If we’re being honest, “too many” is almost always however many Helen has had.
BURGERPunk continues its greasy rampage on Kickstarter, leading us to create a few more stretch goals for the back half of the campaign, which will be announced shortly. If you haven’t checked out BURGERPunk yet… what are you doing? Go do that. Click on the glorious map of New McDonaldland below to go to the campaign page!
At some point there will be an actual femur harmonica in the comic, maybe? That seems like the next level of this recurring joke.
BURGERPunk The RPG is on Kickstarter now! It’s already funded and we’ve served up 5 of 7 stretch goals, but there are still stretch goals and nearly four weeks left, so become one with the Living Meat(TM). BURGERPunk is absolutely the weirdest thing I’ve worked on, and if you want to hear more about it, you can hear Cait talking about our process of writing tabletop RPGs and the origins of BURGERPunk on the Rite Gud podcast. You can also hear us talking BURGERPunk and the movie Hell Comes to Frogtown on Podside Picnic.
You can also click on the image below to back BURGERPunk. The digital tier with the book and all the stretch goals is only $5 CAD, with the print version (and all the digital stuff!) is $15 + shipping. Here’s a look at one of the 7 Flavour Profiles (character classes), the Cola Commando.
Bridget, Bar Fight Champion of Hell could also be the name of a Hell, Inc. video game where Bridget beats up demons. Maybe if Guinea Pig Press RPGs continue to do well, I’ll become wealthy enough to be the dictator of a small video game studio that adapts my comics into games. For some reason I recently started thinking about Hell, Inc. as an action platformer (like how everything got adapted as an action platformer in the NES/Super NES era). Doug bouncing around Hell popping people in the schnozz with his Popeye arms and collecting souls or something.
Leonardo is Employee of the Week! They supported the creation of Hockeypocalypse: Slashers, and helped make that book ! You can do that with my next graphic novel, Rent-A-Thug, which I will be serializing on Patreon as well. Backers at the $5/month and up tiers will get a copy mailed to them when it’s finished!
In other news, BURGERPunk the RPG launches on TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14th! Click the image below to sign up to be notified when the campaign launches! The main event is the BURGERPunk The RPG ‘zine, which is 32 pages of fast food action movie post-apocalypse chaos including the complete gameplay rules (using Powered by the Apocalypse) and 7 Flavour Profiles (character classes), available in print and digital formats.
I’ve been playing a lot of Hollow Knight lately, and was somewhat delighted to realize that it was about bugs. They’re so stylized that I didn’t read the characters that way until I saw them in the game’s environment. As someone who really likes the idea of army ants being taken literally, Hollow Knight feels like if those old Army Ants toys were in the supernatural fantasy genre. Also, Hollow Knight is really fun.
Speaking of fun, it’s my birthday tomorrow (unless you read this on a day other than January 30th). If you feel the urge to celebrate with me, feel free to drop a buck or two on my Patreon, which supports projects like Hell, Inc. and the upcoming Rent-A-Thug graphic novel. I will likely be spending my birthday either drawing more pages for said Rent-A-Thug graphic novel, or working on BURGERPunk, the RPG that nobody knew they needed.
If you want to hear more about BURGERPunk, sign up for my newsletter, which will be debuting some never-before-seen BURGERPunk art prior to the February 14th Kickstarter.
Conversations with my parents during the pandemic made me realize how much “things we have done recently” form the core of most casual conversation. When the answer to “what have you been up to” is “nothing, same as you,” it’s a lot harder to carry on a chat. That was indirectly how I arrived at writing this strip. I wasn’t consciously comparing the gang not having anything to talk about because they’ve all been together for a month straight to not having anything interesting to tell my parents because I’ve been at home for a month straight, but upon reflection it’s pretty clear how I ended up at this week’s joke.
Sebastian is Employee of the Week, and you can, too! It’s how I have predictable money, which is both Cool and Good. If everyone who read the comic in a month chipped in $1, I’d be able to turn down most freelance work and focus on doing Hell, Inc. stuff and my own graphic novels! That would be pretty cool. Speaking of graphic novels, currently Rent-A-Thug: La Cosa Glasnostra is being reformatted as traditional comic pages and posted. Following that, the Rent-A-Thug graphic novel will be starting up (unless some publisher gives me a lot of money before that happens).
Also, the next RPG in my burgeoning empire is going to be launching in February, so sign up for my monthly-ish email newsletter to learn about BURGERPunk.
I don’t know what a table-dancing jam is in Hell, but Diane probably has some insight on that.
Barrie Deatcher is Employee of the Week, and will get to read my new Rent-A-Thug graphic novel as I draw it! Subscribers to my newsletter have already seen the first page, which I think is several orders of magnitude cooler than any previous Rent-A-Thug stuff. Patreon is my predictable source of income, and I would very much like it to grow to the point where I can get into a workflow of webcomic + graphic novel.
