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Peggle Replays Infrequently Asked Questions Paul Notley The Leaden Angels Alt Oscars 2012 Alternate Oscars 400 Fave Movies 500 Fave Songs 100 Movie Murders PopStrips! Buy Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots. It's a poster! Angryflower.com generously hosted by Brunching Shuttlecocks.com Books!!! 
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Fri, May 11 - The Zenth Is/Are And the Avengers? I'm still collecting my thoughts, so I'll give the stragglers another week before blasting everyone with spoilers. So far it's awesome crowd-pleasing fun, empty and ultimately trivial... or is it? Fri, May 4, Avenger Day It's always made me a little sad that the Marvel universe all-star team named itself The Avengers in response to DC's Justice League. Generally speaking I'd rather be on the side of justice versus vengeance. At the same time, I'm a Marvel kid through and through so I'm looking forward to some avenging! At Any Rate another Bob the Angry Flower cartoon appears now:  Fri, April 27 - RETURNING Just when we thought old issues had been dealt with and laid to rest, somehow they arise again as we explore the multivariant complexities of  Cabin in the Woods I'll follow the established non-spoiler approach to discussing this movie in that I recommend it, it's fun, it's interesting, it has revealing things to say about horror movies. SPOILERSSSS!!!! Curiously, given all everybody says about how the movie runs on surprises, it really doesn't. Instead it runs on insight and analysis, speaking to the audience as though they understood or were about to understand everything it has to say. It plays its biggest "surprise" at the outset, in the very first scene, playing its trump card to be understood and appreciated. It's clever. It's clever almost to a fault, and it grieves me to say this, because had I been clever enough to come up with its approach I would have played it out the same way. I would have tossed suspense in favor of examination. I would have gone for gags rather than mystery. I would have sought to illuminate, to bring light to a world built on shadows and darkness. I keep saying "I would've," but I didn't. Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, they put this idea and approach together; they made it work on its own terms. Go see it! See it and see it with other folks! See it and talk about it! It's super cool! Wed, April 18 - Bejillickers!!! I don't know about you folks (and yet I fear I do), but the last little bit has been quicker and more flavorful than late. Good? Yes? Evil? No? Can't decide??? In such cases I've found it useful to 
Fri, April 13 - Moneyball Last year wasn't really all that super great for movies. Not a whole lot stuck out. I will, however, confess a latter day attraction to Moneyball, a movie I would not have expected to like or even be interested in. Of course it helped that it hit me where I'm most vulnerable, as we see in  Book 8! Golly, I can feel it, coming into shape, arriving, forcing itself into existence. Got some neato stuff gonna be in it. I think you folks will dig! Fri, April 6 - Hail n such I'm told that an icestorm of hail arrived itself on our streets of Seattle yesterday. I must have missed it, eating a mushroom/italian sausage crepe with parmiagiana sauce as I was. Apparently it came at went quickly and only bothered Seattleites who happened to dare to be outside during the key thirty minutes or so. Regardless, all this is meaningless in the context of the extraordinary, life-affirming, sex-having Zenth storyline which continues to present itself along such lines as  Gaming and Hungry I'll take a moment or two to speak on the Hunger Games movie. I'd read the first book and it seemed it could easily be made into a film. It was punchy, dynamic and visual, and while it focused (as novels do) on the internal consciousness of the main character Katniss, there would be obvious ways to externalize these feelings into a story for the screen. When the movie came out, I watched it on opening night and spent the first half trembling with frustration and anger as I found myself constantly ejected from the film by jerky camera movements and unnecessary cuts. It was as though the filmmakers had consciously built into their film a suite of 5, 7 and 8-year-olds constantly kicking the back of my seat. "Here's a scene between Katniss and her young sister Prim. Let's cut and jump all the time so we can't focus on these two characters or how they feel about each other. Instead let's constantly skitter and scutter because it's 'real,' forever preventing the audience from feeling the film, engaging with the characters, entering the film narrative or enjoying the story." I literally (actually literally) spent the first half of the film trembling with ever-increasing rage, ever more frustrated at the filmmakers' refusal to allow me to watch their film, seriously considering getting up and walking out, only balking because I sat with a group of friends whose experience I wished not to interrupt. (soilers) After all this jittery nonsense in preventing me from feeling anything and dragging me along with events I was never allowed to properly experience, we arrive at the Tributes' Parade, an obviously cinematic sequence displaying Katniss in all her compromised glory along with her fellow tribute Peeta, both presented to a blase future society as incredible wonderments, the Girl On Fire (along with the Boy on Fire) wearing sci-fi future outfits of astonishing flame. Honestly my fingernails bit into my palms with anger as this sequence once again shoved my eyes away from the spectacle. I never got a chance to be with Katniss during this moment. I wasn't able to absorb the both of them uncomfortably dealing with their roles as dolls in the best dress-up ever. And I couldn't feel pleased and satisfied as a confortable Central Section audience member seeing the lowly tributes paraded before me. Jittering shaking jump cuts, cinematic styles I must imgaine were intended to draw me into the world and the moment, instead forced me away from the story every second and half second. Seriously I think at one point I licked blood from my fingernail-gouged palms, was the rage. Thankfully the movie entered the second half, the actual killzone. Here the filmmakers' "You can't-see-anything" aesthetic made more sense, so I didn't feel constantly assaulted by the stylishtic choices. And when Katniss (spoilers) gave Rue what she could as a burial and presents her defiant hand gesture to the camera she knows is there, only to cut away to Rue's Section and their boiling anger and Rue's father exploding in uncontrollable rage, then and only then the movie hit me for real. It meant something, more than the books had at that point. I wept. So, go see the Hunger Games! Expect spastic camera actions and edits. Wonder why you don't feel as connected to the characters and the story as you did when you read the book (assuming you did). Take moments as you can. Enjoy Jennifer Laurences's Katniss as best you're allowed to. Try to feel relationships and emotions in defiance of the filmmakers' stylic indifference or open hostility to same. And, y'know, read some books and some more! Fri, Mar 30 - Enough Marching Yeah, yeah, it's been fun lingering in March. I personally greatly appreciate not having to go into April until I had to. But go we must, have to we all, so here's a quick Bob the Angry Flower cartoon to accompany on the journey.  