First off, with a nod of thank you again to Chris Hastings of Dr. MicNinja, I wanted to welcome new readers. I do hope you’re enjoying the ride.

Thank you for the donations to Beth and my walk on Sept. 4th to benefit the Pig’s Peace Sanctuary. If you haven’t donated, you can still support our walk by either donating, or by bidding on a drawing I did of a pot bellied pig: Auction ends tonight, Wednesday, 5:00pm PST (every penny will go to the sanctuary). Help the piggies!

I spent the weekend at Chief Timothy campground, located on a small island in Snake River near Clarkston, WA. I thought I’d share some pictures I took with y’all.And lastly, a picture displaying my fondness for Macaroni and Cheese.

In panel #7, Martina is making an “Eiffel Tower” hand gesture.

Me, I have been eating cookies all afternoon. I can be such a glutton.

Of course, yesterday Beth and I walked three-and-a-quarter miles round-trip to each get a slice of pizza. Mind you, Veraci makes damn good thin crust pizza.

Maybe I’m more an extremist than a glutton, gluttony is simply one of its colorful trappings.

Today I submitted another story, this one to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. And I wrote a Fantasy story last week, but felt it could be a great comic, so I rewrote it, sketched it up and passed it on to my MAD Editor.

All the grass that’s been growing in my head, I’m mowing it down like a tornado, without any idea what that means.

Strips continue to sell. Thank you all! And I hope you enjoy today’s installment. Story, character, humor, and multiple settings. The only thing I wish for daily after “more time in the day” is “more space in my panels.”

I just realized, I’ve been wanting to do editing. And you know what, I GOT THAT WISH. I’ve been discussing scripts and comedy with Tom of Marooned, exchanging stories with Dan Wolff of Cookrookery and Wild Life, and in this writing group I’ve joined — we all provide editorial assistance to each other, which I am looking forward to.

I just like it. I like to tear stuff apart and bring out its strengths. I like helping people see their work in new ways. It’s fun.

And lastly, for those of you who may still be confused as to what Twitter is, this short exchange (reformatted for easy reading top to bottom) between Alotron (Alan Ryan of “Faraday the Blob“) and myself clears up its full potential…

Alotron: Snacks on a Plane
chris__baldwin: Snakes on the Plains, a western.
Alotron: ‘Get these Mo’Fucken snakes OFF my Mo’Fucken plains”: Marshall L. Jackson
Alotron: Steaks on a Plane #livingthedream
chris__baldwin: Stains in the Peaks, a bloody climber tragedy.
Alotron: Stoats on a Boat
chris__baldwin: Toads on a boot, a tale of longing for the lost boot with no toads on it.
Alotron: Snorks on a Plane
chris__baldwin: Sporks en le Pain, a tale of the American French cultural clash, with a bread suffering the collateral damage.
Alotron: Magnifique!
chris__baldwin: In France they’re called Freedom sporks.
Alotron: Snakes on a Higher Plane #hallelujah
chris__baldwin: Teenage Snake Drivers in a hydroplane, a tale of insufficient drivers ed. #hydroplane
Alotron: Viva Les Sporks de Liberté!
Alotron: Snorks on a Spork
chris__baldwin: Sparks on a Snert, the story of savagery aimed at Hagar’s dog. What was the topic again?

Tornitus 6. I am SO excited that things are about to happen. Establishing character and getting to know how everyone interacted with each other was important, but I am ready.

I’ve already begun building 3-D models for the city, and today I’m going to sit down with coffee and really bust out the set of scripts for Tornitus 6.

I actually almost never drink coffee anymore (previous stomach problems), except when I want to really really concentrate, often when I do a huge binge of writing, where I want to be more than 100%. Which always reminds me of a scene in “Beverly Hills Cop” where Eddie Murphy is telling the chief about the other two cops (Judge Reinhold and John Ashton) and how they are kinda like supercops. I wish I could find it on youtube, but Murphy is ad-libbing like crazy. And in an extra on the DVD they comment on how Murphy never drinks coffee, but that morning he had some.

Which I supppppose is not a lot different from the normal comedian coke habit (a la Lenny Bruce, Jon Belushi, etc), but it is certainly more legal. :)

Link to the Original Artwork

Read the iphone version.

Who needs aliens, when I can’t even understand birds. We have two bird feeders on the same side of the house. One of them, the birds empty in about three days. The other remains untouched. I’ve moved the untouched one closer and closer, and now they are about three feet from each other, but still, seeming no luck. Hrm.

