Nowhere Band News

Even Josh has limits to who he wants to come to shows. Can you blame him? Getting grandmotherly huggles after a show is about the least-rocking thing in the world. During the heyday of AC/DC, the Young brothers kept their grandmother chained up in a basement just to prevent such an occurrence.

Other notes:

1. I learned the hard way that changing your wife’s ringtone to “Cotton Eye Joe” will provide much hilarity and leave you perilously close to sleeping on the couch. Being single, of course, Josh has no one but himself to blame for his ringtone.

2. Josh’s all-beige apartment is pretty typical for your cheaper Minneapolis rentals. I lived in a bunch in my 20s, and the weirdest thing is that they all had the exact same floor plan.

3. The hardest part of the coloring process for this strip- by a long shot- was Josh’s shirt, which is really fussy and has a lot of little nooks and crannies and isn’t even the shirt I meant to draw to begin with. This is why so many NB characters wear blank shirts. Ugh.

Man, those Swedish death metal dudes are depraved. Depraved and lewd.

So, David Foster Wallace. Wow, that was tough; I’ve rearranged a whole lot of my mental furniture in response to stuff he wrote. His story “Good Old Neon” fundamentally changed the way I think about depression.  Disturbingly, “Good Old Neon” is all about the suicide urge and how depression is really a weird sort of intense internal war, devastating to the person it’s internal to and generally kind of opaque and impenetrable to people on the outside. It’s a little disconcerting when the man whose opinion you respect the most on these matters dies by suicide. Read more

Nowhere 45 will be up by Monday for sure. And I’ll say this: until Tuesday night, no Nowhere strip had reduced me to incoherent giggles at my drawing table. 45 did, in a big way.

So, if nothing else, I guess now the world will be able to get a firm calibration on what it takes to reduce me to incoherent giggles.

Also, a post about David Foster Wallace will be up this afternoon.

We had to put our car, Ella, to sleep on Thursday. We’re both still pretty shaken up about it– 6 weeks ago, she was totally fine. And then she developed a limp, and then things got steadily worse by the week as what turned out to be cancer (we thought it was an infection at first) spread like crazy. I’ve been kind of a basket case for at least the past month, ever since it became clear that the antibiotics weren’t working.

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Wherein Dan and Miranda talk about where the Awesome Boys fit into the bigger scheme of their lives.

I like the way this one looks; it’s been a long time since I’ve done something with a black gutter, which I used to way, way overdo. In moderation, it’s a cool look.

Other notes:

1. Just to be clear, not autobiographical. Although I’m guessing that everyone in a band (or dating/married to someone in a band) will have something resembling this conversation at some point. or think about this conversation.

2. For the millionth time, I wish I’d either given Miranda a different name or a different hair color, since I’m always cringing about the (extremely) unintentional Sex and the City shoutout.

3. While I’m at it, I wish I hadn’t gone for a Wilco song for 43, because “The Late Greats” is just too thematically perfect not to use here. Oh, well.

4. #45 will probably take about 2 weeks. Some stuff’s happening this week that won’t be very conducive to comic-making.

This is a handout I whipped up to, um, hand out at tonight’s Derailleur show at the Bedlam Theater (we’re too cheap or too futuristic to make CDs). We go on at 8:30ish, the other bands are reputed to be excellent, and the $10 entry fee goes towards a project involving lockers for the homeless. If you’re in the Twin Cities, you should be there.

So, then, the production update: there’s a good chance Nowhere 44′ll be late, and for a shitty reason: we’ve been undergoing kind of a long-ongoing catastrophe as our cat Ella has gotten steadily sicker. It’s been tough to deal with, and is probably just going to get tougher. So if the comic’s late, that’s why.

Where do you go when you’ve busted your guitar, need a new one, and don’t have much cash? You go to a dark, dark place; a place where 14-year-olds seranade you with their metallic chops; a place where dudes with ponytails try to sell hundred-watt amps to practice with in your apartment; a place where you can count on some dude who thinks he’s Flea to be snapping and popping with a bass in the corner; a place where the sales people will hand you a cable, plug you into some digital-amp monstrosity, and then stand there openly radiating, “what’ve you got, sucka?!” as you try to test-drive a guitar; where signature-model guitars with fake autographs from the dudes in Oasis hang on the walls as something other than a joke.

Actually, I suppose if you’re smart you go to Craigslist. But an awful lot of people aren’t smart.

Not that you put a lot of thought into it when you go guitar-smashing, but maybe Aaron should have thought things through a little bit more than he did… Like I said for #41, I’ve never smashed a guitar, but I did get rid of one because I thought it had bad wiring, when it turned out I’d just been using the wrong kind of cable. Hey, live and learn.