Hey kids! Well, if all goes according to plan this should be the last blog post here and the last Boxcar strip featured on our main page. Next Sunday, when Boxcar Astronaut #75 hits, you should be looking at an all new Boxcar Astronaut website created with ComicPress that features the strip and the blog all in one convenient location for your viewing pleasure! This blog will remain here to act as an archive for those of you who want to read about all the old strips. Hopefully, things will go smoothly for us. Cross your fingers!

This week, we wrap up Caveman’s birthday party with the weirdest and funniest clown ever! Marc and I were discussing this final strip and came up with the concept of the party being a bore and needing something to liven it up. Marc mentioned the boys “hiring” a clown and immediately the same thing popped into both of our heads…Robot! It’s a great visual that made for a nice ending to the party. I also love the characters with their pointy party hats on; to me funny headwear is always comedy gold!

This just in: Marc has started his very own sketch blog called Complete Heterochromia (read the blog description to learn what that is), which will feature his awesome non-Boxcar related artwork. Stuff like this illustration of baby Kal-El and his Mommy and Daddy!

See you next week for Boxcar Astronaut #75 (wow!), and the new site launch!

Hello all! This will be a short and sweet blog this week as tweaks to the new and improved BoxcarAstronaut.Com continue. As things stand right now, we hope to launch the fully-functioning ComicPress improvements on August 17, which will mark the milestone 75th Boxcar strip. The site will have a clean new look, be much less cluttered, and have vastly improved functionality; including the ability for you guys to post comments, view full archives, and subscribe via RSS feeds.

This week we continue with Caveman’s birthday party as the boys present ol’ Cavie with a staple of kiddie birthday parties: a delicious, candy-filled pinata! Of course, after a brief demo, Caveman bashes the poor thing out of sight like a Big Papi home run! (and I hear our friendly neighborhood Boxcar artist actually did some photo reference from actual baseball players for the final panel. Neat!). We hope you enjoyed it, and be sure to come back next week for the conclusion of Caeveman’s birthday party. See? I told you this was gonna be a short one!

Hello again, faithful Boxcar readers! Before I delve into the discussion of this week’s strip, I want to mention a few things that are on the horizon for the comic. First up, our brand spankin’ new ComicPress website is nearing completion. I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with the awesome ComicPress tool, designed and developed by Wally & Osborne creator Tyler Martin. The site needs a few more tweaks here and there, but if all goes well it should be up and running by the end of the summer, just in time for the start of the new Fall TV season! Secondly, I want to remind all of you that we have a super-cool Cafepress store chock full of great gifts like T-shirts, mousepads, and magnets for the Boxcar fan in your life. Order something for your space cadet today!

This week we bring you the second part of our “Happy Birthday, Cavie” storyarc, which features what is probably the single greatest facial expression in the history of the strip. Although you only see the reflection of the birthday candles’ flames and no pupil or iris, this marks the first time in Boxcar Astronaut history that we see Caveman’s eyes fully opened, and it’s pure gold! When I was batting around ideas for this birthday storyarc,  came up with several birthday cake gags where the boys would try to teach Caveman how to blow out his birthday candles and he would have either spit all over the cake or grabbed it and swallowed it whole, candles and all.

While we were kicking around ideas, Marc thought that it would be really funny if Caveman reacted to the lighted candles just like any prehistoric human who had never seen fire naturally would, with total awe. Caveman has an “illumninating” experience, to say the least! As he drops to his knees and worships the fire as a gift from the heavens above, I just love Devin’s “Umm…” reaction; it’s just so well-placed and really, what else could he say at that point? Hilarious stuff! I also really dig the messy, lopsided birthday cake Ben and Devin make for Caveman. It’s exactly the kind of cake that two kids would create, and the mis-matched candles are an especially nice touch. See you next week for more birthday misadventures!

Howdy fans! how’s your summer going? By now I’m sure most of you have visited your nearby air-conditioned megaplex to see The Dark Knight, and if you haven’t, you should stop reading this immediately and get your little hinders down there because it’s astonishingly awesome! It’s a grilled awesome sandwich with an extra side of awesome! It’s deep-friend awesome even! Oh, but um, make sure you read Boxcar Astronaut #71 first, of course.

This week’s adventure (which kicks off the Caveman’s Birthday storyline) features some good ol’ fashioned comic strip humor, with a simple punchline at the end and some terriffic physical comedy from Caveman. It’s actually quite unique, you sort of get two comic strips for the price of one with this piece: the boys in the foreground discussing Caveman’s birthday, and Cavie’s hilarious slapstick antics with the Stetch Armstrong. Normally I think you would try to avoid this type of thing in a comic strip, but Marc has such a great eye for stuff like this and really excels at pulling these innovative ideas off brilliantly. The two layers don’t run into eachother or get confusing at all; evertything flows very nicely together.  it another testament to the care, dedication, and hard work Marc puts into the illustration, design, and layout of this webcomic. Did I mention how much I love the Stretch Armstrong’s head? Theat cheesey hair and smile is so perfect! I also like the rendering of Caveman chomping down on the Stretch’s head in the third panel. There’s something about the Cavie’s teeth that reminds me of an R. Crumb drawing.

