week. Currently catching up on gin and David Cronenberg.

Strip 036, 20051024 –

There was originally foley to go with the third panel, but it just didn’t seem to work right, so I cut it.

Strip 037, 20051025 –

I can’t imagine Skyy/Vladimir-laced Maxwell House (or Beehive-branded coffee, which is more than likely what Whitehouse is drinking) being any worse than Pepsi Kona. Fortunately the time period for Kona is 1994, so this bit of corpse-kicking is as close as many of you will ever get to it.*

I’ve had some damned shitty coffee in my time – Pepsi Kona is right near the top – but never anything cut with booze. Fortunately. I’m on post-hangover coffee as of this writing, and I think I’ll blame the Liefeldesque “anatomy” in the third panel on that as opposed to lack of reference or being too lazy or impatient to do sketchwork.

* If you’re one of The Few who actually liked the stuff, drop xeno a line. I’m sure he’ll be happy to know he’s not alone.