I am really, really sorry for the lack of updates the past couple of weeks. This week was finals week and despite all the sleep I lost I still managed to fail one class. But it doesn’t matter, because for the next two weeks I have COMPLETE FREEDOM. Which means, we’re back to our regular updates!
Also, my 21st is this weekend, so I implore you to go out and party with me in spirit. : )

The forums are down right now, I’ve been trying to fix them for the last couple of hours but to no avail. I think I’m gonna sleep on it and see what I can do tomorrow.

For everyone who has stuck around, I thank you from the very bottom of my heart for putting up with my constant bullshit. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again — I write a comic about failed relationships. How together do you think my life is?

Much love.

Some old stuff, some new stuff, just felt like putting ‘em up since most of them haven’t seen the light of day before. School is killer, and it’s destroying my sleep schedule, my appetite, and — this I fear the most — my sense of humor.

But I’m trying my best. Promise.

I mean, I write a comic about failed relationships — how ‘together’ do you think my life is, really?

So much love for the continued, undying support. You guys are awesome.

That formula might not work for me anymore, unfortunately. As we enter our fourth quarter in this intensive design program, the workload has increased accordingly. One of the reasons I maintained a Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday schedule is that I am an incredibly slow worker. I may understand a concept or have a great idea in mind for a comic, but as of late it’s been taking me up to six to eight hours to finish a comic strip. “Six to eight hours?!” you gasp, raising an eyebrow. “But the comic art is so simple. Why does it take so long?” Well, I tend to be a little OCD when it comes to my line art, and the actual majority of that time is spent drawing, erasing, and redrawing.

tl;dr I’m slow to begin with, and being busy makes me slower.

As it stands I may tone down the updates temporarily for the next few weeks, from three updates to two (most likely on Sunday and Thursday).

(To appease a disgruntled reader, the header image will be edited to reflect this change as soon as I get home.)

I really wish I didn’t have to do this, but school is killer and I haven’t been sleeping lately. Well, that’s a lie, I did sleep yesterday — I got home on Tuesday night, passed out, and woke up on Thursday morning. It’s pretty bad. My dad calls me “Sleeping Beauty” now.

The good news is that, while I am working at school right now as I’m writing this, I do have a strip in the works that will be up between tonight and tomorrow morning. And as a little extra for those who haven’t seen it and are willing to wait for me to get my shit together, I’ve put my old webcomic back up. You’ve probably been wondering who the hell those kids at the top of this post are — it’s the cast from the defunct No Spring Chicken webcomic. If you have some time to kill, feel free to browse through about 200 mediocre strips!

It’s nothing amazing and frankly at some points it’s a little embarassing, but I started making those strips when I was fourteen. It was just kind of interesting looking through all my failed projects and seeing how small elements from all of those endeavors seem to have found their way back to CUEK.

And finally, thank you all so much for your infinite patience and continued support, you guys rock

Hint: I made THIS for my final project for Flash class (nothing amazing, but I’m still thinking baby steps). And don’t forget THIS.

So as it stands, the school semester just ended and I find myself a bit behind on the comic, so ideally I’m going to try to get caught up with over our two-week break (yes, that short) from school.

Goals up until end of July:

• Get shit together and establish a comic buffer. No more  waiting until the night before to draw the strip. Have a couple done ahead of time, say, a week or three’s worth.
• Get out of the house every now and then.
• Refrain from threatening to ” ___(violent verb)___ a  __(_[group of]_ cute fuzzy baby animal[s]_)__”.
• MERCHANDISE. Or, at the very least, T-shirts.
• Put up a Cast Page so people won’t wonder anymore who is Frank and who is Zeke.
• Explain in said cast page that the characters weren’t originally supposed to have names/distinct personalities, hence initial confusion when reading from the beginning (if you read closely & follow the text colors, you’ll notice that both Frank AND Zeke apparently went out with Red, which makes no sense).
• Revise the Frequently Asked Questions page to include questions that have actually been asked.
• Have the script ready for the CUEK Flash game.
• No more fat jokes for a while. Compensate with dick jokes.

And that’s it from me until later today. Sorry to bump Jade’s article off the front, so go read it now or I’ll start punching puppies.

Wait, fuck

I noticed while going through the demographics of all the visitors to CUEK that 52% of all the visitors from the US were female. This was quite intriguing to me!

Mainly because I’ve always felt that, in the majority of the strips — especially the ones before the introduction of Jade (yes, that’s Purple’s real name) in #46 — the females were either the butt of the intended joke, the object of ridicule, or depicted as a bitch or a liar or a slut or something along those lines. Not that I hate women or feel a need for them to be constantly ridiculed (in truth, it’s just one or two specific women, but that’s not the point). I just, you know, thought that I was always relating to a more male audience since that’s my personal perspective.

I mean, I’m not unwelcoming to the female audience as well, it just came as a bit of a surprise!

