Sorry folks, but there won’t be a new comic today. I didn’t get as much done on the weekend as I wanted to and woke up this morning with a nasty cold. Hopefully I’ll be able to get something up later on in the week (probably not Wednesday, but perhaps Friday). I finished a new Hockeypocalypse page a couple of days ago, so I’ll probably post that a little later.

Again, apologies for the lack of new comic, but trying to draw while leaking various head fluids doesn’t work.

So my desktop computer seems to have ‘sploded. Not “boom” ‘sploded, but “refuses to function” ‘sploded. Being technically incompetent, I turned things over to more adept folks, who’ve assured me that it’ll be fixed over the weekend. In the mean time, I can’t scan and format today’s update.

On the plus side, everything should be fixed by Monday, so I’ll just push today’s update to then.

Have a good weekend!

I guess to start with, if you aren’t interested in hockey you can probably go ahead and ignore this entire post. Go read Hockeypocalypse anyway, though.

I’ve been watching quite a bit of hockey lately. Okay, by “lately” I mean “since October”. On Sunday night the Oilers retired Glenn Anderson’s No. 9 jersey in a tremendous ceremony prior to battling their way to a 6-3 victory over the Phoenix Coyotes. I was a little disappointed when I read the post-game write-ups in the newspapers and online that none of the members of the media picked up on the fact that the game honouring the retirement of Anderson’s No. 9 ended with a total of nine goals scored. I mean, c’mon, that’s just a gift right there.

Also, watching Dwayne Roloson in action in tonight’s win over the Columbus Blue Jackets was hilarious. I’ve never seen a goalie intentionally bat the puck out of the air with his head, but he did, after leaping off the ice to do it. Tough to follow something like that, right? Well ol’ Roli did, by beating up Jarrett Boll after he crashed the crease a little too hard. It wasn’t an actual fight, really. Roloson just started punching him while they were both on the ground. Still, it was really, really funny. Roloson’s antics make me even more glad that the Oilers kept him and dealt Garon to Pittsburgh. A rock-solid goalie that also picks fights and headbutts pucks? Hells yeah.

Also, I’ve been working on a hockey-based comic lately. I’ve posted the first five pages in a gallery, which you can find here. Check it out and let me know what you think.

I took a trip to the Alberta Art Gallery yesterday to see the ARENA: The Art of Hockey exhibit, which might be the first time I’ve ever gone to an art gallery. Certainly the first time I’ve ever gone to one on purpose. It was an interesting experience. Some of the pieces were really cool, others seemed like pretentious douchebaggery. My favourite thing was a rink built in the style of those slot-hockey games (the ones where each player is on a peg and you control them with rods like in phooseball), except that each player was a hand-made puppet that could be manipulated. The piece was a re-enactment of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ last Stanley Cup championship (which was in the ’60s, I forget what year exactly), so one team was the Leafs and the other team was the Boston Bruins. Each puppet had a little wire sticking out of its back where the jersey and the pants meet, and the wire was attached to a little metal thingy that could slide around in a slot. Above the piece was a television with video of the entire thing animated to recreate the key moments of the Stanley Cup final with commentary.

On the douchebaggy side were things like a helmet, skates, and mini-sticks covered in honeycombed bees wax. I have no idea what the point of it was, and I don’t think anyone else did either. Most of the pieces had a little card with the title, artist, and an explanation. This one just had the title and artist, probably because nobody could understand why the hell anyone would cover a helmet in honeycomb. There was also one that was a guy imitating Bobby Orr’s famous belly-slide goal celebration, except that he was pretty much just laying there with his arms out, wearing normal clothes. Yeah, that must have took some thinkin’.

On a more positive note, my other favourite pieces included a diorama created using the MacFarlane Toys line of NHL action figures. The figures were all famous old-timers playing a pick-up game on a frozen pond, and it looked really good. There was also an Edmonton Oilers: 30 Years Young retrospective with a bunch of memorabilia from the team’s history. The coolest part of that for me were Kevin Lowe’s Stanley Cup rings (all five of ’em). Those are possibly the most glorious rings I’ve ever seen. They also had Wayne Gretzky’s locker-room stall, including his practice jerseys, a game jersey, gloves, etc. They also had Craig MacTavish’s old stall, although none of the stuff in it was his. Also on display were the Oilers’ first Campbell Conference Championship banner (which was, fascinatingly enough, hand-painted. You could see each layer of paint on it.), all of the retired Oilers jerseys, and a bunch of other stuff.

In other news, I added a pair of inked comic pages to the Illustrations gallery. Both are from the First World War comic I’ve been working on. Check ’em out.

During my week off from posting new comics I haven’t just been lazing about (although there HAS been a fair bit of that). Next week’s updates are all finished, and I might start the next page after the Oilers game tonight. Next week will be the first three pages of “Two Crooks, a Croc, and a Fine Pair of Shoes”, a bizarre 22 pager featuring Dirk the Head, Mr. Nixon, and Croc Head. I’ll leave some mystery surrounding the fine pair of shoes.

Aside from drawing new pages, I’ve been playing a lot of Gears of War 2 over the last few days. A webcomic artist talking about video games!? *GASP* Anyway, I’m on the fourth chapter (of five) of the single player campaign and have logged a few matches online in the last few days. The single-player campaign is much-improved over the first Gears, although unlike a lot of the whinier internetters I liked the campaign mode in the first game just fine. Yeah, ok there wasn’t a lot of plot, but how much plot do you need in a shooter? They established the world, your character, and that you needed to kill the bejeezus out of the Locust. Anyway, Gears 2 ramped things up with a more involved plot and a larger cast. The Locust have also been made a lot more sinister, which is cool, since there wasn’t a lot revealed about them in the first game other than that they lived underground and could be killed by violence. There’s also a heavy mortar which is a lot of fun to blow things up with. So far I’m having more fun with the campaign than with multiplayer, which has been pretty slow, match-makin wise so far. And I’m not overly fond of the “you die, you sit” concept, since I’m not all that good at Gears online, so I do a lot of dying and sitting. And occassionally chainsaw some schmuck in half. So far my favourite modes are the ones that involve re-spawning because of that.

But wait, why should you care what I think about Gears of War 2? You probably shouldn’t, really. I’m trying to use the blog section a little bit more, but I can only talk so much about the comic. So instead I’m rambling about video games, and occassionally hockey. I’ll probably provide some status updates on some of my other projects once I get them underway in earnest.

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow with the first page of “Two Crooks, a Croc, and a Fine Pair of Shoes”.