Fri, Mar 23 - A Game of Hunger Hey, readers! Are you excited about the Hunger Games movie? If you're not, you should consider becoming so cuz it's about to be the giant thing. I advise getting on board one way or the other, either by reading the book or books, or by watching the movie, or by firmly establishing a "Fuck Hunger Games" stance right now, cuz get ready. If the lineup outside the Cinerama Thursday night for the 12:01 screening is any indication, we're about to be culturally inundated with hungry, hungrier and ever hungriest games. As though we weren't already. Anyway, I meanwhile promised last week that we'd be out under and away from the worst of the Zenth storyline. Judge for yourselves if it's so, thusly:  Fri, Mar 16 - The Worst Once we get out under and ahead of  chances improve for all of us being better off. Or at the least such is my firm belief. Fri, Mar9 - Zenthy Sorry folks and Bob readers but you're on another story journey. I've been drawing comics twice a week for three weeks to make pages and here's the first of the fiercelessly hopeless awful new stuff, utter babble going by the nomenclature of  Readers Recommend! As far back as Feb 3, 2012 I called out to readers to launch suggestions for the next, 8th, Bob the Angry Flower book. Many of you responded, and I received far more notions than I ever thought possible. The title's not yet quite ready, but readers be assured. Though no contest was announced, prizes will be given. Submitters who nailed the title will get books. Furthermore, many submitters who submitted amusing titles will also get books. Appearance Occasionally it behooves this page to recognize the existence of anything beyond it, and this is one of those times. Thankfully there's a Bob the Angry Flower-related reason to go, in this case one of a powerful depiction in the midst of an overall story so brilliantly right it could not have come from any other brainpen than Jason Yungbluth of Weapon Brown, Clarissa and Zogg of WhatIsDeepFried.com. If you have any interest at all in a perfectly realized wasteland filled with the broken corrupted refuse of the Sunday edition comix pages, do start at the beginning with Weapon Brown. It's shockingly vulgar. Fri, Mar 2 - Yes it's March Snuck up on us, it did, March 2012, lurking behind February's leap year extra day before springing out from the bushes all fangs and teeth and pillows and stuff. Bastard! Why does March always have to be such a dick of a month? Or perhaps, wait, it's not March's fault, maybe we should all instead blame the  Fri, Feb 24 - Remember To kick off this special Academy award-oriented angryflower post, I am proud to present Paul Notley's Alternate Academy Award List, covering the years 1927 to our current days. I'll admit it's a bit baffling for the first few decades, but once you get into the years you remember, it's pretty neato! He gave Best Picture in 1981 to Raiders of the Lost Ark for the sake of God! GENIUS! And speaking of Oscar-winners, one should always avoid the 
Fri, Feb 17 - Super Bowing How long ago was the Super Bowl? Six eternities? And yet I can remember almost like it was earlier today, just after lunch, the strong, insistent emotions I felt  Fri, Feb 10 - CUBE!!! We haven't moved far into this particular month of this particular year, but we've gone far enough for us to really, truly, emphatically and deeply re-evaluate our understanding of gelantinous cubes and their natures. We've found it easy to dismiss their personhood, their character, their habit of screaming "Cube" whenever random adventurers make their random appearances. It's appalling and it needs to stop and it's all a terrible result of selfish 
Book 8 Title Names Last week I asked for some suggestions for the title of the next and eighth Bob the Angry Flower book. I'm humbled and delighted at the ideas, notions, possibilities and lively names I've received. Readers who sent stuff in, thank you. I've had a handful of ideas churning around already, but many of your submissions are forcing me to stop and rethink. Funny stuff coming in from many sides, good ideas of which I hadn't conceived. Ultimately the book can only have one name, but to all of you who have launched proposals myward: you have helped to create this next book. I am grateful. Additional notions may be delivered thiswards, and I hope to hell and damn I can come through for you on the final product. Uhhhh... EXCELSIOR! Fri, Feb 3 - Unification blah blah blah blahdebalh some stuff for this part of the web site updating Oh! Pardon! Didn't see you folks there! I was just trying to get a simple template down for elementary updates such as the following  a cartoon of the simple sort, making no pretense to wider relevance or import. New Book Number 8! Hey, readers, there's another Bob book coming up, debuting July 2012 at San Diego Comic-Con. But OH NO! I haven't finished it, nor do I even have a title! If any regular readers, all 36 to 87 of you, have ideas for titles for the new book, please send them my way! Fri, Jan 27,2012 And so we arrive at another Friday, another seven-day span where most of us are still alive. It certainly seems a bit silly to blabble on about these kinda days, but honestly I have no choice. Thus, here all bear witness to the 
Fri, Jan 20 - Snowmageddon Yow! We had a whole lot of snow in Seattle this week. Generally snowfall in itself is no big story, but Seattle being as uncomfortably geographical as it is, the slushy deluge shut the city down for two days, with hundreds of thousands of people left without power. I count myself incredibly lucky not to have been in their number, as my place would've rapidly cooled to freezing without the intervention of electrical heat. Let's hope the power crews are able to get stuff up and running as fast as possible. On the theme of disaster, then, I present  **Note: A drunken fool gained access to angryflower.com and posted the following spray of madness as an update. While it would be simple to edit the mess into readability or erase it entirely, I think it's important to leave the incoherent nonsense as it is as a reminder of the critical importance of not allowing soused idiots anywhere near HTML editing software.** Friday, Jan 13 Januraies Go on Mark Millar's Wanted kill-everbody super fun times, as though we never cared about anything other than bad shitty horrible killing and somehow bad shitty horrible killible of everbody getting cool enough so's we all love super-killing and then some. I don't quite to mean that every action is like unto a torture, not do I imagine that every action performed beyonded will always leaded to horror. At best I'd hope independendt actions could go out themselves and build individual Alchemies in the Kush Edmonton Neighborhods. I honestly hope you all people and readers string great hope throughout across as many funs and peopleness as you are able. I will confess I slept a lot and then more so, slumbering deepling as best as I could into possible moments of crazed hilarious world-destructions and cute-girl dream-madmadnessses.And some cartoons:  I'll go on to say it was great this full 2011-endyear, cool and easy, leaving the dog and cats to places and people who fully rather did them better on comfort than I would've myself. Gave me time to hang with humans, and humans I did hang with, groups and piles of them, Edmontonians abounding, honestly fun folk throughout. Seriously, non-Edmonton readers, it''s a chilled but good time to slide around. And I've been a terrible person to which to listen for the last few runs of word. TERRIBLE, I say! Oh, and there's a new strip. Please enjoy and learn from Fri, Wed, Dec 26 - UrrrOrrggg It's a comic! 
