The Chalkboard Manifesto Blog

I used up a vacation day yesterday.

Sorry for not alerting you to that beforehand. I had a lot of things crop up all at once. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t even get to watch House. =(

Fear not, your regular comic goodness returns this Wednesday!

This leaves me with 3 vacation days left in the year. Since these don’t rollover, I’ll probably take one week off in December. I’ll alert you beforehand.

Make t-shirt. Sell t-shirts.

Not quite that simple, but neither is it absurdly complex, so I’m well on my way towards the first Chalkboard Manifesto t-shirts for sale.

Here’s where I am right now:
I have a physical t-shirt. It’s a black shirt with a design based on this comic: to that guy at the party. The design is basically the diagram on the chalkboard.

I’m looking to sell it at maybe $17.99 before taxes and shipping. My goal is to sell at least 20 of them, and I’ve already got two orders. How it’s going to work is that I’ll take pre-orders and if I get enough orders, you’ll get your shirt, but if I don’t get enough orders, I’ll refund the money.

What I still need to do:
I’m not in any shape to take pre-orders yet, unless I know you and you want to make sure you get one. I have to figure out how much shipping will cost — for one shirt and for multiple shirt orders. I have to setup a merchant account so I can take orders over the internet. I have to take pictures of the shirt so you know what it looks like. I also have to figure out sales tax.

Not super complicated, but this will take time when you factor in my other responsibilities.

I’m unsure of the timeline right now. I am currently aiming to take orders before Christmas. I don’t know if I can ship everything and guarantee arrival before Christmas. Stay tuned.

So I already shared this on facebook, and anyone who reads this blog is probably my friend or fan on facebook, but I dare you to tell me that Gangsta’s Paradise does not deserve another link.

I found this video, which my friend Trevor shared on facebook, fascinating. Naomi Wolf talks about how mass protest in America has been neutered.

I’m reviving this blog, and I’m going back to my original plan of Monday = comic news, Wednesday = politics, and Friday = fun stuff. Except I think Wednesday will be philosophy/politics. Also, today is Tuesday. This plan is off to a great start, isn’t it? Well, here’s some comic news.

I recently switched ads from Google Adsense to Project Wonderful. Hopefully, this will mean less shitty ads. Adsense wasn’t working out too well because it couldn’t read comics. It wasn’t very good at serving relevant ads. In fact, even if it could read comics, I’m not sure it would work too well. I just made a special k pun, would you like to buy some cereal?

So far, this experiment with Project Wonderful has been a success. I’m slowly accumulating pennies. Perhaps these pennies can be turned into advertising on other sites. Theoretically, this will give me more pageviews. This will, in turn, earn me more pennies. So on, and so forth. At this point, I will have a perpetual motion machine.

I’ve also moved forward on t-shirts. I made a design, and now I have to see how it looks like on an actual shirt. If all goes well, then I will start taking pre-orders. I don’t know what the timeline on this will be. I’ve started pretty late, so I don’t know if I can get the shirts all shipped and at their destinations before Christmas. I’ll keep you updated — on Mondays and on facebook.

See you tomorrow with some politics or philosophy.

I’ll be going on vacation for the rest of this week, and I won’t be back until next Monday. I’m going to Vegas!

The comic may or may not be updated on Friday or next Monday, depending on how busy I am. I expect to have enough time to update on at least one of those days.

I suppose Comic #500 is a good place to stop and acknowledge that I’ve reached a milestone. Thank you to each one of you fans because I never would’ve made it this far without you. No, seriously, I would’ve been like, “Fuck this,” and then moved onto something else. Knowing you’re out there keeps me going.

This comic literally started out as sketches on a chalkboard. My senior year of high school, I sat next to the wall in AP Calculus. On that wall was a chalkboard, and I would make a new comic to entertain the class, and hopefully entertain all the next classes. My comics didn’t often last the two days before I sat in that classroom again, but at least my calculus teacher never yelled at me for drawing on the board. So thanks Mr. Porper for not quelching my artistic urges.

The unique style of the stick figures you find in The Chalkboard Manifesto comes from the influence of my friend, Ryan F. If you want to see a sample of some earlier stick figures, you can look at this bizarre comic from the archive of my old humor website. Blech, gross, right? He showed me the whole mouth beyond the head thing; he showed me stick figures with legs and arms that weren’t sharp and angular. Eventually, the stick figures evolved into the style you see today. Ryan also convinced me to write in lowercase instead of uppercase. Here you can see an older version of a future Chalkboard Manifesto comic with uppercase lettering. I think the lowercase lettering fits better with the style. So a big thank you to Ryan for making the comic look the way it does today.

By the way, that comic is scanned from a piece of calculus homework or notes. No, it can’t be notes because I stopped taking notes at one point. Anyway, that’s why you have the graph paper background for the main site.

