Doc Absurd, occasionally known as Timothy J Tobolski, was born a long time ago in the unmemorable city of Buffalo, New York, early in the morning and in the midst of a snowstorm. Not that this explains anything, except maybe for his necessity for long nights and snowcones. . .and a bizarre penchant for bison. He was, however, dropped on his head once in his childhood, which does explain quite a bit.
He took to drawing at a very young age, filling coloring book after coloring book with alarming speed. Shortly after, he discovered that crayons drew just as well on walls as in coloring books; that was about the time his parents got him his first pad of blank paper and a spray bottle of cleanser.
He grew up on an unhealthy concentration of Hanna-Barbera, Looney Tunes and Disney animated cartoons. When other kids wanted to be firemen, police officers and infamous felons, he knew he would grow up to be a cartoonist. This statement was often confused with him wanting to be just a cartoon, which explains his need for sound and laugh tracks throughout his life.
He started his professional career with the black-and-white boom of the mid 80's, working on his own book and contributing and assisting with an anthology for Blackthorne Publishing. He moved to Orlando, Florida in 1989 (where it turned out the Sunshine State was lit by the fires of Hell), and five years later managed to land a job with Bart Sears' Studio back in Syracuse, New York. As this proved too much of a daily commute, he relocated back to his home state. When the studio closed down nine months later, he hung around Syracuse for a bit, eventually meeting his future wife and re-re-locating back to Buffalo. Which explains his abnormal twitching at the sight of U-Haul vans.
After a few false starts with a few publishers of questionable repute, and two children that have since taken over his legacy of crayon wall-drawings, he is planning to re-launch his career within the small press community, where he hopes to expose the world to his own creations.
Which explains his need for keeping a lawyer on retainer.
I think DOC_A will bring some new and interesting perspective to our gallery and please check him out and his thoughts at the SPA forum, which a link to which is on the HISTORY SECTION. D_A will be sending me new work every week so please come back and enjoy and comment on the IF forum!! But for now enjoy the art below.
Here's my first update sketch. He's called Smitty, and he's the bartender at a place called Event Horizon, just inside the BlackHole Bordello. He'll be appearing in my first book, as a matter of fact. It's just a quickie, done with marker and Rapidiographs; I'm experimenting a bit to check results and speed. Half hour to fully ink, and that's including one attempt that didn't work.
You're now looking at the finalized version of Doc Absurd, complete with his sidekick, Kharma the Cockroach. I decided late last year to give of some sort of companion; I got stuck when deciding on what. I needed something that could withstand the rigors of time (particularly helpful, considering that Doc is himself a time traveler), as well as the rigors of Doc's acerbic wit. Ugly enough, a documentary was showing on Discovery, and cockroaches were featured. Bless serendipity. Kharma's shtick is that, no matter how many times he gets killed, he continues to return to life as a -- wait for it -- cockroach. And he gets squished regularly.
Please, don't anyone say how much they love this guy. He's a villain, plain and simple; heck, he doesn't even have a name, if that's any indication of how generic he's supposed to be. And he was specifically designed to get the living crap pummeled out of him by a quartet of fuzzy animals. He's a would-be conqueror, who lands on a rather. . .peculiar outpost. The story will be my first webcomic; the fronstpiece will be coming soon, and more details about the comic itself will follow in the next month.
