Today, February 2nd, 2020, is Palindrome Day. It has been quite a while since I posted a new Palindrome strip (which are usually thought up by my clever son Ben) on my Patreon page, but here is a comprehensive list of the ones posted to date:
David Chelsea is watching: The Room
starring Tommy Wiseau
I haven’t blogged about this very much, but one of my main activities this the past year has been learning to do motion graphics in the software program Adobe After Effects. It’s been a steep learning curve, but my efforts are beginning to bear fruit. This week, I posted two short videos to YouTube, both of them morph sequences created in After Effects. The first is a collaboration with my son Ben.
David Chelsea is reading: A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel
by Amor Towles
The latest issue of AMERICAN BYSTANDER, America’s freshest humor magazine, is out, by which I mean I’ve finally gotten my contributor’s copies in the mail. Issue #6 has a cover by the legendary Arnold Roth, as well as some choice humor, illustrations, and comics from a stellar stable of regulars: MK Brown, Rick Geary, Ron Barrett, Randall Enos, Mimi Pond, John Cuneo, Peter Kuper, etc.
David Chelsea is reading: Night of Camp David
by Fletcher Knebel, Co-Author of Seven Days in May
I blogged a few months ago about reaching #100 in a series of “End Strips” on my Patreon page– these being short, vertically-formatted comics drawn on random strips of paper trimmed from larger sheets for various reasons, usually some project my daughter Rebecca is doing for school. These have cycled through a number of themes, including portraits of friends on Facebook, nude figure studies drawn from models posing on YouTube, short comics featuring my characters Sandy & Mandy, travel sketches, and so on. At the time, I was just beginning a series illustrating palindromes written by my son Ben; the first of these was #100 (Palindrome definition: a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward, e.g., madam or nurses run.):
David Chelsea is watching: The Room
starring Tommy Wiseau
I haven’t posted about my Patreon page since I posted my one hundredth End Strip a few weeks ago, but I’ve been steadily adding material. After I finished up the 24 Hour Comic THE CRUMB BUMS, I serialized my rhyming parody of a Jack Chick comic from 2011, Chastity Blasé, in two parts. Just this once, I turned the drawing duties over to the talented Chad Essley:
David Chelsea is reading: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
We’re well into the fall, and I have posted only sporadically the entire summer, so it’s time I caught you loyal readers up on what I’ve been doing. One big thing was that I concluded my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, which I have been serializing on Patreon for the past two years. You can read the entire run of the strip on Tumblr here, at least for a while- there are plans in the works for a book version, and I will most likely take down the archive when that comes out.
David Chelsea is reading: Someone Please Have Sex With Me
by Gina Wynbrandt
This week I posted my 100th End Strip on Patreon (actually, 102nd- I mistakenly gave a couple of strips the same numbers). End Strips are short comics drawn in a vertical format on random strips of paper, usually ones trimmed from larger sheets by my daughter Rebecca for some school project or another. These have tended to fall into a few main groups: drawings of celebrities from my various clippings folders:
David Chelsea is watching: Alien
starring Sigourney Weaver.
Just in time for Christmas, my daughter Rebecca’s very first animation Frog Chase , re-released with a new original musical score by her brother Ben! Originally created in 2012- hard to imagine how far she’s come since then!
David Chelsea Is Watching:Camp
starring Anna Kendrick
Usually I blow my own horn in these blog posts, and rightly so, but today I celebrate the recent accomplishments of my two brilliant and beautiful children, Ben and Rebecca. First up, the socks that Rebecca designed for the 2015 Design a Sock of Contest for the company Sock it to Me- which were third place finishers- are finally here in their true physical form! Show them off to your friends and family- you are sure to have the coolest slidy penguin socks around.
David Chelsea is watching: Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! – Season 1
by Warner Home Video
It saddens me to report the death of Bingo, our family cat for the past twelve and a half years. Although he was already pretty old by cat standards, Bingo’s last illness came on very suddenly. Last Saturday, Eve noticed that his belly was strongly swollen. It was more so on Sunday. Instead of purring, he was cooing like a dove, which was odd. Monday, Eve called for a vet appointment. Since it did not seem to be an emergency, they gave her a Tuesday appointment. When they took his temperature, the nurse thought it was a mistake because it was only 95.5° The vet said it was cancer causing fluid to build up, which explained the swelling, and that Bingo’s temperature meant that his body was actively shutting down, and he might not last to the weekend. Quite a shock, since we had vaguely thought this might be worms or a bowel obstruction. The vet recommended euthanasia on the spot. Eve decided to have it done at home, so Rebecca would have a chance to say goodbye. Bingo had not seemed to be in pain before, but he spent Tuesday night squirming around on the floor, yowling piteously. The end of life vet arrived Wednesday morning. Eve and I had a chance to hold him one last time before she stopped his heart. We buried Bingo in the yard that afternoon.