005. Dear Leader, Part 1

I swear I have a good reason for having no comic up on Wednesday. I've been working on a short arc about the death of Kim Jong-il, and the succession of his son Kim Jung-un. The arc will follow a U.S. spy as he attempts to gather information on the new ruler of North Korea - things do not go as planned.
This should all be over and done with before school gets back, at which point I'll get back to making fun of Winter Wonderland and Campus Security, as well as sharing some stories from my San Diego/Los Angeles/Las Vegas trip.
Ah yes, and Special Thanks to Dan, for inventing the now-classic "Two Dolphins and a Blunt" pose. I'm not sure if Kim Jung-il likes Dolphins, or Blunts, but I feel like the pose accurately captures his former life-style.

004. Winter Clothes

College is a time for trying new things, breaking down barriers and experiencing life from new points of view. I feel like it took me the first three years of my college career to realize this. Like everything in life, my situation is complicated (though undoubtedly less so than others').  Suffice to say that I spent the last year of college breaking down a lot of barriers that I had left up for way too long and I got to experience some incredible moments because of that.

This year is my last year in college. After that, it's real-world time. I intend to continue on my trend and make the last year the best one by far.  To that end I'm finally doing something that many college students consider essential to their experience: the college trip.

Though it's usually a spring break thing, when you're from Hawaii, spring break is pretty awesome here. So instead, it's a winter break/new years eve/birthday party/road trip week-and-a-half-long, hopefully mind-blowing extravaganza with a bunch of my college friends. 

One thing we realized though: none of us (the ones from Hawaii anyway) have any winter clothes, and seeing as how we're doing this on New Year's Eve, in the middle of the night and outdoors, we should probably purchase some.

The Puppet Master and Colleen

This illustration is over a year old at this point, but since it's the end of finals, I don't have any new content to share tonight.  This accompanied an article which I wrote for Ka Leo last fall during the mid-term elections.  The article talks about some of the problems I've had with the way the democratic party does business in Hawaii.  

003. The Wonderland Issue

Wonderland Entertainment has been throwing events at Wet 'n Wild, the old Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park, for a couple years now. I've been to a Winter and a Digital Wonderland. The two main problems with these events are that they're all the way in Kapolei, which is pretty damn far from UH Manoa, and they're the same thing every time.  

I for one was already getting tired of the events themselves, and that was before Wonderland Entertainment scheduled Afrojack for the same weekend as Porter Robinson, started posting entitled-sounding Facebook posts, and started bringing down bullshit for their main acts. Now, they'd need to bring down someone incredibly awesome for me to still bother going to any of their events anymore. Otherwise, I'm just plain over it and I'd rather support cooler groups like Eightball Hawaii with fresh, innovative ideas. (Edit: thanks to Stanley for reminding me about Livewire too).

But maybe I'm the only one - I've still heard excited kidsos talking about the raving prospects in the weeks leading up to Wonderland's last couple events (though I've heard that the whole Afrojack/Porter thing ended up costing them  money).  Once January gets closer it'll be interesting to see if the hype surrounding the second Winter Wonderland is as big as it was last year for the first (which was awesome because they picked someone dope for it).

(Edit: Dec. 17): Wonderland posted their promotion video from the footage they got at the Afrojack show here in Honolulu. It's a mediocre video and it certainly doesn't reverse my assertions that they're going downhill already. It's only 2 minutes long, the song is alright at best, the "babe factor" (let's face it, an important part of selling future tickets for events like this is showcasing the amount of attractive females that attended your previous events - like it or not) is 'meh', and - despite the videographer's valiant attempts to prevent us from noticing - there, frankly, just aren't that many people at the damn thing. 

Nowhere in this video do we see the typical promo shot - an establishing shot, from as high above as possible, that tries to show the maximum amount of bodies possible.  Based on what I understand to be the capacity of Wet N' Wild during events like this, and based off what we can see in the video, there looks to be no more than a few hundred people in attendance.  

Love Fest Hawaii 2011 (From Go Ventures), I believe, filled capacity, meaning 10,000 tickets sold. 