Remember Top Webcomics? That’s still a thing, so if you want to boost Hell, Inc. in the rankings and funnel some new readers in, click on the banner below. You can vote daily.
Next Week: Ever look at a group of people and wonder “what would they even talk about?” Sara does. Read it early on Patreon!
Happy New Year! It’s 2023 now, which is… I dunno. It changes my signature and not a ton else. As far as what’s on the horizon for 2023, there will be plenty more Hell, Inc. including the omnibus of what were originally intended to be the first six volumes. I’ll also be working on the Rent-A-Thug graphic novel, which I’ll be posting on Patreon unless I can convince a publisher to give me a bunch of money for it. In the near future, the newest addition to my RPG empire, BURGERPUNK.
Ben Hamlin, host of Syndicated with Lesley and Ben (among other casted pods), is Employee of the Week. I’ve been a guest on several episodes, most recently the strange and Hell, Inc.-esque animated comedy Ugly Americans – a short-lived series that never quite reached the potential of its premise. I’m also on the episodes about extremely well-crafted but under-remembered ’90s sitcom NewsRadio and 2010s stoner thing that loosely adheres to its premise, Workaholics.
Patreon! It’s a predictable source of income, so if you like things that I do, check it out.
Also check out the newsletter, which is how to hear about what I’m up to without needing to subject yourself to things like Twitter.
This was a strip where what I was thinking it would look like while I was writing it and what it looked like as I started to lay it out did not match in difficulty AT ALL. I expected I’d do the one shot where Doug was visible, and that would be a bit tough, but everything else would be pretty straightforward. But then I was all like “but what if I made it more dynamic and grounded the characters in the setting more?” Because I’m an idiot, you see, and do a lot of things that make my job harder because I want things to be “good.” In this economy!? We don’t have room for good, we need art-stealing robots and entire animation departments getting slashed.
Robbie Dorman is Employee of the Week. He is co-host of The Simpsons Show, the only podcast about The Simpsons, and also the only podcast about The Simpsons that I have done a guest spot on. You should also follow him on Twitter to learn about his new novel releases. He writes that good good scary shit. Indie artists need your support now more than ever, so check out his stuff!
Speaking of which, over on Patreon I’m serializing a new comic, a Rent-A-Thug one-shot called La Cosa Glasnostra. When that wraps up (it’s looking like it’ll be 40ish pages), I’ll be moving on to the full Rent-A-Thug graphic novel, unless I miraculously pick up a book deal somehow. Patreon is my (currently only) predictable form of income, so if you like Hell, Inc., every dollar helps!
“Christmas Party Benefits” sound like the kind of thing a company would include in a job posting that definitely doesn’t post the salary. Encouraging employees to view each other as having “stab here” signs on their backs also seems like the kind of thing a job that doesn’t post the salary would do.
Caitlin is Employee of the Week, and currently helping finish the Hell, Inc. The RPG Kickstarter fulfillment. Our kitchen table has been a packaging station for a while now, but the end of the shipping tunnel is in sight. Until there’s more shipping. I should just get my living room classified as a Canada Post depot.
A new book series has started for $5/up patrons! The first published Rent-A-Thug story in 12 years, La Cosa Glasnostra, is being published in print-page format for the first time on Patreon. The first 5 pages are free here. The rest will be going up on Patreon, and seems like it’ll end up being somewhere in the 40 page range. I don’t know if I’ll end up printing this one, we’ll see how I feel once I see the whole thing compiled as a PDF.
I haven’t plugged it in a while, so go sign up for the newsletter.
I wrote about it in more detail in the Patreon preview post for this strip, but this one is an example of writing a script that presented me with some visual problems. It’s also probably one of the better examples of those problems resulting in better visual storytelling than solving those problems in the script phase would have.
In other news, my kitchen table belongs to Hell, Inc. The RPG books now. The first batch of books has gone out, and many more will follow as we get packages put together.
“Game Time” Art Middleton is Employee of the Week! Follow him on Twitter or check out his Twitch streams, OR… do both of those things. Also, head over to the Hell, Inc. Patreon, where you can support the continued existence of your favourite office demons and read new strips early (see above!). It turns out that humans, like demons, need money to live! Me, specifically.
The next project to be serialized on Patreon (for $5/month and up patrons) is RENT-A-THUG. Some of you might remember that as my first published work, but I’m reimagining it as a graphic novel that utilizes all of my improvements as a creator. I’m aiming for it to see publication around the 20th anniversary of the strip’s first publication in 2005, but that’ll be dependent on a lot of factors outside of my control. Right now, I’m posting the print-formatted pages for La Cosa Glasnostra, the short story I created for Webtoon as practice for meshing the original art style with my current skillset. Like with Hockeypocalypse: Slashers, I’ll be posting the first 5 pages as a free preview, and then adding a few pages every month as they’re made.