Odd-Fish Webcomic

More News!

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 20:30:00 -0100

In the interest of raising money for The Plan (move to the country and start a family before I get too old, decrepit and cynical) I have decided to riffle through my folders of original Odd-Fish artwork and sell it off.
First up is a pencil sketch of Lovecraft I did early last year in preparation for a painting that I never got around to doing.
It's a classic Lovecraft pose, gazing lovingly at Mr Potato Head and is A3 size on acid free 130gsm cartridge paper.
So if you're keen to own a bit of genuine original Odd-Fish artwork head on over to Ebay. Bidding starts at £4.99 and I can ship worldwide.
If this first piece garners people's interest and sells well it will be followed at irregular intervalls by more pencil sketches and other bits and pieces of original art. Stay tuned!

Box

NobbyNobody — Wed, 1 Jul 2009 16:18:27 -0100

Box fish are one of my all-time favourite fishies. Just so cute and weird!

I was very pleased to find out a few days ago that the Odd-Fish Book One: Inexplicable Zebras is now available in the US through Amazon.com!
I don't know why, but to me it feels like a special thing, almost like my work has been legitimized even though it's an Amazon partner selling it not actually Amazon per se.
Of course, it's also available directly through Odd-Fish which works out a little cheaper for us Europeans.
Why not have a look around the Odd-Fish Shop?

JellyTim III

NobbyNobody — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0100

The denouement to the joke involving Timothy the jelly fish and his shopping-bag girlfriend. Was it worth the wait? I doubt it!

So much for my aim to update Odd-Fish every five days! It looks like one a week is going to be more live it, with a possibility of ten day gaps as well.
Dammit. I really want to have enough new material for Odd-Fish Book 2 by the end of the year but I'm now waaaaaaay behind.
Curse you, real life!

JellyTim II

NobbyNobody — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:00:00 -0100

Here's the second in this loosely linked three-parter
I've decided to review my update schedule for Odd-Fish. I don't think, for the time being at least, I'm up to going back to the old twice weekly update schedule. Frankly it was killing me.
Not the drawing part of although that did take up a substantial amount of my time with each strip taking approximately five hours to do. Ten hours a week is a lot to take out of anyone's time.
No it was simply the task of thinking up new jokes twice a week. I managed it for over a year, although the quality of the jokes has always been somewhat hit and miss, but it got to the point where I was doing nothing but turning over ideas in my head even when I should be working, driving or sleeping.
So I'm going to try a schedule of once every five days (or thereabouts) it's a little more than once a week but not quite twice. I think (as long as the ideas keep coming) that I should be able to sustain it well enough at that rate.
Of course, I can't guarantee that the jokes will be any better though!

JellyTim

NobbyNobody — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:54:37 -0100

Back to business as usual here at Odd-Fish where I'm aiming to update around every five days

Following a couple of comments from people about the layout of the site I've added mini navigation buttons above the top right of the strip so that even people on low-res screens can navigate without having to vertically scroll
I've also spent some time tweaking the about page to include more up to date information on the comic, the author (me) and the main characters together with a comprehensive list of all the characters that have appeared in the comic so far.

A big thanks to all of you for your support after I wrote (moaned, whined and whittered) about my dissatisfaction with urban living and my abortive attempt to move. Things are on hold in that camp at the moment but by no means abandoned.

Labouring a Point

NobbyNobody — Sat, 6 Jun 2009 04:37:37 -0100

The drawings for this, the last in the four philosophy pun-based Odd-Fish strips have been partly drawn and sitting on my desk now for over a month.
The flow of the Descartes jokes has rather gone off the boil and this one was somewhat spoilt by someone in the comments a while back but I thought I'd finish it and post it anyway, if only to get it out of my head.

