Read the first 15 previous parts on one giant endless page HERE.

Click for bigger:http://www.gabbysplayhouse.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

This week’s comic is actually a lot longer than this — however, Photoshop seems to insist that the rest of it should read like this:

Unless viewers prefer this style (Picturebox, here we come), we’ll do our best to decode this mess & reveal it in an easy-to-consume Earth Human Format next Monday.

In case you’re curious, we’re still in our birth-state of Hawai’i, extending our New-Economy-mandated “vacation” into February, and really, can you blame us. Presently we’ve set ourselves to the task of burrowing through 25 years of “storage,” and jettisoning a lot of sub-prime old books on eBay. Stay tuned to this very frequency for purchasing opportunities soon.

…but not another episode of “Sick.” Yet. It’s been rough going. But it’ll be done eventually. Everything will. America; life on Earth; the spinning of our vast galaxy; the collapse of the multiverse itself. All will be done in time.

(if you want a cat drawn you can)

Sorry, nothing new to report/post/sell/complain about here at the Playhouse… what do you expect, we’re still in Hawai’i, where overexertion is a crime.

If you’re interested in continuing to consume our product on a more regular basis, we recommend Our Photoblog, http://manhattanchowder.tumblr.com/, which blossoms anew daily with a fresh digital picture taken during our (now-ended) run as a cupcake deliverer in the isle of Manhattan. We just uploaded the last of those pictures, so it will continue to offer up wonders for the next 44 days.

Of course, Happy New Year and all that. Come back next week, where we might present you with a brand new batch of comics/excuses

1. We’ve been in Honolulu, HI for a few days.
2. It is the Holiday Season

1+2 = There is no new “sick” strip today! In fact we’re not entirely sure we’ve done any drawing at all this week. It’s been the expected haze of Tropical Appreciation, parent-funded restaurant dinners, vegetarian potlucks, and unfettered access to the family video-game console that leaves one in a torpor of a level only Joseph Conrad could appreciate. So, like a small crippled working-class child in Victorian England to our overworked father’s miserly boss, we must beg for the slightest shred of sympathy from your wooden hearts — knowing that, if you’re anywhere other than Hawai’i right now, that is just effing impossible. Haha it’s December and we’re wearing shorts and we’ve been doing this for most of our lives! Wh-what’s that sound? Could it be…. the rumble of clicks as a thousand Playhouse readers take this website off their RSS feed?

Well, anyway, we’ll get back to work soon enough. Perhaps if you’re good, Satan Santa will bring you something nice for the Holy Day.

Read the first 14 previous parts on one page HERE.

Click for bigger:

Well, we did it. Despite our homelessness and the lacerations of another injurious meditation on mortality passing (ie, birthday), we managed to update the “Sick” story with another episode.

And now, in just two days, we’ll be (the TSA & their x-rays/porn-patdowns willing) flying on a plane from New York City to Hawai’i, our excuse being it is the “holidays” and we’re past due for a visit to family. Yes, in just 48 scant hours we will travel bodily through the air across 5 fucking time zones, from the very rancid heart of Empire out to its furthest capillary borderlands. To remind ourselves that a couple people who share our DNA still walk the planet, somewhere.

After a couple weeks of that idle & regressive repast, it may surprise you to learn that we have absolutely no idea where, how or why we will continue living. Likely possibilities: 1) buy a van in the southern USA, pick up our boxes of shit in the northern USA, & drive it out to the western USA to do fuckall; 2) buy a van and drive up to Montreal to join our Quebecois friends in their alcohol-fortified snow-caves; 3) swim out into the Pacific Ocean and just keep swimming out, and out, and out, until the land shrinks beneath the horizon, and large dark forms begin silently circling us in the purple deep, and then, perhaps, the Atlantean grays breach the waves and draw us down into their fantastic, bioluminescent hood deep beneath the Mariana Trench.

It’s relatively likely that we’ll be marching onward toward the end of this webcomic story, but we really can’t say for sure how our hand will be employed over the next month or two. We promise not to do anything rash while figuring it out. (Herpes joke.)

One more thing: our bureaucrats demanded that we inform you that as of, well, now, we’ll not have a serious permanent address for the foreseeable future! So if you’d like to order sexism posters or copies of Monsters, or cat portraits (we just finished one tonight!), it might be a bit trickier than usual — get in touch at our email address (fantods [at] gmail etc) and we’re sure we can orchestrate this new dance between space and time with both our self-respects relatively intact.

