Shared Universe(s)

 Lately, I've been shoring up a bunch of my non-superhero comics into one universe.

Sorta.

Mostly, it was by accident. Part of it has to do with the weird comicking OCD I have had for the last twenty years wherein I hardly ever truly drop a character or concept completely once it's been created and cemented a certain way in my head... or I've destroyed them ON PAGE.

Also, if i do drop a character or concept only to bring it back in another project later, it will still have some lingering continuity or shared backstory to some of the old stuff which winds up blending that into the new.

Listing my comics I came to the realization that my projects Wonderland Hates You, Rose Tinted World, Tales From the Spiffee Burger and others all take place in the same universe. Some of that is by design by way of my fictional city of Saint Murphy, Missouri.

Chip of Rose Tinted World's mom is the mayor. Spiffee Burger location #347 is located downtown. The bakery where Cookie Bellingham's future boyfriend works is owned by the local crazy rich guy who was once an employee of Maddie Crenshaw's (among other things).

This month, over at ComicFury, the 30 Days of Characters event wherein we participants create new characters and/or update old ones for our projects is underway. I have updated 20 out of 26 days so far. (I may go back and shoehorn a few in before the end of the month.) And of the twenty (sometimes groups of) characters thus fare created/posted, 10 updates have been characters for various "St. Murphy" Comics.

Including comics old, current and those in production but unfinished, there are 17 'St. Murphy' projects going on right now. A good number of them are on ComicFury. Two of the others that haven't premiered yet are going straight to my Patreon. I haven't worked all the bugs out of the second project, but the first one I tentatively call 'Marshamallow Peeps'. It'll be a normal slice of life sit-com style comic. The protagonists are BBW girls. I plan to basically make it the OPPOSITE if 'Cathy'.

Instead of being office workers, approaching middle age, obsessing over their weight and trying to catch a man to please a nitpicky biddy of a mom, they are going to be happy, confident and have each others' backs - which means that I am going to have to find fun adventures to put them in and give them positive personalities. Anything but the same old tired fat jokes, overeating and whining.about self esteem and body image issues. Besideswhich, they will be in an 'adult' comic on Patreon drawn by a cartoonist who LIKES big women, so I will admit that a lot of the silly, dumb comedy (and nudity) is going to be focused largely on one thing.

Make that "TWO".

Who knows, maybe later in the year - 'round Thanksgiving or Christmas time, I will concentrate on short vignettes for each property. Maybe 2 to 4 pages each and make a "St. Murphy" graphic novel or something.

For now - on with the show!

Tales From the Spiffee Burger 011: Past Mistakes

We've all taken jobs in a fit of desperation, at one point or another that we ultimately regret.

Say what you will about Spiffee Burger (and I'm sure you WILL), it's a helluva lot better than "Sloppy Toppy's Topless Bar & Grill"! 

Cookie Bellingham

 I've been getting a good bit of mileage out of Cookie Bellingham this last week.

Tales From the Spiffee Burger's current chapter is all about her first day on the job, and the last two pages have her dealing with a "problem" customer.

Y'all know the SZECHUAN SAUCE story, yeah?

5 Nerd Points to the first one who can tell me where Cookie's Pop Culture Reference comes from!

Over on ComicFury, I've done scribbles in certain forums for ol' Cookie as well.

First, there was the "Draw your character in an overly cute style" prompt, in which I made a chibi Cookie.

I probably should have made her eyes bigger.

Then, there's the "Doing Nasughty Art of your Comic Characters" thread in which I posted Cookie's glow in the dark earrings and bioluminescent tattoo.

In the end, I'm glad I put Cookie in the Spiffee Burger comic. The original slice-of-lifwe idea I had for her probably wouldn't have gone too far.

[Bitter] Also, as a footnote, "Happy" 50th birthday to She Who Will Not Be Named. (the FIRST one.)

Here's hoping that getting old didn't agree with you. [/bitter]

Tales From the Spiffee Burger 004: Solace

 

A girl likes to be complimented from time to time, and there are few greater compliments than one of an incompatible sexuality expressing an admiration for your body. I think. I guess. Maybe. Your Mileage May Vary.

If you can't tell, Verolina may have a teeny little crush on Fitz.