My failure to update the comic, as mentioned on the last update, is blamed squarely on events in 'real life' that have conspired to keep me away from biros and Photoshop.
Where to start?
Not least has been how busy we are at work. As some of you may know, I work for the British national Heath Service (The NHS) as a health advisor taking calls from people with health problems, assessing their need and directing them to the appropriate level of care. (anything from an emergency ambulance down to 'take a couple of aspirin and see your doctor in a week if it doesn't improve.') Usually we're pretty busy but I sometimes get time between calls and in breaks to think of ideas for Odd-Fish and sometimes if we're unusually quiet (like during something 'good' on telly) even get a few minutes to jot down some sketches.
Not any more.
Since the arrival of Swine Flu our phones have been virtually melting under the onslaught of incoming calls from people with a huge range of symptoms, real and imagined, all convinced that they are Swine Flu's equivalent of Typhoid Mary. There's no longer any time to even take a mouthful of water or to glance out of the window (if our office had windows) between calls let alone think about pink octopuses or pick up a biro. The additional consequence of being so busy is that when I do get home at somewhere between eleven and night to two in the morning my head is spinning and I just want to veg out.
On top of all that Mrs Nobody and I started making plans to move house. We're are heartily sick of living in the centre of a busy town like Ipswich with other people living so close by that you can practically hear their thoughts. Or you would be able to hear their thoughts if the sound of their music didn't drown it out along with your own thoughts, your TV and the sound of the chavmum swearing at her children ten doors down. We've GOT to get out of here and move to a nice quite village location or better still somewhere in the countryside or even better an uninhabited planet on the other side of the universe. Quiet apart from our own sanity, we'd rather like to start thinking about producing some mini-Nobodys> At nearly forty-two I'm not getting any younger, I don't want to be an Old Dad and Mrs Nobody's body-clock is ticking so loudly you can hear it on the moon. (as long as the neighbours don't have their music on) We're absolutely not-never no-way no-how going to have any sprogs living here. I can't think of a worse place to bring up kids.
So anyway, we started preparing our house to receive potential buyers. We de-cluttered it ruthlessly, we sold a load of stuff we hadn't used in years and we redecorated every room in the house. I never EVER want to paint another artex ceiling again. I don't like artex ceilings at the best of times but they were here when I moved in and I've never gotten around to doing anything about them. The week leave I had off work when I should have been relaxing and drawing cephalopods we were working intensive dawn-to-dusk and beyond sanding, painting, scrubbing, gardening, repairing, sorting, grouting and scraping until the house is shiny, spotless and decorated in a fresh neutral palette (Thanks House Doctor!)
We booked a valuation, an interview with a mortgage advisor and started looking around local estate agents for something within our budget in a suitably remote location.
Lo! and behold! Almost immediately we found something that seemed ideal. With no time to waste and even though it was rather jumping the gun because our house wasn't yet on the market and we hadn't spoken to the bank we arranged to go and see this wonderful three bed house in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.
It was exactly the right sort of house in every way. Three bedrooms, upstairs bathroom, small but roomy garden, gas heating and even a little mini-study for me to use as a studio to work on Odd-Fish in. What made it especially perfect was that its location in a village I lived in as a teenager which I knew very well and had loved living there. Not only that it but the house was in the same street I had lived in. Couldn't be more perfect.
The house had been on the market for more than a year and a half with little interest despite it's excellent price. The agent said the lack of interest was down to its location in the middle of nowhere but that doesn't bother me. I'll happily take an hour's drive to work along winding country roads over living in the fetid hole that is Ipswich. So no interest in the house for eighteen months... until the day we went to view it of course when someone who'd viewed it six months earlier suddenly put in an offer and had it accepted. Arse.
Never mind, we reasoned, if it was so easy to find one house that so perfectly fits our needs there'll be others, right?
Next was the visit to the bank to speak to the mortgage advisor and this is where it all goes pair-shaped. Sure, in principle, once we sell our house, the proceeds will be plenty enough to pay off the existing mortgage and still leave enough equity to put down a healthy deposit on a new house. The resulting shortfall on price we've been looking at houses for is well within the scope of the amount we can borrow based on my NHS wage and still be (just about) affordable. No problem there. But. But. and it's a bigger BUT than an elephant addicted to Big Macs, there are two small outstanding debts on my credit history left over from a failed attempt seven years ago to set up my own business. The debts have defaulted and been left forgotten and disregarded festering on my credit file. Together they're for about £600 and the creditors who own them have neglected to tell me about it for a very long time. We'd thought that the legacy of those very bad times when we were living on nothing, paying off credit cards with credit cards and hiding behind the furniture when there's a knock on the door were long gone. We thought we'd settled all the debts and were just beginning to enjoy the daylight at the top of the long, hard, slow climb from the pit of debt. But no. These two small debts, the result of a bank closing our account while overdrawn were still sitting there at the bottom of the pit like some kind of financial Sarlacc waiting to drag us down into its maw once again.
"So pay them!" I hear you cry.
Ok. yes. That's sensible. If we tighten our belts we should be able to scrape enough together in a few months and pay off those last lingering ties to our incautious past. But that's not the problem. Oh no. The mortgage lender will not touch us until we have had a clean credit file for three years. THREE YEARS! That means even if we paid the debts tomorrow we are still stuck in this hole, listening to other people's home made speedcore and Vauxhall Corsa street racing for another THREE YEARS.
Sod that for a game of soldiers.
The way I see it we've got four options.

