BEHIND THE WONDERS!

It’s been awhile since I’ve opened up the ol’ cellar door and let you awful, cruelly formed things out for a bit of exercise and stimulation, so I thought I’d make this occasion extra special and give you a little inside look into how I create some of the wonders you might have spied up through the cracks in the floorboards while fighting for your survival amongst the other ravenous horrors down there with ya!

You’re only up out of that stinking hell, what, once every month or so, so I could either feed you, or tell you a little bit about how that album cover I did for MC Frontalot came about.  I could tell by the frenzied look in your eye, a look often mistaken for insanity brought on by starvation bordering on the cessation of all your life functions, you would settle for nothing less than even the tiniest bit of background on how that album cover got made, so that’s what you’ll get!
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Help a kid live out his comics dream before he dies of old age.

Don’t change the channel!

I know you want to, because that’s the natural instinct when the screen suddenly shows you some sad-faced kid with flies all over him and you’re wondering why the hell the kid’s not even swatting at them when they’re clearly walking across his eyes and going into his nostrils. Even as you wonder this you’re reaching for the remote because you want to be entertained and watching kids host fly-cons with their heads is not your kind of entertainment at all for some reason.

But wait!

This is about entertainment, and revenge, and murder (not really, but how awesome would that be?)

If you’ve been following me on Twitter lately you’ll notice I’ve been retweeting Aaron Alexovich’s frantic screams for help in getting his comic submission to Zuda Comics to be the ultimate champion this month. As far as I can tell, the winner of this battle of the comics gets enough money to not worry about snacks for several weeks and they continue their comic to complete the story for you guys to read, love and emulate with comedically disastrous results.

I would love to see you end up on the news, explaining through gritted teeth to the reporters why you chopped your arm off like in the comic before you pass out from blood loss, but this just won’t happen if Aaron and illustrator Drew Rausch aren’t allowed to bring the comic to completion.  If they lose, they’ll just end up old men telling stories of how it would have ended to disinterested younger folks who have better shit to do than to listen to two obviously broken old men long past their vital days.  That’s just too sad and just the thought of it makes me laugh but it also makes me sad.

A little about Aaron, so as to help you sympathize and think of him as an actual human being, making it easier for you to do your part and help him win and make that creepy face he makes when he is feeling some approximation of happiness:

Aaron was the character designer on INVADER ZIM and drew some of the most horrifying children and aliens I had ever seen.  Despite that, I think it would be cool to see him win.

Check out some of Aaron’s work on ZIM.

Frankenchokey, famed ZIM cereal mascot

Voting’s almost over with for the month, and the comic, Eldritch, has been neck and neck with another quality entry, so it’s been pretty tense, with both comic entries trading 1st and 2nd place slots seemingly every week!  Voting results are updated weekly, so even though Eldritch is #1 at the moment, the votes for the competition have been surging behind the scenes, so here’s what you can do if you haven’t done so already.

Click on this banner, register to vote (I know, but t goes quickly), then vote, and be sure to rate and fav the comic.  If you have ANY friends, or people that just do what you say because they’ve no real minds of their own, get them to do the same until there is nobody left on the planet who has not voted.  It’s that easy, and you’d actually be helping determine the future of a comic book project, and quite possibly the very future of the human race.

ELDRITCH

So why do I give a shit, personally?  Well, I wouldn’t say it’s because one comic is better than the other, really.  Let’s just say that, with Aaron coming into the prize money that he’d get from winning this thing, he’d be a pretty sweet target for a mugging, and I could use the cash.

Like I said, it’s super close right now, and they need your help!

FOR THE CAUSE!

The Cabinet of the Ghosts of Gaming’s Past

Man oh man!  I don’t usually plan on going out for groceries and coming home with a burlap sack filled with women, but it’s just one of those things that happen if I’m not wearing that collar the doctor’s put on me.

Generally I deal with it efficiently enough so as to not bring any more problems down on me than usual, but this time I ran into storage issues, so I had to start clearing out some space wherever I could, and that’s what brings me to this silly little post.

Before emptying out a chest to make room for my new friends, I thought it would be fun to document just a few of the items inside of it before putting them in storage.  This thing had become a repository for old gaming hardware from days long past.

Have fun, try to identify as much of the magic as you can while I look on and nod every now and then, taking down notes that you’ll never get to see.

Click on the images to go over to the Flickr page hosting them for the super high res versions!

Maybe I'll be buried in this chest, with maracas in hand like a crook and flail.

Ghouls N' Ghosts is better than people.

Someday we’ll find it, the Portal-ZIM connection?

The INVADER ZIM factor in the making of Portal?

Some gamers out there might get a smile out of this (I know I did!)

Got this email on the ol’ fanmail account a few days ago, and though I usually don’t make a habit of waving fanmail around, prancing about like a lunatic, this was one that stood out a bit.  That’s not to say that getting fanmail isn’t always nice, but now and then you get something from people that had something to do with something you yourself are a fan of, and it makes you realize that everyone else writing to you is shit.

I kid!  Stop with the sad eyes.  You know what I mean.

Anyhow,  I asked  Jeep Barnett if it was cool to reprint his email here for you guys to read, and after he edited the email, removing all the racial slurs and threats to kill the President and such, he said okay.  Thanks, Jeep.

(No, he does no misspell my name.  I sometimes write it out without the O for a more staccato effect.  No kidding.)

Hey, Jhnen! No, we don’t know each other. However, I have a bonus INVADER ZIM Fact that I believe even you aren’t aware of!

FACT:

Valve’s “Portal” may never have existed if it wasn’t for Invader Zim. It’s true! I know this, because I’m one of the programmer’s who worked on Portal and predecessor, Narbacular Drop. Here’s how it went down…

For our final year at DigiPen IT, our game team wanted to create something awesome that would become DigiPen’s “flagship” of the year… to take us to independent game festivals and propel our budding careers. After a lot of design work, we came up for the portal/puzzle concepts in Narbacular Drop (and Portal).

However, we were missing a key ingredient: artists! While I was at DigiPen, the art and programming students were generally kept apart, except for the final year where artists could choose to work with a programmer game team. There was a very limited supply of art teams that wanted to work on games, so the programmers had to pitch their game to them and pray to be selected.

Well, that year there was only 2 art teams and 15 programming teams, so we knew that we’d have to have a kick ass impressive pitch. We built a small prototype of the game to show them and did a lot of thinking about potential art styles that would make the game an attractive pick. We finally decided on a sort of “twisted fairytale” theme and in our presentation we used JTHM and Zim as examples of the direction we were going for.

I honestly have only seen a few episodes of Invader Zim (I really enjoyed it, but never got around to watching them all), but I love JTHM and Squee (also the Bad Art Collection was awesome). Others on the team are huge fans of Zim. And as it turns out, the art team that decided to work with us were also rabid fans of Zim. Mentioning it in our presentation made our game stand out and was a key factor in acquiring the art team.

So the teams worked together for 8 months, made Narbacular Drop, that went on to great success, got the whole team picked up by Valve, made the spiritual successor Portal, and the rest is history… all thanks to Invader Zim! And in Portal itself, maybe you can see some of that morbid humor that your work inspired in us.

So… thanks!!

And thanks for putting so much time into the 31 facts posts! I’m a slow reader so I’m a little delayed on finishing them, but I was throughly surprised and entertained! I’m especially glad that I didn’t need to be a Zim nerd to enjoy them. I learned a lot and it’s inspired me to add the Zim DVDs to my Netflix queue.

-Jeep