Luckily for Benjamin, her golden armor is an elastic rubber-gold alloy built to accommodate the full-figured pleasure goddess on the go. Also lucky she had that turkey leg - which was kept in a case labeled with “Break Glass in Case of Simultaneous War and Delusions of Godhood”, and had a smaller turkey leg hanging next to it. I didn’t draw that stuff because it’s already getting kind of long.

If anyone’s heading to Dragoncon this weekend, check out the freebie table, there will be fliers there to advertise Widgey and Pepper, so pick one up if you’d like! A big thanks to Jennifer for putting them out for me!

(P.S. since I’ve been so into Nancy Drew lately, today’s H!aV was fucking delightful).

It’s been asked a few times whether Ivy is a permanent addition and the answer is, yes she is! She hasn’t been added to the cast page due to a variety of factors of which the most prominent is laziness. She’ll be on there eventually though.

NANCY DREW… REPORTER (1939)

I watched this one for research purposes since I’ve been on quite a Nancy Drew kick while working on Pepper Penwell. You know what? It’s actually suprisingly good. The Bonita Granville’s version of Nancy may be a little clumsier and ditzier than modern (and somewhat cardboardy) incarnation, but she’s also brave, assertive and quick-witted. She gets herself in plenty of trouble, but she’s tough and proactive about getting out of it, too.

This version of Nancy’s not a perfect feminist icon — there’s more than a whiff of ‘lookit what this dizzy dame is putting her poor long-suffering boyfriend through’ about the film — but considering it’s from friggin’ 1939 and it still manages to have an active heroine and even pass the Bechdel test, it’s not bad.

Plus, it’d be worth it for Killer Parkins - the 12-year-old Jughatted hoodlum with a penchant for slipping into a Donald Duck impression - and the out-of-nowhere all-public-domain musical number, even without the main plot.

Like everything else ever, it is now on Youtube. Let’s watch, shall we?

(Edit: The movie can be watched all in one piece here, which might be more convenient - thank you very much to the reader who sent this link!)

China, being enormous both in area and in population, is a lot more diverse than the Western world sometimes gives it credit for. For instance, while a hardworking animator is busy making a rocking cartoon about an adorable little butterball who can kick your ass, someone in another part of the country is making this, which poses to the asses of the world not the danger of being kicked, but only the danger of being laughed off. Seriously. It’s pretty funny.

I was actually mildly interested in this when I first heard about it. Then I saw the trailer and guess what? It’s another one of those “movies that came out this year — the movie!” dealies, craftily not calling itself Vampire Movie in an effort to lure me in to a bounty of pointless skits based on the trailers of Toy Story 3 and Inception and whatever else is currently or recently in theaters. Because god knows there’s not enough silly stuff in Twilight to just do a parody of that.

One of the other trailers for it contained blurbs from “Ivana Tinkle” and “Hugh Jass”. You know everybody hated it when they have to get their rave reviews from crank calls to Moe’s. But as terrible as they are right now, though, the ongoing crop of spoof movies is going to be very interesting in forty or fifty years, when they’ll function as a kind of pop-cultural time capsule. We’ll be able to watch them and see a cross-section of everything that was part of the pop culture in the year that it was born, from the things that went on to be treasured classics to the detritus that was forgotten after its opening weekend. I guess in the long run, they’re a good thing (and it’s not as if anyone is making me go see them, anyway).

But here’s something better to watch: The Big Girl, a beautifully animated student film. As you can probably guess from the title, I have ulterior motives for liking this one, but seriously, it’s awesome for everyone. Gorgeous blending of stop-motion and drawn animation, starring a kick-ass heroine.

Great new fanart today (the first featuring Ivy!) from a longtime reader. Thanks a bunch!

She’s not crazy, she just happens to have one of those personalities that’s a teeny-tiny bit susceptible to declaring herself a god and going full Nero.

Rusty looks way too tall sitting up in that last panel. Just imagine he has roborrhoids and has to sit on a rubber donut, I guess.

I’m not sure where this room is in the ship - they have a lot of rooms that don’t serve any apparent purpose (having a crew of seven people on a ship that’s a couple of kilometers long will do that for you.) There’s a small living area and a whole lot of ice cream storage, and the bridge… I think the rest is taken up with theaters and topiary gardens and what-not.