Stay here until I lose the plot, buy a gun and climb a clock tower
Win the lottery and buy my own island somewhere
Buy a gun, rob a bank and buy my own island somewhere
Sell this house, invest the equity and rent for three years

I'm leaning towards option four but I'm concerned that it still puts our plans to spawn on hold and what of our pets? Will we be able to find a nice rental house that allows pets?.
Of course there's always option five: Become a famous illustrator and get rich on the proceeds but if it hasn't happened yet, it seems unlikely that I'll get 'discovered' any time soon. I'm not holding my breath.
Can anyone think of an option six? Better yet, can anyone give/lend me a hundred grand?

So there you are. The reasons why Odd-Fish hasn't been updated in a month. Not excuses, just real life.
Sorry about the blog being a bit of a downer, it's all been a bit trying lately. On the plus side though, at least we've now got a tidy, clutter-free and freshly painted home! Ooh! Silver lining!

Not Descartes

NobbyNobody — Mon, 4 May 2009 10:29:03 -0100

Fortunately Lovecraft survived the HEADSPLOSION he suffered while trying to get his brain around the complexities of Descartes' philosophy and has decided to try again, but starting gently.
Before we know it he'll be pondering the meaning of life itself and the reason for the existence of zebras in the multiverse.
For those of you who may have seen this joke somewhere before, I like old gags. So sue me.

More Descartes

NobbyNobody — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:56:31 -0100

A double Odd-Fish today. I considered spreading this over two updates but decided that neither half really worked on its own in isolation.
Of course I'm making the assumption that the strip works as a whole. I hope so.
I particularly enjoyed drawing Lovecraft's head exploding. Am I a bad person?

Descartes

NobbyNobody — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:53:45 -0100

A little bit of pseudo-highbrow humour for today's Odd-Fish.
What other comic gives you fart gags one week and Descartes another?

INRI

NobbyNobody — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:07:04 -0100

Three new strips in one week!
Sadly it's more down to bad planning than generosity on my part. When I thought of Wishing on a Starr the strip that went up on Thursday I hadn't meant it to be a two-parter which then meant that today's Easter strip would go up on Sunday with a nice comfortable few days between them.
Unfortunately, time restraints meant that I has to split Wishing on a Starr into two parts and I only got the second part finished late on Friday night for publication on Saturday so it's only been up for a day before today's strip replaced it which of course had to be up on Sunday.
I'll try and get the strips more evenly spaced out in future.
Happy Easter.
Mmm chocolate. Om nom nom nom nom nom....