Blender Magazine: The Tick and Ben Edlund on CD-ROM

I picked up a Tick oddity a few months back: a copy of the the CD-ROM magazine, "Blender", from back in the mid-'90s.  The date explains why in the world anyone would try to publish a CD-ROM magazine, I suppose...I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time but it comes off as a little ridiculous now.  Were you supposed to save every one?  Imagine a shelf full of these next to, say, National Geographic or something.

The content for this, uh, issue, was just about as '90s centric as you can get ("that Minnie Driver is the next big thing!!"), but it's interesting to see that among all of these real-life people, The Tick gets the cover and top billing on this second issue of volume two from 1996.  The technological limitations - the CD is pretty obsolete almost twenty years later - kept me from reading the issue as it was meant to be read.  Luckily, I was able to go in and pull out some files that looked relevant.  I didn't feel like going through the same hassle to learn about Gwar, for some reason, so I don't know just all that was included on this disc, but the image on the back cover gives us some clues:

So apparently this issue of Blender Magazine covered such diverse topics as sex, death, politics and religion.  I'm sure the writers gave a definitive take on each subject and that's why there's no more to be said in their regard.  Thanks for getting the heavy topics out of the way for us all, writers of Blender.

The CD itself is probably as detailed as 1996 could offer.  It's like a dang spin art wheel.

At the center of the CD is a tiny Tick symbol.  The Blender staff really must have been fans.

The problem with computer technology from this period is that it's been obsolete for so long that it's difficult to recover any of the files.  When I put the CD in my iMac's drive (an external drive to boot, as Apple is phasing out CD/DVD drives on their new models), I found these files, with what must have been super awesome graphics back in '96:

I have to admit that I was a little worried about putting in the disc in the first place.  I kind of thought that my computer might blow up just from trying to read the disc.  But then I'm confronted with a skull and crossbones icon and two "blendme" icons (one for PowerMac!) and I felt even more trepidation.  But I had got that far so I figured that I might as well keep going.

Clicking on the "Blender" icon took me to a list of files, each labeled by subject.  I found a handful of short videos that contained interviews with a young Ben Edlund, and in each he talks about one aspect of The Tick (yes, there's one file titled "TickSex.mov".  I was almost too terrified to click on it), both the cartoon and the comic.  I think Edlund would have been about 27 in these videos.  His sweater is pretty rad.

It seems apropos that an electronic magazine's articles would consist of video clips.  Perhaps there was also a text feature that went along with it, but I didn't stumble upon any nor did I poke around too much.  But I was able to take the various video clips and slap them together.  I uploaded them onto YouTube afterwards and voilà, now it's preserved on the Internets for generations to come, or at least until YouTube becomes as obsolete as Blender Magazine.

Take a peek:

The haul, 2011

One of the last things that Christmas should represent is overt commercialization - secular or not, Christmas should be about more than the crass act of consumption.  That being said, for Christmas I got stuff.  Stuff that I was excited to get.  So I'm showing it off, knowing full well that the emperor has no clothes, to extend a metaphor.  Gaze upon these works, you mighty...and despair:

I got a boatload of graphic novels this time around.  That's right, enough graphic novels to load a boat with!  Depending on the size of the boat.  Anyway, here we have the Dylan Dog collection, volume 2 of Joe Casey and Tom Scioli's Godland, and the highly anticipated Habibi by Craig Thompson.

Also among the stash is The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb.  It's astounding that someone who has spent his life creating psychedelic, counter-culture underground comics can put something like this together and have it look so incredible.  It's ironic that this just might become his best-known work.

I've now got three of four of the Hellboy Library Edition collections.  It's beautiful stuff.

I got some cool Thing-related merchandise as well, including a Thing shot glass that is just awesome.  And I landed a Thing Squinkie without having to buy the entire damn set.

I got some DVD swag, too!  Season one of Conan: The Adventurer, Volume six of Futurama, Weird Al's Alpocalypse HD collection of videos, and the first collection of Adventure Time, a show I'm loving more and more with every episode.

Rounding off the display of cool stuff is a Magic Mouse for the Mac, some brand new Shrinky Dinks (pre cut?!  What the heck!!), and some Pac Man crafty figures.  Pac Man and his ghosts were made by my friend Vicki, who has a photo blog here.  Vicki did a bunch of video game themed figures that would totally sell for cash money on a site like Etsy.  Seriously, Vicki, open up a store.  And make me some Yetis.  I SAID DO IT!

I hope that everyone out there had a wonderful Christmastime.  Here's to 2012!

website maintenance

If you head on over to the main Teddy and the Yeti website, you'll find...well, nothing.  The same is true for the Franks and Beans website, and this may cause undo consternation and wild, speculative rumors regarding my personal life.  Don't worry, though, because this is all due to some much needed updates on the server that hosts both sites.

