YO! This is the postmortem for RATBASTERDZ 3: STRAW DUCKS.

I started writing these as a way to reflect and bookend the production of each episode, hopefully you will get something out of it too. You can read the first two here: 1 2

And support the show on Patreon here! If you enjoy this kind of BTS stuff or my longwinded writing, I do that EVERY FUCKIN MONTH on there! 

STORY

Going into the batch we wrote after episode one, a “Deacon episode” was something I considered essential. I’d always loved the character and wanted to develop more of him now that we had him established. He felt like the breakout star to me, in part due to how much of a departure he is from the rest of the cast, and how much character @Gianni lent to his performance. 

Peter (@AmazinLarry) has sent me random ideas for RB episodes and scenarios for years now, often insane or bizarre, as a joke. One he sent me was “Deacon Duck SWATs himself so he can capture the CIA”, which I liked enough to save. When we wrapped episode 1, Pat (@pjorg) and I were discussing what we wanted to do next, and that one immediately stuck out to me as being what felt like the perfect Deacon episode. 

I’ve talked in previous writeups about RB being about getting back to the heart of why I started making toons. Back in the day Peter and I wrote most of my cartoons together, and he voiced pretty much everything I made too. I think he is genuinely one of the funniest people alive, his humor is very distinctly his own. With the episode concept being his, and with how many ideas he was sending me for the show, it seemed natural to bring him on as the third writer. This was cool because, starting with this batch, I got to work with the only two guys I’ve ever seriously written cartoons with together on the same project. 

A big thing for me is preserving the individual voices of the animators in the cartoon– I think in this episode we saw that with the writing too. @Nihaho said something to the effect of “I feel like I’m animating all the shots Peter wrote”-- and I wasn’t conscious of that, but he was right! I think you can kinda tell who wrote which parts– Peter’s voice is a lot more silly/absurdist, Patrick’s is a lot more into concise dialogue driven comedy/structure, and I’m a lot more character/environment driven & into the bigger picture and theme. (Pat’s words not mine!) 

The entire first draft was scripted by Peter, and other than the ending there wasn’t too much we changed, other than punching up gags here and there or injecting new things when it came to visuals. This is the only episode that wasn’t my idea at its inception, so I asked Peter to write a little bit about the first draft: 

Deacon was obviously the focus of the episode given the concept, but I knew I had to get the three main boys involved in this and give them all their own little moments. So I worked from the middle out. I knew the meat of the episode would be Deacon killing federal agents, and there was already an established idea that each episode would have a segment set to music, so that would be the core that I worked backwards and forwards from. 

I feel proud for nailing down the beginning and all the set-up from basically the first draft, save for some trimming on the Casteneda bit. Some personal highlights include Deacon having a Santa Claus inflatable in his front passenger seat, inspired by my boss at the time, and Rodney’s awe over Deacon’s crappy car and crappy house. I think highlighting the idea that these characters are young and impressed by a “cool” adult hanging out with them was very funny to me, especially contrasted with the grim situation. 

To the point about Santa– we wanted that scene to mirror the car-ride from the first episode, but with its own distinct uncomfortable feeling to it, like riding in the car with a coworker you barely know. I was specifically thinking of when I had to do this at an old retail job and how fucked the inside of my manager’s car was.

Another specific reference point I gave to @plainstupidmoron when he was writing the song on Deacon’s radio was being driven around NYC by this guy I knew from college. He had a chip on his shoulder about being at art school and started larping as a blue collar guy. It was funny. He listened to Johnny Cash the whole time as I sat in the back in silence. There was something very specifically hilarious to me about this that I wanted to capture.

Jacob did a great writeup of how he wrote the song too, which you can check out here! 

The ending took some refinement and back and forth with me, Jon and Pat. I knew it had to be an anticlimax and have some kind of deus ex machina so nothing is radically altered. At first I had Deacon’s house open up and he flies off in a Mad Max styled gyro-copter, which was rightfully deemed too silly. 

We wanted to provide a little more motivation for Deacon, so we came up with the idea of the hostage negotiator being his estranged brother, and all of this serving as an over-escalation of a petty feud from decades ago. It couldn't be any sort of legitimate grievance– it had to be something so inane that only a psycho like Deacon would fixate on it for so long. 

