Welcome!

Yooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!! Put yer hands in the sky!!! So I can search yer pockets!!!

If you're one of the lucky few who visited the site earlier, you'll notice that I've taken down the newest editions of my sleeping hit comic strip, Fresh Fruit. Why? Well, I'm still twerking on them, learning Photoshop, seeking illustrators and/or animators to collab wiff (that's "collaborate with" for those uninitiated to my regular assaults on the mother tongue) as well as trying to get published in glossy print, and eke out some scripts and other materials for to make Fresh Fruit into maybe a cartoon series. Cross your fingers, cross your toes, cross your nose.

So.

What I've decided to do instead of posting new material is to start from scrizzatch. I know, nobody's doing the "izzle" talk anymore, but I'm just not ready to let go. Get offa my back already. Anyway, I've been drawing my own liddle comic strips since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and started specifically working on the characters for Fresh Fruit around the fall of 2001. Some background:

I had just been dismissed from university after delivering a brilliant lecture on the aggressive influence of rock and roll on German culture entitled "You, Kant, Always Get What You Want" --

Sorry. Wrong story. Let me set the tone.

Having graduated high school in 1999, I moved to NYC to pursue super-gay dreams of musical theater fame and fortune. Surprise surprise, things didn't work out and with my tail between my legs, I returned home to upstate New York where I spent the following three years moving in and out of my parents' basement and drifting from one crap job to the next. During a brief stint working the door at Prime Time Too, the local gay club, I met the close friends and even closer enemies who would later appear in Fresh Fruit, but it wasn't until I got fired from that place and took a job as a bellhop that I actually started drawing the strip. The actual bell-hopping took up only about 15% of my shift time, which left 85% to shoot the shit with my co-workers, smoke pot on the roof, and sit around doing nothing. Most of my earliest doodles were on the backs of parking tickets that looked this (click to enlarge):



I know. Fascinating.

So, here are some prototypes for some of the characters I would go on to feature in Fresh Fruit. Originally, the strip was called Fruit Salad, but just recently I decided that Fresh Fruit is a little more specific to the tone of the comic. OH MY GOD I'M BORING MYSELF. Okay, no further ado. Here. Excuse the handwriting, 'kay?

"You can be all the shady you want. Just stay the fuck out of my light."

This here's Kirk, the buddy whose cartoon name I'd later change to Kenton. A Jamaican transplant, he's more or less the strong, level-headed type, both in real life and on paper.

"Mom!! You will remove your ham-hock feet from my Moroccan camel clogs right now!! Now!!"

Vin's the sassy one, oh yah.

"Lionel Ritchie is full of shit. There is nothing easy about Sunday morning."

Based on yours truly, Manny is the well meaning fuck-up. It's funny - I drew this shit six years ago and aside from the bagginess of my jeans, not a lot has changed... Go fig.

"I just know, that someone, somewhere... has a gun pointed at my head."

Paranoid Jake was the first sort of "guest character" who I'd later feature in a brief storyline that lasted for three strips. You'll see them later.

There is a fourth character, TJ, who is an amalgamation of every rival and evil queen I've ever loved to hate. You'll see him later too.

So, okay, you saw it here first. This, I hope, is the beginning of something truly beauteeful. Besos.