And if you’ve got any solid leads on a good cheap cargo van (preferably an E-series Ford with a hightop & around 100k miles & a rebuilt transmission from somewhere in the southeast, but that’s just dreaming), get in touch!

(READ ALL OF “SICK” SO FAR RIGHT HERE ON ONE PAGE)

Another week, another non-Sick post. Sorry folks. Our life is All Fucked Up right now. In a messy but not necessarily bad way. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been addressing the mundane and frequently draining tasks surrounding the process of Becoming Homeless. Yes, we have Lost Our Lease and Everything Must Go. And it went. We are now left with a few scattered boxes across multiple states, and a backpack full of clothes that hedge our bets between a tropical relocation and prolonged exposure to the antipathy of a Northern Winter. Our original plan to buy and occupy a van fell through when bureaucracy intervened; our present plan to return home for the holidays is foundering on the rocks of overbooked flights. We are left, as ever, gazing into the whirling Maelstrom with naught to rudder our craft but a vague, decaying conviction that Everything Works Out In The End.

What frequently doesn’t “work out” here at the Playhouse is our drawing hand, and we apologize for the anemic output of late — between drawing commissioned work and padding the blow of our sojourn into shelterlessness in a land even geese can’t abide during the frost-rimed yuletide season, we’ve had more than enough on our plate. Or would, if we hadn’t already given away our plates.

We’re doing fine though. Though slowed to a molasses-like trickle, work still progresses on our present webcomic — and a publisher or two has expressed interest in printing it out when it’s done (and laboriously improved). For now though, you must be content, as biblical, insane John was in the wilderness, with yet another meal of locusts in the Winter of Playhouse discontent. We’ll be sure to post special alerts on various social media once there is actual Content for you to consume.

Also, thanks to everyone who came to say hi, buy my old book, and offer encouraging words via the Secret Acres table at the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Fest this weekend in Brooklyn. It was a very cartoonist-like time, and we suppose that is just where we belong. Well, for now — we’re not sure how many blown weekly deadlines are allowed to pass before our Cartoonist Card is voided.

And speaking of comic cons: by way of apology for how shitty we are at the rudiments of just even living, much less updating a weekly webcomic, here are some Vintage Sketches. We did them last year while we were extras at a fake comic con in the HBO show Bored to Death. For a while they were saying they were gonna post these (and sketches from other the cartoonist-extras present) on HBO’s Actual Website, but they “just had to clear it with Legal first” — and we know what happens then.

Click bigger:

The few of you who are still actually checking this site for “Sick” updates are probably not surprised there’s no new stuff this week; but at least we have something to show for our silence. See, we’ve been drawing cats:

(click for larger)

This one was ordered by someone who wanted a nice picture of their departed Maine Coon for a shrine. At first we were a little intimidated by all the fur, but eventually it became fun to watercolor. Anyway, this is something we do for money.

Speaking of paid work, we also spent the last couple weeks frantically inking out the 12-page, soon-to-be-published 2011 CCS Appeal pamphlet. It was a huge honor to be asked to draw it, the implication being that our drawerings were so purty-lookin that they’ll make people GIVE MONEY AWAY. And although we always hate everything we draw generally and always have plenty of regrets about our output in hindsight, we’re sure your eye will be more forgiving than ours.

Also, our sexism comic from last year (and its bizarre, self-replicating reception) got a mention in a recent Sady Doyle piece for In These Times!

Also we’ve been invited to speak at Dan Nadel’s SVA class The Art & Business of Comics on the day before Thanksgiving. Not bad for a middle-aged guy who can’t even keep a roof over his head or get health insurance or stop drawing kiddie cartoons, eh?

Anyhow, that’s what’s up, besides watching live feeds of the Occupy Wall Street stuff (and occasionally going down to visit what’s left of it “irl”). Now that we’re done with our homework we can get back to the “fun” (haw) stuff, and have already penciled a few panels for the next “Sick” installment. Expect it next Monday.

