Duck Master p.13-15 (color)

Getting close to finishing this... Just keep having little side jobs and things that come up.

Anyway.. These particular pages, I got a little more experimental with using Photoshop to adjust the hand-coloring. Mainly in the backgrounds: since I'm using gray-colored paper, sometimes it helps to "fill" large background areas with some brighter color, to relieve the monotony of all that gray.

Compare to earlier pages where I was leaving it gray and I think it helps a little. What do you think? Write a 300-500 word essay, and post it in the comments below. Winners will have gold stars affixed to their lapels.

Exigencies!
Tim

Footwear: A Diatribe (NSFW)

by Fred P. Insoll

I’m having an Andy Rooney moment here.

Or maybe a Godzilla moment: I feel like I’d like to shoot space lasers out my eyes and vaporize --- wait for it --- ALL MODERN FOOTWEAR.

Jesus, I’m tellin ya. Six months ago it was bad enough; I was looking for shoes then, too. But at that time I gave up, and just put duct tape inside the soles of my brown Rockports to keep them from leaking. Which didn’t work as soon as the duct tape wore down after about five minutes, but anyway.

Now, though. Have you BEEN IN a shoe department lately? I’m lookin’ at you, Academy Sports. Or any fershlugginer shoe alcove, really. Shoe hut. I don’t know what they call them in the industry. They should call them SHOE SHITSHOWS. Because that’s what we have going on: shitshows!!!

Let me get straight to the point and stop all this vamping: the issue here is “mesh uppers.” Overnight, it seems like, every shoe and its inbred step-cousin is made out of “mesh uppers.”

Yes, it was bad enough six months ago --- I guess at that time they were still vaguely hybrid abortions of shoenetic engineering and societal devolution. But now. Now they are full on mesh uppers, glued onto some kind of fruity foam-injected plastic sole (and since these shoes have no souls whatsoever, maybe let’s call that something else. Like “plaswalk” or another appropriately NewSpeak type of term.)

Are you people buying this garbage???

Are ya? Apparently so... I haven’t heard any complaints. I guess your little “celebrities” have been modelling them and now you’re all hot to trot and get yourselves a pair.

You know what’s really galling too?

I will tell you.

They want to charge 60 or 70 dollars or more, i.e. the same price as a normal shoe used to cost. I guess they want people to think they are desirable or something, despite being made out of extruded plastic mesh.

Then too what I love is that there are 50 or 60 “options” on display anywhere you go, THAT ARE ALL BASICALLY THE SAME OPTION. I.e., just differently colored plastic mesh, or mesh running crosswise or zigzag or overlapping several perpendicular layers of mesh. But it’s all mesh, mesh, mesh from here to eternity. Mesh extruded out your ass for as long as the day is long.

(I bet they literally have some Asian they’ve bred to excrete this stuff out his (or her?) ass. I have nothing against Asians, mind you, but I know how our Shoe Overlords love to exploit the overseas help.)

Boy they really phased this one in in the blink of an eye. Maybe it was the plan all along. When you look at how freaky regular leather tennis shoes started to get in the 80s and 90s, you can see that they probably already had it in mind.

“Just get ’em used to funky crapola and gewgaws everywhere, and soon we’ll have them right where we want them...”

Buying our unreal reality and wearing it on their feet, in other words. Yes, it’s a sick sick world, a top-to-bottom mind control cult of manufactured humans and simulacra simulating circumlocution.

Overnight, too. Overnight they ship in all this “product,” throw it out there, and nobody bats an eye. Really impressive, I have to say. Kudos to them on their shitty shoe coup! Must be a lot cheaper to produce, I bet. But don’t lower the prices, oh no, that would alert people and give the game away. Why, if it costs a lot, it MUST be worth a lot, eh? What bandits. What droll brigands of the high seas, raking it in just like their East India Company forebears.

Also it’s more technologically advanced-seeming, and all tech is an advancement, yes?

* * * * *

Now in other amusing news on the “shoe front,” I will just throw in this little paradox I noticed: the more MINIMAL a shoe is, generally speaking, the more it costs. Ah yes, this denotes taste and sophistication, this avoidance of crapulicious gewgaws and vomitious decorations. YOU must be part of the select few, the 10 or 20 percent of upper middle class brainiacs who demand elegant style! Why you rascal (or vixen), you.

We’ll charge YOU $170 or $220 or more for that lifestyle luxury. Yes, you would THINK that less gewgaws might equal lower production costs --- and isn’t the promise of mass production that good design doesn’t really have to cost more? A one-time cost keeping some sunlight-dreading designer in Adobe subscription dues, and then we can all reap the rewards of his/her canny eye.

But no... No, let’s gloss over that fine point.

And anyway. Even if you GOT the dough, you still ain’t gettin’ off that easy. This high end crapola may be minimalist, with (sometimes) decent materials, but the knife-twist here is that we always try to make it just a LITTLE obnoxiously pretentious. We just throw in SOME ingenious twist to make sure you look like a total asshat who has to have $170 “sophisticated” togs.

Ah yes, shoe buying is not a simple matter for the more Rooney-esque among us. Those of us who can remember farther back than last week’s manufactured social controversy --- like five or six months back even --- are up shit shoe creek without a paddle. Fred P., out!

Duck Master p.13-15 (pencils)

Duck Master p.10-12 inks/color

Still struggling with dip pen issues on these pages... I switched over to a Micron 08 at one point. But I found this great inking tutorial by Tom Richmond, going to give some of his ideas a try:

https://www.tomrichmond.com/2006/08/21/inking-tutorial-part-i/

You know what's hilarious though?

At one point Richmond says he prefers the Hunt 303, for its ability to change directions without catching on the paper, and to draw "almost like a pencil" would. Now, I have NEVER come across a 303, that I can recall. My local art store, which has a pretty good selection, doesn't have that nib.

You would think, as great as this nib sounds, that it would not be some obscure mystery buried in the recesses of an old warehouse somewhere. That cartoonists would be singing its glories from the hills, and constantly pestering art stores about it. The industry standard nib by comparison, the Hunt 102, SOUNDS pretty awful from every description you can read about it. It snags, it can't change direction, it doesn't hold much ink, etc., etc. But THOSE are in good supply! What are ya gonna do...

Duck Master--- p.10-12 pencils

A run of very BORING page layouts for some reason. I apologize! Please use all your abilities to concentrate and focus to overcome this enormous hurdle which I have inexplicably dropped in your path. You're welcome.

Duck Master p.8 & 9 - in progress

Still struggling with Speedball C-6 nibs. My nibs are all ink-encrusted, ha.

Apparently the Hunt #102 is the industry standard (as far as ink-dipping pens), but they don't seem to hold enough ink in my experience, you have to dip too frequently. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. But also this paper I'm using is probably the wrong texture anyway.