Tales From the Spiffee Burger 3: Personal Details

 

Yes, it's true! I cannot tell you how many straight women, gay dudes and self-identified asexuals I've known who, despite their various sexualities to the contrary really dig tits!

Tales From the Spiffee Burger #2: Marshmallows

 Another page of Tales From the Spiffee Burger carted over from ComicFury:

As stuffy as Barbara can be, she does this sorta thing to her sister (and any newbie that she judges to not be a creep) all the time.
Cookie really doesn't mind, but somebody oughtta get the poor girl outta there before she suffocates.

Honeybees From Heck

 Well, if I'm gonna use this thing, I'd better use it. Here's a little backstory on the project called "Honeybees From Heck".

As one of the vagillion times I was trying to get a comic started while I was in one of my "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" phases, I was attempting a simple slice of life comic. Though, with me, oddly enough - and I DO mean "oddly" - I just can't seem to wrap my head and creative juices around "normal". Every time I try, "slice of weird" is the closest I can get.

I was thinking of protagonists and couldn't get anything down. I tried to go with my go-to "Normal White Guy" character, Warren Abernathy as the protagonist

but honestly, I got bored before I even finished the thought. Of course, nowadays, Warren has a place in the Tales From the Spiffee Burger comic.

At the time, I swore I was the only comicker out there not making some sort of porn comic. I tried that. I wasn't right for it. Hardcore, bodily fluids drenched copulation, anyway. Cheesecake, I could do, though. Mind you, that's not where the comic went (at first), but it was a relatively new idea - for ME, anyway. After all, in the name of what TV Tropes calls Author Appeal, I do have a habit of drawing bigger girls with rather pronounced chests. My girlfriend teases me about that. So much so, that in true Johnny-Octavius fashion, I had to make a comic about it:

That's neither here nor there. The meat of the discussion, so to speak is that not able to think up normal scenarios for a normal protagonist, I decided to go the weird, one-off kinda non-sequitur route. Like a Far Side comic or something. As far as protagonists, I decided to go the Hanna-Barbera route. Take an already existing property, tweak it and go from there.

I had already done that a few times with my favorite movie, but I decided to try again, delving into my myriad project for a smart-ass, a man-child, a stoic genius and an Only Sane Man type. As I said, I'd done that before and it didn't work. It didn't work that time, either, despite the mix & match tactic. That was when I decided to take a radical left turn and gender-flip them all. After all, at the time (and still to this day, if we're honest) "cute girl protagonist" equals readers, particularly if she's sexualized.

Mind you, I didn't go the sexualized route right off the bat. I just tried for normal comics. 

For the names of the protagonists, I gave the girls boys' names, as I had known a few pretty girls with boys' names thoughout my younger days that I was totally crazy for.

Thus came Reggie, Vinnie and Dave, or, Regina, Lavinia and Davida.

You can probably tell from the cameos in panel 3 and the reference to Cap getting killed in Marvel Comics, how old this idea is.

Vinnie (with the purple bangs) actually came first as she was a previous attempt at a protagonist in a single cartoon. I added Reggie and Dave later, for this project. I renamed Vinnie to "Clyde" for reasons unremembered, just now and added a 4th girl and gave HER the name Vinnie. I tweaked their personalities to be that of the Real Ghostbusters and years later would tweak their body types and such as well as making Vinnie of Latina descent in order to make them less generic webcomic characters.

I'd also changed the name of the comic a few times over the years - From Boys of Bell City to Trouble in Paradox to the current Honeybees From Heck.

Boys of Bell City stemmed from their boy's nicknames.

I went with Trouble in Paradox to signify that they would be travelling from reality to reality, sort of like Jenny Everywhere, but I nixed that idea at the last minute because I already had a Jenny Everywhere in play.

Finally, I went with Honeybees From Heck, as I had another adventure comic idea about a group of all 

-female, bee-themed assassins that I called the Honeybees from Hell that never went anywhere. 

I took the name and changed it slightly, as I was going to call the city/town that the girls were from Heck, California. Or Heck, Oregon or whatever state I was going to put them into.

Since then, there have only been a few Honeybees from Heck pages, but I am back to making them.

