[Click each pic to embiggen.]

Twilight Teen Wolf

Oh, and our hero plays lacrosse now, since someone at MTV thought basketball wasn’t XTREME enough.  And yet for as much as the show looks like it wants to emulate the CW’s Vampire Diaries and create an epic teen drama about supernatural beings fitting in and learning to love others…and themselves…at least Vampire Diaries has the misfortune of having a hilariously awesome abbreviation:

“Say, Candi, are you doing anything fun tonight?”

“Not much, Staci–just staying in and catching up on my VD.”

I mean, c’mon.  ”I’m just staying in and catching up on my TW” simply doesn’t have the same laugh potential.  For shame, MTV.  Anyway, inspired by MTV’s atrocious remake of TW, I was thinking about some other classic tales that could be bastardized into angsty teen dramas:

Montgomery has a terrible secret.  His eccentric uncle has demanded that he must spend $30 million in 30 days, or else something terrible will happen.  It’s a race against the clock as Montgomery must learn to live…and love…with his terrible secret, as he tries to spend the money without telling his vampire girlfriend about his terrible secret.  Coming this fall to the CW…Brewster’s Millions.

Or what about…

Three werewolves find themselves forced to deal with a terrible secret that was caused by one of them…only they don’t know which one.  Can they learn to live…and love…before the terrible secret tears them apart like their werewolf fangs (because they’re werewolves)?  Coming this fall to MTV…3 (Werewolf) Men and a Baby.

And if THIS doesn’t get you amped for fall sweeps, then I don’t know what will…

Ocean Beach High School has a terrible secret that the teachers have kept quiet for years.  But when Peter Venkman discovers the terrible secret, the dead will walk the earth.  Peter and his friends Ray and Egon must learn to live…and love…before Peter’s girlfriend Dana succumbs to the school’s terrible secret.  Coming this fall to ABC…Ghostbusters.

Seriously, these shows practically write themselves!  What do YOU think, dear reader?  Pitch your teen drama in the comments below….

7:16AM: Half asleep, I shuffle zombie-like into the dining room.  I stop.  The curtains look…off.  There’s a small, dark shape above one end of the curtains.  I didn’t know what the shape was, but knew enough about the fiancée’s OCD tendencies to know she’d never intentionally make such an asymmetricality.

I approach the curtains.

The dark shape sits motionless.  Motionless, that is, save for its rodent-like snout and black, beady, soulless eyes–the former twitching with that rodent twitch; the latter a Nietzschean black abyss staring back at me, unblinking.

Artist's rendering

I stop.

It’s some kind of rodent, that I can tell.  It’s too big to be a mouse, but too small to be a rat.  It has a grayish coat and doesn’t appear to be a bat.

“Honey…can you come here for a second?”  She meets me in the living room, twenty feet from the curtains.  Twenty feet from it.  I point.  ”We got a situation in here.”

“What is it?” she asks.  I admit my ignorance, but feel much braver with her around.  I explain why it’s not a mouse, rat, or bat, when suddenly: it moves.  The creature, formerly sitting perched atop the curtain rods, descends quickly in back of the half-drawn blinds.

“Oh, it’s a chinchilla!” the fiancée declares upon seeing the creature’s puffy tail in a flash of movement.  ”It’s somebody’s pet that got loose.”  I dread having to capture the chinchilla and track down its owner.  Fortunately, the creature continues scampering around and it becomes evident it is not, in fact, a chinchilla.  Is it, in fact, a squirrel.

The dining room has a set of three consecutive windows that were each left slightly open overnight.  Aside from allowing cold air in, the ajar windows apparently granted the squirrel’s ingress.  Overnight, the squirrel somehow made it in through the third-story windows (the nearest outside tree being approximately 50 feet away) and spent the night running backwards and forwards along the curtain rod, until the curtain had been sufficiently mussed, hanging limply in one big clump of fabric.  The squirrel, however, didn’t venture down during the night; the bowl of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups set out for Halloween trick-or-treaters was untouched.  Either the squirrel wasn’t hungry, or it had no taste.  In any event, flashing forward to approximately 7:19AM, the squirrel was now frantically trying to escape.  It ran under each of the open windows in turn, climbing up and down screens and trying to find the crack or hole or portal or extra-dimensional wormhole from whence it came.

