"Weikko Wirtanen"

I'm sitting at the computer right now...Of course I'm sitting at the computer. If I happened to be sitting anywhere else but the computer, how would I ever manage to be compiling this new post? Ahhh...Anyway, to begin with, I just wanted to say that I've checked my e-mail a total of sixteen times so far today alone, and as always, my Inbox was deviod of anything other than spam. And the spam wasn't even that interesting kind of spam, which I occassionally recieve. There was a short offer from Hanna Andersson, talking about some kind of sale on last season's clothing, and one of those "Do Not Reply" messages that was sent to let me know that the reasonably cheap ash-gray hoodie I ordered from www.fat-pie.com, portraying a rather ghastly portrait of the cartoon character called Salad Fingers, was well on its way to my place in Asheville. I was happy to hear that.

I just finished inking in a few little pieces of the sixth Weikko Wirtanen comic Janne and I have made together. We're going to try to get the series published, I guess. I certainly hope that they do get published, anyway. That would be just ever so awesome. The Weikko Wirtanen comics have been our very first collaboration, and Janne and I are quite proud of them. I really think that they look pretty nice. They've been done entirely in black and white, since black and white comic stips are generally easier to sell, and we've used a lot more of the black ink, especially, in our aim to inbue each animated panel with stark, three-dimentional effects done to the very best of our ability. Janne and I have decided to portray our dear Weikko Wirtanen predominately as an extremely shy, withdrawn and reed-thin person with thick, unbecoming spectacles and a large floppy winter hat. Weikko Wirtanen's facial features are an andrologenous mix of boy-girl looks, and indeed, we created him intending for him to be seen as a fourteen-year-old homosexual boy, though throughout this first series of comics in which Weikko is the main character, Janne and I have made it a point for Weikko to never go out and actually say this about himself. We've planned the various monochrome comic strips featuring Weikko Wirtanen in such a way that the true sexuality (or true sex, for that matter) of the main character is never known for sure, and at the most, only lightly explored. Weikko Wirtanen, as a comic strip character, is modeled more or less after a funny alternate personality of the opposite sex I purposely delved into back sometime around Juhannus, when I was very drunk and running my mouth to a girl who was partly the inspiration for Eva-Lisa, another one of Janne's most beloved animated characters. The kind of conversation I wound up having with the girl at Juhannus consequently became the basis for the first six-panelled comic strip that ever featured drawings of Weikko Wirtanen and Eva-Lisa sitting together in a dreary, unidentified coffeehouse possibly located somewhere in the Helsinki-Vantaa area.