If you’re just joining us, this is the penultimate post in a five-part series.  You can read the first, second, and third posts to get caught up.

I was on a roll.  The Book and The Book II were lots of fun to make.  I had plenty of time in school to draw these violent stick wars, so I next embarked upon World ‸^Stick War III: The Book.  In this book I decided to utilize chapters, grouping similar battlegrounds together.  I also reduced the number of armies to the following six: French, Russian, American, Chinese, Japanese, and Teenagers (yes, teenagers).  So let’s look at a couple of drawings from this era.

What you see here is the first drawing from the “Towers” chapter of the book.  As you might guess, this chapter contained drawings of stick men fighting on top of tall structures.  In this case, they are on bungee jumping towers.  You can see where I originally drew an arch-shaped bungee tower, but then erased it and went with some less-realistic towers.  There’s not much more of interest in this picture, I was kind of running out of ways to kill people.  One thing to note is how much better my drawings of people on fire got.  By this point I was drawing a person on fire pretty much the same way I might draw it today.  Here is a comparison of someone on fire in the first book versus the third book:

You can almost taste the burning flesh and hair.  Good stuff.

Next up is an image from the “Honey I Shrunk The Sticks” chapter.  I included this one to remind everyone just how funny a drawing like this was in seventh grade, in case you forgot.  I mean there is a guy riding a turd.  A turd cowboy, if you will.  (Note to self: if I ever decided to produce moviefilms of a scatological nature, I have a great title.)  You can see in this one that I again spent more time on the background than on the fighting itself.  What’s sad is that I recall sitting on the floor of the bathroom at home while sketching this out.  That’s dedication to your art.

I kind of got bored with the whole concept of W‸^SWIII:TB and ended it early.  As I recall, I didn’t do any work on it in the summer between seventh and eigth grade, and by the time eight grade started I decided I would start a new book instead.  This book would be Bookstix IV: The Next, Next, Next, Next Generation.  I’m not 100% sure, but I think the “Stick Books” to “Bookstix” title change was a reference to Southern Bell changing their name to BellSouth.  Starting with this book, I referred to the stick men in the book as “stix”, rather than “sticks.”  I don’t remember which armies there were in this book, but I know I introduced Arabian stix and a new type of alien stix (which now resembled four-armed versions of Alien).  This book actually had some sense of a story line, although I don’t think it would have won any awards.  So now let’s see summa them wars.

Here we have a battle at a satanic cult.  Which should really be viewed as having strong school spirit, seeing as how we were the Red Devils, encouraged to show “devil pride.”  You will see that Satan is wearing clothes, unlike most of my stix.  There is actually a reason for this:  Keith drew stick-wars also, and his stick men were unique in that they wore clothes.  So it was an in-joke that the devil himself was a clothes-wearing stick.  The clothes-wearing god pictured is also a reference to Keith’s stick men.  Check out the sexy orgy down at the bottom!  That’s pretty hot!  I’m thoroughly convinced that there’s nothing you can think of so perverse that a kid in middle school hasn’t already thought of it and drawn it on paper.

Tension had been brewing between my stix and Keith’s stick men, and this battle is the culmination of it all.  Believe it or not, Bookstix IV wasn’t all about Keith’s stick men, I just selected these two drawings because they were different from what you’ve seen the past three days.  It was nothing personal against Keith; I mean, I couldn’t claim he stole the idea of drawing stick wars from me, since I actually stole the idea from Kevin.  But getting back on track, I really like this image because it’s just so incredibly violent.  Like, Quentin Tarantino violent.  I mean, a guy gets shot, bifurcating his body.  Then, while the top half of the body is flipping over, more bullets take off the head.  So you’ve got a guy with a three-part body, spewing blood all over the place.  It’s dripping off the ceiling!  And in another place, a guy is grabbed by the feet and used like a baseball bat to kill another guy.  And there’s an Arabian guy down at the bottom pulling a double Sub-Zero fatality.  Awesome!  The page after this battle was titled “aftermath of the page 14” and just contained the word “censored” written diagonally across the page in large letters.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series so far.  Tomorrow morning I’ll wrap it up with discussion of Bookstix V, my greatest work of stick violence ever.

“bifurcating” is a cool word.

If you’re just joining us, this is part 3 of a 5-part series.  You may want to go back and read part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.

Following the success of The Book, it became evident that a sequel was needed.  At the start of seventh grade, I began work on The Book II.  In this book you can definitely see an improvement in my artistic skill, although a lot of my ideas were getting stale by that point.  I also reduced the number of armies, but I don’t recall the extent of that reduction.

