Ode to an Aging Rock Critic

Not so long ago, I wrote a number of freelance concert reviews for a local music blog. It was a pretty sweet gig: see a show for free, take a few blurry photos, and scribble notes during the set like a true music expert. After returning home from the bar/club/hipster lair, I would transcribe my scribblings into an overly-detailed account of the performance. 

How to Get Ideas

This is a problem that any self-proclaimed creative person without a daily regimen of psychotropic drugs has experienced. The search for a great idea can be incredibly frustrating, like trying to force two unlike species to breed. 

Further reading:

Elizabeth Gilbert on the concept of "genius." 

Richard Thompson on where he gets his sublime ideas.

The visual inspiration for the third panel.

Suburban Anarchy

The Road Taken

Email gsnider11@gmail.com if you'd like to order an 11"x17" poster of this comic (for $15 plus shipping).

Love & Fonts

In combining the best elements of romance novels and typographic criticism, I could have made this comic much, much racier: "She felt the oblique, sinuous curves of his letterform. Their passion was legible. But could it ever be justified?"  At least I didn't stoop to making fun of Comic Sans.

The Memoir

Drawing Teeth

Teeth are fun to draw. They are shaped like tiny aliens, tentacled underwater creatures, or controversial modern sculpture. Using Kilgore dental study models as reference, I designed a number of t-shirts for my class over four years of dental school. To celebrate graduation and our shiny new DDS degrees, here all the designs in one extensive blog post.

This would be a great game for an arcade or dental office waiting room. I just have to clear up a few copyright issues:

Dance of the Tipsy Parents

An Education

Two years ago this month, I began drawing a weekly comic strip for my outstanding local newspaper, the Kansas City Star. I called the strip "Delayed Karma" - this was an obscure fusion of a John Lennon song and my mother's maiden name, and by no means an attempt to sound "all metaphysical." I'm not going to attempt to repost all of the early strips I drew. Most are painful for me to look at. The text is incoherent, the characters' heads are poorly proportioned, and I can't read them without finding dozens of things I would do differently if forced to redraw them. But I still enjoy a handful of these comics, so I'm going to start posting one a week in addition to my new work. In doing so, I may save a few brave souls the trouble of wading through the Incidental Comics archives in search of sketchy sustenance, or I may just boost my creative ego. Either way, enjoy the new old drawings, at least until the decent ones run out.