Monthly Archives: January 2016

Success

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I’m literally standing right behind you.

Criticism I can handle. Handling criticism is one of the skills they teach you in Iowa-style writing workshops, of which I have participated in 10. Criticism isn’t personal. Good criticism is useful. It helps you learn how to improve. Unlike insults, which are not useful. But even insults I can handle, having become inured to verbal abuse during my traumatic childhood.

Whether total strangers love me or think I’m a moronic talentless hack, I can still console myself with the fact that I am producing original content 5 days a week. Are they doing that? There is a line in the Tom Robbins book Skinny Legs and All where the main character, an artist displaying her canvas, is told, “My 5-year-old could do that.”

“But he didn’t,” the artist says. “I did.”

It’s like the band Nickelback. They’re hugely successful, and yet so many musicians despise them as talentless hacks, writing heroic couplets and playing 3 chords. But love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Nickelback created something. They created heavy metal music that could be played on the soft rock station. They created it and you didn’t, so try not to be too jealous that you didn’t figure that one out first, because if you had, you’d be the big rock stars, live in hilltop houses, driving 15 cars.

I’m just saying, make it useful criticism.

Anyway, 1 a.m. again. But I made something.

Wicked

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Don’t be shocked. You know babies are so tasty you could just eat them up. 

After writing yesterday’s comic, I flashed back to this flash fiction I wrote a couple years ago.It took a while to figure out how to compress 8 sentences into 4 sentences and 2 pictures, but judicious editing is another one of my talents.

I do love my fairy tales. Classic tropes and all. So much fun to deconstruct.

I don’t know that being a stepparent is as fraught as people make it out to be. Before I met The Man I dated a couple guys with kids and they all liked me very well. Most kids like me. Obviously, I have a very good relationship with my stepchildren or I wouldn’t be joking about eating them, which I also do to their faces, sometimes. It probably helps that they’re very well-behaved, but I think it’s just like any relationship. If you go into things with generosity and empathy and an open heart, you can go pretty far, and if the other person comes into it with the same qualities, you can’t fail.

At any rate, they’re too old to eat now, all adolescent and full of artificial colors and flavors. They’re more interesting as human beings, but they’re probably less sweet.

The candy house and gingerbread kids were super fun to draw. I could easily spend another 90 minutes making them look even tastier, but it’s late and today was kind of rough, physically, so I’m hoping to be asleep in less than that.

 

Dragon Comics 125

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No children were bitten in the making of this comic. 

One day, one of the kids is going to read this. It’s a joke! We mean you no ill will! Ha ha. Kids are hilarious. And they taste like chicken. Joking! Ha ha! Modest proposals aside, there’s a flash fiction I wrote a couple years back on a related subject, which I think I figured out how to turn into a 1 or 2 panel comic. That will be for tomorrow, since it took me until 11 p.m. to even have an idea. And then, of course, I had 2.

Anyway, cannibalism is always hilarious. It was the topic of my senior thesis in college. Chew on that. Or don’t. I’m not sure why that subject sang to me, but it didn’t sing that loudly. I just had to pick something to graduate, and the truth was that I was graduating in the wrong major, and had therefore come to the end of my undergraduate education with very little interest in the field they wanted me to write about, which was psychology.

The topic my advisor had originally suggested I do was “a cultural history of LSD.” No joke. I went to a rather unusual school. I didn’t take her suggestion because it seemed like a really exhaustive subject, to which I felt unqualified to do justice. I wasn’t interested in doing that much work. Not that kind of work. I read a minimal number of books about cannibalism in different forms and struggled to bang out 30 pages at the end of a semester in which I didn’t even take any other classes.

Compared to my master’s thesis, which I worked on throughout my entire 3 years in grad school, and was 600 pages.

Neither of them were great works, but the cannibalism thing was embarrassingly bad. Unfocused and produced almost entirely without guidance. My MFA project was flawed, but full of good pieces too. Mostly because my heart was in it. I feel like I have to throw my heart like that into everything, but I don’t always succeed. Still, my track record improves.

His Song Went on Forever

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I’m not that deep. I’ll never be that deep. But I can see into the depths. 

I don’t usually do stuff like this, not being one for idols, but David Bowie was such an phenomenal creative spirit that it’s hard to imagine the hearing, seeing human being who wouldn’t be inspired by his work. He was a true artist in every sense of the word, a man who wrote what still stands, in my mind, as one of the greatest commentaries ever created on love, aliens, and rock and roll (let alone one of the greatest albums of all time) when he was 24 year old, and then, rather of resting on his laurels, invented himself again and again, for every album, for every movie role.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars played in the background as I drew this comic, and while I’ve listened to this album start to finish literally hundreds of times in my life, I kept hearing new ideas, new notes. It kept offering new inspiration.

I can’t even talk about “Lazarus” right now.

