Enter the raven.
This character has shown up in clerkmanifesto and has been bopping around it in all kinds of places for at least a few months. Scraggly feathers, large yellow beak, a team player. The raven is there in the studio, out on all the field trips, and features in the clerkmanifesto promotional footage. But who is this character?
I don't know.
So I made a cartoon to try and find out.
This may not be the last time we trot out old pictures from Japan here at clerkmanifesto. There is still too much satisfaction in it because we loved it there.
It is now a year since we were actually in Japan, but, and this one seems strange to me: We were nevertheless in Japan more recently than we were in the United States.
You know, of America.
"Ah! America!" As people say in France after we figure out they're asking us where we're from and we answer them.
"Ah! America!" They say.
What do they mean by this?
That they've heard of it?
There is no level of French I can be at that will understand this response. But I accept it. Yes, America.
The important point though here is that I am fully obsessed with what I might fairly describe as a color shaker toy for my photos. You take your little magic can (TM) and load it with any three to five colors you want. Select your photo and mist it lightly with your Ansel Adams Solution, being careful not to saturate it. Then firmly close the top and shake it for 20 seconds or so, et voila! Remove the picture from the cannister and hang it to dry.
In less than ten minutes: Color magic!
My best solution to what to do with all my color magic pictures is to group them up by category. Today is "Japan". I think I might still have a "Minnesota" group, and a "Belle Epoque City" one. After that maybe I'll be ready to try something else, you know, like writing one of those witty essays everyone is always pretending I write. "Thank you for your hallucinatory xray images of the oysters you ate, but what I really enjoy are those crazy little essays you write where you imagine the reader is saying stuff and then you respond to it but it's all in your own head!"
Wait, I don't do that, do I?
Today I have for you two new I E Skin cartoons. Two!
I could just show one, I know. It would be perfectly reasonable. Even employing as much AI as I do here, these still take tons of time to make, mostly with me yelling at and begging the AI to do what I want. But they make such a nice set about my life in France.
I don't know how to explain it, but the first one is a bit of how it feels trying to do the right thing in a slightly confusing other culture. The second one is probably my trying to make peace with the seedy life of the streets here.
Sorry about the hyperbole.
These aren't the most beautiful flowers ever. Flowers aren't ranked. I know that this is hard to remember when one is on the Internet. In the real world nothing is ranked. This is sort of like how if you are dreaming you can try pinching yourself to see if you maybe are really not dreaming. If you are not sure if you're on the Internet ask yourself which song ranks higher: Weight of Love by the Black Keys or Candles in the Rain by Melanie. If an obvious answer occurs to you you are on the Internet!
There is nothing wrong with being on the Internet. It's the 43rd best thing to do on a thursday!
Er, anyway, I made these pictures of flowers for you. They are of course, unranked, because this isn't...
wait
now I'm all confused.
Way back in the mid nineties, not so very far back for some of us to go, I experienced one of my ever so modest peaks of public artistic success with a weekly comic called "I.E. Skin's Guide to All that there is to Know". It ran in a weekly paper in the bay area for a few years and then it went away.
Or did it!
Maybe this here, right now, clerkmanifesto, is really I.E. Skin's Guide to all that there is to Know!
Sort of, I guess, whatever.
This is not the first time I have mentioned my old alt weekly comic, even at some point bringing forth the historical comics here, or maybe posting to an auxiliary clerkmanifesto site that was easily viewable and is still link listed on the sidebar here. Doris the super intelligent alien and even the character of god, stalwarts of I.E. Skin's Guide, have appeared here as well over the years of clerkmanifesto in various ways.
But I can't say I have ever done a proper resurrection.
Until today, because, why not?
Our first return, a sort of let's get our feet wet, is a reworking of an original cartoon of I.E. Skin's Guide, but with some redesigns and a little modern rewriting.
Yesterday I came upon the new word metadistential.
Well, I mean, I wrote it.
Did you know that the most famous clerkmanifesto post of all time was in the coining of the word "Condeluded" meaning to be confused in one's own interest.
Had I struck gold again?
Not that there was any gold for me in "condeluded".
However, I did become super famous and acquired, let's see:
Zero new readers.
Welcome to each and every one of you.
And now was the magic was about to happen again?
Metadistential. Here is how it appeared yesterday:
Sorry, I didn't mean to get all metadistential.
Whoa, metadistential.
I think I have a new word.
I was pretty excited, naturally, what with all the fame and glory headed my way.
Metadistential.
Metadistential.
Metadistential.
Now all I had to do was come up with a meaning.
Actually, I had the meaning.
I just can't explain it.
No, I'm not being clever here. That is the meaning: To know the meaning but not be able to explain it.
No, it's actually not very likely to catch on. It's too...
too...
metadistential.