Perhaps you've noticed that Teddy and the Yeti's homepage hasn't updated in, oh, forever, and this is due in large part to said server issues (plus perhaps a small dose of laziness).  Once the updates are complete and everything is ready to go, there'll be a new - and get this, functional - Teddy and the Yeti page up to view.  And boy,  I hope I don't have to redo the entire Franks and Beans website again, but it's possible as all of those files are saved in different formats, as opposed to the T&Y site which is saved in the wonderful "iWeb" program for the Mac.

Primordial Soup, uh..."webcomic"? with Mike Harvey, plus "Weird Al" Yankovic's new song!

Several years ago, soon after "Eye of the Beholder" was published in Strip Search, I took stock of my comic book aspirations and realized that beyond writing half-developed scripts I had NO clue as to the process that went on to put a comic together.  Beyond this, I had no idea how I would ever again convince an artist to work with me on one of those half-developed ideas (some things never change, I suppose).  In a (perhaps rare) moment of proactivity, I decided to figure it out by putting a short comic together, and I was helped by my friend Mike Harvey, who just so happened to be one of the only people I knew with a digital camera.

The result is as you see below: despite our low level of sophistication, and despite the fact that we decided to go with extremely clever pseudonyms rather than give our actual names, I think that the two of us put a fun short story together.  It's not earth-shattering or anything like that, but hey, it was fun.

The one constant background was just a close up of a section of my back yard juxtaposed with a shot of the sky (the volcano looking image is just a plant...it's a happy coincidence that it turned out as well as it did).  Mike himself drew the caveman that serves as possibly the best joke of the story.  The dividing cells and the Mr. Bill-esque character were...I don't know, Play-Doh?  My sister helped with creating that little guy, hence the "special thanks" credit.  And the relatively giant godlike hand...is mine.

Mike and I took a short drive to my college's computer lab, which had a number of Macs with editing software loaded on 'em.  We downloaded some generic Blambot fonts and even some template speech balloons, which look better than some of the balloons I make now that I know how to do them myself.

All in all, not bad for something that was cobbled together with little or no experience.  Check it out!

Mike recently painted a Mini-Marvel style rendition of the Yeti that you can see here.

Also, "Weird Al" Yankovic has a new song, "I Perform This Way"!  This has nothing to do with the above post.  I just love Weird Al and this new song means that a new album will be on the way soon.  Al has a blog that he updates every once in a while, and if you want to read about this new song and why it almost didn't get released, you can find that here.  Listen to the song on below.

AND ENJOY IT.

Larfleeze's Orange Lantern Cookies recipe (with pictures!)

One of the more pleasant surprises to come out of the Green Lantern title, specifically since there are now power rings for every color of the rainbow, has been the character Larfleeze, the solitary Orange Lantern.  For such an initially one-dimensional character, he's filled out quite nicely in the title lately, in my opinion, providing comic relief to a book that often desperately needs it as well as some pointed social commentary (though I don't get why Hal Jordan thinks he looks like Gonzo from the Muppets.  The snout?  I dunno).

A few months ago, DC published Green Lantern: Larfleeze Christmas Special, which stood out to me for two reasons.  First, I was surprised that the company actually used the word "Christmas" in the title of a book.  Even when they publish books containing stories pertaining to Christmas, DC usually goes the safe route and calls it a Holiday Special or something of the sort in the name of inclusiveness, which I understand.  Why they decided to buck that trend for this issue I don't know, especially when they missed an even better opportunity when a few years ago they changed the title of a book from DCU: Infinite Christmas Special to DCU: Infinite Holiday Special.  "Infinite Christmas" worked SO much better when you consider it was a take-off on "Infinite Crisis", but such is the inner workings of a big company like DC.

Second, the creative team on the book actually managed to tell a good story while mixing in random activities like the one you see at the top of this post: a recipe for Orange Lantern cookies.  I thought that the concept was novel enough that I decided to give it a try (as opposed to the Spider-Man wheatcake recipe I found a while ago), and, well, I took a lot of pictures in the process.  So let's give it a go, shall we?

The recipe first calls for the following ingredients to make the cookies:

- 1/4 cup butter softened
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons of orange juice concentrate, thawed
- 1 teaspoon of orange zest
- 1 egg
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- a dash of salt
- 1/2 cup white chocolate chunks


I left out the salt in this recipe, because...well, I'm not a fan and it's usually for taste, anyway.

After I got the ingredients ready, my first task was to make the orange zest, which is, of course, just the peel shredded.  There's a kitchen tool made specifically for this (called a zester, naturally), but I said, "who needs to buy an extra tool when a cheese grater works just fine?"  If I ever make these again, I might just spring for the zester, because while the grater worked eventually, it was hell to clean.  Pure hell, I say!  So if you're going to use a grater, be warned.

