In which an Ipp demonstrates the proper use of a radio.

In which I got the word "shell" off a box of taco shells and then built a comic around that. I love generating stories in real time from random words and ideas.

Okay sometimes there's the fancy drawing pencils, and sometimes there's just a ball-point pen.

Here the Ipps show that they could do a much better job managing the economy than the clowns we have now. Look at em go! Ipps work hard.

Listening to a Journey power ballad while loading this. Although I suspect they sound more like the Clash. Or, Roy Orbison meets Whitesnake. Or something.

in which the Ipps enjoy a cup of coffee at a sidewalk cafe. I just love drawing those Paris cafe tables and chairs.

... in which it's never to late to do something romantic.

A little something for Talk Like A Pirate Day, mateys!

Here's to bucket hats!!

in which an Ipp shows what we would all do if we had a big, big drum.

in which a young Ipp gets a visit after losing a tooth.

I saw something today about a guy whose dog dialed 911 when he had a seizure. I figure, as technology gets easier to use, it's going to get more and more likely that dogs, and monkeys, and other animals will be able to start using it for their various animal purposes. I wonder what a parrot would put on its iPod. Probably that one guy whose fans call themselves Parrot Heads? I forget his name.

I live in the SF Bay Area, though, and there is no species on this planet that is ever going to have an easy time with the BART ticket machines. That just isn't going to happen.

Judging from the look on its face, I'm guessing the little one started it.

Every so often, I'm doing stuff on my computer, and then the little green light goes on and it starts gurgling, and gurgling, and... it just keeps doing this. It is very, very busy. But it will not tell me what it is doing. All I know is that it won't do anything else. Like open any programs. Or close any programs. Or light up anything. Or anything. I hate this.
I got this program called Crap Cleaner which I run periodically (they renamed it "CCleaner" when it got successful and I guess they figured it wasn't too family friendly referring to Crap) and this helps for a while. I am stunned as it tosses tens of Megabytes of, well, Crap off my drive. Like, every week. It's like soapy buildup if soapy buildup made it impossible to even get into the shower.
Perhaps, given campaign politics lately, my computer has discovered some sort of religious fundamentalism and is speaking in tongues or preparing for The Rapture or something.
Or maybe, it just gets bored and decides whatever I'm doing is unworthy so it goes off to do something else.
Or maybe it's been taken over like a Drone or whatever by those evil hacker people who take over your computer and make it into a Drone.
Whatever. I hate the gurgling green light.

Alright, at this point it is routine to see ads on TV for Cialis and Viagra and that other drug that I forget its name during baseball games and other programming. Putting aside the weirdness of that in general, I have a question. One of the ads says you're supposed to seek medical help if things don't, um, settle down for more than 4 hours. 4 hours? Okay, so when do you make the call to your doctor? At 3 hours? That still seems like an awfully long time. 2 hours? Do you wait 2 hours and then become concerned that it might go for another 2 hours? And then when you've made the decision to actually seek medical help, what medical help do you get? I'm not sure I want to think about that too much. Then there are all these other ads for drugs which, as far as I can tell, turn you into a smiling person playing at the park. They don't really say what the drugs do, although you shouldn't take them if you are nursing, pregnant or may become pregnant. And they all give you a dry mouth and nausea apparently. But you won't notice, because you'll be happy playing at the park. Unless you're seeking medical attention.

In which there will not be a soccer game played today.

My street has schools at either end of it, so today I got to see lots of kids at various levels of excitement and nervousness walk up and down with new backpacks on. And, I am guessing that at the end of the day many of the teachers will be wanting to get themselves a big beer. So I figured this drawing kind of covers both bases.

In which the Ipps try out a few sports. One of the great things about athletics is the ways in which people distort to do different things. The Ipps are pretty good at that, too - being mooshy and all.

Like all good characters, the Ipps continue to evolve. Lately, they have grown tiny legs. These changes often happen for practical reasons, like the need for shoes. How is an Ipp supposed to play soccer, or go scuba diving, or set a world record in the long jump without the proper footwear? These guys don't have shoes yet but you can see their evolving, er, physique.

Besides being very portable, I find drawing little bitty pencil sketches gets you to focus on a very few things, and the space between them. I've always loved small pictures of big spaces for some reason. This sketch of a tree is about 2 inches square.

We're getting our house painted. So we've splatted colors all over our walls to see what colors we like. We kept them in the back so people don't think we've gone all militia-like and started painting our house in camo or something.

We thought we knew what we wanted - an understated, stone-like color. With white trim. So we got quarts of three different things and splatted them on.

Well, they looked - not bad, but just incredibly boring. My husband labeled each one with pencil so we'd know which was which. After looking at them I re-labeled them "Battleship barf," "Gloomy grey" which could also have been "Liquid boredom," and the last one was simply "Eh."

I think they should hire me to re-name their little samples for them, so we could save people lots of time. Instead of "Autumn Sage" we could put "Bleah." Instead of "Dusty jeans" we could put "Dirty laundry." And so on. See how much time that would save?

In which something comes to visit from outer space. I often have visuals like this come to me when I am waking up in the morning. This one came to me a week or more ago, and I hadn't gotten it drawn until I just decided to grab the nearest sketchbook and a crummy pen and get it down on paper. This guy reminds me of those toys where you throw them against a window and they stick and then roll their way down.

In which a creature and his pet enjoy a good chair and a good book

In which the Ipps pay a visit to the Ipposarus.

As you may know, I teach kids drawing and cartooning a lot. And as I am teaching, I also get to have one big flashback to the social dynamics of, say, fourth-grade girls. Or second-grade boys. The stuff that gets said across the table as the pens are getting thrown back and forth and kids are becoming best friends and then not friends and then friends again is truly head-spinning. But it's simply amazing to me how much of it is exactly like what I experienced at their age. There's the ringleader who is kind of mean to the semi-outcast kid, who just keeps coming back for more abuse because she just wants friends and doesn't know how else to get them. There's the friend-of-the-ringleader, who is more compassionate and is nice to the semi-outcast when the ringleader isn't looking. There's the kid who copies his friend's drawings, because he likes them, not because he's stealing ideas, but this is Not Okay and the subject of much discussion and yelling. There are scribbled notes passed, tears shed, unflattering drawings made. And it occurs to me that each of these kids has an identity that is totally a function of the other kids. They are like a little ecosystem, a food chain maybe. They are figuring out who is predators and who is prey. For the moment. Then they can go back to drawing various inappropriate body parts on their pictures so I can look sheepish when their parents pick them up.