Box of Art and Crimes

Note that you cannot name dogs when this party member isn't in your party (or when... she doesn't feel up to it, to put it in a spoiler-free way) and that once a dog is named its speech bubble will have its name in it. There are 30 dogs in total. Some are missable. The walkthrough has to include the note:

As some of you might recall from this essay, I spent the latter half of 2025 working on a comic for the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Tania Sammons, a curator at the museum who had previously licensed my guide to sailors’ tattoos for a show, wrote to me with an irresistible pitch: four cartoonists would be hired, assigned a vessel from the museum's extensive collection of models, then given six months to produce a short comic for publication in an anthology alongside an accompanying museum display.

How could I say no?

My original brief was to research the Anne, the ship that brought the first colonists to Georgia, but in the aftermath of my dad's death the story took off in directions I couldn't have foreseen.

I'm releasing the whole comic online to coincide with the opening of Drawn to the Sea, the exhibition in Savannah. If you're in the area this week (or anytime over the next nine months!) you can stop in and see all the amazing work that came from myself and fellow artists Avery Hick, Rich King, and Sharon Norwood. Details about the museum show are here.

In the meantime, here's a very personal comic.

Content Warning: this piece deals with suicide and parental mortality. Readers with trypophobia may want to skip pages 14 and 15.

SOLD - 550 Bored Apes to this enterprising young idiot

Me: I'm a trekkie

Elli: well yeah me too

Me: No, there's no nuance, you have to choose one.

Elli: Well in that case yeah, I would say my dad is probably a star wars guy... and for me, I am also a star wars guy, like my father before me

Me: captain america at the table understanding that reference

Elli:

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.