Avoiding Burnout and About ME!

Not burnout as in spinning the tires, but as in abandoning a blog.

This is my third attempt and second resurrection of NASCAR Comix. The first two times I burned out after 15-20 comics.

I hope I learned my lesson.

In particular, when happened in the previous incarnations is that I put out comics as soon as I thought them up. Doing that made me run out of ideas quickly.

This time I will force myself to put comics out slowly. (It feels so good to have the next one sketched out already!) I'm am not even going to tell myself: it has to be at least one per week--but that will be my unwritten (except I just wrote it) goal. Maybe I'll post the occasional text blog in between. Not sure about that--then are many great NASCAR bloggers, so my niche, such as it is, will always be the comics.

About Me

Here is a mini-bio. I am nuclear physicist. I do research here and I am a physics professor here. As a physicist I'm a bit embarrassed that I don't do something academic like "the physics of NASCAR," but she has that covered.

I live in Virgina, but grew up in Pittsburgh, so I am still hurting over the %^$%$!! Superbowl. Especially the next day, at the gym, when a row of eight TVs in front of the treadmill was looping Superbowl lowlights.

I have a fantastic wife and two great sons. One son is autistic. You can see (and hear) him play the piano here.

About the Comics

I am still a relatively new NASCAR fan--I started getting interested in 2003. I'm sure, like me, you get asked: "why do you like watchin' cars goin' round and round?" I probably give the same answer you do: 1) If you invest some time and learn the details you see there is a lot more to it, 2) The readily identifiable bigger-than-life personalities, and 3) The inevitable titanic clashes of those personalities.

So the comics try to take those personalities and exaggerate them (not always easy to do!), while blending in pop culture and sometimes biblical references. Some personalities I don't know--so I just made them up. I portray Brian France as a kind good hearted but simple-minded Mr. McGoo figure, with Mike Helton having no choice but to pay lip-service to his lunatic ideas while trying to hold the ship together. (And in doing so he has sold his soul--a recurring theme wherein Helton interacts with a impish devil out to destroy NASCAR by making it boring.)

Another device I use is the the silhouettes from Mystery Science Theater. That's the wise-cracking guy and robot in the foreground of many of the comics. I figured even if you didn't know Mystery Science Theater you'd still grasp that these two are used to inject commentary and pop-culture references.

I like to imagine people asking me what my favorite comic was. I don't think I have one, but I have favorite jokes within comics, and my favorite is either at the end of this one, where Zippy the Pinhead announces that he is proud, as part of NASCAR's diversity program, to be NASCAR's first Pinhead driver--and someone from in front of the fourth wall says: "Ha, ha! That's a good one!" (I should have had the shout-out read: "First pinhead! Ha! Yeah, that's a good one!) Another one that still makes me chuckle is the first entry in the fake Jayski page on this one. This is way back at the beginning when, new to NASCAR, I first noticed that Mikey could (and would) under any circumstances, rattle off a list of sponsors better than anyone. I once saw him say, crawling out of his car after a DNF, "I don't know, something failed in the engine" then, without skipping a beat, "it wasn't a NAPA part!". He's the master. So I imagined what would happen if he won a race in an unsponsored car...

I mention these because blogging comics has something in common with text blogging. As a general rule what you think is great, nobody comments on. While the most comments are delivered to what you think is mediocre. You can't let it bug you it--it is what it is.