The Penguin

I was just going back through my blog archive and happened to stumble across this post I wrote way back in June 2015, in which I profiled Boy's Life artist Tom Eaton. Mr. Eaton wrote and illustrated "Pedro" and "Dink & Duff" for the magazine, as well as illustrating numerous puzzles and gags, beginning sometime in 1984. I received wonderful responses from several Tom Eaton fans, who pointed me to collections of old Boy's Life ; at the time, I was kicking around the idea of collecting Mr. Eaton's work into a single document, if only for my own amusement. As far as I know, there is no definitive "Collected Tom Eaton", which is a shame. Having revisited the post, I decided to Google Tom Eaton and his work, wondering if new material had been uploaded since I wrote the original post. This is when I found out he'd recently passed away, on December 11, 2016. You can read the Scouting magazine obituary here. Tom Eaton was a big influe...

Yep, new year, new weird...no politics here. I consider my blog a politics-free haven. A lot has happened to me lately, all positive; I have a lot to be grateful for. Here's a rundown on all the cool stuff I've gotten into within the past few months: New Job!   That's right folks, since October I've been working at Capital Imaging in Lansing, a print shop - ten years after graduating, I'm finally using my damn Graphic Design degree!!! I started out as a Finisher (stack, chop, fold, etc.), which was awesome...but at the beginning of January I was bumped up to Marketing Assistant, which is twice as awesome. Now I've got my finger on the proverbial pulse of the company, wielding my marionette sticks as the Puppet Master...well, not really. But still, it's pretty rad. New Web! Along with the Marketing Assistant job, I've had a chance to take a crash course in WordPress and social marketing, skills I've tested out with Blind Alley Comics. We now no...

Sorry, Bill Watterson, but I just couldn't resist using this one...all hail Calvin and Hobbes! This comic illustrates a point that confronts us when we attempt to speak about the titanic phenomena occurring in the universe every day. We can speak of a supernova exploding "with the force of x  megaton bombs", or a star that "could hold a million of our suns"...but ultimately all this is meaningless. When the standard unit of interstellar measurement, the light year, is about 8.7 x 10¹² miles, human language (and thus, comprehension) just sort of...blanks out. Here's a lovely example: I'm currently watching a JINA-CEE video about novas in parasitic binary star systems . Essentially, a small, dense star (such as a neutron star) will form an orbital relationship with a larger, less-dense giant. The denser of the two will start vacuuming material off its host, adding to its mass; however, because of its size, it compresses the material into its ...

That's right! The second Die Kätze is out, and soon to be in stores! It's already in our  Etsy store , with convenient online ordering. Yeah, a whopper...22 pages of super Lovecraftian fun, plus cats! Don't miss it! Rick Out.

This is a little touchy, so let me preface this by saying that I'm opposed to junk science...i.e., anti-vaccination adherents and so forth. Especially in the realm of medicine, junk science is irritating at best, and life-threatening at worst. I could write a whole other blog on the hows, whys and wherefores of culture, vis-a-vis junk science and belief systems. I'm fully confident in the scientific method and a science-based model of the universe - how it formed, how life evolved, the whole nine yards - the current "choose-your-own-adventure" model of science and belief among my fellow Americans has me appalled. "The centre cannot hold", and all that. We need more grounded, reality-based, reasonably skeptical humans in the world. Rather, I'm making a case for the self-fulfilling prophetic power of science fiction. The scientific community, by definition, needs to be skeptical; I'm not faulting them on that...it's just that I get so frustrated ...

I've been doing a lot of short comics stories lately - usually about 5 pages, although some are quite a bit longer. What I've realized is that certain genres are pretty tough nuts to crack, if you really want to do them right. One of the most difficult is the Time Travel story. Here's the problem: any story that involves time travel faces what I call "existential overload": if, say, an aspect of history can be changed (i.e., killing Hitler), then why not all of them? Why not a slurry of fanatical time-changers going back and changing things willy-nilly? How would this be regulated, except by a quasi-omnipotent order of "Watchers" who somehow ensure that time runs "correctly", whatever "correctly" means? Will only the time-changers know that history - and therefore existence - has been radically altered, or will everyone on earth retain their memories even when reality slips into a different mode? I ask all these questions becaus...

I'd like to write about one of my favorite places in Lansing, a sort of natural oasis in the middle of the city. Fenner isn't big; it's mainly open grassland, surrounded by mixed-growth woods; they have a nice nature center with small exhibits. I worked there for about six months back in 2012. It's the sort of local place that, without being really famous or distinguished, attracts fanatical devotees from the local populace. I'm not at the "fanatical" stage yet, but I'm still very fond of the place, and half-consider it my stomping ground. The Fenner Conservancy performed a radical "habitatectomy" of the main area within the last couple of years, converting what was once a tussocky patch of field into a shortgrass prairie, complete with all-native grasses (although it's a bit hard to tell, so you'll have to take their word for it). Surprisingly, it has improved the walk. Where once they used to mow the grass down to the nubbins an...