A Waste of Time

Alright, so the last couple strips have discussed Prester’s favorite Christian Rock band, Dove of Love, and I thought I’d post this colored version of their poster and talk a little bit more about what the band is like.

I’m hoping to make an EP with a couple of their songs that I could sell at comic conventions, or maybe include in a future book of my comics, and probably also have available online somehow.  I have some ideas about there sound, and I can probably write their lyrics, but I don’t play any musical instruments or anything like that, so I’ve been talking to musically talented people I know about collaborating on this.  If anybody out there is interested, email me and who knows, we’ll see what happens.  The sound I’m thinking of for Dove of Love is kind of a 90′s grunge band sound, only like kind of bad, low-budget imitation grunge.  It’s supposed to be a parody album and funny, but I’d like the songs to be strong enough that it’s actually enjoyable for people to listen to.  Like I was saying about Dove of Love before, the idea is that I’m joking when I make fun of these things, but Dove of Love doesn’t know that they’re joking.  It’s a fine line there.  I think if the songwriting is strong enough and the songs have strong melodies and everything, this could be an awesome little EP.

As the whole Dove of Love part of things develops, I’ll be posting to the Facebook page for the band , and also the Tweeting for them at twitter.com/doveofloveband , so follow those if you’re curious :)

I kind of agonized over this strip a bit, because it’s something I’ve been planning for a long time, and Dove of Love is gonna be important to my comics.  If you go back a few strips to when they first go into Prester’s room, the Dove of Love poster is hanging there, and of course what Prester was writing on his sign was, “Faggots Burn In Hell,” which is one of their songs they claim as hit singles.  If you go back a bit further still, the other time Prester was writing on a sign, he had written the letters, “AB…” which was him starting the title of, “Abort the Abortionists!”

Making fun of Christian hypocrisy is kind of like aiming at the broad side of a barn, you can pretty much just take actual things that Christians do and say and the jokes start to make themselves.  Christian rock bands are maybe an even broader target, because there are plenty of musicians in “mainstream” music that are some variety of Christian, but the ones who specifically go around advertising themselves as a “Christian” act are usually the ones that are talentless enough that they don’t have another selling point, so they try to use peoples’ piety to get them to buy some CD.  There are reasons, though, that I’ve been setting up Prester’s personality the way I have, and there are a lot of places I want to go with this, and some things I’d like to say.  Dove of Love, specifically, is among other things going to be a plot device that helps introduce another major character that’s coming up soon.

So, sorry for the delay in posting this strip.  I wanted it to come directly after the previous one, since the scene of Rickets and Prester in Prester’s room was, in addition to the Chaplin thing, meant to introduce Dove of Love.  I finished it up to the point that I did for the book I had published last year, because I felt that Prester’s Chaplin speech was something that gave a bit more clarity to his personality and could be a good note to end his part of the book on.  I’ve got some other things coming up that are already ready to go, but I wanted to do this scene all together, and I spent a long time on this one because I was obsessing over the Dove of Love poster.  I wanted it to be pretty much the cheesiest, silliest Christian rock band poster I could come up with, but I wanted it to look like the people who made it weren’t joking.  The type of people that don’t see a contradiction between the statements on the poster wouldn’t get the joke when they made it.

To support the Dove of Love part of the storyline, I’m seriously considering recording an EP with a couple of their songs to sell and maybe give away at conventions and things, or maybe even as a bonus with a future book of mine.  The problem with me making a music EP is that I can’t play any kind of musical instrument.  I’m pretty sure I could write the lyrics, and I have a good idea of what Dove of Love sounds like, but I don’t nearly know enough about recording music to record songs on my own.  Anybody with musical gifts out there interested in collaborating on an EP of Christian rock bigotry?  Heh.  Could be fun.  I’m serious about this part, email me if you think it would be fun.

To get Dove of Love going, I’ve started a Facebook page for them , and also a Twitter account , so follow those, things relating to the band will be part of the world of my comics as things go forward, and should hopefully be interesting :)

This strip actually concludes me posting the strips that are collected in my recently published book, but the story doesn’t end here at all.  When I was putting together the book, I tried to organize the strips and stuff that was included in a way that lent it a structure and brought it to a place where I felt the characters had a satisfying moment that could serve as their last moment in the book and hopefully create a good experience for the reader, but the things I have planned for these characters all feed into big arcs that will go on for quite a while.  Actually this strip that I’m posting today isn’t even the end of this particular scene, the comic that I’m going to be posting on Monday picks up exactly where this one leaves off and shows some more of what’s going on in Prester’s room.

There are also still several spot illustrations and other odds and ends from the book that I’m going to be posting here, and one of the next things that I’m going to do on this website after the next few strips and drawings is a character guide with profiles for the main characters in these comics, which will hopefully be fun for people to read, and also a way for newer readers to jump in, since I think at this point I’ve accumulated enough material that it might be a bit confusing for somebody new trying to figure out what’s going on.

After the character guide, some more strips and drawings and stuff, I’m going to start posting two things that I’ve been writing.  One of them is the collection of strips that will eventually form my next book, which at this point I’m planning to call Damaged Goods.  It’s the next part in the ongoing saga of my rabbit, Rickets, Truckstop, and Prester, and all those characters, and it will also heavily feature some of my other characters like Capitalist Pig, and there are also going to be a couple of new characters that I’m pretty excited about.

When I plan these things, I usually at some point think in terms of big story arcs and things that I want to tackle, and so all the comics I’m doing under the banner of A Waste of Time are part of something that’s going to take me a long time to tell.  Within the structures of the bigger stories I’m trying to do, I also like to leave enough wiggle room for things to be included as they happen, since a lot of the strips are meant to be autobiographical in one way or another, and I don’t know yet what’s going to happen in the parts of my life that I haven’t yet lived :) The storylines and collections that I’m doing are meant to be chunks of all of this, so that people can read one bit or storyline and understand it without reading every single thing that I’ve done.  Although, of course, who wouldn’t want to read every single thing that I’ve done? :P

The other thing I’m doing is a big project that will still fall under the A Waste of Time banner, but that’s taken on a life of its own.  It was originally supposed to be kind of a fun, short thing, maybe five pages or so, but once I started going I felt like there was so much more I could do.  I’ve been doing a ton of research for it, so I want to talk about it, but I feel like I should keep it kind of secretive until I have more to show.  Although, of course, it’s not totally secret, because some people who know me know that I’ve already been talking about it a lot.  That’s because I’m excited, I think it’s gonna be a great comic!  I’m trying to script this out fully before I start doing too much of the illustration, and the drawing side of it is going to be pretty complicated in some places, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to do three pages a week of it the whole time that I’m doing it, so the idea is to get far enough ahead on it before I start posting it that, when I start posting pages, I’ll be able to keep putting them up in a pretty timely fashion.  So, more on that as it develops :)

Anyway, keep checking back, a whole ton of stuff coming up!  Thanks to everybody that’s been reading my website all this time, and if you’ve been enjoying the recent strips, check out the store page for information about how you can order my book collection, which, I have to say, looks really pretty, and I’m proud of!

Sorry that this post didn’t go up yesterday.  There will be a new comic tomorrow, though!