The directions continue:

1) Preheat your Earth-oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit ("Earth-oven"...clever)
2) In a big bowl beat butter, sugar, brown sugar, orange juice concentrate and orange zest.  Then add an egg and vanilla until it looks delicious

3) In a small bowl, stir the flour, baking powder, baking soda and a dash of salt together (again, I left out the salt in my batch)
4) Add the small bowl to the big bowl and stir until smooth.  Mix in the white chocolate chunks
- I also had to add another 1/4 cup of flour at this stage as the dough was a bit sticky for me.

5) Drop small balls of dough across a greased cookie sheet
- I greased the cookie sheets with butter, and also had to slather my hands a few times with it, as the dough was still a little sticky, and I didn't want to just keep adding flour for fear of messing up the recipe.

The batter made 24 cookies, which is exactly how much the recipe calls for, interestingly enough.  And this after I ate a few, uh, spoonfuls of the dough.  If I had to do this again, I'd use three cookie sheets instead of two, as more than a few cookies expanded into a neighbor while baking.  The cookies ended up pretty large.

6) Bake 12-14 minutes or until golden brown
- I had the cookies in for 12 minutes and that was enough for me.

7) Let the cookies cool as you mix the frosting
- As you can see, some of the cookies blobbed right into the one next to them.  Bah!  But overall, they came out well and looked good.

I moved the cookies to cooling racks and moved on to the frosting.  The recipe calls for the following ingredients:

- 2 tablespoons orange concentrate, thawed
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

The frosting directions continue:

1) Mix all the above until it looks like frosting!
- This may seem like a facetious remark, but it's true.  Just keep mixing (with a spoon, not an electric mixer as with the cookie ingredients) until it looks right.

2) Spread the frosting across cooled cookies (it will melt otherwise!)


I had just enough frosting to cover all 24 cookies (I'm a bit of an overindulger, though, so this doesn't necessarily have to be the case for everyone).  The instructions, unfortunately, end here without any mention of the Orange Lantern symbol that frankly make the cookie worth baking.  It wasn't difficult to figure that part out, though, as the solution consisted of simply making more icing and adding some food coloring.

I cut the frosting ingredients to a third of what the original recipe called for (because I wouldn't need all that icing just for the decoration) and added food coloring in the following quantities: nine drops yellow, three drops red.

Oh, and then I just went ahead and used the remaining orange concentrate to make orange juice.  "Waste not, want not"...I guess.

Once the new frosting was mixed, I took a small Ziploc bag (or perhaps the generic equivalent) and cut off one of the bottom corners.  The actual cut was very small.  Then I filled the bag with the icing and twisted it, forcing the icing down into the corner with the cut.  It worked pretty well!  While drawing the design on the cookies, I realized how much the Orange Lantern symbol just looks like an angry Larfleeze.

And here's the end result!  Oh, and also a picture of my Mac.  The cookies turned out pretty well, aesthetically, but there was only one test I was concerned with...the taste test:

And the verdict...well, they're okay.  Honestly, my expectations were pretty low to begin with, as I'm not a huge fan of orange flavoring in things other than, uh, oranges.  But the white chocolate is a big hit in my book, so they have something going for them.  I don't know that I'd make these all the time, but I'd be willing to try them again.  Plus the look is really the key, here - getting an excuse to make comic book related cookies is enough of a reason to take the time to fire up the oven and get to work.

I do think that these will be my new convention cookies for this coming season.  Really, regardless of how they taste (like I said, they're okay), it's sure to catch attention...so if you wander past the Wagon Wheel Comics booth in 2011, come get a cookie.  They're made with love and oranges.

cute overload

I wrote a little while ago about commissioning June Gilbank of PlanetJune to make a pattern for a crochet Yeti doll.  June, of course, came through with flying colors on the pattern, but there was still the part about actually making the doll that needed to be addressed.  Well, as the saying goes, fortune favors the bold, because my wife took it upon herself to first learn to crochet (a crucial step in the process) and then make this great rendition you see above.

After seeing the final project, it's obvious that that right choice was made in getting the pattern and moving forward with these (officially licensed!) Yeti dolls, because holy crap, those things are friggin' adorable.  We'll be sure to have a bundle to sell at the upcoming New York Comic-Con, where I imagine people will completely ignore the book for the aesthetically pleasing qualities of this crocheted wonder.  I look forward to it!

Come and see my magical comic book presentation.

No - the title isn't a sly euphemism.  I'm really going to be speaking as part of a presentation on comics TONIGHT! at the Northeast branch of the New Hanover County public library.  I wrote about this a few weeks ago and mentioned that this is being sponsored by Wilmington's Fanboy Comics as part of their extended Free Comic Book Day celebration.  It takes place from 6:00-8:00 pm, which means that I should still be able to catch most of the Penguins hockey game...because clearly, that is the most pressing thing going on for me this evening.

