First off, no I’m not dead (but thank you for asking). It just seems that as my life moves on I have less and less time for Tanked. The good news is I actually have a bunch of comics written, even have a handful produced that haven’t appeared here on the site. However I can’t say exactly when FishTanked will be back. Although I greatly enjoy the writing process, I truthfully despise the grind of having to produce regular work. Though I suppose in that regard the 19 FishTanked comics across five years speaks for itself…

Nevertheless, I do want to thank those that have inquired about FishTanked. Honestly, I’m very surprised that anyone is still reading Tanked or cares enough about it to write. For that I’m truthfully flattered and humbled. I will say however that although the future of FishTanked is murky at the moment, I am still writing. I’ve got a fantasy-themed young adult novel in the works. It’s been slowly brewing in the back burner of my brain for about a decade now but I’ve just about got it put together. I’m also working on a screenplay. About all I can say about that project at the moment is that it’s a semi-autobiographical dark comedy. I hardly think either one of these projects will ever see the light of day (though one can hope) but as more information becomes available I’ll be sure to post it here.

A reoccurrence of chronic mental constipation has yielded FishTanked #19. This comic was originally written and illustrated in the summer of 2006.

I’ve had bad allergies since I was a teenager. Although I certainly can’t say exactly what caused them to suddenly crop up I do know that they started just a few weeks after suffering through a monstrously bad bout of food poisoning from good ol’ McDonald’s. I had one of those holiday themed Shamrock shakes (here’s a good piece of advice, don’t drink green milkshakes) and ended up vomiting violently for the next two days. I lost twenty five pounds, probably nearly died, and have had pretty severe allergies ever since. Any other person would’ve won a multimillion dollar settlement but all I got was a coupon for a free cheeseburger. Lucky me.

Nevertheless, after two decades of suffering with all sorts of environmental and indoor allergies I finally decided to do something about it. Sure I’d been taking nasal steroids and antihistamines but this time I was going to get serious. So I got an allergy panel done. This is the sort of test where they “scratch” you with 60+ allergens and then inject you with 20 different things just to see what your body doesn’t like. In my case it was just about everything they injected me with except for shellfish. Apparently I’m not allergic to shellfish, which would be helpful if I actually ate seafood.

Long story short, the allergies were severe enough to warrant allergy shots and so this past Friday I embarked on my first round of injections. On my right arm were the indoor allergies (which I’d shown to be highly sensitive to) and on my left were the outdoor seasonal type allergies which were less severe. The appointment and the shots themselves went by fine. I showed up, they stuck me with needles and I was on my way. However just two hours after the shots I started to experience numbness in my right arm just below the injection site. I took a look and had a huge black and blue mark. A few hours later my right elbow was inflamed and by that evening my face and hands were numb.

Obviously I called the doctor’s office since I really wasn’t interested in sticking myself with one of those epipens and wasn’t all that interested in dying. Trouble is the doctors were pretty sure it was all in my head. Apparently you can’t have a reaction to such a low dose. What I was experiencing wasn’t a result of mold being injected into my body but instead an anxiety attack -complete with black and blue marks and joint pain. The recommendation was to get more shots. So if there’s no comic next week then it probably means I’m dead (or just really, really anxious).

After a long bout of dementia, I’m pleased to announce FishTanked #18. This comic was originally written and illustrated in the summer of 2006.

FishTanked #16 is now active. This comic was originally written and produced in a vat of lime Jello back in good ol’ 2006.

The Huns were a confederation of nomadic pastoralist people who invaded Europe in AD 370 and built up an enormous empire in Eurasia (thanks Wikipedia!). But the question is, which one was your favorite?

Monday is upon us and FishTanked #15 is now online. This week’s comic was originally written and illustrated in 2006 but like last week’s effort it’s new to you.

Well it’s Monday and you know what that means – another FishTanked. This week I bring you strip #14. It was originally written in 2006, but it’s new to you. As always you can vote for FishTanked on TopWebComics.com by clicking here. Voting increases the comic’s rank on the site and brings us some free advertising.