For a while we had a flashback sequence of Deacon going to war and coming home to find his mag stash disrupted. I wanted this to provide some backstory on Deacon, and thought it left room for a lot of fun visuals of what he looked like before he got his eyes fucked up, him in the war, etc. I randomly saw this awesome piece by @Ricksteubens and contacted him to illustrate this montage, having both done detailed military stuff and pinups he seemed like the perfect fit. It ended up getting cut pretty early though– in the board phase I found that any time this flashback started my brain would turn off. It disrupted the pacing pretty significantly. We had the high energy chaos of the montage, built a steady tension, then derailed it only to try and loop back around to that same tension. 

At the end I reached back out to Rick to do the credits sequence, which was a cool full-circle moment where we finally got to realize these early visual ideas.

Originally Deacon’s brother reacted logically to the mag reveal– “are you fucking crazy?”. Upon cutting the flashback, we realized it’s much funnier to continue playing it straight– him knowing EXACTLY what it's in reference to implies there's a history we don't even know about, that the straight man in the situation is actually operating at the same level of psychosis. To the former point, so much of good cartooning is the details you leave out– the more movies I make, the more conscious of that I am in the writing process as well. 

DESIGN/INSPIRATION

I wanted their confrontation to lean into the self-seriousness of a war movie– tonally, I felt that would really make it “Deacon’s episode”. We’re stepping into his world and frame of mind. Plus, there’s something I’ve always found funny about something very stupid being presented with intensity. Street Fighter Chode has been a favorite flash since it came out– something I always loved about it was the constant tonal whiplash between complete non-sequitur shock absurdity to this very gritty dramatic narrative of the two tankmen. I didn’t realize this was an influence until writing this out LOL.

I watched a lot of vigilante and war movies for inspiration. Deacon’s a Vietnam vet, and I wanted to channel that in the montage as if he were reliving it. In retrospect I wish I had watched some gorey splatterfest movies instead, I think that the cartoon’s montage ended up feeling way more like a horror movie. However, I think there’s something more true to what a character like Deacon would think is “badass” gained from movies like “Death Wish” and “Dirty Harry”-- so ultimately, it all worked out. The episode title, “Straw Ducks” is a reference to the movie Straw Dogs. An early writer’s note was that Deacon had tons of “home-alone style traps”. Home Alone is essentially Straw Dogs 4 Kidz, and I had just watched the latter in my batch of inspiration movies, so it stuck.

The things that inspired you to start creating never truly leave you, for better or worse. X-Men Origins came out when I was 11, and it was my favorite movie. I watched it more than anyone ever should. I hadn’t seen this film in a decade. About a year ago, I got into a discussion about what defines a “favorite” movie– so I went back to watch the shit I loved as a kid. When I saw this scene I screamed.

The original iteration of Deacon’s line was “You don’t call, you don’t answer my emails, how else am I supposed to get your attention?”. 

Having not seen or thought about this movie in a decade, a copy of that line appeared in the script and went unnoticed for a year. It’s fucking crazy how your subconscious works– this crappy movie is a part of my creative DNA forever because of my dumb kid self! The worst part is that I was purposefully trying to avoid any Liquid Snake dialogue…and somehow stumbled into Sabretooth and Wolverine??? There’s something interesting about it though– I’ve always considered the project a sendup of what inspired me to create to begin with. When you hear this it’s through a romanticized lens of the formative stuff being inspiring and awesome, but an authentic interpretation would have to include the stuff that sucks, too.

I wanted Deacon’s home to be distinctly southern– A shotgun house, one long hallway. I thought this would not only make it specific, but be the most effective way to frame the action and emphasize the horror. Something I noticed about the south is that you see a lot of overgrowth bleeding onto the homes themselves, which I've never really seen elsewhere, so I made sure to include that. We made sure there were lots of holes and scrapes inside to make it really feel like a guy with a hook for a hand had been living there. Something that got lost along the way though was the idea of the TV remote having dozens of holes poked through it! The spit wall and fetus jar in Deacon’s basement are both references to real stories friends had told me that always stuck with me as being particularly deranged.

Deacon’s brother started off by trying to make him visibly related, but more “put-together”. In trying to contrast Deacon’s character, I was trying to channel my great uncle, honestly– the vibe of a southern guy that moved north and looks back with a mixed sort of shame and detachment, but the accent is still there and undeniable. Eventually I had the idea to invert some of Deacon’s design elements in the same way. Deacon’s cranium leans backwards, his leans forwards…deacon’s bill is wider at the top, his is thinner, etc.

