It’s April! Happy April Fool’s Day wooooo! Seriously, everyone should celebrate April Fool’s Day the whole week long because no one believes anyone on the actual April Fool’s Day!

So anyway it’s a joke… sort of. A debate with an anti-humans-in-Ami’s-art person kind of brought me to thinking I should incorporate this more often. Truth be told, I originally created The Glass Urchin to teach me something – to teach me how to create a set amount of pages a week, to teach me patience, to teach me editing skills, to teach me to create gag-a-days and storylines, to teach me how to set up a page and how to do speech bubbles, and to further my abilities as an artist. It was a daunting task and a lot of the reason I use small critters is partially due to my own laziness and partially due to my lack of self-confidence. Not a great basis to start an autobiographical webcomic, but there you have it.

And teach me this comic has! But I never intended to be lumped in with other critter comickers or stereotypical animal-Sunday-funnies types, and although I do not regret The Glass Urchin’s format, I would still love to learn how to draw real human emotion the way my idols have always done. I just plain have not practiced my abilities to draw people and if I can’t even draw a self-portrait I am satisfied with, then how is my art ever the real truth? So every now and then I think it would be healthy practice to include more “Human” type comics, every now and then.

In addition there are just some things that don’t work well if you’re not at least human-shaped. If you think about it, most deep comics have to have that kind of shape, even Maus (as another autobiographic comic with animals) were human-shaped to begin with, in some ingenious scenes they were humans with masks (didn’t want to blatantly rip off Speigelman though). It seems a strong lesson – never get so caught up with the details and format of your set up that you let them interfere with telling the whole truthful story. I’m not comparing my content with that of Speigelman’s great works, but capturing truth in art has always been something I’ve strived for (and felt I’ve failed at).

And the tallness of human characters allowed me to show more of the actual location, without having to resort to drastic camera angles as I usually do. It’s that local favorite – LITM! LITM (as well as other great Jersey City haunts) can be seen in episodes of NBC’s Mercy, like here at around 40 minutes into it. Silly details but still I enjoy it.

The holidays – hopefully your inner thoughts were more peaceful than mine. This is me btw, all the way up to the day before Christmas Eve. Then I went home home, and RELAXED like a mofo for several days. Ah. I feel so so so much better now. But I tells ya, my head was just about ready to asplode. Hope your holiday season was a lot calmer (may your returns also be peaceful!).

Sorry for the late-by-a-couple-hours-post! But I’m sure if you’re like me… Today you’re probably wrapping up loose ends and getting ready to relax for the holiday weekend. Take some time to consider wrapping your holiday gifts in some green wrapping paper, if you can find good news!

I’m sure a lot more of you dream about zombies and love it, right? Happy Halloween all! May yours be full of ZOMBIES!

Every kid who’s ever been to college knows it…. the questions (unless you majored in something you can actually use in real life, which was not what I did). What do you want to do? Where do you want to work? When are you going to get a job, you loser!? Okay maybe not that last one, but that’s sure what it feels like… And of course, who knows the answer to that? I still think ‘I like school’ might be my answer…

The New Brunswick Saga began here.

Or I was thinking of calling it “The Unwanted Toy.”

This is a story Mom recalled to me about a Christmas from her childhood. I don’t know why, but it seemed such a sad story! I felt sorry for Mom, Grandma, and the unwanted stuffed kitty cat… A teeny mistake might go a long way in a kid’s life. Anyway, I just wanted to record this holiday story in comic form.  It took me a while, and playing with the paneling and set-up to get this right, I’m still not sure if I got the mood down.  Anyway, many thanks to Mom, for telling me the story and giving me the Bulgarian text.

Have a safe and sound holiday everyone! And to my friends and family who have been in pain/stress this past month, take it easy, and I hope you feel better! You know who you are!

Sorry about the poor quality on this one – as the title suggests, it’s just a five minute comic I did while waiting for Mike to get out of the doctor’s office (we’re all falling apart, aren’t we?). Now you see why I used Photoshop to do a major portion of my comic!!

Anyway, as Bree and I were saying, this month can go suck an egg.  To all friends, family, and readers who are just hanging in there, things will get better soon!  Hope everyone’s holiday season is a lot more laid back than ours!

And don’t worry, I’ll bring you the real updates, as always, Tues & Thurs!

And that’s literally what she said to me. With conviction. Hopefully none of your relatives are forcibly convincing you that you’re of wizard blood this Thanksgiving. By the way, it should be noted that she’s an older cousin, not a younger more naive cousin…

Oh, and I’ll probably do more on Kalmykia, the place of my ancestors, later.

Apologies to anyone who actually dressed like the Joker this year – next year try to think of something original. I guess it was pretty predictable that the streets would be full of them- I loved the Joker and Batman this summer as well, but it seemed like it was just asking to be overdone on Halloween.

Anyway sorry for the delay in this comic – I intended to post this up sooner, but from all the craziness of last week, I had to put it off. I’m trying to get back on schedule with the comics, so hopefully that will happen sometime within the next couple of weeks haha…

Hope you’re all out there planning the night away, putting finishing touches on your great costume of the year.  I myself haven’t had time to get into Halloween as I usually do, this time Bree and I are planning on going as The Big Bad Wolf/Little Red Riding Hood duo (scrapping earlier plans of Bree’s Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing and my Watch Dog due to time constraints). I regret that I couldn’t use my Watch Dog (based on Tock, from the great children’s book Phantom Tollbooth, which I heartily recommend to everyone) costume, pictured here to the left… It turned out looking a little too super cute… I am sure if I had planned this out, it wouldn’t turn out half as well. And besides… I’m not sure how well I could capture a Yorkie dog trying to dress like a wolf who’s trying to dress like a sheep. That’s a whole lot of confusing right there.

Pictured: Ami as Little Red Riding Hood, Bree as The Big Bad Wolf, Tara as Scary Mask person (she freaked my kitty out when she came over that year for trick or treating ), Shivi as The Mad Hatter, Mel as Dutch girl, and Mike as President Taft.