Fellow Hoosier, Shane Johnson’s comic My Life In A Cube was mentioned in an article on PC Magazine. The article, titled 10 Best Unsung Webcomics, lists Shane’s comic among other online greats such as Sinfest, Kukuburi, Octopus Pie, Girls With Slingshots, and Ugly Hill.

Congrats to Shane on the good press. Take a minute to give My Life In A Cube another look if you haven’t before. That is, if you don’t already read it regularly. Like I do.

-Lee

It's been 5 years since the Barfly cartoon
began appearing in the pages of NUVO Newsweekly.
After drawing over 250 strips reviewing local music, Birdy’s Bar
and Grill, has put together the fourth annual showcase of live music
hand picked by me as a sampling of the best live music Indy has to
offer. The August 2nd multi-genre show begins at 9:30 pm and boasts
a diverse lineup that includes Indy’s best rock, Ska, Metal and Punk.
The Barfly strip was born four years ago after I drew a band flyer
for local blues-rock cover band Karen and The Beast. Instead of a
traditional band flyer I drew one in the form of a comic strip.
The strip was reprinted in NUVO Newsweekly and soon became a regular
feature in its music section. The line up for the August 2nd show
consists of five bands:

Prizzy Prizzy Please: Best Art Punk.
This band is so original and different and yet still grounded in a
punk attitude. I can think of no better way to describe them other
than “Art-punk”. They fuse elements of Soul, jazz and punk into a
rhythm heavy energetic sound that defies description. They’re arguably
the hottest buzz band in central Indiana right now. Come out and see
why you don’t want to be the last to jump on the Prizzy Prizzy Please
bandwagon.

Up!Scumbag: best local CD release.
Up!scumbag are easily the most prolific punk to come out of
Indianapolis. With 5 full lengths and a DVD released in a little over
5 years they are a songwriting machine. Their newest effort though
stands head and shoulders above all their previous releases. Every song
from beginning to end is a solid, catchy slice of punk energy.

AMO JOY:
The super hot buzz band will also make a special appearance before
embarking on a month long tour monday.  Amo Joy are a festive,
whimsical band  that should appeal to fans of  XTC, They Might Be
Giants or even Modest Mouse.  They’re known for handing out instruments
to the audience and getting them involved making every show a unique
listening experience.

Beta Male: Best Dance Rock.
When you take Vess Ruhtenburg (The Pieces, The Lemonheads, Action
Strasse) and P. David Hazel (Extra Blue Kind) and have them cook up a
stew of Alt-rock, electronica and glam you get the high energy, sexually
charged dance rock of Beta Male. The crowds for each Beta Male show
seem to grow exponentially as the word gets around that these guys are
the “next big thing”.

Hey Hey Melodica: Best Songwriting.
Most reviewers pigeonhole them as Folk because of their heavy use of
acoustic instruments. I think that doesn’t even begin to scratch the
surface of this Art-rock collective that uses a Melodica and
Glockenspiels while cooking up the most endearing and heartfelt songs
to come out of Indianapolis in a long time.

Hope you can make it!
-Wayne

In the mean time, Samantha has posted the comic she was working on at the meetup last weekend. You can read it on her site, here! It features a new face to IWG, Jennifer Pitcher attending her first meetup.

Some of you may want to take note that Ron Braun of the Toon-it-Up blog and Wayne Bertsch of the published Barfly and Gadfly strips, both make guest appearances in panel one. Though the artist may have taken a few liberties with the likenesses to facilitate the joke. Also, I believe that’s Jaroslaw in panel two.

Meetup pictures and Jam comic will post late tonight, but I’ll back date it like it actually posted this morning.
BECAUSE I CAN.

-Lee

Hey all, I wanted to bring to your attention another comic by a fellow Indiana native.
Shane Johnson has been posting single-panel, slice of life, office humor gags online for the last 5 months or so. You can find them over at www.mylifeinacube.com. I’ve enjoyed Shane’s cartoons before but just recently found out he’s operating in our fair state, so how could I possibly resist the opportunity to blog about it?

My Life In A Cube takes pride in bucking the traditional spit and polish of your average newspaper gag strip. According to Shane, the comics are created on the back of whatever piece of scrap paper or napkin he can find at the time. These are then scanned and sometimes colored in Photoshop. It’s Shane’s casual and fun sense of composition that really makes the comic work for me. All the random tears and folds in the paper are preserved, along with the occasional post-it note and piece of tape that serve to underline the office work place origins of the comics. Throw on top of that some occasionally stunning use of simple color and shading, and you’ve got a graphically strong gag strip that isn’t as concerned with dotting every i and crossing every t as it is with preserving the messy stressful and absurd life inside an office cubical.

Follow the thumbnails above for a few of my favorites. Shane delivers classic office humor that’ll have any one of you office jockeys giggling knowingly and hanging printouts on your cube wall and filing cabinets. MLIAC is currently updating twice a week or more. So take a few minutes and check it out. You need a break anyway.

- Lee

Hello again from sunny Indiana. I hope everyone had a fun and safe 4th of July.
We’ve got an IWG meetup coming up this Sunday, July 13th at the Pawn Shop Pub on the north side. the PSP comes highly recommended. Directions here. Hope to see a bunch of people there. I’m really excited about it because I’ll have artwork with me from my newest projects to share. And by all means, we encourage artists to come weather they have something of their own to share or not. Bring a comic you just read that really captured your attention. Bring an old favorite. Or just bring your love of writing or drawing comics.

Our friend Ed Cho just attended Wizard World Chicago recently, as did Scott and Benita Story. You can read Scott’s writeup here. And I asked Ed to write up a quick blog post about Chicago that I’ll soon share here. If you like hearing about this sort of thing, a good friend of mine Chris Flick (creator of the webcomic: Capes N’ Babes) Recently attended Heroes Con over on the east coast. I’m sure he’ll post about the con sometime soon, it was his very first con appearance as an exhibiting professional. I know Chris isn’t an Indiana-based creator but give his comic a look anyway. He’s serious about his comic and it shows.

That’s all for now. Remember, Indy Webcomics Group Meetup is this weekend, July 13th, at the Pawn Shop Pub in Indianapolis.
See you there!

-Lee