Josh Kramer Comics

I'm a cartoonist and a journalist

[joshpkramer]

Trying to make room in my heart for this app to be meaningful to me again. Looking for indie comics, especially nonfiction comics.

[campaignagainstcliche]

[joshpkramer]

Incredible

[joshpkramer]

I have a newsletter and sometimes it is good, if you like that kind of thing:

Gray Areas and Nebulous Spaces 📁

Dank nugs and illegal babies in Southeast Asia

[purenonsens]

Polish movie poster for Goncharov by Waldemar Świerzy. Due to delayed release behind the Iron Curtain, the film started screening year later in 1974, which is also the year this poster was made. A classic example of Polish School of Posters.

[joshpkramer]

When I was a kid I loved buying booster packs for fantasy deck-building card games (mostly Magic: The Gathering). You never knew what you might get, and how it might work with the decks you've got going. Recently I've been vibing on mobile games with a similar spirit.

So, in an effort to improve my character design and caricature skills, I've started drawing these cards from an imaginary game. I'd forgotten that cards can be funny too, and I'm having fun coming up with them.

Attributes will be generated through a secret method known ONLY to me, and regular drops will follow shortly.

Suggest flavor text in reblogs if you like!

[joshpkramer]

What do you call curbside when you're in a boat and you pull up to another boat and a person cooks you Pad Thai? Boatside? Canalside?

[blackblobyellowcone]

[aorismatic]

Vaporpunk Rainforest Utopia

[joshpkramer]

Anyone on here now, running away from Twitter?

Hi from underwater off Borneo

[joshpkramer]

My wife and I are one week in to our year-long trip around Asia. We've been tourist-ing hard, and just had the conversation about not being able to do every single thing in each place and taking a sec to relax as we go. Here's me packing everything I brought:

[joshpkramer]

In what may turn out to be the greatest xmas present of them all, Betsey Swardlick has put all of her amazing Fail Wolves comics online. These stories are charming in a thousand ways. Read them at once!

[joshpkramer]

this is one of my favorite panels of all time

[joshpkramer]

I had a blast writing about @stevencrewniverse and their excellent architecture. Thanks especially to @stevensugar, @joethejohnston and Chris from @meathauscomics for talking to me for the piece.

[joshpkramer]

changed my profile drawing for my site because a) the beard seems here to stay for a while b) I can draw better now, so why not, and c) I lost that shirt. Don’t ask me, I don’t understand how.

Top: 2014 Bottom: 2017

[joshpkramer]

file in: complicated but worthy of notice.

2008: Gary Cohn testifies before Congress and admits fault on behalf of Goldman Sachs in the financial crisis.

Rather than punishing the big banks, Pres. Obama chooses instead to regulate the industry and signs Dodd-Frank into law. No execs. go to jail. Golman Sachs and other banks are fined, but also bailed out by taxpayers.

2017: Gary Cohn leaves Goldman and collects over $100 million as he cashes out his stock in order to become chief economic advisor to Pres. Trump. He stands behind the President as he begins the effort to undo Dodd-Frank.

[joshpkramer]

Facts about the NEA

[joshpkramer]

wapo.st/2k4sGGC

[harryandthepotters]

This is a true story.

For a few years, I have known of the existence of the website last-christmas.com. The sole purpose of this website is to aggregate and archive covers of Wham!’s 1984 smash hit “Last Christmas.” If the song wasn’t already enshrined in the pantheon of 80’s holiday hits, this website certainly helped to cement its legacy, possibly even positioning it at the very top. 

I consider myself a full-on holiday music connoisseur and as such, “Last Christmas” has never been one of my favorite songs. Usually I tend to steer clear of the overplayed hits, unless its stuff from Motown or the Phil Spector record. However, since learning of the last-christmas website, it’s been my secret plan to delve into their extensive archives and emerge with a mixtape that represented both my personal tastes and my obsessive/completist tendencies. 

When the website came back online this December, I quickly snatched up the archives from 2006-2010, which came in at a whopping 470 songs, totaling nearly 33 hours and 2.44 GB. I dreaded the thought of auditioning all of these myself, but somehow the idea of sharing this chore made it seem both tolerable and potentially fun. So that’s how I ended up convincing a van full of people to listen to nothing but Last Christmas covers for the majority of a weekend car trip from Boston to DC and back. 

What did we learn? Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights:

This song is a much bigger hit abroad than it’s ever been in the United States. I would guess that at least 30% of these covers come from non-English speaking countries

Of the many non-English versions, a large percentage were from rap artists. They would leave the smooth chorus intact, but then start dropping their rhymes over the absent verses. I have no idea if these were even Christmas-themed raps. Many of them seemed to be Korean. One of them was 9 minutes long.

There are a lot of awful techno covers of Last Christmas. I mean, there’s lots of awful techno music and lots of Last Christmas covers, so I guess this makes sense. It was still annoying though.

In nearly 500 cover versions, hardly anyone even attempted to replicate the soulful exhalations that George Michael drops in both the intro and outro to the song. C'mon guys!

Remixes are unequivocally terrible. This applies to almost all areas of music, not just Last Christmas. There are like a billion remixes out there in the world and in my whole life, I’ve heard about 5 remixes that I would want to hear again. Gah!

Anything that started with chimes was an instant out.

I think our favorite part of the song became the whispered “Happy Christmas” bit that happens halfway through the first verse. It was particularly interesting to see how this part was handled in the different cover versions. Bonus points if it’s extra whispery. 

We became suckers for either passion or vision. We wanted to hear artists who were living and dying by every line of the song. Either that or we wanted to hear it get pushed in totally new directions. Straight up cover versions simply didn’t cut it. The more we heard them, the more we began to appreciate Wham!

Our 90 minute mix tape features the original Wham! version followed by 23 different cover versions. All told, I believe we spent about 12-15 hours listening to and rating nearly 500 Last Christmas covers. On a 5 star scale, we rated about 90 versions with 3 stars or better and from there began relistening to assemble our mixtape. 

If you want a physical copy of this cassette, email me at pauldegeorge at gmail dot com and I’ll see if I can hook it up. I may run out of tapes soon.

Otherwise, you should download away!

Ultimate Last Christmas Mixtape! (zip file, 212MB)

http://eskimolabs.com/xmas/lastchristmas.zip

Side A

Wham! Crash Tokio Benjamin B Riff Raff Das Palast Orchester & Max Raabe Spillsbury Frank Tellina Delaa George Michael’s 8" Stocking Minuteman Ezio 

Side B

PAS/CAL Guiseppe Ruisi The Hairy Bottlers Mon)tag Giuseppe Bovo Orchestra Return of the Ice Cube Trays Richard Cheese IGwAD The Boss Hogs Corporate Solace Evil Beaver WOLKE Tomas Trulsson

Compiled by Paul DeGeorge with assistance from Joe DeGeorge, Jacob Nathan,  Emily Barnett, Neil Cicierega, Ming Doyle, Alora Lanzillotta and Justin Michaelman.

Thanks to last-christmas.com and Wham!