Here comes Herb, in an extra long 8-part series. This series inspired bringing back the "go to first in this series" link.

Interestingly, after doing this series, I was contacted by a friend that may come to live in Seattle! Ah ha!

Timing can be funny.

So Sarah is pregnant and now I'm trying to decide if I should allude to the pregnancy in the comic.

Sure, the comic is loosely based on me, but do I want it to be really based on me?

It wouldn't be the end of the world to have Sarah be pregnant, but I don't know that I want to draw a baby.

Maybe I'll end the comic on #300, with a baby plot. It could be a temporary stop, and I would start again in 18 years.

21 if the kid is a slacker that lives at home.

We are currently in the grip of Battlestar Galactica.

I'm starting to draw more of each frame instead of cutting and pasting everything. It's been fun, and I feel more pride about the final product, even as the artistic quality drops.

A few years ago, Sarah got me a signed print from Chris Ware. I just read a few of the panels and was inspired. But frustrated.

See, the reason your favorite band "got weird" after their second album is because they threw away their mold and tried to make a new one. They had about 20 years to make the first one, away from the pressure of a label or fans. And after pumping out similar sounding music for two albums and two tours, they got bored. Maybe they went to a far away land (India!) or maybe they started studying esoteric topics, new musical genres and techniques. Then they took a leap and tried doing things a little different. (and named their fourth album 10,000 Days and it sucked, grumble grumble)

It's technically easy to keep pumping out the same art, but it's emotionally exhausting. If you're not loving the process, cherishing the novelty, and feeling a charge when you create, it doesn't matter that it's phsyically easy. It's mentally impossible.

I want my comic to change a little. And with a tiny readership, there's really nothing stopping me externally. But I'm a bit of a purist. I'd rather start a new strip than mess too much with the chemistry of what I'm currently doing.

I just got some new art supplies, including these pens:

I'm going to start doing some subtle shading.

I'm on the edge of my seat regarding the upcoming midterm elections, and I have a bit of writer's block.

Clearly the Democrats are going to take the House. By a lot. Clearly the Senate is going to be hard to reach.

I'm not getting many jokes out of these realities. More than anything, I'm hitting reload on the polling numbers about 30 times a day. I wrote 3 political strips the other day, but I'm not sure they were very good.

Maybe a Democratic victory will break my writer's block. Remember to vote on Tuesday :)

So Microsoft is talking up its new Zune device, and I need to respond. Dick seems like the perfect person to take the plunge and buy one.

And he'll have to quickly realize that the Zune doesn't weigh any less than the iPod, it's just as closed as the iPod, the battery life is worse than an iPod, and so on.

But it'll be brown!

(actually, I think brown is going to make a comeback as a color. But it's fun to laugh at Microsoft's color choice)

"Rap" has been the number one story idea on the right side of the page for several months. Tonight I finally wrote up the comic, and even got in a reference to Godwin's Law.

I'm sad to say the comic (and punchline) is based on actual events. I didn't compare rap to Hitler, but I did compare ... ummm ... Java to Hitler. Seriously.

My point was that everything can serve a purpose, even Nazis. So even though Java is not my favorite language, I'm glad it existed to push computing forward. I totally lost that conversation once the word "Nazi" came out of my mouth.

As for rap, I'm becoming depressed about the state of hip-hop. I love remix and cut&paste culture, but I just don't like more than a small handful of rappers. So I've been loving RJD2 and DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist and all the hipster lounge acts like Thievery Corporation and Brazilian Girls.

After a long break, I drew another comic today.

I haven't been doing a lot of comics lately, which is a shame because I have a backlog of ideas. I will remedy this soon. Oh yes. Here it comes. You'll be amazed.

Yeah.

I have a new site to play with. It records what I do in my life by using little 16x16 icons.

One of the first icons I designed was one for adding a new comic.

For a long time, I've drawn my main characters with little arcs around the eyes. In comic vocabulary, these mean "overwhelmed".

I never did the eye parenthesis on purpose, but now I'm sort of stuck with them. It makes it impossible, or harder, to color. It makes every person look like they're scared or wary of the coamera.

And I guess that's ok. My characters are wary. The world is overwhelming. And coloring is over-rated anyway.

I watched Germany beat Sweden this morning, and I got to thinking about America's apathy when it comes to The World's Sport.

So I figured I'd write a comic about it this morning. I considered how soccer players are truly in shape, how they have incredible stamina, cannot afford to be overweight, etc. Which made me think of Shaq with his cherry-picking and Barry Bonds and his doping. And I had a comic drawn up in my mind and ready to go.

But then I saw a Swedish player on the field take a dive. And now I'm torn. I'd love to write a comic skewering the drama queens that dive, writhe around, leave the field on a stretcher, and come back a minute later, all in the name of "strategy".

It was always hard for me to read Tintin comics because his author managed to draw him the same, frame after frame. Every time.

I have some trouble with this. The comics I did as a teenager were plagued with the typical problems: confusing plot, too much text crammed into too small a space, the required self-deprecating remarks about my artistic talent written in the margins. But I did one thing that most of my friends didn't: I made my main character look different in every frame.

This pushed my comics from the understandable realm of "confusing" to "downright bewildering". And however hard I tried, I never was able to get very much better. But then I started doing this comic and realized I could cheat! I could draw something once and cut and paste it!