In early 2023 I saw Fox in Space for the first time, and immediately thought holy shit, his voice is perfect. It’s been next to impossible to find VAs with authentic southern accents, you only find caricatures. I could tell Fred’s was, while subtle, real. He has grit to his voice that mirrored Deacon’s perfectly, and his performance really made the character. Around the time we wrote the episode I was going through a pretty dark patch, and Fox in Space 2 was about the only thing that I found genuinely inspiring. Getting to collaborate with someone who I believe is making some of the most interesting and creative work in animation right now was a huge privilege. 

Once we had the Lieutenant in the script, I had started designing him as a rat, but it wasn’t working. Then I remembered Lt. Fubie! In my original iteration of RB created for college, I had a duo of Frog cops as one of the foils of the series. I wasn’t taking the idea seriously at the time, and I named the big one “Lt. Fubie” after @TheEvaluh’s old skype name. I had always liked his design and silly name, and thought it’d be fun to get Kevin on board to do a little cameo voice. From there I decided to make the CIA agents all frogs too to tie them together visually. 

PRODUCTION 

Straw Ducks, along with Ep 2, were initially experiments in limited animation. While Ep 2 was about re-learning flash and animating with fewer drawings, Straw Ducks was very much about mirroring anime structure from the ground up. Not to retread the same ground as the last writeup, but I had Evangelion on the brain at the time– Something I was conscious of was how much they focus on a background, creative angle or close-up while the characters speak to limit movement. I went through all of Evangelion around this time and screen grabbed all the background-forward compositions from the show, and spent some time studying those. Several of the backgrounds on this one began as adaptations of the basic underlying structure of Evangelion compositions. 

An example of this is the scene right after the montage, the backgrounds of the dead frogs. This was a direct homage to when Unit 03 gets massacred, and I tried to mirror the general composition and timing of the cuts. I first watched that scene in high school and it was one of the craziest things I had ever seen, all these years later I still find it chilling. Though obviously RB isn’t serious– I wanted to evoke the same general feeling and rhythm of that segment, this sort of empty aftermath of horror. 

Towards the end of Ep 2/the beginning of Ep 3 I started to find my footing with my new flash pipeline. Originally there was a series of steps to get the look I wanted– pen firmness cranked up, drawing slow/zoomed out, etc. The more I did this though, I found it largely impractical. I eventually found a rhythm of sketching how I normally do, with the firmness cranked all the way up and the smoothing down. I already bear down pretty heavily and draw quite messy– so in Flash I’ll throw down more ink than I think I need to, and then go in with the eraser and “chisel” things, which gives it a more organic, gritty texture. 

In line with the “arrows at a target” analogy from my last writeup, I started making a conscious attempt to combat my inner perfectionist here. Certain inbetweens would end up sloppier than I’m comfortable with, and I’d have the impulse to perfect it. Instead I’d catch myself and move on. Trying to embrace the “fuck it, let’s see what happens” mentality. Maybe the shot will suck, and maybe it’ll look good, maybe because it’s sloppy, it’ll be more interesting! From my perspective at least, if you want something technically perfect and consistent, AI will be there in two years. I think our role in response to this is to focus on channeling what makes our work innately human– embracing imperfection and making spontaneous creative choices.

Another cool full circle moment was collabing with @Mindchamber– growing up on NG, his work had always been an inspiration. On this project I’d come to realize how influential With My Mind’s Madness was-- I used to watch it daily back when it dropped, and it really imprinted on me aesthetically. Especially back then, you never saw dudes going gritty in flash, it always stuck out to me as being something special. His work on the montage knocked me dead and brought so much personality– him, @Jaime-R and @Emrox all on the same segment was an all-star lineup of guys that push Flash to its limits! 

MONTAGE

Something that is important to me in Ratbasterdz is balancing the comedy/character complexity of dialogue-driven shows, but still thinking visually and prioritizing the unique medium we work in. We start with a script-- a process that can make things visually uninteresting if you aren’t careful. As such, I purposefully leave segments vague to leave room for visual improvisation. The entire montage segment was largely blank, and was something I figured out naturally during boarding. Boiling the frog’s face with the pot of water was a direct homage to Straw Dogs, and the first one I knew I wanted to include. With the shots Jaime ended up animating, I was thinking Superjail– letting the hyperviolence play out with no cutting. I wanted to lean into that more, but with how fast the montage song was going, I felt like having too many held cuts disrupted the rhythm. 