Wed, Dec 21 - Christmastime That's right. I said it. Christmas. As in Noel, as in old school mangers, as in wise men and special stars and babies born to Jewish virgins. Suck it, haters. All you wacky believers in non-Christian religions are just going to have to deal. Seeing as how it's Christmas, that typically means I'm heading back to Edmonton for the occasion, and so it is this time around. As a result, I'll not be here to do Bob the Angry Flower updates until next year, and as a result of that, I now present to you the year's final two cartoons, one after the other. First we have  for your Christmas edification. Once you've finished rubbing various oils and myrrhs on your gut to ease the pain of all the laffs, you may then proceed to  for additional jollity and moral scolding. Is that it? Seems so. I hope all you wonderful folks enjoy the rundown to the rest of the year, and hey... today's the solstice, I believe! YEAAAAAAAAHHHHH! Days start getting longer again! YESSSSS. See y'all next year! Fri, Dec 16 - Yep Hope all y'alls getting ready to bid farewell to this 2011 thang, cuz it's going away no matter how you feel. Here's a strip to deaden the pain and make it light-hearted! 
Fri, Dec 9 - Oh, the Weather Outside ...isn't too bad, actually; for the moment, relative clemency prevails. I just got back from checking out a neat little Star Wars art show half a block from my apartment (good nerd site io9.com has story and pictures here). It was similar to the Muppet Rawk show I saw a few weeks ago, in which local artists did various album covers with Muppets, but different in that it also featured a lot of pieces officially licensed by Lucasfilm, including animation sketches from the Family Guy parodies. Generally the whimsical local renditions are more interesting, but there was some pretty damn hot licensed stuff in there as well, and I say this as a thoroughly jaded Star Wars fan. It's always striking to see dozens of diverse artists turned loose on a touchstone cultural icon. You get your head spun around every time. Meanwhile, last week the United States Senate passed a hip new National Defense Authorization Act to keep American people safe like so: 
Fri, Dec 2 - Good Lord It's December already? How the hell did that happen? Sneaky work, 2011, sneaky work. Though, to be honest, I won't be sorry to put this year behind us; it's been a bit sucky. Besides, next year will be the astonishing 20th anniversary of Bob the Angry Flower. Impossible to believe, but it's the truth. Way back in 1992 ol' Bob made his Molotovin' way into all of our lives, and somehow he's still annoying us with goofy adventures such as  Fri, Nov 18 - ZipzapSay Hey, y'all, this week we're gonna do something a teeny bit different. I'm out for the weekend and the following week, but rather than post the one and then the other a week or two later, let's try posting the done comics all at once! Shocking, alarming and wrongheaded, but it's going to occur. So bolt yourselves down for not one but TWO Bob the Angry Flower cartoons this week, knowing that next week there won't be a new strip and just a flailing web site update without a strip to justify its existence. MAN, that had better be a good update! Daring and exciting, I think we can all agree! Here's this week's strip, a nerdy yelling on physics I've decided to call  And then, if your guts have settled down after the tumultuous laughter the previous cartoon set in motion --and do take your time, I know hilarious comics can set both body and soul a-shivering beyond their normal tolerances-- I hasten y'all to gaze your wondered eyes on a cartoon far more physical and organic, distressing, disturbing and enlightening, a strip speaking to all of our hearts and needs called  Fri, Nov 11 - Descending Up Whoa damn, that daylight savings time switch sure hit hard this week. Yeah, we got the extra hour on Sunday, and yes, I napped the hell out of that hour with great satisfaction. Several times over Sunday, I looked up, saw it was an hour earlier and took on another refreshing half-hour snooze. Several times. But as with all things good, the price must be paid in triplicate. And so it is we discover the sky cloaked in rampant blackness around 5 o'clock. Suddenly, as though by magic! Welcome to the slide in towards Winter Solstice, gentlefolk and additional people. Welcome. Hope you enjoy the ever-darkening view! I'm oddly into this part of the year, and I'm sure if I went back to last year's post this time I'd find myself expressing precisely the same sentiments I'm typing now. I'm terrified to look for fear of succumbing to the temptation to simply copy n' paste. Being in the rundown to the finish line of the year is what I like about this time of the season. Knowing it's gonna keep getting darker for another month or so, but when we sail past December 22nd, 2011 we'll know we're on the other side with longer and brighter days ahead of us all the way up to June 20, 2012, a wonderful amazing midsummer day when everything starts turning to crap again. I really need to stop being so interested in seasonal change. It gets super boring. Here, then, is this week's Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, cunningly entitled 
Fri, Nov 4 - Post-we'en I hope all you wonderful folks out there had an enjoyable Hallowe'en, filled with fantasy and favor, liquor and beer and pigs-in-blankets. Especially the pigs-in-blankets part. I had some this Hallowe'en and let me tell you, if you didn't, you're missing out. So deliciously weinery! It seems to be getting noticably colder out there as well, so I trust you good people will bundle up accordingly with all appropriate  Oh, and one more thing. I know I'm grindingly behind the curve on this as I am on most things, but golly, Parks and Recreation is a jolly good show! You should watch it! Ron is my sudden new hero of all things. Fri, Oct 28 - Craft Work It's gonna be a quick and tight little update this week, y'all. I took the last week off and now it's down to a matter of hours to create some kind of comprehensible Hallowe'en costume for Friday at the PopCap offices. So I do hope you will all forgive me, not just for the slenderness of this particular update but also for the rambling madhouse Daleksex-mania content of last week's post. Sometimes... sometimes weekly cartoonist/bloggers go