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You want to see a picture of me and Kate Beaton riding horses and the horses have rollerskates and all this is happening beneath a beautiful rainbow
WELL SIR YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE
So I had fun at the comic convention on saturday! Hello to all the people off the internet who I met in real life for the first time like ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) daleof (check out his drawing of me in the corner), shug_comics , beatonna and eggstorm , you people were everything I hoped for and more Accross the atlantic, the LA contigent were out in full force at the GIANT ROBOT show off Haight Street, San Francisco. Here's Adam the organizer wearing one of my t-shirts, available soon from attractmo.de . daphaknee was also there representing our side with her Mighty Jill Off hat ( Mighty Jill Off is the game I did the artwork and character design for, you remember, right). She took the hat off because people kept asking her if she was the game's creator Auntie Pixelante which is pretty hilarious mistake to make I guess Here's a picture of her in her owl hat, instead: She was getting important videogames people to pose for pictures in diapers! I can't remember if that was to promote our game or if it was just something she was doing for her own benefit, but you can see pics of the whole event at Daphny's blog. Ok, so! Here's a treat and a novelty: actual content! 
In case you're a new reader, I should explain that for 6 months of last year I taught English on a small island south of Korea. I drew stories for my children which I would project onto the screen in the classroom and act out for them. I'd also get them to repeat every line of dialogue, and I incorporated games, costumes and other exercises. The characters you'll in this story would recurr every week: Becky, Eric, Jin-su, and in later episodes, new character DRACULA. I think I was making about 4 stories a week at one point, so it ended up being a very good exercise in cartooning and storytelling!
I also treated the whole thing as an excercise in pushing boundaries of taste, so each week I would increase the level of violence to see what it would take for my Korean co-teacher to start disapproving of the content in the stories I was writing. I never actually found out. There is one story where Jin-su sets a horse on fire and another where Eric accidentally slaughters seven of his own children and has to wheel off their bodies in a cart, and my Korean co-teacher never so much as batted aneyelid. In fact, the horse episode was actually the first time a member of staff ever told me 'you are a good teacher.'
Today's story is relatively tame by those standards, but was still pretty popular with the kids: IS THIS YOUR HAT, REMIX
( IS THIS YOUR HAT? )
I have recently finished a relatively large(by my standards) comic project for a pretty well-known website, which should be going up in a couple of weeks. I guess I will talk about it closer to the date! If you are a new reader and you want to keep track of this stuff but you're not on livejournal, I put the link to this blog's RSS feed in the sidebar. Ok, think that's about it! Again, if you're a newcomer, thanks for reading! Stick around, kid, we are going to do BIG THINGS | |
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| A while back I posted a story that I made for my grade school English students about a horse that gets stuck in a hole. I made it so that when I was telling the story, I appeared to run out of the classroom and appear inside the story projected onto the classroom wall! Then, I am bundled into the hole by the horse and the HORSE HIMSELF appears to enter the classroom! Believe it!  I realised that I never showed you any pictures of myself wearing the horse mask I used to achieve this terrifying / generally nonplussing effect, so I'm righting that wrong right now. I am a man who rights wrongs.  I don't know who was impressed more, the children or the parents / teachers in attendance! Because the parents/teachers folded their arms in disgust while the children just looked out of the window I have another thing I forgot to post from round about the same time (the time of the US Elections, in fact.) I played a game with my kids called 'My Superhero', where I handed them pictures of a blank superhero-type body with no markings or features, and they had to fill in the worksheet with their own superhero designs and then write about it in English. The kids ended up making a bunch of pretty amazing characters, like 'Fire Girl' and 'England Man' and 'Thief Killer', but one design in particular stood out. I hope you like it!  | |
