01. Exercise Tips, Death of the Artist, and Good Bad Movies
Sometimes I'm thinking about a lot of things that seemingly have nothing in common.
If you’re trying to get your shit together, I have some advice.
Number one — lighter weights + more reps = toned muscles?
Absolute cap.
If you want more muscle tone, the only way is to cut calories, but not skip out on your protein.
It’s the only way.
Give us this day our daily cardio — yeah sure, that’s good for your heart, and that’s really the main benefit. Which is a great benefit. But to lose weight, cardio is absolute cap.
It just burns calories you ate that day. Which means if you’re already cutting calories, you’re going to end up being Double Hungry and you’ll probably end up underwater on your gainz.
Here’s what I do.
Pick a weight range. For me, it’s 180 to 190. Weight yourself every Monday before you eat and after you take a dump. This is how you keep track of where you’re at.
If I’m inching toward 200, I know I’m in trouble and I have to work harder and cut calories. That doesn’t mean I’ll never have pizza and beer ever again, it just means I need to cool it for a little while, that’s all.
I think dad bods are gross, but I also think that a six pack is fucking insane and anyone who has one probably hears ringing in their ears all day and is internally broken in Humpty Dumpty-type ways.
You don’t need a six pack. Set a reasonable goal.
Mine: As long as I look decent in a True Classic tee, I’m happy.
(The silver lining is that just like bad habits, good habits ALSO require a lot of effort to break. And the longer you’ve been at it, the better your body is protected against backsliding.)
There’s this artist I admire named Emil Friis Ernst.
He created one of my favorite graphic novels of all time, a book called Dr. Murder and the Island of Death.
It’s about a supervillain going through a mid-life crisis after breaking up with his arch-nemesis. And for my money, Dr. Murder’s squishy, chubby cheeks and pained, sour expressions are among the best goddamn cartooning I’ve ever seen.
I re-read this book every year. It’s one of my top 10 graphic novels. I would kill to protect my copy.
…
Semi-recently, Emil threatened to quit comics.
Wasn’t feeling it anymore, didn’t feel he’d been successful, couldn’t make a living as an artist, blah blah.
I say “blah blah” because Emil is kind of a mysterious cunt, and it’s hard to tell when he’s Robin Goodfellow and when he’s a heart attack.
I also say “blah blah” because I was very upset at him for this announcement, which days later he seemed to take back. Maybe. Maybe not. He’s going to keep us on the edge of our seats and we’ll see.
No fuck you, make up your mind.
I’m not using Instagram anymore so I have no idea what came of it all.
But I can tell you that I wrote a 5,000-word article mourning Emil and cursing the publishers and millions of faceless readers who fail to show up for some of the most interesting cartoonists alive.
I also had some thoughts about an artist’s stamina, and what an artist ought to be about. It was an attempt to warn other talented cartoonists against doing this thing for the wrong reasons, a trap that I was concerned Emil may have fallen into.
When it appeared that Emil’s artistic death was premature, I felt a bit stung (this is why I refer to him as a “cunt” despite still admiring him quite a lot). I very genuinely worried about this guy. An artist losing faith in what they are doing and still looking at 50 or so years of life on this rock without their purpose is about the closest thing to hell that I can imagine (until you die and then go to hell, of course).
Here’s the the rub — I don’t know what prompted Emil (again, one of the most talented cartoonists of a generation, and a cheeky cunt) to threaten to quit cartooning.
But what I can tell you is that I, like many others, have also flirted with the wrong reasons for doing this.
They are:
Fame
Money
Influence
Chicks
In your deepest darkest, perhaps you desire these things, too. I did once.
But here’s the cheat code — every one of these things you think you want, you can find an example of someone who got it and is a fucking piece of shit.
A piece of shit so colossal that even their art, their God-breathed gift into a hard fucking world, is utterly ruined for you.
Everyone who is famous is a cunt.
Everyone who only cares about money? Cunt.
Everyone vying for influence over on BlueSky?
Cunt.
Dudes trying to get chicks? From Ales Kot to Neil Gaiman — cunts. One and all.
And if you can think of anyone in these categories who is not a cunt, then there’s a really simple reason why.
They’re doing this for the right reasons.
Those superficial benefits are an afterthought. If they’re anything at all.
You can make a ton of money doing anything. Work your way up to the top of whatever industry, do keynotes, all of it. Including getting laid at the conferences. Everyone gets laid at whatever the conference.
So why are you doing this, and not that? Why do you want to get laid at Comic Con instead of the Oklahoma City Farm Show?
Take away all of the benefits — the adulation from people you don’t know and whose praise you will never believe. The money that you could have gotten more easily selling software than drawing pictures. The women (or men) you’ll forget.
Who the fuck are you, at bottom, without all of that?
If you can’t answer that question, then you should quit.
I’m watching the films of Albert Pyun.
You may know him as the guy who directed the bad Captain America movie which, for all of its faults, does contain this scene:
I started with this movie The Sword and the Sorcerer, a fantasy which features a mercenary played by an actor I’ve never seen who carries a three-bladed projectile sword.
I suppose it’s what some might call a “male power fantasy.” But that’s okay, because I am a male, and while I don’t think I’m all that interested in power, I do like fantasy as well as kissing beautiful women, which is something that happens a lot in this movie.
Anyway, it’s a bad movie that is nonetheless impossible not to watch in its entirety, something that all of Pyun’s films have in common.
You may also be aware of his film Cyborg, a Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle from the time when Jean Claude Van Damme was trying to be Arnold and Stallone and kind of got close with Timecop, but could never really break the ceiling, except in the heart of my dear friend and sometimes-collaborator Thom Newell.
Cyborg features, what else? Cyborgs. As well as crucifixion scenes and dystopia. All things that Pyun once said he’s not even that interested in, but these ideas sure recur a lot, because there’s a crucifixion in The Sword and the Sorcerer as well, and more cyborgs in a film called Nemesis.
Now Nemesis is genuinely not bad, except for the acting and the effects and the editing and the directing.
But there are some setpieces in there that, dare I say, I’m fucking stealing. Because they were actually pretty fucking cool.
It came out in 1992 and it’s the kind of movie that almost certainly ended up in Japan and inspired the guys who made Parasite Dolls and a bunch of other frankly amazing shit, and if you trust me on this and track it down, you will not be able to unsee the parallels.
And if this script was re-made today by, say, Denis Villeneuve, I honestly think it would probably win some statues.