I know a surly Swedish American who gets the real dope on anyone thinking about smoking dope on the job at your workplace or running off with the silverware. Seriously, my father-in-law runs a background screening company and he wants your business. Tell him you heard about him on a webcomic and he'll have no idea what you're talking about:
Fast background checks
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Hey, folks, I’m taking a respite from OAF this month. Three reasons: First, I’ll be adventuring in Iceland the first ten days of August and I don’t have an archive of toons built up to run the site on auto-pilot. Second, I need to take a little time when I get back to upgrade Word Press and make some site improvements to restore my missing navbar and help prevent the meltdown that happened a week ago from happening again. And third, I just need a break! I need to reflect on the toon a bit, figure out where it’s going, and decide what I want to do next. Send me some email if you want to weigh in on this subject. My apologies to those of you who depend on their twice-weekly Odin fix to make it through the week without going ballistic with a battle axe. In the meantime, please check out the archives or hit the random button on the right to find something you might have overlooked. OAF is pushing 300 comics now!
See you in September!
- Vato
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Move over Warcraft and Left for Dead and Space Invaders and whatever else people are playing nowadays… Odin and Friends now has its own video game! Dragon Balls! was created by my wife in Scratch and given to me as a birthday present and I’m happy to share it with you finally. The is my wife’s first game (possibly her last, haha) so please don’t give her a hard time for leaving out the VR component this time around. Have fun and look out for Technoviking, he’s a real bitch to hit with a lightning bolt!
I screwed up the naming convention on Thursday’s comic… confused 2001 with 2011 (I get accused of living in the past sometimes, imagine that). But the comic is up now!
Did the Norse Gods Destroy a Statue of Jesus in Ohio?
News of this event was sent to me by a reader (thanks!) who figured maybe Odin blew Jesus away. But even though Odin tosses lightning bolts on a regular basis in the pages of this comic, I wouldn’t point the finger at him for this kind of thing. Blowing away statues of other deities seems a bit petty for Father of Thor. Loki on the other hand… definitely a suspect!
Of course, maybe Jesus himself blew the statue away. After all, isn’t there something in the Bible about not making “unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth — especially really cheesy ones”?
And then there is another theory, quite controversial and certainly ludicrous, but presented here solely for your amusement. Maybe, just maybe, liquid and ice particles above the freezing level collided and built up a large electrical field in the clouds. Positive and negative charges separated, resulting in a negatively charged cloud in the atmosphere and a positively charged Earth surface below. Soon, a giant “spark” occurred between the positive and negative fields, reducing the charge separation. The spark in this case occurred right between the outstretched hands of the touchdown Jesus. At this point, a mighty clap of thunder shook the land, a flash of lightning cut across the sky, the Jesus statue became hotter than the surface of the sun, and all that carefully wrought metal-and-plastic burned to the ground.
Nah, that’s preposterous…
Either Jesus blew himself away to protest his tacky portrait or Loki did it as a practical joke. Apparently the statue was made in Florida, probably by the same crew that paints faces on coconuts to sell to tourists. I say Jesus did it.
Stone Age Tools in Viking Graves Raise More Questions than Answers
We got some interesting news this week from the folks who get their kicks digging around Viking graves (archaeologists, *sigh*).
Just as today one might be buried with an antique Viking sword for good luck, back in the Days of High Adventure and Not Infrequent Death, Vikings were buried with stone age weapons that they considered special. Namely, flint axes and hammers, which may have been symbols of Thor.
Of course, what scientists are failing to say is exactly who wielded these tools and for what purpose they were welt before the Vikings acquired them. Simply calling the tool “an axe” is not enough, for as we Viking aficionados know, there is more than one purpose for such a device, from chopping firewood to settling a blood feud.
Were these tools used as weapons by badass proto-Vikings against Jotuns? Or did cannibalistic lizard people employ them to crack the skulls of dinosaurs? And who actually made the stones? Blabbering neanderthals or clever dwarves working deep underground?
Truly, the necrophiles have a bit more digging to do before making such bold pronouncements in a trussed up boob rag like National Geographic. But I guess nowadays you take what you can get, and it’s always cool to learn something new about the Vikings from a source other than Odin and Friends.
Odin and Friends turned 150 a month ago and I forgot to roll out the mead barrels to celebrate. That’s 150 episodes of floating head madness. It’s been a crazy few months so I’m pleased — almost surprised — that I manged to maintain my schedule while moving, traveling, building two websites, writing a novel, and preparing to move again (overseas, no less). Thanks to everyone who has been getting their Viking fix by following the modern day adventures of the Norse gods, including you chubby chasers who only come here for the sexy giantess jokes.
Some highlights from the last 50 episodes:
- Technoviking becomes the Norse God of Dance thanks to apotheosis by YouTube.
- Thor and Mjolnir make sure the clouds of Migard stay in in good and working order. Important lesson in meteorology: don’t hook up clouds on a single circuit.
That’s right… Odin and Friends is 50 comics old today.
I’m also proud to say that in the two months since it’s inception, Odin and Friends has risen from complete obscurity to become the web’s premiere destination for comics featuring floating Viking god heads.
I spent a good part of the afternoon yesterday working on a couple of new “god heads” to help round out the pantheon, and I’m pretty excited by the results. Here’s a sneak peak at Sif, who will make her debut in the comic sometime in the next few weeks.
For those not up on their Norse mythology, Sif is Thor’s wife, and she’s known for her beauty and fantastic mane of golden hair. Working from mythological sources is great, because virtually every god or goddess is known for some well-defined attribute that can be cartoonized to the fullest.
I’m still working out how she is going to figure into the universe of Odin and Friends, but her hair is going to play an important role. Not a whole lot is known about her from the old myths, other than she has awesome hair and giants lust after her the same way they do Freyja. The proto-comics I’ve constructed so far involve Sif dealing with Thor and his strange attraction to giant women.
We got some interesting news this week from the folks who get their kicks digging around Viking graves (archaeologists, *sigh*).