nutballz, and rather than inflicting their crazed mumblings on random passersby on the street, they deploy their twisted dreams to all humanity via this compu-linked network of stuffs. Do I have a point? Only that I intend to devote the rest of the evening to wigs and scissors and tape and sheets of colored paper, but before I can do any of that I am obliged to ensure that you all you wonderful, wonderful people, readers all, have full access to  Fri, Oct 21- Dalek Sex? Do Daleks have sex? And I don't mean, I'm not asking if Daleks bone each other. I'm wondering if Daleks appreciate and understand the notion of sex. Not gender, as in the distinctions between he and she, that is to say linguistic distinctions. I'm just curious if Daleks have any impression of sex as a biological distinction, as a species divided into two biofoms with separate roles in biological reproduction. We already know Daleks do not make gender (linguistic) distinctions. Daleks do not have hes and shes in their language. Indeed, the only way we know Daleks tell each other apart is purely through status and shell coloration. High-status Black Daleks issue orders to non-blacks. Non-blacks, regular Daleks, perform their duties as ordered. How do non-black Daleks distinguish between themselves? We simply don't know. They say "I obey," but do they really identify themselves through "I," linguistically? Obviously the named Daleks, the Cult of Skaro, are able to use specific identity identifiers for each other, but as far as we know, they're the only ones. But do Daleks have any notion of sex, biologically? Are they aware of male and female as separate slices of a single species, through which genetic variation may be advanced without having to wait for random mutation? They are, after all, the ultimate mutations of the Kaled race, a race much like our our own, a human-like race that had given over all to victory and science, knowing the results of radiated transformations, even before Davros's distortions. Somehow they went from a human-like race into a one-eyed mutated cloneblob encased in shells. Was there anything of sex left after that transformation and degradation? Seemingly not, since we've never seen evidence of sex (biological distinction) or gender (linguistic differentiation through pronouns) in any of our encounters with them. Why am I so interested in Dalek sexes and genders and in how Dalek sexes and genders are distinguished from each other? Only beacuse I need to be interested in something at the moment. So, sexy gendered Daleks, you're IT! Why yes, folks, now you ask: am I mad? Quite so. I am fully mad. I wish this new cartoon conveyed the curent insanity but it only hints. Still, we must not forget the importance of terminologies, to wit: 
Fri, Oct 14 - Chillz I know, I know, referring to weather being in any way "cold" here in Seattle is as laughable as a clown barrel of monkey japes, particularly to folks who hail from, say, Edmonton. Still, t'was a drear chill in the air this rapidly darkening eve, a whisper of what's to come, bepeaking shivering and dampness on the way --and that's not even considering the wreath of ice soon to descend on my fellow Canadians up in Canadia. Brrrr. Bundle up, folks! Could be a cold one this year. Strippy On occasion drawn funnies are presented to the public on this "web site," and so indeed we see such now, a tidbit called 
Fri, Oct 6 - One Returns From APE, of course, the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco, held this last weekend in the Concourse Exhibition Center, site of many independent cartoonists and many many many many many many many many many many many more excited vaporous water molecules whose sworn duty was to induce sweat and swampy heat on the indy strippers for selected hours of the days. Nonetheless, I would count APE 2011 as a success. Sales, brisket, Keith Knight and his table crew Lonnie Milsap and Ken Tanaka, catsleep, drinks, jobniking with Mirian and Mike (Happly Blirthdays, Mike!), Van de Graffs ionizing air at street partiers, stunning veal ribs, Hark! A Vagrant books and superstar Shannon Wheeler, all packed into the same sweating greenhouse for two days. Don't you wish you'd been there? Anon, anon, here we present yet another searingly powerful BtAF cartoon:  Fri, Sep 30 - Six of one, APE of the other APEbreak, folks! It's time for the Alternative Press Expo again this very weekend, Oct 1-2, in humid San Francisco at the Concourse Exhibition Center. Come one, come all, see the witless cartoonists attempt to move bound sheaves of paper in exchange for other sheaves of paper! See a number of them succeed while others fail! Featuring for the first time for sale anywhere The Gunt Chronicles in minicomic form! Amazement! Products! Comic books and local funnies! WHEEEEEEEE! Meanwhile, on the Internet, a cartoon appeared:  Fri, Sep 23 -- Autumnal Equinox Hey, lads and female folks, welcome to the autumnal equinox! What is the autumnal equinox, you might well ask? Nothing much, really. It's just the day whereby night and day are the same amount of time in our northeren hemisphere of our planet called Earth. Since the summer solstice days have been getting shorter and faster. At this point days will continue to get shorter, but they'll get shorter *faster*. The rate of daylight loss will begin to abate from now until the winter solstice . Not enormous, and indeed, mostly invisible. Days will continue to get darker and nights will continue to extend. But even as days shrink and nights grow, the night-growing will slow each and every day until it comes to a stop at December 21, whereupon it will reverse and verrrrrrry slowly start to turn into bigger an better new days into 2012. I find myself babbling far more than I shoud on these Q1/Q3 moments, yapping on and on about our sun fluxes as we decsend into our solar trenches and launch into our solar crests. Indeed I've likely repeated myself a year or two ago or even more recently. But I can't dismiss the way it feels to live on the crust of a tiny illuminated clot of dirt swirling around a mega-titanic ball of unlikely fusion reactions, particularly as the dirt-ball rotations over time come to allow such things as viruses, jellyfish, turtles and Christmas to manifest themselves. Blah blah blah stuff stuff stuff here's a cartoon hope y'all enjoy or smirk on it! 