First up is page 13 of the second book, which takes place aboard a pirate ship.  For this battle and this battle only, you got to see pirate sticks.  Unfortunately there were no ninjas in this book, so there is no ninja vs. pirate action.  In this drawing I broke the fourth wall... with a cannon ball.  Doesn’t that make your eyes hurt!  Do you still refer to the barrier between the image and the viewer a fourth wall when it’s a drawing and not a play/movie/tv show?  You can also see the censored profanity that I first started using in this book, coming from the guy who just killed Flipper.  And check out the guy getting delicately split in half by a machine gun.  That must have taken skill!

Next up is a drawing from the bad taste department.  This one took place at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing.  You can clearly see some censored worty dirds in there.  Notice the social commentary here: the press is blocking the road, preventing emergency workers from getting to the building.  That’s a powerful metaphor or something.  There’s also a reference to Beverly Hills 90210 and its overuse of sex.  At least, I think that was something the show was known for.  I’ve never actually watched it.  I have however watched Nickelodeon’s What Would You Do?, which is also referenced here.  Notice even more social commentary on the inefficiency of governmental organizations (in this case, the FBI, who only just now determined that this was caused by a bomb).  And apparently the local news stations are KILL and KKKI.  Which I assume was meant to be pronounced KKK-1.  Since that would be a really bad call sign for a television station.  Get it?

For today’s final image, I present the one that would have been most likely to get me expelled from school: a drawing of my middle school.  With the principal standing out front.  And she’s about to become the victim of a drive-by.  While she says “stop the violence.”  Yeah, I think they might have overreacted to that.  Can you tell by the not-one-but-two “a.k.a. Hell On Earth” banners that I wasn’t extremely fond of my time spent in middle school?  This drawing, like the Oklahoma City drawing, was one where I spent a lot of time drawing the background, but then never drew the stick men fighting.

I’ve also blurred out the name of someone I didn’t like.  Contrary to what you may interpret, this person never actually did anything to me, at least not physically.  Actually I never really got into fights.  I mean, I’m clearly not a violent person.  No, I’ve blurred out his name because I have no idea what he’s like now: I haven’t actually talked to him since probably around the time I drew this.  I’ll let go of the past because I realize now that he was probably a jerk back then because he had crappy parents that treated him just as badly, if not worse.  He’d already gotten more than he deserved for the things he did, before he even did them.  The sad thing is that odds are good he’s in a prison right now.  Or that he has a kid or three that he cares for about as much as his father cared for him.  But I hope not.  Wherever you are, blurred-out-name-guy, this post goes out to you.  Here’s hoping that you’ve done more with your life than the statisticians, politicians, sociologists, and economists would predict.  Maybe you even graduated high school in my class, in which case (if you’re not in prison) I might see you at a reunion sometime down the road.  No hard feelings, okay?

Join me tomorrow as I take a look at World ‸^Stick War III: The Book and Bookstix IV: The Next, Next, Next, Next Generation.

As I stated yesterday, my first and longest book of stick art was entitled The Book.  In The Book I started out with eight different armies, and partway through I added eight more armies.  The armies included Americans, Feminists, Chinese, Nerds, Nazis, Ninjas, Drug Dealers, Aliens (the kind from outer space, not the kind from Mexico), and Scuba Divers (yes, there was an army of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus enthusiasts).  I apparently stayed away from any armies based on race, at least as I understood race at the time (I thought Arabian was a subset of “white”), and I also tried to balance the number of members of each race that are dying.  I guess this is another thing that could get me sent to Gitmo, as the Americans weren’t doing all the killing (that’s high treason!).

What you see here is the very first page of my first book (not counting the title page, table of contents, or advertisements).  One of the features included is a bad attempt to represent the way the Chinese language sounds to a twelve-year-old who doesn’t speak it.  In retrospect, that is probably pretty offensive.  You’ll also see that there is a “danger room” at the bottom of the cliff.  Personally I would have opted for a hot chicks room, but to each his own.  There’s not much blood in the early drawings, at least not compared to my later drawings (you’ll see this more clearly as the week progresses).  The people with three pony tails, four arms, and two mouths are aliens.  In case you were wondering.

Now I present you with another picture that could have gotten me arrested.  Maybe it could still get me arrested?  This battle took place in Washington, DC and was subtitled “The Clintons Croak.”  I don’t think this was an attack specifically on the Clintons; they just happened to be the people living in the White House at the time.  You’ll see that Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and Sox Clinton all get assassinated.  Well technically, Sox is only thrown from the second floor, which I now know most cats could survive just fine.  There is also a baby being beaten against the side of the building, which was a reference to something that happened in some book we had to read that year.  I don’t remember the specifics.

