Pete.ink/weekly Week 4 July 2022
Welcome to week 4 (of 4) for July of 2022 and here comes another week of content from me, Pete Nicholls at Pete.ink! Sorry this edition of Pete.ink/weekly is so late! I took a long weekend that really wiped me out. You can read more about it below!
I made a cool "cover" image for FutureBlog! What do you think?
Go read chapter 2! Or start from the beginning!
A little backstory on FutureBlog is that I started writing it back when I was living in Los Angeles. Hence, the city having "Angel" in its name. The basic setting for the story was inspired by The Jetsons cartoon which I loved growing up. I went on to work for Hanna-Barbera in the 90s (the company that produced The Jetsons) and I had often wondered about what the real story behind how the world that the Jetsons lived in came to exist. It always struck me as a future-imperfect reflection of the American culture of the time. Think about it--while episodes of The Jetsons were originally airing on TV in the 1960s there was a lot of bigotry, poverty, political corruption, and war going on in the real world that The Jetsons, never really addressed. When they did broach any of those topics it was candy-coated and light frothy stuff played for laughs. I get that it's a kids show, but what if they had tried to tell a more realistic story about how the future looked a LOT like the now, only with poverty "solved," disease "solved," war "avoided," cities in the sky and... wait--what was down below?
After a lot of brainstorming I sat down and started writing FutureBlog. I put it aside for a while and while I was working on a organizing-all-of-my-creative-projects project, I came across the first partial draft and even an opening sequence to a screenplay version. With global warming seriously at play these days, I decided this was a perfect project to dive back into. Hope you enjoy it! Please let me know what you think! Either reply to this email, tweet at me, or hit me up via my official contact page!
Yep, I'm really going there with Pete, Cartooned! I just got bored and, frankly frustrated, with just trying to do a stand-up routine in a comic strip format. I'm not good at the fun/weird expressionistic diary comics some folks do. My brain just leans to far to the literal. So, I asked myself, "What would make this easier and more fun to do?" My answer for a LOT of things is "make it science fiction, of course!" The only drawback is that it's going to really challenge my art chops. Hey, YOLO, right?
It's time for another WednesJAY with your pal and mine, Jay The Pal!https://www.youtube.com/embed/er4n9oOrdVs
When I created Jay, I had been grieving about my uncle having passed the previous year and concurrently dealing with a serious bout of depression related to what was going on in my life, in general. I had a really rough couple months. Then I came across an article online about FAO Schwarz (they were still around in 2008/9) selling Muppets you can design through their website. My wife and I, both being big fans of the Muppets, were so excited about having our own Muppets that we quickly designed one for each of us and placed our order. They arrived the day before we hopped on a bus to go to Washington DC to see Barack Obama be inaugurated. I was so excited that I brought my Muppet with me. I knew I was going to name him after my late uncle but beyond that, I had no idea who he actually was as a person. To find out, I had him out and on my arm as we saw the sights in our nation's capital and had my wife take tons of photos and video. One of the photos just clicked for me. I saw him in a photo and I just spoke with Jay's voice when I said, what I thought he was saying the photo: "YEAH!"
I then shot some video of him (my wife, Sierra, definitely did at least some of the shooting) and began to fine tune his frenetic, awkward attitude. I even performed him in front of total strangers (something I never thought I could do--I'm usually kind of crippled by stage fright). It would be months later before I noticed that my depression had gone away. I credit and thank Jay for that.
A good bit into the pandemic, I noticed some of those old depression feelings coming back. They were not as strong as they were back in late 2008/9, but I recognized something was coming. I knew it was time to bring Jay back. I am never quite sure why I stop shooting stuff with him. I enjoy puppeteering with him so much. Anyway, that's a bit about Jay The Pal.
OK, a bit more than a bit!
Today, I just worked on my Goings On comic for Friday as I wouldn't have time to work on it on Friday. My wife and I left for a family vacation Friday morning for our first even slightly real vacation since October of '19. Like that trip, this was a 4 day weekend. This time we visited her late mom's home town up in Massachusetts, where she still has family. It's a small, former whaling town with plenty of history, watering holes and small-town charm to explore. Plus a couple friends of ours were in a production of Beauty and the Beast that my wife had gotten us tickets to see. So, it was going to be a fun trip out of the big city.
Posted this from the Peter Pan bus:
That's all for the final week of July! After the trip I mentioned above, I was pretty wiped out from all of the social activities and struggled to keep up with my regular schedule. That's why this edition of Pete.ink/weekly is going out so late. Humble apologies! The August week 1 edition of Pete.ink/weekly should go out tomorrow.
If you have a moment, please check out GoingsOn.art. If you like the art you see there (the above is one of them) and want either on a t-shirt (or just want to support me) please click on them or just go to Pete.ink/merch. That will get you to my profile on Everpress.com that features limited time only t-shirt designs. Each new cartoon I put up on GoingsOn.art will be available for a limited time only there, and on my Everpress as a t-shirt for 30 days. So act now and get one before I take down the designs forever--or at least until publish them in a book. I promise these cartoons will never appear on a shirt again in the current form. Full disclosure, I may update the designs and make them available again, but not without demand from readers. The point here is that I have entirely too many ideas for cartoons and t-shirt designs and feel like it might be effective to not try to manage a huge library of designs and just focus on them one by one. It would be a big help if you could GoingsOn.art and see what you think!
That's it for this week's Pete.ink/weekly!
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And thanks again for reading!
Have a great week and hope you enjoyed my ink!