Fri, Sep 16 - Fall Approaches Aw, man, I was just starting to really get used to these long, warm evenings, and now they're draining away like syrup down a gutter. Really tasty syrup, no less. Bummer! Someone must be made to answer for this outrage, and in order to identify whom, it's time for a  And hey While you got a chance, why not play some Pig Up? We added all kinds of crazy new crap to go along with all the old crap! Check it out! Fri, Sep 9 Holy Precious Screaming Mother of Gods does DHL have some serious problems. DHL, for folks who may not know, is an international delivery service. Like FedEx. Or the post office. Except international. And cheaper. Much, much cheaper. Though not cheaper than the post office. What they do, see, is they take money from a person with the promise of taking something from that person and delivering (if you will) that something to another person. They're pretty good at taking the money and the something. Persons hoping to move a something somewhere are attracted by the low charges DHL asks in recompense for this activity.. Where they have a bit of a falling-down problem, sadly, is in the getting of the something to the place or the person to whom it was sent. The delivery aspect, as it were. The completion of the job, one might say. Quick story. I arrived home last night to discover a DHL sticker stuck to my door. My eyes rolled. Someone had sent something to my home, where this kind of problem arises constantly, rather than to my work, where it never does. I took the sticker indoors, called the number, and sought to arrange a different delivery address. I was told, with great patience by DHL's customer service team, that I would have to send a fax back to DHL in order to make that happen. Was there any way I could do it without sending a fax? Regrettably, there was not. I could, of course, easily sign the sticker on the back to tell the courier to leave it sitting on my front porch. Easiest for everybody, really. The DHL courier leaves the package. Somebody else comes along and takes it for whatever reason. I come home to no package but the confident assurance that the package was, indeed, dropped on my front porch. Everybody wins. Though I tell a lie. There was a way to have the package redirected without sending a fax. All I had to do was write a note and attach it to the sticker (the sticker not having room enough for the instructions). The note would instruct the courier on how he or she might walk around the block and deliver the something to my building's leasing office. To be sure, leaving the note was no guarantee. Once I signed the leave-it-on-my-porch line on the sticker, the DHL courier was entirely within his or her rights to ditch the thing on my porch and bail. Any additional hints or suggestions about how he or she might attempt to deliver the packager were of course up to his or her discretion. It's a little thing called trust. CARTOON! Gotta a cartoon for the world, an insightful one filled with... uh... what was the cartoon? 
Fri, Sep 2 -- Fall Falls Hey, everybody, welcome to September! We all know what September means, right? It means the end of summer and the beginning of Fall! Jillikers!!!! Except not quite. A lotta places, particularly northish places, have found their summer pushed over into their fall months and have partied accordingly. Into this arrives 
Fri, Aug 26 - Cowliens and Aliboys Hey, all, yet another week has trundled through the gearworks of our universe (or at least this local bit), and you all know what that means, right? RIGHT? It means another Bob the Angry Flower cartoon, delivered fresh on the internet like a child newborn. Here it is!  Cowboys and Aliens Finally got around to seeing this. Full disclosure: I've got a grudge against this movie. Back in 2000 I and PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka got together to write a spiffy sci-fi western called Planet Texas. While it was adjudged indeed spiffy, the market for same was cooling with dramatic speed in the wake of the release of Wild Wild West. Jason went off to create Bejeweled and PopCap, I went back to drawing Bob comics, and that was mostly the end of our Hollywood adventures. Every so often, though, we'd hear about a project in development, Cowboys and Aliens, "based" on a graphic novel of dubious quality ("based" in the sense that they kept the name). Resentment, therefore, has always simmered in my breast about this film as it developed. Now, after a decade and change, the film is made and out. What of it? I only have a few comments. 1) The aliens are stupid and boring. Without getting into spoilers, they look like default Hollywood aliens. They had greasy skin, a basic humanoid shape with disproportions, acted like dumb monsters, and even pulled out the old chestnut of climbing along walls and ceilings just like the aliens in Aliens. 2) Daniel Craig's protagonist character wasn't stupid, but he also wasn't interesting. I never felt connected to him, and I never gave a shit about what he'd gone through or was going through. I got his basic story in the first grainy flashback, so I really didn't need three more grainy flashbacks to fill in the details. It's not Craig's fault he was asked to play an amnesiac character. But unless you're careful, amnesiac characters are not interesting. They weren't careful. 3) Honestly, I think the movie would have benefited if Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford had switched roles. Ford has the ability to catch you and carry you along. Craig is good at reserve and menace. Given that Craig's character was supposed to be the guy you gave a shit about while Ford's character was supposed to be hard and cruel but with slowly revealed chinks in his emotional armor, the casting switch could have brought something interesting to the film that wasn't there when I saw it. 4) Overall, the movie felt like a bachelor's casserole. Characters have arcs, but the arcs don't interact in any meaningful way. Imagine a bag of Shake n' Bake. Now picture stuff you might find in a bachelor's larder. Pieces of porkchop. An egg. Fish heads. Some macaroni. Maybe some jellybeans. Dampen them and toss them into the Shake n' Bake bag one at a time, extract them breaded, dump them in a casserole dish and bake for 10 years. That's the movie. Scenes trundled into each other with all the dramatic intensity of a script that kept looking to hit 130 minutes and continued to come up 70 minutes short. It's a cool concept --War of the Worlds meets the Old West!