About
My name is Kelly Turnbull, but the internet calls me Coelasquid. The old tongue-in-cheek about page I wrote for this comic a million years ago when it was in it’s infancy and I wasn’t expecting anyone but my pals to read it keeps confusing strangers who come to this page looking for some kind of information about me, so the sincere answer is it’s a comic about dudes who are too macho to function in society getting support from a chill supersoldier who just wants to work a desk job and raise his kids.
Sometime this is a comic about macho action heroes from various vidja games and the like. Sometimes this is a slice of life comic about a time traveling Navy SEAL single dad from the nonspecific spacefuture. Mostly it’s just about things that are presented as MEGA TOPS SUPER BADASS that are actually kinda goofy in practice. Really, it just depends on how things were going that day.
THINGS PEOPLE LIKE TO ASK ABOUT:
What game is that red goggles guy from?
In addition to being a personification of our broken router of the same name and the punchline to a joke about drawing furries who are just hairy men, “Commander Badass” was a joke character I drew up to troll an OCT with, who was abandoned for several months when I realized that trolling OCTs is the biggest waste of time and effort anyone can possibly expel. He’s just an amalgamation of all the manly action hero stereotypes I could think of. He started out as an over-the-top chest-pounding macho man, but he got a complete personality overhaul when I resurrected the character for the Escapist contest that this comic was originally put together for.
Do you think the Commander would sound like Patrick Warburton?
No. Honestly, when I write him in my head he sounds like something halfway between The Maxx and Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice. Antfish did a pretty good job with him. Think gravelly, like Clancy Brown or a spacemarine Tom Waits.
Is the Commander your lame self insert mouthpiece Gary Stu?
He’s just the straight-man bridge between the hyper macho characters and the normal people. I wanted the median type character to be original because while it’s fun to parody games and comics and stuff, using an existing property as the main character in a comic doesn’t sit well with me. Plus, you’re expecting your whole audience to be familiar with that one specific game for them to get your jokes.
If game and movie characters are real how do they still have games and movies?
Roger Rabbit Toon Town Rules.
Does Vorked Write this comic?
No, and I’m not sure why people seem to think that. I write and draw the comic, Vorked keeps the site running because I am completely useless when it comes to anything remotely techy.
Why does Jared look so much like me/my friend?
Jared is the end result of a complicated mathematical equation designed to compute the most completely average teenage boy ever.
Are you really a girl?
Why does it matter?
Why don’t you update more than once a week?
Because I’m a professional animator and I just do this comic in my free time because people seem to enjoy it and I don’t want to let you guys down.
Why does the comic look ugly this week?
Because my real job always comes first, and sometimes that just means putting in 15 hours a day and staying on weekends, there isn’t always a whole lot of time to do a fancy full colour, shaded comic with backgrounds.
Do you do commissions?
Not at the moment, trying to find time to do more art right now is like squeezing blood from a stone.
Can I make icons out of your comic?
For sure. And if you want a certain face but there are words in the way, feel free to drop me a line and I can send you the panel without bubbles over it.
Will you draw a comic about *INSERT CHARACTER HERE*?
Please don’t ask me to draw characters unless you have a REALLY FREAKING FUNNY idea for them. Every time I get a request like “USE -*-MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER-*-” with nothing to work with other than “He’s really manly!” I am just that much less inclined to draw that character. I don’t just do comics about characters because they’re “oh so manly”, I do them because the characters are so absurd they’re ripe to make fun of.
Can I repost your comics?
People were being sticklers about this, so here you go. You can repost them, you can tinker with them, but you can’t make money off of them, you have to let people know I created them and you have to share them under the same terms that I do.
Manly Guys Doing Manly Things by Kelly Turnbull is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Where can I got to ask you more things I’m curious about?
You can either email me at coelasquid@gmail.com or catch me on Formspring or Twitter.