That rhythm itself was its own unique part of this episode– I wanted this soundtrack to be based in grind/mathcore, thinking the chaos would best fit Deacon’s character. Go watch a good mathcore band, it’s like a ritual. Weird time signature shifts, abrupt changes midway through complex riffs, psychotic drumming, all played with a visceral level of intensity. You rarely get a chance to breathe or catch a melody. I tried to mirror that rhythm in the animation– long cuts, short cuts, some extremely well animated, some that are loops of 2 or 3 frames, all interspersed between each other matching the cacophony of the music. 

After seeing how many backgrounds were necessary for the cartoon, @Shufflehound made a great point– it wouldn’t make sense to put the same level of work into every montage BG, as the majority are only on screen for a fraction of a second. He suggested having them as color splashes instead. This idea really stuck with me– we’d have the layouts loose, skip the inks, and go straight into abstract painting, knocking the backgrounds out in half the time.

I wanted this segment to look radically different, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do here– the entire length of the production. Bits and pieces came together over time. I got a bunch of comics last summer– Jhonen, Crumb, Weirdo Comix, Ted McKeever, and Wayshak. I realized there was sort of a singular through-line aesthetically I was resonating with– as I studied the inks, the idea of the montage being stark, textural B/W came to mind. Harvey had already done a color splash with black and red to illustrate his idea, and it started coming together. 

I decided on the general look, but the rest was a mystery. At first I thought about ripping an underground comix inking style, doing crazy German expressionist style compositions. That seemed too plain though. Photo-collage mixed with digital ink and paint came to mind, making it like a surreal hellworld. That wasn’t clicking either though. Nothing felt chaotic or insane enough. I decided to let it simmer.

Later I decided to paint them all traditionally. I’d print the layouts, paint over top of them, and then scan them back in. I wanted it to look like the BGs in old W-P-S or Alfred flashes– maybe because I saw those very young, but there’s always been something that feels scary about these traditional paintings crunched down into flash. It has a very unique atmosphere. I got a bunch of cheap paints, sponges, toothbrushes, palette knives, etc…and then didn’t do anything with them for months! 

I hadn’t painted in years, and was never much of a fan, so I kept dragging my feet. Eventually I sat down and spent a couple hours fucking with it. I immediately realized that doing these traditionally, even as sloppy as I intended, was going to take longer than it would be to just do backgrounds the normal way :P 

Back to the drawing board. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. At this point I had started booking the premiere show, and with the deadline approaching and only a vague idea of what this segment was going to look like, I started sweating. 

While talking about it to Marty, he said something to the effect of “Yeah, textural stuff is harder than it looks if you don’t have a lot of experience. Say, hasn’t @Thejanitor9k done some of that stuff before?” – So I reached out to Sean, with the idea that he’d paint a couple large, textural splatter canvases in black and red, we’d scan them in, I’d cut them up digitally, and throw some digital ink and paint over top of them. 

I had no idea how this was going to work, I just started fucking around. I’d cut out parts of the canvas PNGs and paste them over top of the layouts, using a different part of the canvas for each individual “plane” of the room. I let each one evolve spontaneously. I’d chisel lines with a textured ink brush and eraser where I felt it needed it, splatter digital paints and textures, then digitally paint in shadows/highlights where necessary. I found a sort of pipeline with it eventually, but I did each one a little bit differently. 

My initial attempts at painting ended up not being a total waste either– I had several sheets of paper I had wiped my brush on or used to mix colors that I scanned in too. There was one page in particular that had these really organic looking brush strokes in black that sort of looked like grass– this scene in particular, I literally just scanned that page in, inverted the colors and cranked the contrast, and it became the ground plane. 

This ended up being the most fun part of the process. This was at the end, when I was terribly burnt out and sick of working on it– and suddenly, it all became really fun and exciting again. What I learned from this is that if you keep things intentionally vague, it can kind of reignite the “spark”-- it introduced an unexpected series of creative problems to solve, which in turn made something I’d seen a million times over into something that was actively engaging again. This is how the puppets and the live action montage from Jay’s Day happened, and I’m realizing that I think oftentimes that’s the strongest stuff. I want to try integrating this into my process more going forward. Animation is so slow and repetitive that often you’ll end up getting into a sort of routine on a large project– and while that’s kind of a necessity for finishing more than 3 cartoons before you die, there’s safety in that. Fundamentally it’ll get done in a reasonable timeframe and look solid. But safe art is boring! I look back at some of my favorite shots from all of RB, and most of them have some spontaneous thing I decided to add in the moment. Not every shot can be that of course, but something I definitely want to keep working towards!