No dice, squirrel.

The Creature stops…

Eventually, it stopped at the far window, nearest the balcony door.

“Honey, quick–open the door!  I’ll try to herd it outside!”  I shouted.  In my mind, a sitcom scenario played: like a Benny Hill sketch, the fiancée and I would run around in circles, chasing the squirrel around the apartment at 2x speed, while Yakety Sax plays in the background.

Dramatization

I position the fiancée to block the squirrel’s path to Yakety Sax in the living room while I, broom in hand, bravely try to poke at the squirrel and force it outside.  The squirrel resists, and the fiancée notices something: are those…wings?

Are those…wings?

It’s a god damned flying squirrel.  True story: we do some googling of flying squirrels after the whole ordeal is over with (spoiler: we survive) and discover that flying squirrels are endangered.  Sonofabitch.  And flying squirrels are also prey species for the Spotted Owl, another goddamned endangered species, and the one most likely to next invade our apartment.

Spotted Owl: soon to be appearing in a dining room near you

Soon, I imagine, we’ll wake up some morning only to find a herd of gazelles grazing on the basil plants on the window sills.

ANYWAY, back to the present, I’m finally able to convince the squirrel that his best and only option is outside, and the squirrel runs, jumps, and frickin’ sails through the air across the balcony.  Said balcony being a shared one with the neighbor, whose door is closed, I’m suddenly struck with dread as I realize the squirrel will come running right.back.to.my.apartment. as soon as he’s confronted with a dead end.

“Shut the door!!1!” I scream.  I realize the squirrel isn’t the only mammal in the apartment that can fly, as I too sail across the room and dive at the door, seemingly in action-movie-cliché slow motion.

Victory.  Door closed.  Squirrel exiled.  Manliness reaffirmed.  Oh yeah.  Case.Closed.

…Until tomorrow when the Spotted Owls, gazelles, and whatever other fauna decides to hang out in my dining room.

The End

...Or Is It??

It’s been a while since I updated anything here; hope my absence hasn’t scared away too many people (hello? hello? echo…! echo…!).  Anywho, this is just a note to say that I AM still out there, and AM still planning to do Fade Resistant comics again.  I’m currently writing a story arc and will hopefully be able to spend some time drawing it in the near future.  The format will be different than before: instead of the gag-a-comic format, it’s going to be more long-form; each page won’t necessarily have a joke or punchline at the end.¹ Play stay tuned for the upcoming storyline, which I’ll tell you is going to be called Snowdrift.

In the meantime, check out the new store, if you’re so inclined.  There’s a permanent link at the top of the page, or you can click HERE.  Right now it’s got a few greeting cards I made up in my spare time–perfect for all occasions!  Soon it might have shirts, prints, buttons, etc., so keep checking back for new fun stuff.  Of course, if there’s something you’d particularly like to buy, drop me a line or leave a comment below.  Thanks, everyone!

1. Not that many of the comics before this had good jokes or punchlines at the end.  Hur hur hur.

So please bear with me as I try to re-prettify the site. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated!

p.s. Gotta love that cute little Mood Guy!

Second, there’s about 24 more months of backdated comics to upload (geez, I’ve been slacking…). So here’s the deal: I pledge to upload about a month’s worth of comics each day for the next 24 days or so. That’s roughly 12 comics per day. I’ll upload them in the evenings, but to keep away the clutter I won’t keep making new blog posts about it (i.e., it won’t show up in the RSS feed). And in exchange, just keep coming back here each night

Deal?

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to update your links if you’ve linked to any of the archived comics! I’m using a whole new engine to run this two-horse webcomic, so the archive puts out different permalinks. But if you check out the Archive, you can see all the comics there, broken down by date, category, and name. Have at it!