Before I bought the chalkboardmanifesto.com domain, I put the comic as a subdomain on my old humor website: sketch.psycho-ward.org. The comic had no title at that point. Some of you may know that one of the original titles was Amazing Chalkboard. In fact, I really loved that title and still kind of like it, but a lot of people convinced me that it wasn’t so great. I wrote down a bajillion (approximate number) names, until I picked 2-3 that I really liked. This included the unwieldy Chalkboard Existentialist — I was really into existentialism back then. After I picked the ones I liked, I polled all my friends and classmates until I settled on The Chalkboard Manifesto. It was really weird adjusting to the name, at first.

The comic didn’t originally feature a lot of girls. There are two people to thank for the girls in Chalkboard Manifesto. The first is Stephanie. I was drawing in my notebook, and she noticed a funny looking stick figure in there. “What’s that?” she asked. “It’s a girl,” I explained, “See the big bow.” She noted that it didn’t look enough like a girl. It needed hair. So she added hair, and that’s why the girl stick figures in TCM look the way they do. You may be wondering where the big bow comes from. I don’t really know. That came from my own mind. My suspicion is watching too much Rugrats as a kid, but Lil didn’t have a giant bow. The second person to thank is some e-mailer whose name I’ve forgotten. She (I’m assuming it was a girl) simply asked why I didn’t put more girls in the comic and recommended I do so. I followed her advice, and I believe my comic is better off because of it. I believe that some of my very best comics have female stick figures. The data backs me up. See the future of phones and to that guy at the party. Thanks Stephanie and that e-mailer.

For the first several years, The Chalkboard Manifesto wasn’t consistent. I’d stop updating for a month of so and then start updating again. It took me a long time to figure out how to manage my time correctly. I’m sure it was frustrating, so thanks to everyone who has stuck around, even during the bad times. Now I’m on the strict 3-days-a-week updating schedule (with the occasional vacation day), and I think the humor is consistently better too.

I have a black notebook that was the original repository of all my sketches and ideas. It only has a few pages left in it. Even though I stopped jotting down my original ideas in it, I still use it to refine my ideas and sketches. I’ll be retiring it soon. These days, my original ideas are jotted down on Post-Its. I always keep a pack of post-its in my wallet. Thanks 3M for your wonderful invention that allows me to capture those ideas before they disappear forever.

So that’s a partial history of this comic. It’s weird to think that in the beginning, everyone knew most of this story. Now, I’ve got some fans in far-flung places. I started this comic while I was a senior in high school, and now I’ve graduated from college. I’ve had several previous comics. Only one made it to triple-digits, and it didn’t make it very far past 100. Geeze, who knew I even had 500 ideas in me? (Alright, alright, a few of those comics are the 9/11 tribute repeats.) I believe I can still pump out another 500.

A few — okay, more than a few — more thanks are in order. Thanks to Josh for introducing me to the world of webcomics and being the first fan of my comics, way before The Chalkboard Manifesto even started. Your advice, criticism, and praise over the years has helped me become the cartoonist I am today. Thanks to Lloyd for supporting me through all me web endeavors and being a great promoter. You helped me get the bulk of those first 100 fans on facebook. Thanks to Tommy for the praise and for the reminders to get started on merchandise. I swear I’ll get to it by the end of the year. Thanks to my old roommates Ian and Justin for being the first fans on the facebook group. Thanks to Bob for being a superfan and commenting on this blog. Thanks to all you facebook fans who “like” my comics and leave comments. Thanks to anyone who has provided me encouragement over the years, whether offline or online. A big thanks to all my close friends (you know who you are) for being my inspiration. Almost all of my ideas come from interacting with you. Either I get the ideas from our conversations, or I test out the first draft of my ideas on you. Without my wonderful friends (from both coasts), I never would’ve made it to 500 comics.

And I already said this in the beginning, but thanks to everyone of you who reads this comic, whether I know you or not. All of you give me the energy to keep going. =)

From this news story, Australia considers mass killings of camels, comes this hilarious quote:

Tony Peacock, CEO of the University of Canberra’s Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Center, said a cull was the most effective method.

“To be shot from a helicopter is actually quite humane, even though that sounds brutal,” he said. “If I was a camel, I’d prefer to just get it in the head.”

I’ll be gone for the weekend. Because I’ll be rafting and camping, I won’t have any internet access so you won’t be able to reach me.

Fear not, Monday’s comic is already queued and will be posted no matter how late I get back on Sunday. Today’s slightly late comic was posted around 3AM Eastern time. I fixed the RSS feed around 9AM.

I leave you with words of wisdom from my Vietnam rice hat: “Your day is filled with happiness and love. life was beautiful then.”

Sorry, I was unexpectedly busy today. Tomorrow’s comic will be posted late.

UPDATE: Today’s slightly late comic was posted around 3AM Eastern time. I fixed the RSS feed around 9AM.