Next up is a pretty typical battle, taking place in an underground base in Antarctica.  Here I introduced the element of torture, as some dude is holding a gun to a feminist, who is begging him not to shoot her.  We don’t know what happened next, but I think everyone can agree that it was pretty sexy.  I also must have liked the idea of a stairway leading to Hell, as both this drawing and my first drawing featured one at the bottom.  I’m not sure why a secret underground base in one of the most remote locations on earth would have a giant “To Base” sign advertising its presence, but I guess it’s not likely to be seen by anyone who wasn’t already on his way there anyway.

For today’s last image, I’ll leave you with a battle in an underwater base.  I think this was supposed to be the Scuba Divers’ army’s headquarters.  You’ll see a Nazi about to get harpooned (the Nazi soldiers have swastikas for faces... because I couldn’t think of any other way to draw them I guess).  I didn’t realize it until I started typing this, but I totally have a thing for harpooning Nazis.  But that’s okay; if video games have taught me one thing, it is that it is always, always honorable and virtuous to kill zombies, Nazis, zombie Nazis, aliens, and fast zombies.  Speaking of harpoons, Willy (of Free Willy fame) (mispeled as “Wiley”) is getting harpooned.  There’s also a sewage pipe that just pumps the sewage out in the water above the base.  Why would they build that pipe?  If they weren’t going to dispose of it properly couldn’t they just have pumped it directly into the water?  I guess if they did it that way some guy couldn’t be eating the sewage.  And eating sewage is always hilarious.  For more bathroom humor, check out the “john” where someone has really stunk up the place, so much so that two dudes have passed out from the smell (see, you can tell because they are laying on the ground and saying “sniff, sniff... Shoo!!!”).  There’s also a drug deal going down at the bottom of the ocean (hey, that’s where I buy all my drugs).  Hey check out the cracking glass: that’s actually almost decent art!

That’s all for today.  Tomorrow I’ll have some scans from The Book II.

Last week Garrison tipped me off to this story about a thirteen-year-old kid who got suspended from school for drawing something that resembles a giant gun.  Seriously, is that all it takes to get suspended?  If I were that age today, I would probably be expelled.  In fact, they might send me to Gitmo and throw away the key.

I’ve decided that I’m going to devote this week to sharing some of the things that I drew at around the same age.  Beginning around the second semester of sixth grade (which is to say, early 1994, when I was 12 years old), I drew pictures of stick man wars.  This is something I continued for approximately three years, culminating at the start of the second semester of my freshman year of high school (early 1997, at 15 years of age).  During this time I completed five “books” of these drawings.

For today, I’ll leave you two pages from The Book, my first and longest book (fifty pages!).  Stay tuned as I plan to make a post each morning this week before leaving for work.

If that kid got suspended for drawing a gun, then you can imagine what they’d do if they found a drawing like this.  This was basically a catalog of all the weapons I had used or might someday use in my stick wars.  I need to give some context to the “nazi star” you see on the page, before you leave dozens of comments accusing me of being a racist:  there were many different armies in my drawings, one of which was the Nazi army.  The “nazi star” is a swastika-shaped throwing star, which the Nazi stick men would use sometime.  For the same reason you see a calculator attack (one of the armies was Nerds) and a cape smother (one of the armies was “caped crusaders”).  In tomorrow’s post I’ll elaborate on the different armies.

In my books I included advertisements, and here is an advertisement for “Bombs ‘R’ Us.”  I believe the tone of the ad was a parody of some commercial on TV at the time, that said something like “big cars, little cars, black cars, white cars.”  It may not have been cars per se, but I think there was some commercial like that.  I just changed the subject to bombs.  Check out those 10 inconvenient truths locations.  I guess I picked locations that were either (a) hard to reach; (b) devastated by war; or (c) Madagascar.  You’ll also see a reference to Sega’s pre-ESRB video games rating system.

Check back tomorrow morning for some stick wars from The Book.

Dane Cook has a stand-up routine where he addresses the misconception that all men care about is sex.  As counter-example, he points out that every man in the world would like to be a part of a heist, running down main street with a machine gun yelling “Where’s the van??  The van was supposed to be here!!”  Even more than that, he says, every man wants to have a monkey.

This is all good, but there are other things that should be added to the list.  In particular would be to have someone break into your house, and then defend yourself with awesome ninja skillz.  (I heard in a movie once that girls like guys with skillz).  For that reason, I name Damian Fernandez, who waited in his bedroom for an intruder to enter and then stabbed him in the chest with a ninja sword, the coolest fifteen-year-old ever.