Next week we’ll continue the birthday shenanigans and just wait until you see the visual in the last panel of the last comic in this Birthday story. It’s going to be hilarious! See you next week!

In the late 1970′s/early 1980′s, electric race car sets exploded in popularity with kids. Regardless of what kinds of toys you were into (G.I. Joe, Star Wars, etc.), pretty much every kid on the block had a slot car race set lying around the house (functional or not). The brash TV ads offered the flashy promise of shiny race cars zooming around an electric track, climbing up walls and performing death-defying jumps through hoops adorned with plastic flames. Sadly, once you got them out of the big, colorful boxes, the actual product was a letdown. Sure, the funky whiff of ozone when you plugged in the cheap wiring was a nice “kiddie high”, but the cars never seemed to go as fast as they did on TV (if you could get them to go at all), and it always seemed like hitches in the track would stop the slot cars dead in their tracks. Infuriating!

Electric race car sets also required a modicum of skill and patience to assemble properly, something I was sorely lacking in my early days. That’s why I preferred Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. They were durable die cast metal and came ready to play right out of the box. Hot Wheels cars even had their own race track playsets, and even though they weren’t electric (the cars would usually be propelled through a hand crank or some sort of “launcher” gimmick), they were still pretty fun! The Criss Cross Crash track was a personal favorite of mine. The only problem with the Hot Wheels tracks were the flimsy vinyl tabs that held the pieces of track in place. They would constantly warp and separate, leaving cracks in the track that would stop your Hot Wheels Corvette or Trans Am cold, or send them flying off the course.

And speaking of toy cars shooting off the track, that’s exactly what we have going on in this week’s Boxcar Astronaut strip, a nice little ditty written and illustrated by our friend Marc. I love his idea of the boys using their slot car track as a makeshift rocket launcher, sending four-wheeled projectiles soaring through the air, much to the annoyance of their fellow backyard denizens. It perfectly illustrates one of my favorite themes of Boxcar Astronaut: the way imaginative kids can use their toys in creative ways that go far beyond their intended purpose. My favorite panel is the first, where poor Diogee is trying to enjoy his supper and gets a toy racer in his Purnia for his trouble. His confused reaction is classic Diogee (I’ve really missed that mutt!). Robot getting clunked off of his shiny dome by a mini formula 500 car is funny as well, and you have to love Caveman getting blasted in his nether regions. The nut shot is a classic comedy sight-gag that all comic creators get around to eventually, and Marc and I were discussing how proud we were that it took us 70 strips before mining that well-trodden comedy ground. It’s just pure comedy gold no matter how many times you see it.

The final panel is superb; it’s always great fun to see the boys get mischevious, but it caused quite a heated debate between Marc and myself. Being a huge Star Wars geek, I suggested Ben’s dialogue read “PROTON Torpedo”, while Marc wanted it to read “PHOTON Torpedo”. Marc stated that most people would identify with the Star Trek reference, that “Photon Torpedoes” were more recognized and ingraned in the pop culture vernacular than the Star Wars “Proton Torpedoes”. I took umbrage with this statement and actually phoned a friend to act as tie-breaker in this battle of semantics. Surely I was right, and the instruments of the Death Star’s destruction would be more recognized by the vox populi than those pitiful Star Trek weapons! Alas, I was defeated by my friend, who sided with Marc. It seems “Photon Torpedoes” are the fictional space weapons of choice. But I’m not going to let this go! What do you all think, Proton or Photon? Leave a comment!

Happy Fourth of July weekend, everybody! Here’s hoping your nice four-day vacation is filled with good ol’ Americana like apple pie, barbecues, baseball (Red Sox vs. Yanks all weekend!), and of course, a fireworks display (at a town-run event and not illegally purchased, ‘natch).

39 years ago, on July 20 1969, American astronauts piloting the Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon for the very first time. Kind of fitting then, that Ben lands on Mars’ surface here in July on the 69th Boxcar Astronaut strip, wouldn’t you say? It was a nice bit of serendipity that wasn’t at all planned, but It’s something I noticed during our meeting last week and felt it was worth mentioning. As I stated in last week’s blog, this strip is different from anything we’ve done in a Boxcar Astronaut comic before and I think it came out wonderfully.