Considering the costs of bringing an artist like Afrojack down to Hawaii ($60,000 minimum, plus costs for the venue, equipment, staff etc. and with ticket prices ranging from $35 - $50) I'd guess that they only broke even, or certainly didn't make what they intended. Hopefully it'll be a wake up call, and they'll rethink their style and their event strategy.

Like I said on Facebook, my first rave was a Wonderland event with Skrillex as the headliner. It was truly awesome. I wish they'd head back in that direction - or that I could reverse time and re-experience that first night - which is out of Wonderland's control, I'm afraid. 

Golden Rods?

The stack of things we need to accomplish before we can graduate.  See other graduation and finals content in Ka Leo's last issue of the semester, now with 100% more naked diving.

Living with Henry

An illustration that I created to accompany one of our December 1st Housing Guide stories.  The story was written by Justin Fransisco, who will be stepping up to Associate Opinions Editor next semester. Justin wrote a sex awareness column this past semester and so his articles for the Housing Guide posses some of that angle of interest. 

This particular story is about making the decision to move in with your significant other and what you should keep in mind before you commit yourself to such a change.  

An alternate version a la purple Kool-aid man titled, "Living with the Purple Kool-Aid Man." That's what's up.

002. Big-Ass Trucks

Here's a comic about the new trucks campus security has in their arsenal. They are, as the title suggests, large vehicles, but I wonder how much they'll actually help to prevent things like this from happening. I can't help but wonder if the money might've been better spent on something else.

Monkey Suit

This past semester Ka Leo has had a strong opinions section with many consistent writers. A lot of the best material comes from the opinions editor himself. Taylor's writing is solid and he picks interesting topics. The best part is, he likes using my illustrations to go with opinions articles, so I get to draw fun stuff like a monkey in a suit to accompany articles like this one. It's about political "shit-talking," if you will, and the similarities that has with monkeys flinging feces at one another.

Christmas Zombies

Well it's Christmas time soon. As usual most places decorated for the occasion much too early for my tastes and a lot of the talk was focused on what to buy and where to by it from. 

I spent Black Friday in Seattle this year which meant I got to see how the mainland parties on their Day of Consumerism.  Maybe it's because Seattle is such a strange con-flux of really rich business heads and the upper middle class, together with the really poor and under privileged, but I got to see an Occupy Seattle rally next to a massive mob centered around the downtown shops like Nordstrom, which was being boycotted by a bunch of "Fur is murder" protesters, which was being serenaded by a couple of Hipsters playing the violin on the street corner next to a street Santa offering $2.00 pictures.  I had a good time.

One of our prolific writers for Ka Leo, Trevor Zakov, writes opinion pieces on a wide variety of topics, including consumerism, and I have been fortunate enough to be able to come up with some cool illustrations to accompany his stories (and other writers as well).  This piece was created for Zakov's article and ran along with it.  Zakov's original article can be read at kaleo.org, or found directly here. 

John Boehner's Original Tea Party Recipe

This editorial cartoon was created last may and was entered into the Associated Collegiate Press' National College Media Competition in the cartooning category. The cartoon won first place. 

If you follow that link, you can see some interesting conversations being had on the UH system news site. Most of them accuse me of name calling, while calling me names, or say that they do not appreciate the way I critique what I see in the media. They must not realize that editorial cartoons fall under the opinions section of the newspaper and it is therefore my opinion that the republican strategy early this year was to try to damage president Obama's credibility and ratings by spreading rumors, escalating tensions, playing off of fear and ignorance and flat out lying. My opinion may be based on perception, but my perception is based on fact.

Still, nice to see my work generating discussion. That's what it's really here for. 

001. Skyrim Jobs

The Sun Also Shines on the Moronic takes another stride on its evolutionary path. With a new blog comes a new and improved comic strip. Some things are the same, some things will never be the same, still other things now contain 50% more gravy.
As usual, these are being run in Ka Leo too, but there it just seems like a continuation of the old strip. Here - here is where the wheat is separated from the chaff.
I hope you enjoy the new comic and that you tell all your friends about how groovy it is.