Note: you can follow this link to listen to the Dane Cook bit I mentioned.  But that link is not in any way an endorsement of the extremely not-funny-or-interesting Halo machinima.

Last Monday marked two years since Stephanie and I got hitched, an event which was well-documented on this site and others.  Those of you who are fans of The Office are no doubt familiar with the Dwight Schrute bobble head.  Well in honor of our second anniversary, my wife had a bobble-head Kip constructed.  You will see the results below, I think it’s pretty cool, although the bobble-head doesn’t have the I-sit-behind-a-computer-all-day physique of yours truly.  But I don’t think I’d want a realistic representation of my waistline sitting on my desk all day anyway.  Other than the eye color, I think it’s pretty spot-on, at least insofar as that is possible on a bobble head.

It’s me.  I’m the bobble-head. Yes!

A week ago I set out to Guitar Center to get a very small and portable amp, since my current amp (seen blurrily in the background of this photo) is over two feet wide, weighs about forty pounds, and is a little too loud for the apartment late at night.  What I had in mind was a Marshal Mini Amp (which you may have seen in School Of Rock), or something similar.  However, the amps that size did not have very much oomph to them.  The guy there talked me into playing a Roland Micro Cube.  It was incredible that it could put out that much noise and yet be so small.  It can even run off batteries (six AA’s)!  Don’t get me wrong—you’re not going to worry about losing hearing unless you hold it to your head.  But you can very well drown out any conversation or tv in the room.  It also has a pretty wide set of effects:  chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, delay, and reverb.  In addition to that, it has six different amp modelers, including a very nice acoustic simulator.  The link I mentioned earlier has several pictures of the box and its controls.  But if you’d like to see it in action, check out this shot of yours truly rocking out:

See how awesome it looks?  And I had it turned up so loud that the camera picked up those yellow sound waves (betcha didn’t know that’s what sound waves looked like, didja?).  I’m also rocking out a black “teal” shirt (I wanted to put one on my cafepress store, but it won’t let me put up more than one black shirt).  And for anyone interested, I tried to give myself 1980’s hair band hair, but my attempt at doing so was less than successful.

For any who want to hear what this thing sounds like, I recorded a few short sound clips below.  If the audio quality is sub-par, blame it on the free-with-a-gateway-computer-six-years-ago-ness of my recording equipment.

Acoustic simulation
It’s amazing that it was able to get such a bright sound out of my Stratocaster.  Usually without distortion an electric guitar just sounds so flat.  I recorded two samples, both are also using a little bit of the Chorus effect...  I mean, why would you not use that effect with an acoustic-like sound?

• Galapogos (sic) - 0:14 - This song shows off the acoustic simulator with a song that picks one string at a time, rather than chords.

• Shine On - 0:14 - This song uses the acoustic simulation with chords.  Ain’t it purdy?

JC Clean
This is supposed to sound like the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus amplifier.  I’m not sure how successful it is, but it does sound very nice with certain sounds (although obviously not as bright as the acoustic simulation).

• Shine On - 0:12 - I played the same song on the clean channel so that the difference would be quite obvious.  This one sounds much flatter to me, which is not my personal preference.

• Hummer - 0:29 - This song will show off an example of when the clean channel would be much better than the acoustic channel.  I’m also using the delay effect on this song.

Black panel
This is supposed to simulate the Fender Twin Reverb sound.  I don’t like it very much, because all it seems to do is overdrive the low end and make it sound like my speaker cone is torn.

• Zero - 0:10 - You can hear how only the low-end is distorted.  I’m not too very fond of this setting.

Brit Combo
According to the manual, “this is modeled on the Vox AC-30TB, the rock amplifier that created the Liverpool sound of the ‘60s.”  I don’t particularly care for this sound, it’s kind of like the “fuzz” distortion that Jimi Hendrix used a lot.  Just sounds to me like the clean signal mixed with a lot of static.

• Welcome To Paradise - 0:53 - This is a rather long clip.  I guess it kinda speaks for itself.  I boosted the low-end on the recording because my microphone didn’t pick it up very well...

Rectifier
This is really the only distorted channel I use on this thing.  It is modeled after the Mesa/Boogie Rectifier.  Much closer to the sounds of the mid-to-late nineties that I liked so much.  Unfortunately, the sound recorded does not match what was actually played very well at all.  In fact, the sound that was recorded is extremely obnoxious—I don’t know where the low end went!  In reality, the distortion is much creamier (that’s the best word I could think of to describe it).