-- but when it came to coming up with a story, the ball got punted down the field, out of the stadium, around the block, down the highway, onto a ferry to the next city, back and forth a few times in the next city's park and finally into a bank's marketing department whereupon it was offered drinks, refused them and signed a piece of paper. Before I saw it, my thumbnail review was that it would turn out to be "Well-produced garbage." And I think I pretty much stand by that. I liked Sam Rockwell, I liked Harrison Ford though he was in the wrong role, and I liked seeing Adam Beach get some work. That, really, was about it. A shame, because if it had been a giant hit, the market for sci-fi westerns might have heated up enough that a good one might have been able to lurch from the grave and find new life. Instead, we have another decade of fallow before anybody dares try this mixture again. Fri, Aug 19 - Dammit! Here it is, Monday morning, and I totally forgot to do the update. Worse, I don't even have the excuse of drunken amnesia to deploy; I actually got home last night at a reasonable hour with not a drop of the sauce. If anything, my distraction was far more insidious and embarassing; I ended up playing The Sims Social. Well, I gotta get to work, so enough blurbling. Here's a cartoon about justice! 
Fri, Aug 12 - The Apes, How They Rise Saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes this week. Generally, I liked it. I keep thinking that there have been a slew of action/sci-fi movies which default in their third act to a swarm of [x] breaking out and threatening to destroy humanity, but now I consider the case the only one really popping to mind (awfully) is I, Robot. Regardless, Rise of the Planet of the Apes does, as the trailers suggest, feature a swarm of [x], in this case apes, breaking out and threatening to destroy humanity. But the appealing thing about RiseOTPOTA is that when it happens, you seriously root for the apes. Yeah, humanity, one thinks, get some! About time, you damn dirty people! This, plus the presence of Brian Cox in his standard role as old reliable movie bastard who nonetheless gives his performance some lovely shades of color, puts this one a decent shoulder above this year's slough of summer dreck. Almost memorable, it is. Tooning The strip this week is, I'll admit, a bit of a mess, a collision of a number of half-baked angers and frustrations coming together in a lumpy stewpot I've chosen to entitle 
Enjoy, my lovelies, enjoy! Flappin' And for those who checked out the game I've been working on at PopCap, and for those who have not so checked out (shame on you!), I encourage folks to examine and place themselves on the alar of Pig Up, now featuring new features such as bug fixes, new sound effects, new Style Moves and the exhilarating opportunity to RIDE THE COW (to ride the cow, begin the game and immediately drop towards the ground for fun and moos. Offer void after 20 seconds). And if you do happen to click the link our of idle curiosity, I beg thee to play at least two games and come back the following day and play at least one additional game. Retention numbers are currently everything! Have a good weekend, y'all! Fri, Aug 5 - HOW DANDY! Dandy is as dandy does, I've never said. But now I've said it once, dammit, I'm gonna start saying it all the time! Who doesn't want things to be dandy, and, by extension, do dandy? Nobody, that's who! In the next few weeks I'll make everyone around me wish they weren't with my insistence of the importance of general dandiness. Mark it. Speaking of dandy things and ideas, here's a comic-stripple confection 
Fri, July 29 - Con Report Well, Comic-Con came and went, as it does. Comics were sold, pitches were pitched, cute girls in odd costumes were observed and prodigious quantities of overpriced gin were resentfully consumed. YEAHHHHH--- it's COMIC-CON, BABY! This year sales were, well, rather terrible, though they picked up a bit on Sunday, God bless. Thanks to all who came by and helped a brother out by dropping a few coins in the tin cup! Gracias, folks! Thanks also to the creators of the Square app for iPhone; had that thing not existed, the selling picture would have been seriously gloomy. As it was it was merely irking. On the positive side, I think it was a better con this year than last. Last year had an oppressive vibe, tens of thousands of people overcrowded and frustrated, anger and irritation misting over the crowd like the stink of a comic convention with wholly inadequate air conditioning. I don't know what was different this year, maybe the lack of huge movie events, perhaps invisible behind-the-scenes changes enacted by the Con organizers, but people actually seemed to be having a good time. I saw smiles. Kids were running around oohing and ahhing with wonder and delight. Perhaps folks weren't as disposed to drop mid-sized amounts of cash on a humble flower cartoonist and his amazing, groundbreaking strip collections, but they were enjoying themselves. I'd also like to direct a shout to my table neighbors Keith Knight (The K Chronicles, The Knight Life, think) as well as Lonnie Millsap (My Washcloth Stinks) and Ken Tanaka (Everybody Dies). Ken's book was a particular hit, charming the bucks out of all who beheld it, and his energetic carny hucksterism was an inspiration and constant goad. Good con, lads! Let's do it again sometime! Cartoon Ah yes. I've got a Bob the Angry Flower cartoon for you folks. It is  Captain of the Americas The damn thing premiered at Comic-Con, but I was too busy trying to sell books to see it. I only got around to the bloody thing last night, if you can believe it. Jolly good fun, I'd say. It's not enormously ambitious, but its modest grasp and reach are well suited to each other. Of the modern superhero films it's most comic-book like: unpretentious, simple and uncomplicated. The production design is clean, functional and occasionally impressive, Chris Evans turns in a performance not once reminiscent of his turn as the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four movies, and the action scenes are reasonably well staged and