After I had gotten into the rhythm of these, Marty saw them and had an idea– the whole idea of textured BGs for animation comes from an era where they didn’t have the capability of making the textures “live”. He’s been doing all sorts of crazy compositing in flash over the past few years, and called me to pitch the idea of trying that in the montage. I was immediately down, though terrified because the premiere was four to five weeks out at this point. Marty’s a fucking legend for this, honestly. He comped nearly every montage shot while fighting two similar work deadlines and getting sick. Real MVP shit. 

He recorded a little video on how we did that part if you want to listen to us talk about that!

PRODUCTION CHALLENGES

Production on this one was probably the biggest challenge in Ratbasterdz thus far. It was a cocktail of unfortunate timings that left me pretty terribly burnt out.

It was great to enter full production on episode 3 with a good chunk already finished. However, I saw the biggest downside to the “chainsmoking” method– it exacerbates the typical cartoon cycle. In my experience, you enter a project with a ton of enthusiasm, ride the high of the “newness” down to the end, where you find yourself sick of it. By the time I had entered full production, I’d already been living with this cartoon for well over a year. I hit the ‘sick of it” point in the middle of the episode, which heavily contributed to the intense burnout I experienced with the cartoon following. This was something completely foreign to me-- I'd never felt "burnout", I'd never not wanted to be making art all the time.

After Jay’s Day wrapped and I moved my priority to this one, I took a new job in a new career. While I knew that long term this was going to offer a better quality of life and allow me time and flexibility to work on Ratbasterdz, the first few months were an uphill battle. August-December I was working pretty much every weekend and most nights, and during the days I was always overwhelmed and underprepared. 

Reasonable people would have taken a break from the cartoon for a bit while they got their bearings, but I am stubborn. My creative work is something I’ve always worked on compulsively, until I finish a project I don’t allow myself to do much else. The thought of the cartoon hitting stagnation made me feel ill. With the Patreon, I felt a new sense of responsibility and pressure I had never felt previously. The thought of letting anyone down or taking too long gnawed at me a lot. 

I’d force myself to work on it in my limited free time or lunch breaks even when my heart wasn’t in it. It felt like I never got to enter “the zone” with anything. I was more hands-off than I wanted to be and things slipped through the cracks. What was originally my favorite episode had turned into something I had started to resent. I started to think of my passion project as another set of responsibilities. I realized, this is how it happens– these little slips are what erode the foundation. Nobody sets out to make shitty art– they start making minute, even unconscious compromises that lead to a gradual degradation. 

It felt like one hurdle after another was popping up on the life front as these months droned on. The stress and lack of rest started exacerbating a lot of health problems, physical and mental. I was bordering on collapse. I reached out to a friend I had bonded with over similar circumstances around this time, only to find he was being institutionalized. He gave me some advice-- and I realized I could keep doing things the way I always have and lose it, or make some changes.

The creative process parallels life, which is part of why I find creative work compelling. You experience ups and downs, and in order to fully appreciate the “ups,” you have to live through the “downs.” The contrast is necessary.

For a long time I’ve approached art with the mentality that discipline trumps motivation. Creating anything meaningful takes a lot of hours that aren’t necessarily enjoyable. But, the momentary sacrifice culminates in something more fulfilling than the sum of its parts. I still believe this is essential advice for all artists, but I adhered to this too dogmatically. Bluntly, I had conflated the majority of my value as an artist to my productivity alone. I’ve always looked at creativity as a spiritual practice– translating abstract thoughts/feelings into something tangible that other people can interface with. I had also somehow totally neglected that aspect of it. You have to make room for the work to be what it’s going to be. Sometimes that means grinding through the tedium necessary to complete your passion project. Other times, it means channeling that fleeting motivation into something. Whether that’s a spontaneous addition to the bigger project, or painting some weird unrelated idea you had on a whim. 