Anyhow, you may have noticed, I added a “Formspring.com ask me stuff” widget on the bottom-right of this page. Not that you couldn’t ask me questions here in the comments. But there it is. All linked up to my Twitter account and (if I ever get the connection to work) on my Facebook account.

Happy Cinco De Mayo. Drive safe. :)

Link to the Original Artwork

Read the iphone version.

Nope. No Stumptown Con report yet. Still catching up from the weekend.

Of note, in the 6th (8th?) panel, Nogg is using a laserblade. Retractable and portable. Nothing fancy. But those who were curious from its mention here, now you know.

And I love Stephen Hawking’s recent take on Alien visitors. That they’ll probably be searching to colonize new planets since they’ve likely used up all their resources back home. Kinda like Columbus, Hawking said, “which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

I agree, in ways, with his sentiment. And sure, there’s a possibility of that. But one only has to read a few dozen sci-fi books to see that there are SO MANY possible scenarios to contact with aliens. If it happens, I wonder what it will be? Good guys or bad guys or really really desperate guys.

If they offer candy, and ask me to get in their spaceship, though, I’m totally in.

Link to the Original Artwork

Read the iphone version.

have you been reading about Obama and NASA lately? Fascinating. As a romantic, I feel totally for the side of the astronauts, but I agree in my head with the path to go robotic. Technology, energy, etc will improve and I think in time it will get us to the stars, but continuing to send up people in the meantime doesn’t necessarily make sense. But robot probes do. Get info. Know what’s there for when we’re ready to go there in person.

On a SPACETRAWLER note…. Is there any “info” you’re craving from the story? A friend recently said, “I’m a bit lost, I don’t know how long they’ve been in space or how far they’ve gone.” I’m gonna address that, and I was wondering if you had any questions I should address as well.

Mind you, there are some things I don’t want to tell you, in order to tease you. And there is a level of information I don’t want to go into because I don’t want to bog down readers with it at the expense of the story flow and humor.

So, throw your questions my way. Unless the question is, “is this a rock?”

Link to the Original Artwork

Read the iphone version.

Beth and I moved the office into the bedroom, and the bedroom into the office this past week. Which made a lot of sense for several reasons, the best of which is: the office is now in a more open, warm, and light feeling room; and equally as good, the bedroom is now in the cozier, cooler, more snug-like room. My workstation, of course, looks pretty much exactly the same.

I’ve been very behind on thank-yous. Jon Kilgannon and Mark Sachs who do a comic “Afterlife Blues” gave me an awesome link. I am unfamiliar with their comic, but it is bookmarked and I look forward to when I have free time to read it. And thanks to Orcovado who linked to me on Reddit. Also, thank you for links from evan Dahm of “Rice Boy,” Paul Gadzikowski of “Arthur, King of Time and Space,” and Spencer of “Girls in Space.” Oh, and of course Jon Rosenberg’s “Goats“. If you are not reading Goats… then there’s a problem, people.

I’m looking forward to Stumptown (info below). I love this festival because 1. Portland is awesome, 2. I have lots of friends down there who I’m looking forward to seeing, & 3. it’s just a casual laid-back fest and I have always enjoyed the chats I’ve had with people who’ve come by my table.

I will be at the Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland this weekend, April 24th & 25th. I will have free Spacetrawler “bookmarks” and for sale I’ll have a Spacetrawler full-color promo zine (strips up through the Bollyck attack) (if there are zines left over, I’ll put them up for sale here). I will also have Little Dee stuff, although not book #4 because it is still at the printer.

Link to the Original Artwork

On FRIDAY I’ll be doing a “Book Club” Spacetrawler guest strip for Unshelved, an awesome comic by Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes. Since my sister, Kevin Moore, Sara Ryan, and others I know are librarians, I did a librarian theme week in Little Dee (including t-shirt), and use my own local branch CONSTANTLY, I am pleased to be a part of this.

I’ll post a brief link to it in blog from on friday (for you RSS users), and then I will mention this again with Monday’s strip.

p.s. – what do people think about an “iphone formatted” version of Spacetrawler? Any recommendations for doing this better or applicable plugins etc?

Link to the Original Artwork

At the Seattle Comic Con someone asked me if I had an RSS feed. the answer: YES. The little orange square on the upper right side of this page is your RSS link. For those who don’t know what an RSS feed is, it’s one place where you can have all your favorite blogs and comics and news sources come to you. I use livejournal as my RSS reader, but most people use Google Reader.

Speaking of ways to follow me, I’m on both Facebook and Twitter, and you can see my other work at littledee.net and baldwinpage.com.