Another sneak preview of The Palace: Theatre of Crud by Jimmy J. Aquino

Here's one more peek at the upcoming arc I'm currently busy with.

Connor throws a mini-Irish wake in his office for a fallen friend.

A sneak preview of The Palace: Theatre of Crud by Jimmy J. Aquino

The 14-part Theatre of Crud arc is the next arc of my webcomic The Palace, and it's coming soon to this blog. All 14 strips will be single-panel. As with all other arcs, I'll be posting one strip per day.

Letterer Janice Chiang's old Transformers comic word balloon shapes, which were boxy with sparks emanating from the corners to distinguish the robot characters from the human ones, influenced my boxy word balloon for the talking digital camera in the strip below. Day four of Theatre of Crud refers to a certain jozjozjoz.com post that was brought to my attention by a Time.com article last week.

I'll be on the next episode of Javiland

Javier Hernandez--El Muerto comics creator, Javiland cartooning talk podcast host and Fistful of Soundtracks fan--invited me to be one of several guest webcomic creators on the phone during this Sunday's Javiland episode about webcomics at 6pm PST (Tyler James, whose Over online graphic novel I just started reading after Jav mentioned it to me, has confirmed he'll also be part of the ep). Javiland is a must-listen for anyone who's interested in creating self-published comics like Jav has done with El Muerto.

It's a great time to do Jav's show because I'm in the middle of writing and drawing another Palace arc. The targets in this arc will include right-wingers and craptastic movies, whether they're mainstream or art-house flicks (The Palace is based on the years I spent going to art-house theater screenings for local critics--art-house movies can often be as awful and hackneyed as mainstream ones, and man, I was subjected to a lot of awful ones). I'm constantly rewriting the gags. I don't want to turn into the crazy but brilliant Danny Arnold, who rewrote the gags in his scripts for Barney Miller so much that he caused afternoon tapings of the show to continue all the way into the early morning (what a nutso way to write comedy, and I bet the actors really enjoyed staying up all night at the studio).

Since the 2002 launch of my radio station (which Jav calls a podcast, but AFOS has never really been a podcast like Javiland because if it were, I'd be saddled with so many music clearance fees I'd end up standing around wearing nothing but a barrel), many of my most responsive listeners have been artists, graphic designers and cartoonists like Jav. I never thought I'd become one of them. But that's what happens when you need something to keep yourself busy when you're unemployed (or underemployed, to be exact).

So tune in to Javiland to hear me stammer and say "But, um" a lot.

A sneak preview of The Palace: Death to Skinny Jeans by Jimmy J. Aquino

The seven-part Death to Skinny Jeans arc is the latest arc of my webcomic The Palace, and it's coming soon to this blog. Here's day two of Death to Skinny Jeans, which will be a mostly single-panel arc:

Name that tune: Richard Harris' 100 film and TV theme tunes challenge

British composer and piano teacher Richard Harris will give a prize to the first person who can name all 100 film and TV themes that he plays in less than 10 minutes during a video he posted on YouTube. It looks like no one has been able to identify them all so far.



I was only able to identify 74 73 75 82 83 of the 100 themes. It's that difficult. Three of the tunes I couldn't identify are most likely from chick flicks that not even Jack Bauer could force me to watch if he shot me in the leg.

MARCH 10, 2009 UPDATE: Richard e-mailed me to say I'm at second place with 73 75 right. He wrote, "You're a genius!"

MARCH 11, 2009 UPDATE: I listened to Richard's medley several more times and correctly guessed a few more themes, so as of this writing, I'm now in the lead with 82 right. Richard wrote, "I'm very impressed that you got a couple of favourites that I deliberately threw in to make it a tiny bit harder - [COMPOSER'S NAME DELETED]'s superb score for [MOVIE TITLE DELETED], for instance... no-one else has come close to getting that!"

MARCH 14, 2009 UPDATE: Now 83. Still in the lead.

[Via Pop Candy]

Now in the works: A new arc of The Palace

My black-and-white webcomic The Palace riffs on pop culture or whatever topic is on young Asian Americans' minds these days. It's about the staff of the Palace, a struggling old-fashioned movie palace in the fictional Northern California university town of Luminesa. The staff consists mostly of Luminesa State University students like freshman Daryl Ruiz, a Pinoy usher who's worked at the Palace since his senior year in high school and comes up with creative ways to handle everyday annoyances like noisy moviegoers and rival businesses. The Palace screens both repertory theater favorites (Vanishing Point, The Warriors) and annoyingly middlebrow "art-house" movies (the Asian male-bashing chick flick Egg Foo Young, the Oscar-bait bodice-ripper Coming of Sage).

In the next seven-part arc of The Palace, which I hope to begin posting here on Monday, every strip will be single-panel. I felt like experimenting with single-panel gags this time.