I realized how much I’d been ignoring true creativity. I never drew unless it was for RB or a commission. Even when I had the energy I’d shut it down, thinking it was “wasted time” because it wasn’t in service of this larger goal. I’d become so intensely disciplined that it had become a disservice to the work itself. It culminated in work I wasn’t proud of, a version of the cartoon that was less “true” to what it was supposed to be. Stuff I ended up having to go back later to redo or fine-tune. I was so focused on finishing the episode that I had totally lost sight of enjoying the process.

I’ve since been making a conscious effort to find balance. I took some time off from the cartoon, and when I returned to it, I made a point not to work on it every single day. I started letting my animation take as long as it needed to be. I’ve made time to read, write, and began keeping a proper sketchbook for the first time in years. Drawing what I want when I want. It’s been revitalizing, I feel like I’ve reconnected with the heart of why I like making art. It's something I'm still working to figure out daily.

PREMIERE

I thought booking the last premiere was a challenge but this one was substantially more so. 

Music scenes shift, grow and evolve in such short spans of time. A lot of the smaller spots that would have taken a shot on us weren’t an option anymore. I think by the end I had reached out to something like 15 venues, ranging from established venues to extremely DIY spaces, even in neighboring cities.

On a whim I bothered Snug a second time, and they were willing to give us a Friday. I immediately said yes and started working on a lineup.

Snug’s a lot less DIY than spots we’ve worked at previously, and Charlotte’s a much more popular city to play in since the first episode. Suddenly everything had this “business” element I had never run into before. It was a struggle, and for two months I was half-expecting everything to fall through at any moment. 

We were working on finishing the cartoon up until two nights before the show. In the past, we finished the episodes a couple weeks out, so I had time leading up to the show to make finishing touches and relax. This time there was a week straight where I was going to bed with stinging stress headaches. The night before the show I hardly slept, it felt like the weight of the past eight months crashed down on me at once. But, true to the analogy I made earlier about ups and downs in life and art, the show was an all-time highlight. 

Every time I start booking a show I think “I’m never doing this again”, and by the end, I can’t wait for the next one. These gigs always live on in my memory as some of the best times of my life. Bringing together like-minded artists and seeing my favorite bands with great friends, I really can’t imagine anything better. It's surreal and very special to see so many people I care about, from all different walks of life, all in the same space– friends from childhood, college, my local music scene, and 10+ years of homies I've met through NG. 

As far as the events go, it’s never looked or sounded better. If we’re to go off tickets, there were triple the amount of people than the first show. I’ve been floored to see how much this thing has grown. With the first gig, I thought it was crazy that a handful of friends were traveling from out of town for it. Seeing how much of the crowd was composed of people that travelled specifically for the event, and how far so many of them came this time around, was really insane.

Violent End closing out the night after being the first band to join the Episode 1 bill back in 2022 was a perfect bookend and really felt so special. I’ve seen VE a lot, and that was my favorite set I’ve caught from them. Seeing how much they’ve grown as a band alongside the RB shows themselves was so fucking cool. Such crazy energy from everyone there, the entire thing felt like a dream.

Seeing how much the NG community fucks with RB means more than I can really express. It’s still something I find hard to process that people are willing to travel for these. I really appreciate this site and community for actually giving a shit about this kind of thing. What this site represents is important, and it's important we never take it for granted.

NG attendance list: 

@moonslop @amazinlarry @spinalpalm @brewster @joshua @croody @nihaho @peekaywalsh @sveekins @findoesnothing @ghost-bat @deadlycomics @thejanitor9k @plainstupidmoron @hannahdaigle @puppetology @iejomaflo @droid @poptaffy @brandybuizel @littlbox @alexmigo @jaster @mikelzng @coledawg @cokenutz @eckslol @nubcat @kowproductions @cchilab @squirm0 @roxas853

During some of the lowest points of the past year I’ve continually found myself coming back to the music and words of Ian Mackaye. I’ve been a fan since high school, but the older I get the more I understand why he is the realest to ever do it. 

He once said “The crowd is what makes it a show. Without you showing up, it’s just a band practicing on stage”. I’m a broken record, but I am appreciative beyond words for everyone who has made this project what it is– whether that’s the friends that have worked on these cartoons with me, people that come to the gigs, read these massive tomes I write or supported it in any way. I live for this shit, through all the headaches it induces, and it means a lot to me that anyone gets it. Thanks. <3