Well Mike57 from California, the truth is I haven’t actually made a new comic in years so I’m more than a bit rusty on the details. What you’ve been seeing are “enhanced” versions of the original series plus a hodgepodge of stuff that was created in 2006. Some of the newer stuff was released previously and some wasn’t. However even the unreleased stuff was still written previously so we’ll have to wait a good ten weeks from now to see if I’m still capable of producing mildly amusing disposable humor on a regular basis.

As for the process itself, it’s pretty straightforward. I use a Mac and I tend to write in Scrivener. It’s a simple lightweight creative writing application and it lets me aggregate my “strip scripts” into categories. This helps weed out the really bad ideas from the slightly less rotten ones, though it offers no inherent protection from my need to integrate bad puns into dialogue. Nevertheless, I mention the writing first because this is where I spend most of my time. I’ll sit down and write and write and write until I end up with something that I’m reasonably happy with. At that point the script ends up in my “ideas” category where it sits and brews for a few days or weeks until I either hate it or sort of like it enough to use it.

Regarding the illustrations, most of the comic is hand illustrated in Adobe Illustrator. So the foregrounds & characters are all vector artwork that’s hand drawn and colored with a mouse. For those of you unfamiliar with vector art, think of it as 3d animation without the extra “d” (or the animation). Essentially I create a character like Gill or Steve and then reuse them throughout the strips. I can change expressions, move fins and reposition eyes without recreating the character each time – at least for the most part. I opted for this method verses the Photoshop with a graphics tablet approach since the characters in FishTanked are relatively simple and drawing them over and over just takes too long.

Backgrounds are another ball game. Some are digitally created, some are 3d illustrated and others are digitally enhanced photos. What gets used depends on the mood and the scene. Though these days I lean towards the digitized photos a bit more since they lend contrast to the fish. Plus, again, drawing the backgrounds by hand takes hours. Yes, I’m creatively lazy.

The end result is a PNG file produced by Illustrator and uploaded to the site. Total time from start to finish for each strip varies quite a bit but its not uncommon to spend about 3-4 hours per comic. All that for the potential chance at a chortle, chuckle or guffaw…

Have a question? Ask Joe.

I live on an interesting street. Three years ago it was a middle-class neighborhood. These days you’d be far more likely to find a goat in someone’s driveway than a BMW. Needless to say our tiny little community has slipped into the depths of the lower-middle class. And with that particular segment of the social class comes an endless supply of neighborhood antics. Some antics are benign enough, like the guy who’s so wasted that he decides to take a nap in an adjacent driveway. Others are a bit more risky, like the time my one neighbor discovered that lighting your grass on fire is not an accepted method of lawn care. And then some antics are just so bizarre that they require a critical examination.

That’s exactly the case here when just three days ago the property just two houses down from me had a little incident with a mobile home that was haphazardly placed at the end of their yard. I won’t ask why the home was there to begin with, I’m assuming it was either a rental or a meth lab, but I do know that not all mobile homes are actually mobile. Therefore tying a rope to the front end of the home and hooking the other up to your fifteen year old pickup truck is bound to end in disaster.

And of course the ratio for disaster in such circumstances increases exponentially when the parties involved:

1. are drunk

2. are listening to rap music blaring so loud that the distorted rhymes sound as if the artist suffered a stroke

3. have mullets

Clearly then this was the perfect storm of residential catastrophes. And it didn’t disappoint. The old truck revved its engine a few times, purportedly to loosen the home off its foundation, and then the driver gunned it. At this point, had the home had wheels, it likely would have jostled loose and slid out onto the street. However as cinderblocks have terrible mobility, the house just sort of ripped in half instead. This of course was followed by a hodgepodge of expletives and head scratching on their part and more than a little snickering on mine.

Nevertheless, now where a neighboring home once stood, there lays a yard full of aluminum and rotted wood permeated by the effervescent smell of cat urine. I wish I had a firm grasp over enough adjectives to properly describe what aluminum, rotted wood and cat urine combined smells like but I suppose, “not good” gives you a general idea.

It goes without saying that after reading all this you might assume that someone in my position would feel inclined to complain about this incident or at least report the debris left behind. But truthfully I’m pretty happy that there’s now one less house on my street to worry about. So unless the neighbors suddenly start living in tents (which is certainly possible), I consider myself a pretty fortunate guy right now.