My friends the Harvey Girls point out that the other universal practice space thing I’m missing is a cat litter box; and, weirdly, they’re right. Most of the practice spaces I’ve used _have_ had litter boxes, or at least cats who liked to pee in gig bags. Huh.

The timing on 48’s a little uncertain; I’m travelling for work next week, and that’ll throw a bunch of curveballs into the mix. If 47’s inked before my flight leaves, and if there’s good internet access at my hotel, 47 should be up next Monday or Tuesday. If no to either or both of these, well, I’ll be back in Mipples by Thursday…

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.

I want to be clear: I don’t judge. I’m just sad the dude’s gone. I liked living in a world where his articles came forth periodically, and where there was always hope of another novel as ambitious but maybe more focussed and less reader-hostile than Infinite Jest. For my own narrow, selfish reasons, this sucks. I want more.

To me, the strangest thing about his suicide is this: even though I know from endless counterexamples that it’s not true, it seems to me that being prodigiously talented and succesful at something– especially if it’s something one cares about greatly– should be enough for at automatic happiness at at least a baseline level (sure, you have bad stretches, who doesn’t, but your standard outlook’s pretty rosy). Wallace clearly cared a hell of a lot about words and the use of them; and you’d have to work pretty hard to find someone better at it than he was. And yet, it’s pretty glaringly obvious that talent and success didn’t bring him happiness.

I’m in the middle of rereading Infinite Jest (I’d bet a stack of AIG shares that more people are reading that book now than at any point in history), and it shocks me how much of the preceeding paragraph applies to that book. I’d almost go so far as to say that talent being a curse, not a gift, could well be the entire point. The vast majority of the characters are prodigies in some field (language, tennis, math, punting, optics, filmmaking, burglary, raw beauty), and to a one, everyone who’s naturally great at something suffers because of it. And, in most cases, turns to some sort of substance to deal with the pressures of living up to their talent. The only two happy characters I can think of are Mario Incandenza and Teddy Schacht; one was born severely deformed, so nobody expects anything of him. The other was a tennis prodigy until knee injuries and Crohn’s Disease took him down, excusing him from performance pressure. There’s too much of this front and center for it not to have been intentional.

Losing Hunter Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut and (hopping artforms) Johnny Cash was bad, but those guys had at least lived out their lives. And (getting selfish again) they’d all pretty much quit working. Wallace was so damned young; he deserved a couple of decades of elder-statesman status. And the rest of us, well, it’s not that we deserved a few more decades of work from him, but we sure would’ve enjoyed it.

BONUS MATERIALS
The MetaFilter Thread about Wallace is full of interesting and touching comments (FWIW, I post there as COBRA!).

I actually wrote a Wallace cameo into my America’s Next Top Novelist comic a couple of years ago (he appears on pages 4 and 5).

Finally, at some point I discovered someone else’s attempt at a comic adaptation of part of “Up, Simba,” Wallace’s essay about John McCain’s 2000 campaign.

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.

The end was pretty bad, but actually not as bad as the weeks preceeding it. We found a vet who did house calls (Ella was notorious for taking on all comers atthe vet office; when I took her in for the first limp, back in August, she fought a vet and two techs to a standstill. A couple of years ago, the vets actualy had to deploy a kind of lasso on a pole to stop her on a vet-office rampage), and let her sit out in the yard for a while before bringing her in and putting her in a patch of sunlight on the couch for the final procedure. She didn’t fight; mostly, she seemed very, very tired.

As you can see in the middle picture above, Ella was actually a big part of my drawing routine. If I sat down to work at my table, she’d appear, jump on my lap, and spend the next hour grimly trying to keep her balance and trying to hang her front feet onto any rulers or sheets of Bristol that came within range. I guess that was a pain in the ass, but it was also fun to have some company.

Rebecca and I are probably more atached to our pets than most people; it’s tough to say, though, because a lot of our friends and wider acquaintances have been really great and understanding as we’ve been dealing with this (once again, I’m sorry to anybody who I’ve been really weird to in the past month… at times, it really did feel like there was someone else in the driver’s seat). One thing that hit me over and over, though, was how many “lame” pop-culture elements actually take on some meaning if you think about them in context. I always used to laugh at Kirby’s Black Racer as the figure of death in The New Gods– a dude on skis who you have to run away from, har har. But it’s a great metaphor (with Kirby, it usually is a great metaphor). The end’s chasing us all, and our primary mission is to make the most of our lives as we try (and inevitably fail) to stay one step ahead. For the past six weeks, I was keenly aware that Ella was losing ground in a race against something; I’m just impressed that she kept the race up as long as she did, especially on 3 legs.

—-

I also have a lot to say about the death of David Foster Wallace, which was a pretty bad kick in the gut as the rest of this went on. But that’s for later.

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.

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