Evens are Odds: 2014

I realized this year, with the excited realization on Halloween that Christmas stuff would start happening, that I actually secretly like the prolonging side effect commercialism has had on the holiday season, and frankly, I'M NOT AFRAID TO ADMIT IT!

CPP Drive Edition

MARK: "How the hell did we get ourselves locked in a bad guy's boot?" TEDDY: "Um... No comment..." MARK: "Here, you're closer: Kick out the tail light--that's what they say you're supposed to do in these situations, right?" TEDDY: "What? Just destroy it? That's like a $180 part! Hard to find on this model too... Seems a bit needless really..." MARK: "Um...Priorities much? Perhaps you're forgetting the whole BAD GUY part of this equation: I don't think we need to be especially concerned w/ their stuff..." TEDDY: "Yeah, but that's hardly the car's fault, is it? It didn't do anything! Don't listen to the mean man baby. He didn't mean it..." MARK: "..." TEDDY: "Here, just give us a minute, I'll dismantle it properly... I don't suppose you have access to a credit card we could sacrifice for these screws?.. Oh, hold up, this seems a thick paint chip, ...might do in a pinch..."

See, Bad Guys, this is why you never want to actually restrain abductees in your boot: It pretty much necessitates things getting broken in the inevitable escape attempt, and that's clearly no good for anyone....

Hi Tech

This is a pure, unabridged Dad-Joke from my own father the other day; they don't get much fresher than that!

Branching Out

I honestly have no idea how a "street style, anything goes, freestyle design competition" would work, but I like to think that we live in a world where the winning proposal would have swimming-pool-corridors...

MIMAL

After free-sketching the entire continental US last week, I've got a coupla these geography jokes lined up, so I'll try to space 'em out a bit for y'all...

Clockwork

*Pock! Pock! Pock! Pock! Pock, Pock! Po-Po-Pock!*
*pad pad pad pad pad*
*Pock! Pock! Pock! Pock! Pock, Pock! Po-Po-Pock!*
*pad pad pad pad...*

*Grooaan. 'Is it 5:00 already?'

As a general rule, I try not to base my characters too literally in reality, but in this case I have to make an exception. Internet, meet Furrgus, my parents' deaf, kinda-legitimately-mentally-deficient, extroverted-in-a-needy-canine-way, people-food-loving, rescue cat. His skills start and end at the ability to pick up and carry a ping pong ball in his mouth and the mastery of an audible full-bodied putty flop. I cannot confirm whether he plays this game when I'm not home, but I do know he literally and reliably only ever plays it at 5:00 in morning, pretty nearly on the dot.

Jet Lag

After four and a half years of architecture school, my circadian rhythms work fine; they're just set to cycle on 36 hour days...

Trains

*carriage labeled 'Hammock Car'* How is this not a thing?

My tailbone wants to know after that red-eye on Monday.
Seriously Amtrak, you're just so close on this one!..

"Polish"

Though, to be fair, it's his own fault: Everyone know's you paint the work boots the day before the event...

Effort

EFFORT

So I really felt the need to come up with some original, sleep-deprived crit joke to help me cope, but all I could think of was that stupid fake "painted eyes" gag

So pretty much when I draw during crit, it's to keep me awake: Generally its pretty effective, but I recon I hit a new low today when I jerked awake, pencil in hand, and realized the background characters on the left were somewhat darker than I was originally intending... #sleepshading...

Expectation

I think I you're honest with yourself, you'll admit this was bound to happen sooner or later...

I think what this comic revealed, more than anything else, is that I really have no concept of the logistics of a fruit-hat...

Bandwagon

I'd say this is pretty definitive proof America has no clue what gluten actually is...

I'm no expert, but gluten is basically the stuff in flour that holds stuff together, so a good general rule of thumb is if you're drinking it, and its not gravy, its probably OK on the GF front...

Litigious

Again America: Nice things, we can't have them; this is why.

Ferrying

hmm... Somehow this feels a lot less macho than that riddle w/ all the wolves & sheep...

Though, I suppose to be completely fair, it's hard to get much more macho than sitting alone with a wolf in a boat that's so small it literally can't even take the addition of a cabbage without sinking...

Socially Acceptable

I think as a society, we can agree;

We can totally do better...

Restraint

I will not eat the random street hamburger. I will not eat the random street hamburger. I will not eat the random street hamburger. I will not...

Walked past this tempting beauty all day yesterday: I'm ashamed to admit how difficult it was to resist by the time I finally left studio at 5:00 this morning...

Motherhood

MAC GIRL: "Oh and here's your access code" ALLISON: "Access code?" MAC GIRL: "To the alternate dimension things get lost to. Science can't entirely explain it, but occasionally wormholes open and transport objects there; There does seem to be a certain correlation between their appearance and when men in particular go looking for something." "As a mother you can now access it."