• Welcome To Paradise - 0:52 - Once again, I’ll present the same song on two different channels for you to compare and contrast.  But really, I like the recording of this much less, but in person I liked it much more.  Stupid cheap microphone.

• I Caught Fire (In Your Eyes) - 0:09 - I wanted something that used the flanger/phaser (I can’t remember which I’m using in this song).  This was as close as I could come to the sound in the actual song, but I definitely fell short of what The Used recorded.

Well that’s all.  I know that was a lot of files, but it’s only three minutes of audio.  I wanted to embed the sounds in the page so that you could play them right there, but (from what I could find) there’s not a good way to do so that is standards-compliant and works across most platforms and browsers without requiring a plug-in, Flash, and/or javascript.

PS:  I do know that there is an audio output on the back of the thing.  In the past I have found those outputs to be noisier than placing a mic in front of the amp.  I haven’t tried with this amp though.  But as far as I know, pretty much all professionally recorded music uses a mic’ed amp, rather than the output from the amp.

Sometimes at work I am at a meeting and the topic of conversation doesn’t really involve me in any way.  And sometimes this happens when I have a pencil and a piece of paper handy.  And sometimes I doodle.  Usually, I am doodling The Ninjas.  The other day I scanned some of these drawings from the past fourteen months.  Now, you too can enjoy them.

Who are The Ninjas?
Who aren’t The Ninjas!  They are a totally rocking awesome hard rock band comprised solely of ninjas who are dedicated to rocking hard.  They’re so awesome that they don’t even care if they have fans.  That’s what makes their fans love them so hard.  Their music rocks so hard that you’d stab yourself in the ear with a rusty screwdriver, just because you’re psyched so hard.

Here is a drawing of the whole band.  Notice how the lead guitarist is totally rocking hard!  And the lead singer is totally getting into it.  And check it out- there are people crowd surfing to show just how much The Ninjas rock!  And check out the bass player over there, he’s totally all “whatever man, I’m just too cool for you”.  And the drummer—check out the drum!  It’s got The Ninjas’ logo on it!  That rocks so hard.  These guys are so cool.  I’d totally do them all if I were gay.  Twice.

Here’s a drawing from The Ninjas’ latest music video.  That’s no special effect- the lead guitarist actually set himself on fire for the video!  He was recovering in the hospital for nine months!  That’s how much he rocks!  But it doesn’t stop there—dude totally brought his guitar and amp into the hospital and rocked the nurses’ pants off.  They all totally wanted him, even though he was covered in third degree burns.  That’s how hard he rocks.

Here’s a shot of the lead guitarist rocking so hard that he had to be airborne to do it.  You can’t tell from the picture, but he’s actually jumping off of a fifteen story building without a rope or parachute or anything!  Dude’s totally crazy!  He landed on his feet and kept right on rocking!  And that rocks hard.

Finally, here is a video of the lead guitarist rocking hard, then smashing his guitar in the middle of the song.  That rocks.  That guy rocks so hard.  (fyi- there are only ten quick drawings in that... I didn’t waste as much time on it as you might think)

Click here to download my The Ninjas wallpaper!  It is not a typical desktop size, but it is in the correct aspect ratio (4:3), so just set the position to “stretch” and it will look right.  That’s the actual size it was scanned at (600 dpi), but I’ve adjusted the color balance a little so that it is darker.

Run away, go ahead and try
  run away, before I stab you in the eye
Because you’ll never know (you’ll never know)
  how far to go (how far to go)

—The Ninjas - Hands Off My Girl (Nozomi’s Song)

This may be weird, but I enjoy walking in the rain.  In college I only carried an umbrella for a short time during freshman year before realizing it was kind of a hassle.  After that I just never used one.

If I were in a rock band I’d wanna do one of those cliche videos where we’re playing in heavy rain and it’s in slow motion and everyone’s jumping around and the water is flying from people’s heads and guitars, and did I mention it’s in slow motion so that it looks totally awesome.  I’m trying to think of a video like that but can’t remember one off the top of my head.  “Thief” by Our Lady Peace has a video where it’s raining, but not for the purpose of being cool so much as to symbolize sadness.  I think there was a Live video (Dolphin’s Cry maybe?) where they were playing in rain (I think?).  Oh I think I just remembered which one I was thinking of- the “Perfect” video from A Simple Plan, where they’re playing on the roof in the rain.  I just think that’s really cool looking.

Anyway it’s something I’ve thought about during the last two days’ nearly-constant downpours, so I thought I’d blogify it.

Rain falls on everyone, the same old rain

This is funny.