Everything’s great; the bootprint in the sand (drawn wth the actual first bootprint from the moon landing for reference), the sun gleaming down dramatically on Ben’s helmet, the dramatic shillouette of Ben planting of the flag, all outstanding.  It’s very stylish and superbly rendered by Marc, while at the same time maintaining the spirit of childhood fun, especially in the final panel. I love the punchline delivery and the absolutley exasperated expression on Devin’s face. After all Ben had put him through in the previous three tests, he’s just had enough and socks Ben with an unfiltered verbal punch right to the gut. Simple, brutal, and in my humble opinion, very funny.

Happy Fourth of July, gang! be safe!

So I know that Father’s Day has come and gone, and I know I don’t have any children, but today I truly feel like a proud parent. My “child”? Why, it’s this week’s hilarious (in my not-so-humble opinion) Boxcar Astronaut strip! In all seriousness, I think this final “space training” exercise strip is one one of the strongest and funniest comics we have ever done, and of course much of this can be attributed to Boxcar’s other “parent”, if you will, Mr. Lapierre.

Marc usually shows me the penciled and inked artwork for a Boxcar Astronaut comic about two weeks before it goes “live”, and when I saw the first panel of #68 I think I can safely say that I laughed harder than I ever had at any previous piece of art Marc has done for this webcomic. The main source of my guffaws? Three simple words: bubble. wrap. headgear. Funniest Devin costume ever! (sorry Power Boy!) When I came up with the idea for this space training exercise, I told Marc just to put the boys in makeshift crash protection gear (pillows tied to them, etc.), and of course Marc kicked it up a notch by adding that fantastic bubble-wrap babushka on poor Devin’s head (he doesn’t have the benefit of a helmet like Ben does). The results speak for themselves, it’s absolutely priceless!

Great facial expressions all around for Devin in this one (I love the gritted teeth in the third panel as he watches the horrific results of Ben’s “launch”); he really ends up stealing this comic despite Ben’s aggressive attitude. Ben’s always been the “boss” of the yard, but lately he’s really been flexing his muscle around the yard, almost becoming borderline bratty. Someones going to have to take him down a peg or two soon, methinks.  Perhaps next week in the conclusion to our story? Check back and find out, it’s another stellar piece of art from Marc and it’s different from any other Boxcar strip we’ve ever done. Don’t miss it!

Before I go I’d like to send my condolences to the family, friends, and fans of well-known comic book artist/writer Michael Turner, who passed away on Friday at the age of 37 after a long struggle with cancer. Turner is best known for his original creations Witchblade and Fathom, as well as his cover work for DC and Marvel towards the end of his career. You can read all about his life and career at his Wikipedia entry.

Hey all! Just a quick reminder here that Marc’s comic for the Guest Strip Project is now officially live, so head on over and check it out!  It’s a really funny piece with some great artwork (as usual), and some terriffic background work. As I mentioned in a previous post, the GSP features all sorts of cool webcomic artists taking their turns telling a police-themed story featuring some pretty off-the-wall characters. It’s all for a great cause as visitors can make a donation to the International Make-A-Wish Foundation. Head on over and help out!

Hey everyone! First thing’s first, congratulations are in order to the Boston Celtics, for bringing the city of Boston its sixth major sports world championship since 2001! The Celtics absolutely humiliated the heavily-favored L.A. Lakers 131-92 in game six last Tuesday night to clinch the franchise’s 17th NBA title. Way to go guys! Here’s to 17 more!

Well, the end of the NBA season is one sign that summer is here at last. To all of our school-age readers, congrats on the end of another school year! No more pencils! No more books! No more teacher’s dirty looks! Enjoy your time off, but remember to hop online once a week to get your weekly serving of fun and adventure from Ben and Devin, okay? As for myself, school has loooong since been over, but I always welcome the arrival of another summer. I love the smell of freshly cut grass, the sound of the ice cream truck rolling down the street, wearing shorts and sippin’ ice tea at a barbecue with friends and family gathered around. You can’t beat it!

This week Ben and Devin are still in the midst of their strenuous astronaut training for Ben’s ambitious mission to Mars. I had the idea in my head to do a strip where you didn’t realize the boys were actually upside down until the final panel for about a year now, but I never had a good enough premise for that visual until this space training storyline popped up. Originally the gag was supposed to involve Ben and Devin hanging from monkey bars, but I think Robot makes for a better and funnier sight gag.

Marc did a superb job on this strip disguising the fact that the boys are actually upside down. Obviously you can tell something is a little off, but it’s not until you get to that third panel with Devin’s flushed cheek and that little dribble of reverse drool coming out of his mouth that you begin to realize what’s going on (That upside down drool bit was actually added in by Marc, another one of his excellent little flourishes). I’m very pleased with how this strip came out, and just wait until you see what the final training exercise turns out to be in next week’s strip. Marc showed me the advance artwork for it last night and it’s absolutely hysterical. I think it’s going to be one of the funniest Boxcar strips ever. Don’t miss it!