I suppose I’m that closed-minded that I’ve never taken the time to look at relationships from a female point of view. But since I was 15 I have been in four serious “relationships” (quoted, because only two of them were “official”) and all of them ended terribly. Which doesn’t leave me much of a perspective to go on aside from the stereotypical “THAT BITCH WAS A HO” standpoint.

What’s the plural of “ho”, anyway? Hos? Ho’s? Hoes? This is going to bug me all day.

So if you’re a female, and you’ve wasted the few minutes it took to read this, tell me: Why do you read CUEK?

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A “sketch” I spent way too long on that turned into what you’re looking at right now.

Okay, so I totally meant to post this at the BEGINNING of the weekend (because, of course, that would make more sense, considering there is no comic). Well, straight to it — a couple of things, I’m sure you’re all already aware of the new design and the new-ish forum, where I got bored and decided to start an MS Paint Adventure.

You are ZEKE.

If you’ve never heard of Andrew Hussie or MS Paint Adventures, you should educate yourself — granted, if you consider yourself dorky enough to enjoy/participate in such madness. Because it is quite dorky, but that’s what I love about it. It’s a game, and the player is you. The premise of an MSPA is an artist tells a story and the readers contribute commands to advance the plot, whereupon the artist continues the story however way s/he sees fit, but using the readers’ suggestions. Andrew Hussie popularized this (if not being the first person to come up with the concept) with the epic story of Problem Sleuth, which started as a simple detective story and, thanks to the readers, became an incredible, nonsensical journey.

So if you’re bored, you should definitely come join our own homegrown paint adventure, which is in part a tribute to Mr. Hussie.

Another forum user picture request.

Last thing I want to mention was to stay tuned for an animated comic strip coming soon to… the top part of the website, if Enzo doesn’t completely fail at Flash. Have a great week, people.

The site’s been due for a redesign and if all goes well it’ll be up by the end of the week. In the meantime, the comic will maintain its Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday updates. If you’re one of the people who likes to read and discuss things, check out Jade’s Blog. Jade is the girl whom Purple is based off of, and one of the things she enjoys doing the most besides kicking my ass is write. Mainly about issues pertaining to Life, Love, and Loss – the exact premise of CUEK.

In other news, I just drank a liter of Red Bull over the last 40 minutes and my hands are twitching. Is this bad?

This first image may disturb and confuse you.

This was made for my friend Rev for a Women’s Studies class assignment. The premise was basically that people in medieval times (I think? I’m not sure. Point is – a long time ago) believed that the woman’s uterus needed “feeding” (a.k.a. coitus, penetration, sex, etc.), and if it was not properly “fed” it would eventually retaliate against the body, moving up along the organs to ultimately devour its host’s heart.

Pretty crazy shit, man.

This park bench illustration was for one of my best friends, whom I never get to see anymore because she’s far, far away. I miss you.

This is an illustration of fans ProfessorKatz and doctor_desert. I like to take suggestions for drawings so if you have a request, feel free to head over to the forum and post it! I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible.

This is what I call a digital sketchbook, which is basically doodles and things I would do in my actual sketchbook, but inked in Flash. Technology is amazing! This is pretty old, though, about a couple of months back.

Aaaand this one, I couldn’t tell you if you asked. I have no fucking idea where this came from.

That’s all for now! I appreciate your patience

In other news, last semester in our introductory Flash class our final project was completely open-ended in the sense that we could make anything we want, as long as it applied all the things we learned during the semester. Although I already was fairly familiar with basic animation, I was absolutely illiterate when it came to the Flash Actionscript language, so it was all new to me. The end result was a short introductory ‘demo’ for a proposed Cheer Up, Emo Kid flash game. The premise was it would be a point-and-click RPG adventure of sorts, and in the tradition of Andrew Hussie’s MS Paint Adventures, I was hoping I could integrate some sort of user-interactivity where readers could continue the story by deciding what the character would do next.

Well anyway, let me know what you think of it so far — also, it ends when his mom comes into the room, just to let you know in case. . . like, you sit and stare for hours waiting for something to happen.

We should probably be working on getting our t-shirt shop online, too. In all fairness, that’s coming soon. Like, real soon. Promise.

In other news, there’s apparently a workprint (unedited) version of the new Wolverine movie floating about somewhere online (*cough*PirateBay*cough*). While I don’t care much for arguing about the ethics of piracy, and while Hugh Jackman is totally hot, the guys over at Fox are total jerks. In case you’ve been living under a rock the last couple of months leading up to the release of Watchmen, they sat on the rights of the movie for, like, a decade or two, and after Warner Bros. obtained the rights and actually began making a movie that looked like it would be a success, Fox was all like, “yo, dudes, that’s not cool. We, like, still technically own the rights to this movie, man.” Or whatever. People are greedy, man.

But I digress. I’m sure Mr. Jackman wouldn’t mind since apparently he’s being picked up by Broadway, but otherwise, Fox can kiss my nonexistent ass.

Kim out.