It makes me feel guilty because I want to be able to hand-draw these all individually. I'm reading early Peanuts and they said in the introduction that Schultz hand-inked every single pane from the first to the last, many decades later. More guilt.

But I'm getting better. I have pages and pages where I try to get Kai's chin right. Pages and pages where I get Dick's angry brow furrowed at the right angle. And most importantly, I'm forcing myself to scan new strips even when I have perfectly servicable scans I can re-use.

But I like having something change over time, so currently Kai is showing off different shapes on his shirt. A little shout-out to teenage me, but hopefully without the staggering amount of reader confusion.

After a day of adding the ideas list on the side, I've done two strips based on the votes they received. It turns out they both have to do with being mean to animals.

I just got a new feature working. Over to the side, there's an "ideas" column. You can drag and drop the comic ideas into a new order to vote for the ones you'd most like to see.

I don't record the data in any serious way, but that's sort of the point. I like the idea that the best ideas will float to the top, even if the data isn't concrete.

I just discovered Gnarls Barkley and RJD2, which are natural progressions from my Gorillaz and DJ Shadow obsessions.

There's something strange going on in music, and I love it. I have a feeling the next several comics are going to be powered by these strange and innovative albums.

I grew up watching and listening to great stand-up. My brother loves Bill Cosby, old George Carlin, old Robin Williams, Richard Pryor and others, so we always had plenty of comic material around the house. Also Comic Strip Live was going strong in the early 90's, and the brand-new Comedy Central had no content other than 4 hour blocks of stand-up, which I eagerly absorbed.

But like a wine snob who can't appreciate common wines, I think I lost my taste for a lot of normal comedy. I hate jokes that I can see coming a mile away, and worse, ones I've heard repeatedly. Which is why I found some joy in the fringe of comedy. Stuff that's so far out there it's not even funny any more. Andy Kaufman. Bill Hicks. Dennis Miller before he wet his pants on 9/11 and started voting Republican.

So I've always wanted to be a comic, but I know I wouldn't be "funny". I don't mind talking in front of crowds, and I sure have a lot to say, but I'm pretty sure I'd disappoint people just there to see someone, uh, be funny. So if anyone knows of a comedy club that would pay to see a guy rant about things, let me know.

In the last few days, I've jotted about ten different jokes on scraps of paper and in my sketchbook. This is a great sign for content, because at very least I have 10 more strips ready.

But I wonder what's happening here. Am I coming up with better ideas, or are my standards getting worse?

It's all academic anyway, because I'm publishing these suckers one way or another. Though I may need to consider keeping an idea trove so I don' t lose track of my stash.

I've been learning Ruby on Rails well enough to put this workshop and the main comic site on it.

In all, Ruby on Rails is a ffantastic thing. It's lovely, and beautiful, and I wish the coding world had more things like it.

But, you know, it has nothing to do with comics. The sooner I can stop writing code and posting comics, the happier I'll be.

Remember The Greatest American Hero? It was a 1981 television show where the superhero couldn't land right. I only saw a few episodes with my dad, but I remember waiting to see the main character try to land, because it made me happy every time.

Or Perfect Strangers? Again, I used to watch that with my dad, and our favorite thing to watch for was the "happy dance". They probably only did the happy dance a few times in the entire history of the show, but it was still my favorite part. Something to look forward to.

Calvin had his rides through the woods and his Spaceman Spff fantasies. Bloom County had the dandilion patch and the anxiety closet. Charlie Brown and Lucy have their horrible football romance and Snoopy has his Red Baron fantasy. Garfield hates Mondays and spiders, which were great ongoing themes until they were overdone.

I'd like to get the same thing going in Yet Another Comic, but every time I get ready to, it feels cheap. Like if I were to return Kai to the USS Couch, would he really have anything new to share? Would it be funny and engaging, or would it just seem like I'm running out of ideas?

We're having a MacQuake at work. Ever since Apple announced their Intel chips, more and more people have been buying their first Macs since the 80's.

One co-worker claimed today "It's not a matter of if, but when", which surprised me somewhat. He's always represented the most strenuous resistance to any new trend, whether the use of the term web 2.0", Ruby on Rails, or now, Apple Mania. He also hates Radiohead, and hated them before it was cool.

So even he is getting a Mac, which got me thinking what a social stigma it can be in some circles to buy one. Say your next machine will be an iMac to a group of hard-core geeks and you might as well have touted pico in an emacs/vi flame war.

I've decided that Dick is going to buy a Mac. Why? Don't ask him. He might punch you in the face.

It's funny how the smallest details are considered and reconsidered in the name of aesthetics. For example, selecting the font for this site.

I knew I wanted the blog to be designed by me, not the default wordpress or typo theme. But my designs are heavily weighted towards fancy elements that won't work well for a hand-drawn comic. For example, color. And, well, straight lines.

So I looked at my Yet Another Comic main page for inspiration. It was a good enough design to expand into a blog, so I set to work.

But then I got to the part where I wanted to add blog text, and I realized none of the standard fonts would do. Verdana, Georgia, Helvetica, Arial are all so clean, and would look wrong in a hand-drawn interface.

So I settled on courier. If I'm going to have to use an boring computer font, I'm going to go all the way to 11 and pick something that looks like a typewriter.

So my goal is for the design of the blog to be like a typed manuscript with doodles on the margins.

Or the unibomber manifesto.

Let it be known that in April of 2006, I tried to make a blog for Yet Another Comic.

It would be over a month until I could get it working well enough to write a second post.