As I draw this the clutter of my desk is scattered across five others, so I can say with some certainty that my masking tape is not, in fact, among it. Also, why is it that when mothers find something that's been lost, it's inevitably glaringly centered on the surface you've been diligently scouring for the past half hour, yet on those rare occasions you do find some success on your own, its only after army crawling down the entire studio row twice, and even then its not the roll you were immediately looking for, but one you lost two months ago?..

Symbiotic

If architect's designed buildings w/out engineers - *collapsed rubble* ~ If engineers designed buildings w/out achitects - "So we forgot to include any windows... or doors..."

'The good news is it's damn near indestructible, the bad news is there're 47 workers trapped inside...'

Monastic

Don't worry, there's no obscure joke here; its just a silly image that was put into my head today that was too good not to draw up

Blocks

Inspiration

ALLISON: "There you are. You doing a comic up here?" TEDDY: "Eh. Sort of. I feel like drawing something, but I'm not really in the mood to develop a joke or story arc right now." ALLISON: "So? Why don't you just draw one. Sounds like that's what you want to do." TEDDY: "What, without a plot or anything? Isn't that, like, an abuse of the convention, to just use the comic as a hapless vent for errant creativity? Wouldn't that be kinda cheating my readers?" ALLISON: "Not if you draw a pretty enough picture."

The beauty of writing a web comic, is you can get away with any half-baked notion if you pass it off as cutesy romantic stuff!..

Perception

This is the hangovercure someone needs to invent *depicts "life volume" control turning down harshly rendered panel to softly rendered panel*

It occurred to me in writing this that while it may not, for example, be possible to "turn down" the pointyness of your tables and plants as such, one could certainly hypothesis a device which would intercept the sensory signals in your brain, and just sort of mute them a little... Until I realized I'd just invented drugs, got super sketched out, and reverted back to my traditional "Ginger Ale" solution...

Cliché

"Hey babe, did it hurt?" ~ "...in that horrible pang of realization when you thought I was actually going to use that pick up line?"

Nailed Mac Girl's face in the last panel

Carbon

Your mother is so egocentric, she thinks the whole universe revolves around her because she's special, when really it's BECAUSE SHE HAS SO MUCH MASS!!! hey-oh!

"Advancements"

#when someone is trying to snapchat you when you're in successful stages of undress and you have to figure out how much clothing you actually have to put on to be able to decently reply

Actually handy that I drew this one as it serves a nice disclaimer: If ever I take (sadly my usual) six hours to snap you back, don't take offense, in all probability, it just means I'm largely naked, and keep missing the "next" episode to fish a shirt out of the laundry...

Inverse

line graph representing positive correlation between "percentage of people on campus you assume are freshmen" and "what you are" increasing from "freshman" to "senior"

Freshmen

this is what happens when you return to a college town for the start of the school year after several consecutive fall semesters studying off campus * "senior" with several items behind long line of "freshmen" with overflowing carts

Seriously, how can there even be this many freshmen? Like, where do they all go after the first week?

Conceding

TEDDY: "So you know how I'm, like, objectively bad at conversing? Well I wrote an app that tracks how I insert myself into conversations so I can start to narrow in on specific areas for improvement. Was just about to check out my first batch of results..." ~ 47% "1.) Actually, they tested that on Mythbusters and..." "2.) Oh, I'm sorry, were you talking to me?" "3.)We're you going to finish that?" ~ TEDDY "I'm beyond hope, just go on without me."

The awkward moment when it takes you half an hour to realize that you're actively watching MythBusters as you draw this comic...

Mranding

One of the worst things about growing up in a house of girls is the selection of options you're left with when the androgynously ambiguous shampoo runs out... Also I really want "mranding" to be an actual thing now...

"Arsave" Pop-Up Desk

One Friday morning (amidst some blue-spinning-wheel-of-death-or-another), I read a piece on the company blog on standing workstations and the various implications and health factors they had. The over-simplified up shot was that, while its pretty obviously not super great for human beings to sit on their butts 8 (-14, seeing as we're architects...) hours a day, the ideal situation would be the one affording flexibility to variously stand or sit throughout the day. Naturally, by lunch, the idea had completely metastasized, and after a whirlwind pillage of Home Depot straight from the office and a similarly crazed weekend, I had a passable Frankenstein mock-up of a desktop module that can be raised and lowered as your tailbone sees fit.

A further summer (and several Lego Technic proof-of-concepts later) I had this much prettier, admittedly more reliable version.

It's constructed from steel-reinforced rigid polypropylene (read "shiny plastic with some bits of metal strapped to it"), has a closed profile of 4.3 cm, and a ratcheting latch system for extended heights ranging from 23.6 cm - 42.2 cm.