Category Archives: Comics

The Kraken Busters- now in (experimental) comic form!

Comics, History, Kraken Busters comic, Rank Stupidity

So you’ve probably heard me talk about the book I wrote about the US Navy fighting sea monsters in the 1940s, and then the subsequent podcast adaptation that I did of it. Well, I have a terminal case of Cartoonist Brain, so with a story like that sloshing around in my head, it was inevitable that I’d start getting ideas about different ways that it could be presented visually. And this started to drive me nuts.

And then, inevitably: I sat down to give it a shot. So here is Episode 1 of a notional Kraken Busters comic, trying out some visual ideas and also leaning into some cartooning techniques I’ve never tried before. This might be a one-off, or it might be the start of a massive ongoing project to adapt the whole thing; if you dig it, please let me know, because that could help determine which way this goes (same thing, I guess, if you really think it sucks!).

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Ripsaw

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Maybe worth noting that I kind of have a 3-way creative split going on right now between Ripsaw, Pickup Switch, and A Life in Film (4-way if you include the band, I guess), so progress on all of them might be a little slow, especially for the next couple of weeks as I settle into a new job. I know you’re supposed to just pick one thing and be good at it, but that’s not how my brain works.

Just know that nothing’s being abandoned, it’s all just moving along at its own pace. And thanks!

Pickup Switch #1

Pickup Switch
a comic describing the early history of the electric guitar in four panels

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OK! Here’s the next thing I’m trying!

If you follow me on Bluesky (or used to follow me on Twitter), you know I have a bazillion opinions on electric guitars. So I thought it might be fun and interesting to try a nonfiction comic about ’em. I’ll be looking at the history, design, and function of electric guitars.

Does this mean that Ripsaw’s done? Nope! That was always gonna be a strip that would run for a while and then sleep for a while; so this is a thing that will happen during Ripsaw naps. And vice versa.

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Ripsaw

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To be super-duper ultra-mega clear: I think it’s great when Americans of Euro descent are conscious of the history of the land they’re on, and what had to happen for things to be the way they are. I’ve seen land acknowledgements done as part of larger holistic programs , and I think that’s great when I see it. My beef is entirely with words divorced from action. I’m not calling for fewer land acknowledgments here, I’m calling for more action to go with them.

THE UNEXPECTED FINAL BUMMER OF THE IOWA CITY POLICE LOG

Comics, drawings, Essays, Linkage, Thoughts

So, from January of 2020 to September of 2023 (with a couple of breaks), I had a project where I’d look at the twitter feed of the Iowa City Police Log, pick an entry for the day, and draw a single-panel cartoon based on it. It was a lot of fun! Of all the art projects I’ve done in my life, it was one that resonated the most with other people; Twin Cities Public Television did a piece on it, and I wound up meeting a bunch of fun and cool people online through the strip. All of the strips are still available on Instagram (twitter, too, but IG’s the better interface), and I remain proud and full of love for them.

I wound it down in September of ’23 for a bunch of intertwining reasons: the strip was tightly tied to Twitter, and at that point (and I guess still) it wasn’t clear how much longer Twitter would be around, or how cool it was to be involved with it given Musk’s determination to remake the site into a right-wing oasis; I was getting worried that, after about 620 strips, I was running out of jokes and in danger of repeating myself; and, as those snowballs rolled down the mountain of my brain and started to get bigger, internal political stuff in Iowa City forced the issue when the city changed the way it reported police incidents, kneecapping the feed I depended on. So my choice was made for me. The police log strip was done after a long and full life, and it was time to move on to other projects.

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Ripsaw

OK, to be clear: this is coming from a place of skeptical love. I like the Current a lot, they’re a community asset, and they’re the only rock station in town worth paying attention to enough to joke about. But I really can’t shake the feeling that the main thing they provide is a sense to old musicheads that they won’t get made to look out-of-touch when they talk to people in their 20s.

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Digging into Achewood

Comics, Essays, Thoughts

Quick note: this originally ran as two separate-but-related articles at the late, lamented Comics MNT. Alas, nothing is permanent on the internet; but I like these pieces too much to let them succumb to link rot. So here they are, together at last!

1. The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood

Remember Chris Onstad’s Achewood? If you care enough about comics to be reading the MNT and were online between 2000 and 2010, you must. For most of the first decade of this century, Achewood was one of the flagship webcomics when webcomics were an exciting new cultural space; it might not have had the reader numbers of some of the topical gamer strips, but its cultural presence was huge and it was very much the critical darling of the scene.

If you need a refresher: Achewood was a weirdly erudite, often filthy, funny-animal strip with minimalist Charles-Schulz-with-Adobe-Illustrator black and white art and aggressively unconventional lettering (almost certainly the only landmark comic to be lettered in the Chicago font). The cast was distinctive; the strip centered on Ray Smuckles, an oblivious but goodhearted thong-wearing rap mogul cat, and his depressed computer-programmer friend Roast Beef Kazenzakis. Other major characters included an avuncular novelist bear, another bear who loves food and The Cure, an eternally childish, bottomlessly naive otter, a couple of eastern European robots, and several others. And yes, all of these listed characters are male, and yes, that will become important later.

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The Iowa City Police Log

Comics, drawings, Linkage, Rank Stupidity

Quick update from December of 2023: the Police Log comics are now a finished project, with an unfortunate coda. I’m still proud of the comics, though, and they’re still available as linked. If you see anything involving the Iowa City Police Log and AI art, please know that I had nothing to do with it.

Every morning, I get up, consult the twitter feed of the Iowa City Police Log, and draw a one-panel cartoon based on it. This started out as a get-through-the-winter whim and has turned into a get-through-a-pandemic-hellscape coping mechanism. The resulting comics get posted to a Twitter thread and to my Instagram feed, in both cases paired with their inciting Police Log entry.

People seem to be pretty into these, which is great! TPT, Minnesota’s Public Television station, even did a short piece on them, where I talk about my process, my motivations, and the sort-of-intentional larger political point of the strips in an era where we as a society are rethinking the way police departments should be constituted. They also put KEITH PILLE – CARTOONIST on the screen, so I guess despite endless questions about my artistic identity, now I know: I’m a cartoonist.