Beef and Mr.Potato Heads

Again, sharks are NOT mindless eating machines. :D
I had this script in my mind a couple of weeks ago and drew out all the characters but didn't add the text until recently. I found that I'd drawn one panel for which I simply couldn't remember what my intended text was. It was so annoying... I never learn that when I think I will remember something, I usually don't.
I'll probably put that panel up anyway and have you all fill in the conversation.

Its shark is worse than its bite

The two panels were meant to be independent of each other. It makes sense either way, I guess... as far as sense goes.
It probably looks like The Shark ate the dog. But I assure you it didn't.
If I ever get my own dog, that's the kind of "beware" sign I'll put up.

Mindless eating machine

I think I was craving burgers when I drew this. Or at least I was craving them after. It's a random sketch but I like it. 

This is another notion about sharks that people simply have - that they'll eat anything. I think it's all those film snippets showing sharks cut open and finding license plates, shoes etc inside their stomach. I've heard they're pretty fussy eaters. They'd probably like burgers though.

Sharks & Sarees: The new fad

This was done for a friend who owns this cool saree shop, The Silkworm Boutique. I promised to do a comic and then was stuck with wondering how on Earth I'd combine sharks and sarees. The answer is simple: just combine them. 

Since sarees have to be colourful, I had to colour it in. I picked a common combination - mustard & red. Obviously it's a good thing I didn't go into the saree designing business. After I coloured in the saree, everything else looked pale. 

ps - My intuos makes drawing so much easier except when it comes to the human. I really dislike drawing humans. 

pps - I usually spell it as "sari" but only when I searched for "saree" did I find some great reference images. 

Painting the Wall

Now that I'm a super duper expert in photoshop (who can't still figure out how to draw shapes and get them to intersect and/or overlap), I tried colouring "The wall" picture. The idea for the caption is actually inspired by my friends at Congratulafins who said that they liked this picture because the message they got from it was "that sharks have the right to their fins, just like our right to have out feet to move free".

It makes a pretty cool desktop wallpaper so if anyone would like to have this as a wallpaper, I can put up a larger file on facebook - just let me know the size most prefer.

Now, THIS is "A whole new world"!

Ever since the internet entered our lives full-time (remember aol?) and we could be a whole different person with an active social [media] life, it's taken over so much of our daily routines.

Now that I've finally got a dumb smart phone that works, I get very excited when I'm around wi-fi areas or my vodafone mobile internet connection is on. While I used to check my email/social media sites maybe a dozen times a day, it's probably more like several dozen times an hour now. 

There are several reasons why internet on-the-go has become necessary. For instance, now, I can wake up in the middle of the night wondering what that actor's name was or how do I spell "cemetery" and find out with my imdb.com and dictionary.com apps! Or if I'm waiting for hours for someone at a restaurant (I like being there 5 minutes before agreed time and most people follow GMT while in India), I can watch silly parodies on youtube or play "words with friends" (and check dictionary.com at the same time!). 

This seemingly random post is my entry for the Indiblogger  "Internet is fun" contest sponsored by http://www.vodafone.in/fun

ps - I actually tried posting this via my mobile but my many accounts confused me.

pps - yes, I caved in and entered a contest. I'm such a sell-out. :D

Better with (than) you

Sometimes a thought comes to me during half-sleep and I jot it down on my phone and feel like I owe it to myself to put it into comic form. This is the pure snob hidden deep deep down in me talking through my subconscious, I think. hehe.  

Anyway, this reminded me of a passage from one of Ravi Zacharias' book which said something like people are all equal but ideas are not. Or there aren't superior people but there are superior ideas (something like that). It's something we all have to learn - to accept all people but to know which ideas to accept as good and which to reject as harmful (or stupid). 

Air Jaws? Not so much.

Here's another sharkish one. It was just a rough doodle that I'd done - it was probably funnier in my head but slapstick is always welcome. White shark breaching is amazing to watch - if you've never watched the "Air Jaws" video, try and watch some of the shark breaching videos on youtube. This was what put South Africa on top of the list of places to see. I mean, who'd want to watch some trained sissy dolphins jump through hoops after this?

Cats shed stuff too!

Well, it would still be cooler to have a shark than a cat (personally, I think it's cooler to have even a ferret than a cat). This is just a random one - a bit more "sharkish", if you like. I like how sharks simply lose their teeth every now and then and are quite nonchalant about it whilst we humans get all excited about finding fossilized shark teeth and selling them on ebay (I will not buy a Megalodon tooth. I will not buy a Megalodon tooth).
Interesting fact: Sharks shed their teeth continually over the course of their lives. At any given time, a shark will have between five and 15 rows of teeth growing behind their functional front chompers. As the front teeth fall out, the ones behind them assume the duty as the mature denture.

Wedding RSVP cards for Congratulafins

I posted these on Facebook but forgot to post them here! These are a couple of wedding RSVP cards that were done mostly by my friends at Congratulafins. I did the sketches for the front side of the card and all the lettering, logos etc were all done by Congratulafins. I think it's a really great idea for a Chinese wedding RSVP card considering that sharkfin soup is such an important part of the wedding. But they might as well give up having at weddings now or they'd be forced to in some years when there aren't any sharks left to serve in a bowl.

Movie theatre venting #5762 - They're probably just being considerate!

It's been a while since I vented about public entertainment spots and how consistently annoying they are. There hadn't been any improvement since my last post so obviously these people need a bit more persuading.

I honestly think that maybe the above explanation is why people do what they do at movie theatres. Either this or they're out to get me personally. It's happened at 95% of the movies I've watched here and the remaining 5% had people cheering constantly because they forgot for a second that they were in fact inside a theatre and not saving the world along with Batman or Spiderman or whoever.

The script I was trying to capture (without revealing too much) in the first panel was "The Hunger Games". There were these men sitting behind us who simply had to repeat every single thing that was happening on screen. It didn't make any sense as to why one would have to describe something to someone who was there too. That's when it hit me - this has to be the only feasible explanation. If not: my dear fellow countrymen, please try not to be so irritating in public.

Again, if any of you (who really are challenged in these functions) are offended by this, I am sorry. But the shark still doesn't care. It thinks you ought to stay home and watch a movie and have all the loud conversations you want.

ps - my last two strips were digitally done entirely! yay!

And the #1 cause for over-population is...

There are some "auspicious" months in a year when most households get flooded with wedding invites. People bring them with an odd sort of apologetic smugness with the compulsive need to ask us when it's our turn. And every time we get a new invite, my mother sighs because she probably feels that we're like some sort of rebels or freaks of society refusing to pay wedding dues or something, wondering when the revolution will end so that we too can shove these cards in people's faces. 

I, on the other hand, look at the sheer quantity of them and think "If there's ever a society in the world that probably needs to NOT get married and procreate, it's this one". 

Everyone seems almost confounded to see a zillion people at the cinema, malls, parks, beaches but they still continue to play out the above dialogues regularly in their lives!  [okay, so I may have exaggerated a teensy bit on the above scenarios]. 

I'm sorry if this offends anyone (I don't think The Shark cares though).