Friday, March 20, 2015

Oh, the Shitstorm You'll Precipitate (an ebook)



As new material is created for this e-book, I'll add it here.  
No doubt some editing will occur along the way.  
It's a bit of a febrile mashup of some somewhat familiar concepts...



Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Five Years and Over 2000 comics: Pliny's Retrospective


I was surprised when I looked back and realized that I'd been at this for 5 years or so and had posted over 2000 comics.   What follows are some of my favorites from different times and highlighting the evolution of style that's occurred.  And yes, these are ones that I think are funny. 

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 CRO MAGNON COMICS
My early drawings were pretty crude.  Mostly poking fun at religion. My tools were pretty primitive.  In some cases I had to draw the image by hand, scan in the line drawing and add color with MS Paint.  Not terribly efficient.  My Adobe PS and Illustrator versions were too outdated to run on my later machines and $1800 was a tad much for my hobby.  I plan to rework so of these and post them in the future.



Mohammad's 4th grade picture day.


 Jobs and the underworld

 First (certainly not last) panel about the sainthood of Mother T.

This is the very first image of Venn Masters (so named since she was intended to mostly present Venn/Euler diagrams). This image was a homage of sorts to Jesus and Mo.  It was my impression of what the barmaid might look like.  Venn wasn't intended to be the primary character in the comic but she pretty much took over the main thread.



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 REFINING THE VISION

 Turned out, that I did have access to a pretty good art program.  Once I figured out that Keynote had a pretty good vectored graphic component (no doubt a holdout from Mac's artsy origins), it became my primary platform for doing the comic.   The next few panels show some of the evolution of Venn and her sister.  The move to Keynote certainly cleaned up and crisped the images and allowed me to build a library of images that I could use to build panels pretty quickly. You can also see the speech bubbles starting to morph to their final form which just seemed more natural to me than the simple shapes normally used.



 50 shades of gray if you were having trouble...





And snakes





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STABLE AT LAST: THE FAR CORNER CAFE 
Well, the artistic style at least. The next sets are grouped together by style and subject.
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The ALIENS - LIFE WITH THE XENOMORPHS

The Giger alien is the greatest movie monster of all time.  My versions are a little bit more civil - most of the time.




 One of my top 5 favorites of all time.  Definitely my best panel about racism.


 A Pliny can dream...



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CHRISTIANITY


(god-of-the-gaps)




 An Easter post from a while back - The Tombs in NYC


 

The unspoken consequence of predetermination.




 About the Starbucks coffee cup tempest in a teapot a few years back.

 A fav





A sick favorite.




Church signs are a deep vein of unintentional irony.







Probably the most on target thing I've ever created.



I thought of this the first time I saw a Christian supply store.  Love this one.


 The real problem with ontological arguments


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CREATIONISM





Evolutionary theory can never be complete enough to persuade the believers.






Very early but I still love this one.  It's from an SAT-style test.  
The question was, "Stooges not associated with the Discovery Institute".

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THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

A Fav

 






 The first of the MINUTE UNIVERSITY SERIES.  
Made to look sort of like those 50's era educational posters.


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OTHER THEOLOGY











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THE AMERICAN GUN FETISH








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RACISM






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FEMINISM




The new MAGA god popularized by Trump, of course




The Black Widow marking is pretty obvious but you might not have 
recognized the coral snake or blue ringed octopus markings the first time around.





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THE PLINYHEIM MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

About the only opportunity for free artistic expression I have these days.  Most in this series tend to be more serious in nature - not these ones of course.



 Hey, I don't know where half of this stuff comes from myself.  Love this one though.



 
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TRUMP ERA
The Trump era.  I've done hundreds on him.  I'll spare you from all but a few favorites.
 Some are just generic Republican bashers but, hey, they are his enablers.


 

 The instant I saw that picture of the White House Christmas decorations I knew I had to use it...

( Pinocchio of course)



Done during the 2016 election.  Still makes me laugh though.






 Inspired by one of the most dickish things he's ever said - and that's saying something (about John McCain).  Put in a context his many Christian defenders should understand.  A classic IMHO.

 I believe I was among the first to make the connection between organized crime and the Trump administration.  At the time it was meant to be a bit of hyperbole, but now... Another IMHO classic.





 Sigh

 This one always makes me laugh. Portland does have these strange
unfinished off ramps.  Might as well put them to good use. 


I kid everyone's favorite former KGB oligarch.  I'm sure he can take it - 
but I still avoid crowds, cross the street if approached by some dude holding an umbrella, and use a Geiger counter on all my meals.

Fox sucks. 







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And Finally...RANDOM THOUGHTS





 
A pet theory of mine - Think about it - somebody gets bonked on the head and wakes up in a bright room surrounded by blue gray aliens with big heads and no nose.  And trust me - a rectal exam is part of the trauma work-up - I'm just sayin...




 I wasn't much of a Peanuts fan when Schultz was alive.  
Less so with the endless posthumous rehash.

I was surprised that several people didn't get this one
 (Activities on the Dark Web)


A little solicitor avoiding trompe l'oei. Brin's shadow on the ground is the clue.
 
Makes about as much sense as any other explanation of inflation

  Another groaner inducing pun
 (Mammoth undertaking)

(Titled: Trolley Problem - Engineering Edition)

'Drag and Drop' - Probably my absolute sick favorite.


The espresso maker from Dorian Gray.
Caffeine is the only thing holding me together at this point.


 
 Enlightenment
 
And finally, things like this really do get stuck in my head.


I do hope you enjoy these (unless you are in the targeted demographic - then piss off ;))
 Cheers and: