A few things – there was a shooting at a high school in Kentucky the day before I finished drawing this. “The 11th at a school in 23 days” according to the press. There was no tweet from the President or the guy running his twitter account about the shooting. He instead mocked the Democrats and also pushed theories about FBI agents conspiring against him. His press secretary did the thoughts & prayers thing but none of those goofballs have at any point actually said anything that represented the views of the president, and we know this because he contradicts them days if not hours later. Point is, I was worried about being insensitive, but the subject matter is insensitive. Or purposely cruel when he lashes out for minor things even beneath politics as usual.

Another bit is the punchline: “but her emails” was an easy one, and the first thing that came to mind. I’ll probably follow this strip up with “he drained the workplace swamp” or “at least he told it like it is” captions. Snappy Punchlines To Stupid Strips!

Then there’s the shading. I got a little ambitious. I sometimes use two gray shades but there a was a silver one I used for the gun. I didn’t adjust the contrast nearly as high as I usually do when I edit out the noise (pencil lines, line errors, little smudges the scanner picks up) but the silver still showed up as a harsh gray. Like…rusty lead. (I use a non-photo blue pencil but it still shows up on the scanner. Easy enough for me to filter out.)

Final note of this strip: This is the 100th Mort Inkingbot strip, according to the file number I assign these strips as I do them (not including the Conflicticons strips). I’ve shared them all on this site but some were removed when I changed the format. 39 of them are in the first Robots With Coffee comic book. Not the biggest milestone since this started off as a parody. Some of the parody strips I started with as Mort were ‘renamed’ in the file once I figured who Mort was and wanted to switch from those parodies to doing original gags that had nothing to do with a certain toyline of shapeshifting robots. Since those strips didn’t directly reference that property, I decided to use them as the start of Mort’s…Earth career, where he keeps cranking out bad puns to a decreasing number of newspapers while trying to merchandise Johnsontron and anything else that will stick to the wall.

It’s a little less popular than doing fanart, which I still like doing (Megatron & Trailcutter 4ever!). This is just more fun, and I get to occasionally explore Mort as a character. I also quickly developed actual reoccurring characters. It’s a fun challenge to keep coming up with more dopey robots, and I have a Coloring Book due out this year. I also decided to do another shift in subject matter, focusing on Trumpbot and the extremely ill-tempered nutjobs that surround him and the political party that keeps looking the other way to push their agenda despite the fact that he is an ideological and moral opposite of what they say they stand for. So much for the Big Tent, right? I doubt the reach is far and I am sure it will shrink by people turned off on political “jokes,” but I feel like I didn’t do or say enough during the election. Maybe I should have been shouting into the wind more. Maybe louder. There will be a collection of those strips sometime this year, maybe.

Anyway, so far I made 100 comic strips about grumpy robots doing their terrible jobs terribly, with an unqualified idiot who had everything he wanted and was given the last thing he needed. Plus, pics of coffee and robot action figures. It’s only 100 tiny gags, but there was just going to be ONE tiny gag, “Inkingbot.” So, thanks for the support. I’m hoping to make a bazillion more.