Empowerment Comics

Shooting skill is the kind of thing you hope never to need.

I give you Das Bunkbed. Dave built this triple bunk from steel shelving units.

I spent hours testing them and comparing them. Trust me, the matte MacBook Pro screen is better than the glossy one. The new LED-backlit matte screen has vibrant colors and the glossy screens are really distracting and there's nothing you can do about it.

Running With Scissors' Postal 2 is quite a powder keg. Everyone who heard about it knows about the controversial violence, but everyone who played it will remember its political humor. It was akin to playing first-person South Park. It was one thing after another: suicide bombers hiding in convenience stores. Heavily armed People Against Violent Videogames protestors storming Running With Scissors HQ. A spoof of the Waco ATF raid. Police brutality against pedestrians shouting "You're oppressing me!" There are much more tasteful games out there, but there are few games with more satire.

Self-styled "scandal director" Uwe Boll is making a movie. Uwe Boll has physically punched the daylights out of critics like Richard Kayanke of SomethingAwful.com in a boxing match. He embraced his "bad director" image and internet rumors by playing himself in the film and joking in the trailer, "My movies are finanzed with Nazi gold." His critics hate him, but he is also very funny, and this time it's on purpose. Some who've seen the movie say its really quite hilarious and I look forward to seeing it when it comes out.

UPDATE: The original comic had flow problems with being split up so I rejiggered panel 2's art into a single panel and made speech bubbles in panel 1 white on the edges. Maybe nobody will care but me, but I'm a perfectionist and I think it makes a better comic.

Learn all about starting fire, an essential part of survival skills training.

Here's my first stab at an Empowerment comic.

What do you think? Is the poo in the first panel too graphic?

So far, it tests well with 14-year olds and not so well with my Mom.

The basic idea is to do comics that make you laugh and learn at the same time on at least a weekly basis. Comics should relate to some kind of learnable material, preferably with a specific link to the relavent learning URL included on the bottom of the comic. The comics will be added to the relavent pages themselves to liven up what is otherwise very serious subject matter.

Do you have ideas or suggestions for comics? If you'd like to contribute, let us know. 

Read more about the concept behind doing Empowerment comics  at www.empowerthyself.com/spread/comics . 

This is of course meant to illustrate the www.empowerthyself.com/fire article.

The words are an actual quote from hagcel on gnn.tv in a discussion of guerilla camping methods.

The first thing I thought of when I read it was an unhygenic Gollum lighting a fire with his eyes.

This one is a 3.5x2" card format optimized for printing out and carding.

It was made 6/11/2002 with Fireworks in the ugly Comic Sans MS and updated using the Digital Strip font from Comic Life.

At the time I thought about making comics. My first idea was to make an anti-Microsoft comic with art consisting entirely of Microsoft Office clip art. I ended up making this knock-knock-joke turned political rant instead and promptly ran out of gas, only to revive it for historic purposes.

As I said, I made this in 2002. As of now, it seems to me that the 9/11 truth movement has failed to bring anyone down and I'd rather focus on issues which are a) really important b) clearly proveable and c) I can do something about. Maybe someone will uncover smoking gun evidence that proves exactly what happened conclusively, maybe not, either way we have a democracy to fix.