bunched towards the end of the movie. All that and a twinge of melancholy. Not a gritty re-imagining, not a self-conscious parody, it's a silly action movie and it seems to be at peace with that. Kudos. July, 20 - Con Cornding Howdy, y'all! I'm dropping this update a tad early in the spirit of concording. That is, concordance, which is to say things happening at the same time (I think that's what concordance means, but I admit I'm stumbling on the keyboard right this second). The first big thing occurring this week is, well, San Diego Comic-Con. It will be happening and I intend to be right there along with it from Wednesday (July 20, today!) all the way to Sunday (July 25, five days from now). I'm too drunk to figure out how to print out a nice little con map for where I'll be other than to say that I'll generally be in the Small Press Area, K16, Aisle 1400. Same place as I've been for some four or seven years. Keep an eye out for the BTAF banner and the dude with the flower hat; you'll discover the BTAF locale and me (unless I'm snoking, which all shoud expect to be often). Bob the Angry Flower books, long difficult to get, will be on free sale in this location during the above-mentioned span of time! Get them while they are hot! Significant and evergreen gags will be available, stuff that is just now as straight up as it ever was. Talkin' 'bout the real thing, folks, comics-style, from the past to the ongoing right-now future! Oh Some Interested Gods At the same time as paper books will be pushed onto haplessly lucky patrons (credit card orders now taken!), the other thing I've been spending time on will be exploding in my absence. I talk of course about Pig Up the exciting new PopCap Facebook game just now out and open to all who care to fly! Thus For those who read this remotely, read and enjoy. Ideally, click and play the PigUpness. For those who read remotely with intention to be at the Comical Con, read, enjoy, remember and drop by. The ultimate is this: Bob the Angry Flower books will be available at Small Press Area, K16, Ailse 1400 all con long, and the co-creator of Pig Up! will be in exactly the same place for exactly the same length of time. Credit card sales will be!!! And what's the cartoon? Simply this, you people without emotions:  FEEL SOMETHING, DAMMIT! Fri, Jul 15-- Whuff I've probably used "Whuff" as an update title in the past. I've been in many Whuff moments before and I expect to be in many in the future. "Whuff" is a general term, one meant to express an inexpressible emotional reaction of both excitement and horror, hope and fear... the kind of sound you make when no other sound sounds right. Maybe you've been there. Why Whuff? Ahhhhh... soon, readers, soon. So close. I am held to silence for reasons that make sense to many, sometimes even me. It's all part of that inexpressibility I discussed earlier. But hang in, dear readers, hang in, and all will be expressed, said, explained and URLs provided. Anyway! What does the above burbling have to do with this week's update and the cartoon posted within? Happily the answer is nothing. And so with little further ado, I present  Fri, Jul 8 - The Bar Eats You This is one of them times when you look around and discover you jest got eaten by the bar. And when I say "you," I really mean "me," in that the bar has eaten me fully and left behind neither bones nor bloodspatters nor even a shoe. No, this time the only thing the bar left behind was  Fri, July 1 - Canadian Day!!! I am saddened that I, a Canadian, will not be surrounded by Canadian soil and Canadian humanfolk on Canadian Day. Nonetheless, I solidly expect Canadians so blessed will be able to enjoy their righteous holiday in my absence. But weep not for me, friends, weep not. Busy pleasures present themselves to this Canadian soul. I have bags full of happiness and solid satisfaction to sustain me in this arid weekend of un-Canadianness. As it happens sometimes Canadians must go abroad, must bring the Canada to all those Canada-benighted lands that are not Canada. We do it with pride and courage and topped-up levels of Canadian belligerence to spread the C-word. Or I do, at least. What am I getting at? Surprisingly little. I'm just typing for a bit to make this update look like something with some thought rather than a single image linked to a cartoon. But y'all have found me out, so I'll rebut with  This week: greyscales! Fri, Jun 24 - Far far far too late If I had any kind of sensible Web 2.0 schedule, I'd have posted this five days ago. But as regular readers of this site --those of whom who still exist-- know, angryflower.com has never been about 2.0s or sensibilities. All down the line it's been about abominably outdated web page design and regularly updated cartoons, even if the cartoons in question are 4 days past their due date. Very much like the following:  Fri, Jun 17 - Almost There This time of year is always bittersweet for me. It's great to be on the runup to the longest day of the year, but I can never dispell the onrush of autumn lurking in my mind, waiting to spring the moment we pass the solstice. As I've heard it said, autumn is coming. Who wants a cartoon? Anybody? You? Really? Honestly? Seriously? Okay, thanks, you can put your hand down. Here it is.  Fan Labour I spell labor "labour" above in solidarity with my Canadian brothers and sisters battered by a senseless hockey loss. Fellow Canadian citizens, this u's for you. To the purpose, I wanted to let y'all know that a self-described huge fan went ahead and animated a Bob strip and then posted it to YouTube. It's called Bob the Angry Flower Tribute! and if you're curious I strongly counsel a swing by the link to check it out. Who can guess the title of the strip? Fri, Jun 10 - Well Then I hope everyone enjoyed X-Men: First Class as much as I did, which was quite a bit. I admit I responded to simple pleasures, hearing Kevin Bacon drop crisp German and then Magneto forcing French and Spanish (with subtitles!) on his enemies. As a Facebook friend mentioned, it elevated the whole proceedings. It was bad to see the black dude ejected from the story 9 minutes after he appeared and the Hispanic girl launched from the good guys swiftly after as though from an unspoken edict from above declaring the X-Men had to be whitest. That aspect was not cool. Most