Optipess

Observant readers have probably noticed a brand new donation button thing on the site. Here you can throw some spare change in the depicted cup which I will exclusively use for critical comics-related expenses, like paying the electric bills for powering my Cintiq drawing tablet or for hiring bodybuilder bodyguards to fend off myriads of overly affectionate fans.

Now of course, I’m definitely (luckily) not as poor as in the drawing, but then again like most webcartoonists I do have a day job – and without it I would probably have to draw these strips on napkins and barely be able to upload them to the internet through free coffee shop Wi-Fi. Anyway, to make sure that never happens you can donate any amount you’d like, probably even $0.01 if you’re so inclined! (edit: turns out PayPal has to get their share either way, so a more functional lower limit is about $0.20.) I don’t think there’s an upper limit for donating, but feel free to test that out as well! You know, for science.

Oh, and in return for your much appreciated support you will get a Cthulhu-themed wallpaper which is the high-res first panel from this strip. Click on the button in the sidebar (or the one below for you RSS-ers) to throw some spare change at me. Don’t hesitate to contact me if anything isn’t working for whatever reason and I’ll fix it ASAP.

Thanks! I bow to thee.

So I had a comic in mind for today, but apparently over the weekend I completely lost the ability to produce these strips, resulting in me scrapping said comic altogether. Not the best feeling, but with some luck I should be able to relearn it all in time for the next update. Hopefully?

In any case, here are some other comics I’ve been reading lately. Maybe you’ll like them too?

Buni by Ryan Pagelow should hit the mark perfectly, especially if you like sickly optimistic bunnies with terrible luck. Also, if you prefer your comics with as few words as possible, Ryan has gone for a completely pantomime and dialogue-free strip with wonderful results. Gloriously dark but still able to put a smile on my face every time.

Lair of the Lizardmin is a lovely comic I’ve been enjoying for a while now. Especially I’m absolutely enamored by the visual style and the character designs, quite up to the point that I usually just start snickering from the expressions of the characters. Which are all Lizardmin, by the way. With the occasional Robotmin, Fishmin and Octopoid, not to mention the mysteriously elusive Gorrilamin as their mutual enemy.

Savage Chickens is probably a comic you already know and love. If not, prepare to waste hours on Doug Savages’ hundreds (or is it thousands?) of gag-a-day strips, all rendered lovingly with mostly ridiculous-looking chickens taking the main stage. As a fellow office slave I’m also very pleased to see it’s entirely produced on sticky notes – finally someone put these annoying things to good use.

Werebears and Lonely Children by Jennifer Barrett is definitely not an odd 80’s horror/drama mashup as the name would suggest, but instead a low-key, often adorable, always amusing relationship comic with a simple but effective visual style. It reminds me perhaps of Pictures for Sad Children, another favorite of mine, but it might just be the name similarities talking.

So yeah – go read these while I scamper back to the drawing board (quite literally), this time hopefully with a regained sense of how “jokes”, “comics” and “drawing” work, things that seemed completely foreign to me last time around. See you next time! (Fingers crossed.)