Refreshing Rectangles

Just a little cosmic skate something for you.

I have a 3 page comic in the latest issue of Calling In Sick magazine, about building a new bike and then optimistically taking it out on a ride for which I was woefully underprepared. The issue’s theme is underbiking: riding bikes that are perhaps ill-advised for the given route. The pieces in the issue explore the gulf between what an upgrade-obsessed industry considers best and what is fun.

Check out the mag if you’re at all a bike person and enjoy varied, weird, voices pursuing their obsessions.

Perhaps the sentiment in my above graphic seems corny or extreme or terminally childish but I assure you that it is also genuine. For me skateboarding has become a tremendous source of comfort. And there are those days.

Whatever anxiety is eating me alive, when I step on the board I am calmed. It’s impossible for me to skate while worrying about other shit. Skateboarding is difficult in a way that demands and, eventually, rewards focus. Progress is hard-won but thrilling.

It’s also a free play activity. Zig and zag however I feel. Not unlike the sort of unconscious play state we get from picking up a crayon and doodling. Even when honed in on learning a specific move, it’s still in the context of whimsical leans, carves, and scrapes as I play my way to the goal.

I could rhapsodize on and on but you get the idea, right? People achieve similar nourishment from other activities, whether playing music or meditating or hiking in the woods. I’m grateful to have found a thing that maps well to my needs and hope you’ve got your thing too.

If you follow me on the accursed platform you’ll see me post clips of my own skateboarding. It’s a bit of self-indulgence that clashes with my usual self-deprecating nature. And yeah, I’m not even good at it! I’ve rolled around on skateboards for most of my life, but I never tried to learn tricks or rode a ramp until my late-forties (yes, I will accept your old man pity points). If you want to watch skateboarding online you have myriad more impressive options than my rickety ass wobbling through the basics. Regardless, I’m proud of what I can do and am inspired by clips of other fledgling skaters finding peace upon their boards.

It’s that time of the year! We celebrate our freaky friends in the deep.

Here are a couple of new publications, available at my shop now! Both are short, humorous comics, black and white interiors with color covers. Sharp-eyed readers will note that these are reprints of previous work (from my 2021 year of minicomics, color covers are new for these editions) but the print runs on the original editions were so extremely low that I am confident that these are new to you.

I Demand Excellence is about an artist confronting his own mediocrity and his own clogged ear canals.

I was messing around with that dead line-weight and talking about art angst stuff without being too precious.

Hell Bent for Nectar is basically a story about hummingbirds being little bastards. Not gonna try to explain it more than that.

As mentioned previously, I will be posting new work to Refreshing Rectangles soon. But, in the meantime, here’s a round-up post of the main things I worked on over the past few years.

In 2021 I created and published a new, paper minicomic every month, roughly 140 pages of work. I wrote an in-depth post about the successes and failures of this project. These minis are now mostly out-of-print but I’m going back and reprinting some of my favorites with new, color covers.

In 2022 I published two issues of a new comic series Gnarcadia, about a group of kids creating a space to skateboard from an urban dump zone. There’s some success and failure in those issues as well. After issue 2 it got backburnered but I intend to bring it back with a new issue in a new format.

In 2023 my comics output was mostly limited to 4-panel strips with the title Schmizards posted to Instagram. These have yet to be collected.

I also started getting more into creating sculptures from laminated plywood shapes. I spent the most time working on this black cat guitar stand design.

Otherwise I made a bunch of one-off pieces, cut from plywood on a bandsaw, laminated, and then painted. All of my woodworking art is sold via my Etsy store.

There were other small or dead-end or commissioned projects throughout these years but the above is the tidiest summary for the record. Onward, to the new!

It’s been a while since I last posted so here’s a brief explanation on what happened and the posting I intend to resume:

• I stopped writing comics reviews and other comics hype stuff, which was the original purpose of this blog.
• I am going to start posting here again, mostly about my own creative work.

Less-brief explanation:

• After that period of writing about comics I realized that it was taking a bit more time than I’d intended and I liked doing it a bit less than I’d expected. I wanted to reclaim that time for working on my own comics, so I stopped posting to the blog.
• Of course that coincided with a stretch of wandering in the woods on my own work, experiments, false starts, angst, crying fully-clothed in the shower, etc.
• *boilerplate harangue about the hell of social media and wanting a venue outside of someone else’s Pavlovian wealth sieve*
• Once I settled down on some actual projects I started blogging about that work, but behind the paywall of my Patreon. The thinking was, “I have this Patreon from the last project. Use that?” It’s been unsatisfying and pointlessly exclusive.

Voila! I’m back out here in the Zuck-less blog wilderness ready to shoot my mouth off (within reason, I assure)! More soon!

P.S. I’m also discontinuing the new comics release calendar I’ve maintained. I had hoped it would be a useful service but I can tell exactly how few people ever look at it so I’ve decided it’s another bit of personal overhead to reclaim. Poof!