other aspects, however, succeeded, from McAvoy's insouciant forehead-tapping privilege through Fassbender's multilingual learning curve to Mystique's frantically aimless and searching sexuality. X-Men First Class maintains focus among a good solid handful of characters just as Thor's focus falls apart four minutes in. Solid effort, though, Branagh, and I'm eager to see you give it anothe shot with a story not built around the main guy's naptime! Anyway... With little additonal ado, here's this week's Bob cartoon  Fri, Jun 3 - Xmenxmenxmen! I'm actually really pumped about this new X-Men movie. Sure, the last couple have been abominable, but a new cast and no Wolverine bode well. Boding even better is Matthew Vaughn, whom regular readers of this site would know I adore ever since he dropped Kick-Ass on us last year. Throw in a period setting and some hot chicks and I think we have a winner. Early reviews seem to support this hope, so we'll see. Anyway, you came here for a cartoon, not a pre-movie gush, and so I now present 
Fri, May Two Seven in a Base Ten Thingy Golly, another Thursday night rolls around finding me again too plastered to even attempt to do a proper update. If only gin didn't taste so awful!!! Anyway, a cartoonistic amusement of sorts 
May 20, 2011 - Okay, Yes I'll get around to talking about Thor eventually, but tonight it's late and I just wanna feed you folks  May 13, 2011 - Thor? Alas, not enough people made their way to Thor before I can feel comfortable declaiming loudly and spoilery on my site about my impressions. Got on it, folks! In my stead this time we refer all inquires to the  Additional I'm afraid I'm far too liquored to responsibly post in a public forum, but I will note that game-sound recording sessions can be very amusing! Also Michael Bolton rockets into my heart from the abyss of nonexistence with his efforts in this catchy piece. Fri, May 6 - THOR!!!! Okay, I admit I haven't seen Thor yet, and I'm not even sure if I'll see it today, given work-related efforts that are likely to take fun precedence. Still, for all those who perhaps agreed with the sentiments backhandly presented in Mjolnir, I think we can all agree this thing is going to be awesome and will have something that looks like a giant robot but is actually a giant suit of armor infused with some kinda wacky Asgardian god energy or something. Give me it now. Anyway, in the current spirit of doing cartoons or posting remarks about things long past cool, I direct your attention to  I did this comic only because a couple of weeks ago I happened across a pair of Starcraft strategy guides. Being able to survey in brief the majestic sweep of Starcraftness in only a few dozens of handfuls of pages rather than having to earn knowledge by spending countless hours playing the damn thing, I firmly dig it. Described as "the best computer game of all time," Starcraft presents a vision of such finely tuned game balancing that it essentially serves as prima facie evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. I don't give a crap about sports, but watching Starcraft bouts with commentary is fast becoming an obsession, so in that spirit I give links to a few enjoyable matches. And by "enjoyable", I mean interesting if you have the slightest clue what the hell is going on; otherwise it's a bunch of YouTube videos depicting blurry computer graphics moving around. But if you get it, seriously folks... gripping. The Will of the People We went ahead and had our election in Canada last Monday, and as a man once wrote, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Drinking heavily at the Chateau Lacombe in Edmonton on Election Night and seeing monstrously historic gains for the NDP, it should have been a heady vortex of hoarse happy screaming and uninvited hugs. Instead, Canada also saw the arrival of a Conservative majority government, thereby muting most celebratory impulses. Sure, we've had Conservative majorities before, but we haven't had any like this, ghouls shrieking to recover the glory days of the American Bush administration at a time when Republicans won't admit the years between 2000 and 2008 even happened. As my good friend and colleague Fish Griwkowsky points out in this week's column for See Magazine, Canada now enters a shadowed new realm of polarization. Gone for four years are the reliable good sense and general consensus of the typical Canadian landscape; we now face stark and irrevocable diverging paths into the future. Nonetheless, I spoke of hope on Election Night and I've done it as well on Facebook, saying "if there's anything the NDP is good at and has plenty of experience in, it's being the opposition. Better us than the Liberals with a Harper majority. We'll win the war of ideas in a country where we take such wars seriously." I just hope I'm right. Fri, April 29 - Election! For non-Canadian readers, I've got a bombshell for you: the Canadian federal election is next Monday. Crazy, right? You'd think there would've been some mention of it somewhere, a remark in passing, some tiny hint that politcal gamboling was afoot in the CanaSphere. I certainly would've thought so, but no. Had I not friends in Canada on Facebook, I would have sailed through the next week and beyond never knowing the minority government had fallen and been replaced by another minority Conservative government. What's Canada gotta do to get noticed down here? Legalize gay marriage? Done it. How about pot? Pretty much done that too. What's left? It's gonna have to be Gamera. Gamera or Son of Kong. Anyway, none of that has anything whatever to so with this week's strip, but fear not. This week's strip has something to do with... last week's strip! Or the week before, if you want to get all "correct" about it. Enjoy! 
Thor is going to be awesome. Yes it is. Silence, doubters! Earlier Updates Interested in earlier updates? Here they are!
April 22, 2011 - The Gunt Chronicles! Go nuts! It's content! And a big mess o' cartoons...
Bob the Angry Flower runs weekly in VUE Weekly and Terminal City and some other papers I'm too lazy right now to detail, though the Buffalo Beast is one. This Web page is created and maintained by Stephen Notley - To complain, simply e-mail stephennotley@comcast.net. © Stephen Notley 2008 |
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