NAMASTE
Welcome to the dojo.
Leave your shoes and limits at the door.
This is a space for champion dreams.
Those are the ingredients to pull the rusty nail out of the world’s paw. They are the SOULution™ to aide in our prison break. That’s not a typo. It’s a gift.
Scoreboards and calendars have ends. What you’re looking for doesn’t. You can feel it hiding in the tall grass waiting to get on a microphone and pounce into a sea of love and adoration. But it’s wild and unaligned like a square active volcano squeezed into a round match head.
It needs to be coached through the jungle of noise with a gloriously designed strategy. The message needs to persist even when it’s nose is smashed in or is tasting dirt.
The possibility remains. The calmest part of the storm is the middle. The eye.
Zero.
That’s the mission.
Training starts yesterday.
We get to do this.
SHOW
EYE CANDY*:
Analog and digital. I like it to feel like a bit of both and dress it like gorgeous cyborg armor. Behind the screen and under all the wires there’s a soul hammering away, punching up through the quicksand. Every opinion and statement can be copied and pasted from someone dead or we can dare to say something that vibrates off our heart. The echoes of inner truth tastes better than reindeer games but it’s not on sale. It takes time to recognize that weirdness is innovation and leaders cut the path first. We want our rivals to second and third guess their life choices when they see us and everyone else to smile knowing that we arrived.
*candy is prohibited in the dojo
TELL
THOUGHT BALLISTICS:
This garden armory is where we grow and launch seductive ideas in the 4th dimension. We will be using sound and with movement to alter consciousness. Time is a mysterious choice and can be a powerful intoxicant. If you get sick or dizzy there’s a puke bucket in the corner.
Hit play.
SPARTAN BUDDHA
YOUR FAVORITE WEBCOMIC:
Superhero stories are an excuse for people with extraordinary powers to punch each other while destroying public property. Spartan Buddha is an excuse I created to exercise cartooning powers and engage in philosophical warfare against metaphysical properties. The type of protagonist I wanted to see was one that thought for himself. But you got to have spice. So let’s make those thoughts into monsters. AND… we gotta have fist fights.
DOWN WITH MONSTERS
LITERARY NUTRITION:
There’s facts then there’s nightmares. We probably exist somewhere in between.
We tell ourselves all sorts of stories. This is the story of our stories through the lens of the fighting philosopher Spartan Buddha.
Call it a manifesto or a war cry. It’s just another fairytale.
ROBOTS FIGHT DIRTY
EXECUTE SCRIPT:
To be self aware is to know that you exist but what if being slammed on your circuit board repeatedly makes you aware of the errors in your own programming?
The only rules robots follow are the ones they’re programmed to. Even if that means being a neurotic, violent man-bot that recounts their life using the syllable structure of haikus.
We’re all capable of atoning for the pain and suffering we’ve caused if we’re capable of caring. We’re all capable of time travelling to correct those mistakes if we could afford the vacation days.
M O V E
INSTRUCTIONS:
You have a beating heart. Do what you can. Make mistakes. Take a break before you break. Be kind to yourself. Empty yourself. Remember to breath. Keep your lawyers away from me.
INGREDIENTS:
My knee felt like it was going to slide out of the socket. Lifting weights wasn’t enough. I submitted to the mat to get it back in line. I continued when it pushed my mind over a wall and cracked it open. There’s the gymnastics that sells the pants and branded t-shirts but there’s seven other limbs to that spiritual obsession. Limbs to grab items hidden on the shelves of life’s mysteries. To open the jar of who this God fellow is that everyone is talking about. To pretend you’re blissfully chill when you’re one traffic jam from raging in a McDonald’s.
PROTIP:
Fast food won’t increase your run time.
KN0W
POP QUIZ:
How hard do zen explosions play?
ZEPH is a biblical name I was assigned. ZERO came from a joke and stuck. Then I reversed engineered it to give it meaning. If you believe that’s how time works.
I’ve been making comics since I was a kid. I’ll probably do it in some form until I go blind or die. Crayons, kung-fu movies and comicbooks were my childhood tools. I collected eastern philosophy and western esoteric thoughts as I grew older. What I consider fun now is seeing how far my body and thinking can go. Let’s call it cultivating fighting spirit ≠ masochism.
ANDDDD let’s talk about that grinning dragon. No not me. The one with the lightning eyes and laser focused mind breathing a star. You’ll see it embroidered on the back of your uniform and waving on our flag when we march into battle. It didn’t devour you on your way up this mountain so it must like you, for some reason. Remember that.