The program will highlight the comic book career of local artist Tom Fleming and will include a Q&A session with Tom and other local creators (I'll try to use as little sarcasm as possible when answering questions).  Chick-Fil-A will be providing sandwiches - like manna from Heaven - for all attendees free of charge, as well!  Did I ever mention that I met the Chick-Fil-A cow?  Well, I did, and it was very sweet.  Oh, and I guess I'll sign some comics or something if anyone is interested.

This is all a rather auspicious moment for me, and I'm looking forward to being a part of the program.  I spoke with Tom when we met at the Pittsburgh Comicon, and he suggested I put some information together on how writers approach the comic book creation process...so I did, and I'll be talking about that tonight for a few minutes.  I've even put together a PowerPoint and everything (and posted a damn picture of it, of all things)!  Here's hoping that I do a better job at presenting than my students do in the public speaking class I teach...because those are usually pretty terrible.  On the other hand, if watching people fail miserably brings joy to your life, show up and watch, because there's always the chance!

If you'd like to show up, here's the address:

1241 Military Cutoff Road
Wilmington, NC 28405

Remember, it's not the main branch - it's the Northeast branch.  If I hadn't just done a search for the address, I would have honestly gone to the main branch and thus missed the entire thing.  That would have been bad.  See you there!

Tell your friends.

The above advertisement appears in the special "convention edition" of the soon-to-be-released Teddy and the Yeti #3.  I decided to check out a folded titled "logos" on my desktop one day and said, "what am I going to do with all these logos?  I have way too many.  Perhaps I'll create an advertisement and put in as many as I can."  And thus was born this eye-catching gem!

One might question the effectiveness of an advertisement promoting the Pittsburgh Comicon when the book the advertisement appears in will first be available AT the Pittsburgh Comicon, but...what can you do.  I suppose that is what the Internet(s) is for.  Where is the "viral" button on the Mac located, again?  I'm sure it has one...

Birthday swag

The past few weeks have been, in a word, busy.  It's midterm time at school, my brother-in-law got married, I sent Teddy and the Yeti #3 off to the printer (forgot to mention that, huh?), filmed another episode of Franks and Beans, and what's my reward for all of this?  Apparently lots and lots of comic book related presents, courtesy family and friends.  Oh, and it was my birthday, too.

Among the awesome things I got are those pictured above.  My buddy Larry got me a Marvels hardcover, a Fantastic Four plug &; play video game and (as a gag, I assure you), the first issue of the Madballs comic series from Marvel's Star Comics imprint.  They've started to reissue Madballs since their heyday in the 1980s and, as I had a bunch of the originals, I plan on getting some of the new ones.  But I haven't yet.  But I will.  Maybe.

I also managed to snag the next book in Scott McCloud's instructional series, Reinventing Comics, and a Time Capsule backup for the Mac.  Now I can actually save my progress and not kill myself if the computer ever crashes and I lose all of my comic book work for the last three years!

My wife got me Funko's Thing bobblehead, which is AWESOME, a "Weird Al is my homeboy" shirt (which has nothing to do with comics but I'm showing it anyway), and a yeti keychain that you can see below:

The key ring comes off to make it like an action figure.  I'm not sure which way I'll use it yet.  Finally, Batman: Year 100 came in the mail on Saturday, which rounded out quite the haul for me on my...uh...19th birthday.  Right.

Oh, and I got an ice cream cake that had "Beast Wars" written on it.  Dairy Queen was pretty confused about that one.

Teddy and the Yeti on Comic Book DB and Collectorz Comic Database!

Sometimes it's fun to watch and see other people mentioning Teddy and the Yeti or listing the book on new release forms without any input from me.  Other times, dammit, I have to mention it myself.  I thought about pretending that I wasn't the one who made the submissions/updates, but what the heck.  I hold the smoking gun.

Teddy and the Yeti is now listed on the catalogue site Comic Book DB and on the organizing software from the Collectorz company!  The Comic Book DB site post thumbnail covers, story synopses, and character and creator information for tons of comics, and now they have listings for issues 1 and 2, along with the New Dimension Comics version of #1.

Collectorz picked up on this info and uploaded it to their database, and the cover to issue #1 was used on their page that lists the daily updates for the software for January 27th.  They've uploaded the three issues to their own page as well!  I've used their database before, and it's pretty sophisticated.  It's a handy tool when you're looking to organize a gigantic collection - all you do is enter the title, select the issue number, and all of the other relevant info (even the stuff you really don't need to know) including a cover scan uploads right along with it.  I'd probably purchase it myself, but they don't yet have a version that works on a Mac...which causes me to scratch me head, because Macs are awesome.

I've also updated the main website a bit, with a preview of issue #2 (including a the first look at the final cover) and a few other minor things.  Just a few more weeks until the second issue is out!