Instead of sequential comics that tell an ongoing tale, and doing the Jenny Everywhere thing, I decided to go opposite - instead of the girls travelling to parallel universes, I'd decided that they simply exist across the multiverse. In short, every time you see the foursome of girls, it's a different Reggie, Vinnie, Clyde and Dave.

Thus far, the new(ish) formula is working.

Of course, there was also an element of cheesecake that I included ad have since made a conscious decision to include more, including more blatant nudity and sexual situations.

Of course, wouldn't you know that as soon as I added more T&A (&D, too!), this comic got a rather large boost in popularity. Not the first time this has happened - with these very characters, even!

Remind me to tell you the Stella & Celeste (and "Shameless") story, sometime.

Haulin' Ass to Lollapalooza!

 Here We Go Again!!

It's been a while since I gave Blogspot a try, but I'll be honest - I hate modern "Social Media".

Like, ALL of it! Even the ones I LIKE (BlueSky and Instagram... and that second one is really just for the overwhelming number of chubby girls whose entire 'Instagram Persona & Presence' consists of bouncing their ridiculously oversized breasts into their cameras while the worst music in the world plays for the sake of some snarky-ass 'meme'. Don't get me wrong. I'm a red-blooded American pervert cartoonist with an almost stereotypical obsession with gigantic (natural) breasts, but seriously! When did this become a 'thing'? And why wasn't I notified on Day One?!) - Even the ones I like have become tedious.

Being the Old Fart that I am, I miss the heyday of LiveJournal. I miss blogs and journals in general because I am a journaler. A writer. I enjoy expressing my thoughts in full sentences instead of truncated 300-character (or less) text-soup full of abbreviations, L33t5p3ak, 'modern slang' and sheer illiteracy for the sake of manufactured brevity that's supposed to appeal to those short on both brains and attention spans. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, "BTW".

Also, I miss the days when one could post as many pictures and photos as a rudimentary knowledge of HTML would allow instead of a maximum of four - or worse, ONE - per post! I'm a CARTOONIST, for fuck sakes! So, I have created this page in order to post said thoughts and cartoons, mostly unfiltered, just in order to have a place to do so that isn't DEVIANTART (don't get me started), FURAFFINITY, as I outgrew my 'furry phase' over a decade and a half ago, or out-of-the-way, niche-y spaces like NEWGROUNDS, MASTODON or PILLOWFORT.

So, that being said, here's a smattering of the stuff I'm doing these days. Most of my sequential comics are already being hosted on ComicFury and The Duck Webcomics - both of which I am still enjoying, but I, for some dumb reason, feel weird about posting Nonsequential Arts and One-shot Comics there.

On January 1st, I launched the newest version of my old autobio comic, Shrimp Fried Riot - and took out MOST of the autobio elements. Perhaps this time, the whole damn thing won't come out like some kind of illustrated mid-life crisis turned suicide note.

The protagonists, Mutt & Ozzie are the replacements for 'original' Octavius (me.)

At some point in the future of this blog, I will go back and (re)post all the original Shrimp Fried Riot comics. Also, with the permission of David "ProfEtheric" Hickmon, I started an ongoing comic taking place in a 'SpiffeeBurger' restaurant, which started in his comic, Autumn Bay.

My Spiffee comic began in the pages of my comic "Never Odd or Even";

This was sort of a "back door pilot" that introduced the characters for the ensuing comic:

Things seems to be going pretty well with it, so far.

I also brought back The Honeybees From Heck after a couple years' hiatus. What better way to reintroduce my favorite Girls with Boys' Names AND cement my notion to add more gratuitous nudity into my comics in this, the New Year than with this page:

I figure - why not? Every other graphic artist on the Internet is making pics of random naked people doing random naked things. Why should I be any different?!

And, of course, there's my superhero themed - or should I say Super VILLAIN themed comic, "I Was A Teenage Super Villain", which I am STILL doing 5 years in.

I am in the middle beginning of Chapter 7. So far, only a few members of the titular team have even been seen in this chapter, as I have introduced two other teams in order to set up future storylines, but they'll be back!

And, indeed the whole point for making this blogspot:

Random pics, pin-ups, jokes, NSFW content and Nerd Rage that I really can't post too many other places without breaking the rules or offending the sensibilities of the community at large.

So, this is who I am and what I do. If you dig it, feel free to stick around.