All done!

Some of them I worked a little more closely to reference material than I would if they weren’t for free and I’d actually agreed to do them in the first place.  But what the hell, hey?  Now to (arbitrarily) number them, and spray them with fixative since whatever card stock they used doesn’t hold ink at all.

Here’s the next six C4 sketchcards!  Only eight to go.

Now available on Indyplanet! Or in person this Halloween at the Central Canada Comic-Con.

After being caught inadvertently being heroic, the Spanker is approached by Family Force, a political action group that seems to know everything about him. Can he break free of their terrifying agenda?

The Spanker, a supervillain who is consistently thwarted by do-gooder hero Diaperman, breaks out into his own adventures in his quest to bend the world–over his knee!

I was thinking recently about socialism, fascism, and other shiny theories of goverment that collapse as soon as you apply them to imperfect people, and I had a thought. I don’t know how original it is, but it came to me so here goes.

What if, on our income tax forms, we all had a page with a series of checkboxes, allowing us to declare where we want our tax money to go? I’m envisioning general categories like “roads,” “public schooling,” etc. And, depending on how many categories there are, we would each be able to pick, I don’t know, say, three.

I know the technology is available to us now, since Safeway is able to track what brand of tomato paste we all like. But is the theory sound? Could we govern by Facebook poll?

Imagine, in this twitterocracy, not enough people in a region checked off “roads” one year. We can assume the roads would fall into disrepair, and more people would check off “roads” the following year. Areas with lots of parents would have well-funded schools. Medicine Hat would have an awesome hospital. The system should self-balance–I think.

What about the money the government needs to run itself? I doubt many people would be interested in checking off “administrative overhead.” I sure wouldn’t. I like to think that if you take away the decisions about where money should go, you could probably get away with a much smaller government, but that isn’t very practical. Better to let the administration have the tax money of those who choose not to fill their boxes in. Judging from the level of voter apathy today, that should be plenty for them.

Of course, I’d be more interested in government if I had a direct, quantifiable say in it. Would you?

When the Central Canada Comic-Con announced that they would be handing out free sketchcards with weekend passes, I didn’t really take any notice.  They hadn’t asked me directly, and I’ve had more experience than I’d like to admit with concoms coming up with sudden, poorly-thought-out ideas.

To me, this smelled like “let’s give out free stuff! Hey, artists, give us free stuff to hand out!  For free!”  That sort of thing gets my back up, and it’s not C4′s fault–especially since they extremely reasonably don’t charge for Artist Alley tables for out-of-Manitoba guests.

Still, nobody else will value your art if you don’t, so I found it very easy to ignore the request that hadn’t been sent to me in the first place.

Kyle, on the other hand, believes that all exposure is good exposure, and he replied to them.  And they sent him his ten cards, and my ten cards, and ten cards for Michael onto which they apparently want him to write dialogue, and an extra ten for I do not know what.

I appreciate tenacity, and brute-force bulling forward.  And also, free artist tables.  So I’m drawing my twenty cards.

Thus far I’ve been drawing whatever’s in front of me at the time, so coming up is Freakazoid (Michael bought me the DVDs for my birthday) and probably more Gargoyles since I’ve been going through the series ever since getting back from the Gathering.

And I suppose I need to draw Destro practicing the clarinet as well.

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This is the first post on my new WordPress blog, which is much more powerful and secure than my previous platform (sphpblog) and also automatically poots out posts to Livejournal and Facebook, which is extremely nice for me because now I don’t have to, and not so nice for you because you have to read everything three times.  Sorry about that.