Hi Everyone, Happy belated New Year, and I hope everyone had wonderful holidays.

Geoff here, and I want to thank every one of you for your patience.  Yes, we are still here and still intend to continue the comic.  Hot Mess remains a passion project for all of us.  We’ve had a rough couple of months with personal obligations and holidays – not an excuse, just the reason why we’ve been so slow in getting back up to speed.  What we’re now doing is stock-piling a large handful of strips so that we can run them without interruption.

I’ll ask for just a little more patience in this process and hope you all check out the new strips when they’re up.

Thanks again to all of you,

Geoff

For our fans in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving!!  And instead of our usual holiday card-style post, we’ve got a regular strip… and it’s about food (kind of).  It’s more about the crazy amount of crap in our prepared foods.

I had wanted to find a way to comment on the menu stats restaurants are now required to post ever since they started doing it, when I noticed that my favorite dish at an eatery that shall remain nameless – a dish which I thought was at least relatively healthy – was chock full of insanely bad ingredients and way over-the-top when it came its nutritional deficiencies.  Needless to say, I never looked at salad the same way again.

Hi Hot Mess fans.  I don’t know how many of you are comic fans in general, but if you are, I’m sure you’ve heard of the controversy created by one of the writer/artists who helped shape the creative direction of an entire generation of mainstream and indie books, Frank Miller.  Basically, he rails against the Occupy Wall Street movement, and conflates their efforts with helping terrorists.  I would link to it, but it is fairly offensive, so I’m sure you will have no problem finding it on Google if you’d like to seek it out.

Now, politics aside, I don’t think his rant has much coherence as an argument.  He makes a lot of logic leaps in order to link protesters to terrorists, and takes certain big things for granted which I think are factually incorrect.  Perhaps if someone set down with him he could explain his thought process beat by beat and how everything he mentions is linked together, but we’ll probably never get that chance.

The response from the comic community has been mostly negative toward Frank’s views, and our friends over at The Webcomic Factory have made a comic that’s been getting a lot of attention… so I just had to share.

The Webcomic Factory’s response to Mr. Miller.

I feel so stupid now when I think back to the times I used to go out with a large group of people, and I was always so nervous, especially if it was with people I didn’t hang out with very often.  ”Is what I’m ordering cool?”  Really?  Did I really ask myself that?  Yes, I did.  So lame of me.  This was long before I really knew who I was, and wow am I glad I figured that out.

We’re at the three-quarter-century mark!  And how perfect is it that during Halloween week, we get to post this very special #75 strip?  Our first look into the mind of someone else in the series, and it’s very, very bleak.  Can you guess which animals in Anna’s head parallel with those we see from our Bethhy?

Happy Halloween everyone!  Make it awesome and make it safe!

A special thanks to the magnificent Emily Chan for this wonderful holiday card!  Be sure to check out her delightful StupidFox comic – as if you hadn’t already .

You all may remember these posts about my love of all things scary: The Horror of Colony 6 and The Watcher of Yaathagggu.

Well, now I’ve found the perfect Webcomic that combines all the aspects of my horror-love in an incredibly funny package.

PARA ABNORMAL by writer/artist Dave Lowe is in turns funny, biting, bitey (with the zombies and vamps and all), clever, scary, witty, and very very satisfying.  It definitely gives me my fix of absurdest Halloween humor.  When I first starting reading PARA ABNORMAL about a year ago (he’s been plugging away at the comic since 2008) I thought of it as a macabre Far Side.  It shares a lot of features with that classic strip - absurdest humor, recurring characters and themes, fantastic aesthetic style, and a consistent vision and tone.  But I also liked that Dave experiments with mixed media and never limits the potential of his comic.

He updates very frequently, and coolest of all, he updates daily during the month of October!

So, check out a couple of samples below, click through to his site if you like them, or if you want to jump the gun, just click here to visit Para Abnormal!

Headless Gothic

Damian Protest

Van Meyers

More Trick Than Treat!

Halloween is coming up… I think I’m going as Slumper.

Any cool, creative costume ideas out there?  Last year I went as Axl Rose, but my Slash got sick, so it didn’t work like I had hoped.

Writing Zoey is always fun.  She’s not a… erm… “sucker” (as Fribble would say), but she’s a person who knows herself so well, that she will never allow the negativity of others to ruin her mood.  I think I knew all of one person like this in high school.  She was the only person who at that age knew exactly who she was and who she was going to be throughout her life, and she never fell into the trap of putting down others to make herself feel better.  Out of all the characters, she’s the one that the phrase “Hot Mess” applies to the least.

What about you guys?  Do you think the majority of your friends are “Zoeys” or are they Hot Messes?

UPDATE:  As you may have noticed, we swapped out this week’s comic with a new version… one done in our old (and IMO way, way better lettering style).  What do you think?  Wanna see the difference between the two?  Click below to see the one originally posted.

This was the original lettering for #73

Which one do you like better?

UPDATE 2:  The new version of #72 is now up!  Just click here or the back pointing arrow below the comic!

As much as I love a logic problem, the dynamics of groups are never logical, and trying to figure them out has always been tough for me.  There are so many motivations that people have, and on top of that, so many ways that people go about acting on their motivations that the combinations are endless.  Add to that that even when you think you have a person within a group figured out, new information can always come to light which wholly changes your perspective.

Personally, I strive to have a “Zoey” attitude – look for the positive in everyone and try to keep in mind that there’s always hidden motivations and things going on behind the scenes that I’m not privy to, and therefor spend very little time accentuating the negative.  In actual practice, I’m probably a bit more like Anna, splitting the difference.  But every now and then, I know I’m a bit like Jack – snarky, cynical and negative.