Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

This holiday season my roommates and I decided to do a Yankee Swap in order to keep holiday gift costs in the realm of the reasonable. There are five of us, after all. The Tall One, rebel that he is, decided to buck the system (no one bucks a system like he does) and got me a separate birthday present. I am all for the bucking of systems, especially when the bucking nets me gifts. The Tall One got me a Penny-Arcade Print. Which one? That one about the parasitic alien life-form that I enjoyed so much.

The Prints system is about as easy to use as iTunes. See a comic, press a button, buy a print. Couldn’t be simpler. Prints are usually 17×11 inches of high-quality, thick paper, and since almost all the prints are created from their high-resolution source files, print quality is quite good. It’s not museum quality, mind you, but they look great from any reasonable distance, particularly when framed.

Ah yes, framing. It’s surprisingly hard to find a 17×11 frame. I tried convenience stores, Bed, Bath, and, indeed, Beyond, and the local Blick art supply store. None of these stores had an appropriately sized frame. The unshaven art student at Blick suggested that I assemble my own frame and then cut my own glass, which would have cost me the kind of money that makes me glad I didn’t actually go through with it and become a real graphic designer. Ultimately I had to fall back on online vendors, who, despite my fears, proved surprisingly efficient and trustworthy. The frame was packed in an indestructible variant of bubble wrap. Try as I might, the bubbles would not pop, and let’s be honest, that’s like canceling Christmas. But I digress.

To my surprise, the print didn’t fit in the frame. Double-checking the Penny-Arcade store shows the print in question listed as 11×17, and the insert of the frame also proclaims itself to be 11×17. Yet the two don’t fit together. I must be dreaming. Any minute now Jon Stewart will enter my apartment, except he’ll be made of glitter and talk in George Burns’s voice.

By applying ruler to paper (Watch out! Science!), I was able to determine that the print is actually on a 12×18 sheet. Luckily, the print itself takes up just 11×17 inches, with a bit of room to spare. So, ruler, pencil, ruler, pencil, ruler, scissors, ruler, help from friend, decisive cutting motions, and it now fits in the frame. And it looks really good.

So, a word to the wise: Penny-Arcade Prints are a good buy, but watch out for that paper size.