Man, Swine Flu Is For Posers

Stand back, boys and girls, don't get too close, and hurry up and put on the supplied face masks and sanitary gloves. It's your boy Johnny Despair, Esq. here, and he's sick, baby, sick. But not with that flash-in-the-pan swine-flu business. Hell no. That ain't no respectable kind of sickness. Nuh-uh. Your boy's got some old-school fukken' disease right here. Got some pneumonia all up in his lungs, wreckin' the place, all coughin' up gobs of boogers 'n blood and sounding like a big old pile of dyin' grandpas. Pneumonia is a real friggin' sickness. That shit killed presidents, man, at least one of 'em. I think. I may currently be hallucinating under fever. Whatever. Pneumonia is bad shit, no doubt. So, you know, not been a productive week, unless you count massive sweats and disorientation as being productive.

So, as a little gift to you (but mostly myself), I'ma link ya'll to some righteous entertainment while I'm out of commission. Now, for reasons that have nothing at all to do with a contest that he's runnin', now seems like a hell of a time to spread my deep love of Wondermark. Wondermark is a great comic. It is consistently really, really funny. David Malki! is a guy who knows how to write comics. He has put essays up on his site about this very subject, and they are also very friggin' funny. Malki! is really a guy who ought to be a much bigger force in webcomics, in my estimation: he's clever; he's handsome (raaawr); he's nice; he's productive (despite only updating the comic proper twice a week, he does regular sketches, and various essays and blogs posts means there is content basically every day); his aesthetic sense is poised to pounce upon the exposed jugular vein of the steampunk/anachro-fashion movement like a beautiful, misunderstood vampire eager to drink it dry and not even give a shit and not even be beautiful but a disfigured old monster with horrible claws and barely human anatomy because that is how my vampires role and jesus FUCK can I stop seeing Twilight ads in my fucking convalescence pretty pretty fucking please I know bitching about Twilight is now about as cool as bitching about Fox News but honestly I am sick and I do not need this shit all up in my eyes; he's all about these "beards" that the kids seem excited about these days; and he produces one of the most listenable podcasts I've ever heard, Tweet Me Harder along with Kris Straub, who is, last time I checked, a friggin' institution or something. True story about Tweet Me Harder: I once listened to it so harder, that I was unintentionally talking like a weird Kris Straub/David Malki! slash-fic lovebaby for days. It took three hours of listening to the Sex Pistols to cure it.

Oh, another item for the list: David Malki! designs some of the net's best shirts. Don't believe me? Consider the evidence. If I was a cartoon character and could only wear one shirt forever, it would be hard not to pick "Steam Powered Heart."

Okay, going back to forcibly losing fluids from various holes. Drink your orange juice and don't lick strange objects, kids, and you may just avoid the terrible fate of the sad, the pitiable, the ever-on-the-verge-of-covering-himself-in-sick,

Johnny Despair, Esq.