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| This is the last story I made before I got fired from my job as a English teacher in South Korea. I still have a bunch more lessons to show you, but I thought now was a good time to show you the final one- 'THE SNAKE IS LONG'. This one's an epic. It's sort of nuts. I hope you like it!   ( Who is this? ) | |
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| I'm busy with a character design commission right now, so in case next time I get to update is a ways away, here's another Eric Story:   Who is this?  That's right, it's JIN-SU What's he doing? That's right, HE'S WHISTLING  Who is this? ( MAN WHO IS IT, I MUST KNOW ) | |
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|  Sketched during a meeting, finished at home.  Who can tell me who this is?  Starmen.net love me now.  A little kid drew this for me.  This man has DUDE-A-TUDE.  Here's my band I'm starting up, THE UNITARDS.  Here's our rival band, ASSHOLES (The Leotards).  Class materials.  Self-explanatory.  I experimented with making a CHARACTER GENERATOR.  I'll be honest: I don't remember a whole lot of what was said at this this meeting.  I have about 20 eric stories you guys are yet to see. | |
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| The problem with making this a semi-regular feature on my blog is that each lesson runs for 4 weeks, and because it would seem kind of wasteful and uneccessary to make up four stories all about 'Is this your puppy', I just 'remix' the stories for the next week. In today's lesson, 'How Many Cows REMIX', I added french cows, pigs in cars, made the Crazy Cow explode in a shower of hamburgers and hid tiny cows in the corner of the frame, and asked the kids to count all the things in the story as we went along. After that, I stuck a sign saying '1', '2', '3' and '4' in each corner of the room. I'd then ask the children maths questions, like 'number of korean cows minus number of pigs equals...?' and the kids had to run to the corner of the room which corresponded with the answer. It was pretty nuts! We all had a lot of fun. I'm not 100% sure it would be that interesting to you guys, though.
This is a story I made for last week- lessons were cancelled during the day, so I spent the day making an extra-long story for my after school classes. It worked out ok!
Jin-su: Hey, Eric! What's that?
Usually one of the kids will tell me it's a 'magic wand' before the next frame comes up.
Eric: It's a Magic Wand!
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| First of all, thanks to everyone who'se entered our competition so far; we have had all types of crazy stuff coming through. In addition to the amazing drawings, people are making Jills out of cloth and lego and god knows what else! An incredible array of creativity on display! I guess people must really want these custom sneakers I'm going to make for the winner, and why wouldn't you, because when you rock these shits you will be the TALK OF THE TOWN The competition is still WIDE OPEN. We're rewarding creativity as much as, if not more than, technical ability. You've still got until HALLOWE'EN. Don't forget to include your shoe size with your entry! In other news, new friend jeskabotdrew this picture of me marrying a mermaid:  THAT MERMAID HAS GOT EVERY QUALITY I COULD EVER LOOK FOR IN A WIFE Ok, here's today's lesson. Shall I carry on posting these day by day or would you prefer a big update at the end ofthe week? Let me know. This is the quickest one I've ever done; I had like an hour to make the whole thing. It is pretty jacked. This was easily the most popular story I've done to date; In every class I taught today the kids actually asked me to go through this story twice, which was pretty cool. After I told the story, I asked the kids questions about what they'd seen, like: -How many Korean cows were there? -How many American cows were there? -How many cows were there altogether? -How many apples were there? (the apples are not actually mentioned in the story.) It was fun!  ( Class, who can tell me what this means ) | |
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|  This one went over pretty well. This is the last one I have to do this week!  Becky: Where's Eric? Jin-su: He is singing.  ( OH MAN ) | |
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|  To give you an idea of how much thought goes into these: I write and draw them the day I'm meant to be performing them. So, I did these this morning before I caught the bus. I have to make it, perform it four times, and then the only time I get to look at it myself is in the afternoon once I've posted it, after it's it's served it's purpose. It's a pretty fun, if scary way to work!  Sometimes I'll ask the students what they're looking at. What's this? DOG. What's this? CAR. One kid today said 'DON'T PLAY IN THE ROAD'.  Who's this? ERIC!! ( MORE ) | |
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