Perhaps we’ve already mentioned we’ll be Literally Homeless come 9 days from now, when the new tenant gives us the boot, thus ending quite a nice run of ridiculously cheap rent. We’re sad to see it go, but know it was too good to last. We’ve thought lots about renting another room in Brooklyn & staying in the city — but every time we do, the reasons not to just pile up and up and up to Fresh Kills Landfill proportions, and we’re forced to admit that this town has long since outlived its use as a cultural mecca for Starving Artists, and is now just plain too expensive, too pretentious, too played-out, too fad-addicted, too wealth-worshippy too vacuously materialistic, too petty, and too all-around jumped-the-shark for us to justify its actual downsides — like the daily lung-dusting of mercury.

Sadly, this town is also full of many very awesome friends (that we never see because they all live on the other side of Brooklyn and we can’t afford to go out), ample inspiration (mostly of the can-you-believe-these-fucking-richies ulcer-fodder variety), and a great job (which we are embarrassed to admit is the main reason we’re still in New York, even though we’re almost 40 and delivering cupcakes For A Living). There’s even a burgeoning Romance. But still… somehow, in the final tally, the magic 8-ball always reads Get Out. And anyway, does this city really need another embittered middle-aged artist who’s made a hobby out of complaining about New York while living in New York?

So in the interest of side-stepping the cliche tiger trap, we’ve been turning our gaze Craigslistward of late, hunting down that rare and elusive Good Deal on a used van — for use as 1) a mobile storage locker for our scant possessions; and 2) a (relatively) cheap way to Escape From New York(‘s unforgivably, insanely overpriced rents and billionaire trust-funded gold-eating asshole breeders), and lash the oxen Westward, toward bluer hypothetical skies. And, possibly, cholera.

So if any of you other minds in the Hive know of, say, a nice cargo van with about 100,000 miles on it, no transmission problems, costing around $1,000 to $3,000, not too many windows, a Metro North ride away from Brooklyn, we’d be very much interested in hearing about it. Especially if it’s diesel! That snow ain’t gonna hold off forever…

(OH! and PS: we just noticed that the compiled page of Sick episodes 1-10 we have posted up all over this site is missing at least one episode! We’ll fix this shortly)

i’m late for work but wanted to insist and apologize and disclaim.

This “sick” story is not over! the past couple weeks have just required the full attentions of my drawing hand elsewhere — i’ve finished a pamphlet for CCS (i’ll link it later) and a cat portrait has just been completed, so now i might be ready to get back to drawing for free/no reason/to satisfy my whiny self-pitying narcissism. however, that’ll take at least another week for my digits to get it up here on the digital. you can tell i’m rushed bcs we’re not even using the first-person plural — but anyway thanks for your patience.

also sorry to anyone who thought they’d never get their copy of Monsters when my site “went down” — reddit brought me so much traffic that my pay-per-byte webhost was charging me $20 an hour to keep the playhouse up. so i let it languish, now i’m looking for a new host, but who knows when that’ll happen because i’ll er we’ll be utterly homeless on the 1st of december and frankly have zero fucking clue where we’re going after that. art imitates website.

PS if anyone’s selling a decent van for around $1k-$2k please let us know!

ok, late for our “real job,” see you soon. PPS if you ordered a copy of Monsters it’s coming soon!

Hello (hello—hello—-lllooo) — we are speaking to you from the Past. We are writing these words on October 23rd at 12:30 in the morning, just 10 scant hours before our train to Vermont pulls out of that habitrail of shitty fast food and over-armed National Guard soldiers that is Penn Station. By the time you read these words (on Monday morning) we will be wandering about the wilds of the pastoral, deep in serious contemplation as to the nature of existence and wondering when it’s acceptable to start drinking $2 draft beers at the bar.

Don’t ask why we’re up in Vermont right now — it’s a Secret. What you CAN and DO already know is that there’s no installment of “Sick” this week. We promise that this lapse is only for the most noble of reasons, and that as soon as our Responsibilities (hint: paying work) are dispensed with, we’ll be setting our chapped nose back firmly to the grindstone. But until then,

To catch up:
PARTS 1-10.
PART 11.
PART 12.
PART 13.

Click to double-size this new one:

There might be a lapse in this story next week, as we devote our spare moments to drawing a cat commission and filling orders for drawn-in Monsters. Not to mention delivering cakes about Manhattan. But this story’s far from over yet, still, somehow.