Here's the second (and final) strip retelling Gabriel's harrowing past as a retail aggressor.

I hope the writing process for this strip makes it into the show at some point, or at any rate that it is revealed, because he lays the whole scenario bare and it's not the sanitized version we mounted here in a jpeg.  It is a place of darkness, and those dark visions might bring him here, to the front page, to relate some measure of his crystallized fear.

By hour one hundred and thirty-five, Desert Bus had gathered well over a hundred thousand dollars. As in, dollars. Outside of the occasional link - and a donation every now and again, when the next hour was deliciously close - we had almost nothing to do with it. It's absolutely thrilling. As I've said before, becoming a footnote in the charity, the kind of thing a careless Wiki edit might remove entirely, is my ultimate goal.

Efforts like Desert Bus - or Fünde Razor, or Ümloud(!) - represent the spirit at the core of the project. Between independent events and customized wish lists that apply toys directly to the source of pain, we constitute a decentralized, almost guerilla charity. We're up $206,205 over last week, and you can see how much of that came from an "external" source. The quotation marks are there to imply just how little the term means - there is just Child's Play, which shall endure forever. At first completely distributed, now the rally point for wholly organic nodes of contribution, the end result is that we are kicking this thing's fucking ass.

I apologize for the late post. Teaching someone how to poop is incredibly difficult.

(CW)TB out.

the creatures of the forest

If my life was a newspaper you could say that these two comics were "ripped from the headlines". I still have flash backs about my time at Toys R Us and Circuit City. I saw grown women get into fist fights over Tickle Me Elmo. I was cursed out on Christmas Eve for not having Holiday Barbie when the stupid thing had been sold out since June, and just like the comic I've been told a million times to "check in the back."

It was my job to take the things that were in the back and put them in the front. We could not sell them if they were in the back. I would try and explain that I had already spent the morning stocking the shelves and my hunch was that (as crazy as this sounds) other people must have come and bought them all.

Customers think that behind that employee only door is some kind of Willy Wonka style wonderland where toys grow on trees. Chances are when you ask someone to check in the back, they go to the break-room and get a coke. I'd treat it like a little break, talk to my friends back in the warehouse, get a snack and then come out and shrug "Sorry," I'd say "It's not in the back."

I also have a Child's Play update for you. As of today we've collected a mind splintering $748,312.10. That is up from $542,107.01 last week. I'd like to give some special recognition to the Desert Bus crew, who managed to raise $132,392.94 this year. You can't tell because this is the internet, but I am standing up and applauding.

-Gabe out

We've been talking about First Party for a long time and yesterday the site finally went live. We love making T-shirts and we have no intention of stopping, but not everyone can, or wants to wear T-shirts all the time. Some of you might work in an office during the day or maybe you just want something a little classier in the closet. Honestly First Party isn't going to be for everyone. My guess is that some of you guys are gonna hit the site and scratch your heads. If that's the case it's just not for you and that's fine. I think some of you are gonna check out First Party and really appreciate it though.

First Party is something I've been really excited about for years. In fact, if you watched the pilot episode of the PATV show you saw me sporting a black First Party polo during PAX. Originally we thought we could just use blank polos right off the rack but after searching for a year we couldn't find anything we liked. Sometimes we liked the fit but not the material, other times the color just wasn't quite right or the collar wasn't what we wanted. Eventually we ended up having the shirts custom made for us. We spent another year trying to get the embroidery right. The shirts are as nice as we can make them and each one comes packaged in a First Party tin with its own instruction manual.

So if that sounds interesting to you, check out the First Party site. Like I said, it's not going to be for everyone. Be warned though: if you purchase a First Party polo and I catch you walking around with the collar popped, I will take the shirt back right then and there. It's in the Eula.

-Gabe out