Me and The Muses

The Olympians

When Water Towers Dream

I'm a strong proponent of the personification of buildings and man-made structures, a theme I'll return to in a drawing later this week. If the dreams of the first two water towers are reminiscent of scenes from the movie Super 8, it's likely because director J.J. Abrams read this comic when it first appeared in the newspaper or on the blog last year. So yeah, just a coincidence. 

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.

The Library

I spend an inordinate amount of time browsing the shelves of Kansas City's downtown public library. To the staff there, I'm probably known as the weird guy in scrubs who lurks about the children's section and always leaves with more novels and compact discs than any one person could hope to consume. I've accepted the fact that I have a book problem.

Kansas: Land of Zen

This comic was drawn in anticipation of a long drive I made this week from Kansas City to Denver. I think Kansas was mad at me, because I had to navigate my Honda through a snow and ice storm that spanned the entire state. However, the terrible weather did make the trip anything but boring.

The University of Awesome

This is just like where I went to college, only more awesome. As always, I'm selling prints of this drawing to put up in your seedy dorm room or give to your wayward college-age son/daughter/hippie. Click here for details or email me at gsnider11@gmail.com.

The Treehouse of Adulthood

This comic originally ran about a year ago and can be found on this blog in its original form. I decided to update it with color, mainly because I thought the pond creature should have green tentacles and the in-laws lurking inside the tree should have yellow eyes. Incidentally, my mother-in-law is visiting this weekend. As usual, this is available for purchase as an 11"x17" poster (email me at gsnider11@gmail.com) so you can put it up in your cubicle of employment or useless hobby zone and eventually stash it in some closet with your exercise equipment. 

The Thing

The 18th Hole

Moving to Sunday

Starting this week, my comic strip will no longer appear on Thursdays in the Kansas City Star. Instead, "Delayed Karma" will be included in a juicy Sunday comics supplement called KC Strips Extra, available to home subscribers for some small additional fee. The format won't change much, and every third comic still won't make any sense whatsoever, but I will be able to do a color strip whenever the spirit moves me. Until next Sunday, here's one of the stranger pages from my sketchbook:

Museum Rules

I recently returned from a weeklong road trip across the upper Midwest. I had a chance to visit the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The one thing these great museums had in common: draconian rules.

Downtown

Meet the Band

My First Date With Cyclops