If you notice that I have chosen the silhouette of Jareth, the Goblin King to represent the dozens of faces that Bowie wore in his career, it is because I am 9 years old, and because when we fall in love, we always remember the moment, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love The Hunger or The Man Who Fell to Earth, brutal and adult as both those films were.  

This is sort of what I feel about any really great artist finishing their work here: it’s sad they had to go when they did, but it’s wonderful that they got to stay as long as they could. The world is a better place for the existence of people like David Bowie and Robin Williams, and I’m a better artist for having walked in their light.

Dotty Mandala and Macrophotography

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It’s a bit spotty, isn’t it?

That was another breakneck weekend. And now it’s over.

This mandala is stark and cold, like the snow icing the mountains, making the desert look like Denver. It being somewhat threadbare, here is some macrophotography to fill in any gaps the white space may have left in your visual pleasure receptors.

Humans have visual pleasure receptors, right? Feast your eyes on this:

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What else are you missing?

This is the bud of an aloe flower. Tiny and pretty!

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Twisty!

This is a detail of a small garden sculpture my mother bought me at a street fair. It happens to be the curly hair of a little fairy, a very specific fairy, in fact: the first year dance fairy. You can tell by how she holds her feet. It’s a long story. But a small detail.

There ya go. Happy Monday.

Making Mistakes: A New Year’s Bulletin Board

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It’s not perfect, but I learn as I go.

For the first bulletin board of 2016, I knew there would be flowers. The quote came afterward. Monday, I went in just to get the background up, and it took all of Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon to finish the project.

Originally I planned to make an assortment of very different 3-dimensional flowers, but I started with the big one, and it ended up taking me almost 3 hours and it didn’t even look exactly how I wanted it (it would be better with twice as many petals) so I ended up experimenting with another method of getting a (smaller) flower with many petals and some dimensionality, and then, at the very end, I threw on a bunch of simpler (but still complicated) really small ones in the same color scheme.

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You can really see the dimensionality.

For the quote I was thinking of Anaïs Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” But then it seemed like Nin could possibly be a little racy for an elementary school if some impressionable young person decided to look her up. Or if some grownup decided she was inappropriate. It’s really an outside possibility but people can be pretty touchy about literature, and she’s strongly associated with erotica, so I decided to err on the side of caution and go with Gaiman. We have 2 of his books in the library: Coraline and The Graveyard Book. I edited the quote just a bit for length. It’s still so long that there was no  time to cut out the letters.

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You can tell where my hand got tired at the end. 

Compatibility

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We just come from such different backgrounds. We belong in such different worlds. And we’re just made of such different materials.

And this concludes our inadvertent shark week triumvirate. I think. I can’t promise no more shark comics, but I don’t intend to make any more. I didn’t intend to make this many, though. Shark comics just happened. You know how it is. Someone gives you an idea about sharks, which makes you think about sharks, so then you make a polymer clay shark, meaning you have to create some kind of polymer clay shark themed art even though you’ve already done some digital shark art, after which then you remember that you also have a Lego shark, and wouldn’t it be funny if the two sharks met, and what would they say to each other, keeping in mind that the last time we saw our little polymer clay shark, he was pumping himself up and thinking about mating.

I never had Legos as a kid; my parents rejected any toy that inspired us to keep asking for more of the same toy, and obviously, you can never have enough Legos. To wit: I received the shark as a gift from a guy I dated in college, who had 20,000 of them. That’s not hyperbole. He counted them. And he brought them to college in a foot locker. Periodically he would let other people play with them, but mostly he just built increasingly elaborate castles in the dorm room we shared, none of which were ever finished because he always ran out of Legos. He was good though. He could have been one of those professional Lego artists.

Since he had multiples, the Lego shark lived in our fish tank for a year or so. When we got rid of the fish I cleaned the calcium off it and it was good as new, but I never had any other Legos to stick it on until last month, when The Man received the Google Fi holiday package, which contained a quantity of Legos and instructions for using them to build a shrine to your cell phone.

They were calling it a “phone holder,” but we built it, and I promise you it was a shrine. An altar. A monstrance, if you will.

The other side of the page offers instructions for building a “cable tidy.” We did not build the cable tidy. We may worship our phones, but I promise you, we never organize our cables.

Shark Affirmations

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I may have no idea what I look like, but I promise you I *smell* amazing.

It’s not that I have any particular affinity for or interest in sharks, beyond a general interest in nature and marine creatures. It’s just that Monday, while thinking about puns for Tuesday’s Sharkcuterie comic, the Girl asked to do some polymer clay modeling, and when she wanted to know what I was going to make, I just said, “a shark,” because that’s what was on my mind.

I also made a watermelon (not pictured here).

So while sitting here, feeling tired and uninspired (already spent a couple hours making something else today that I wasn’t able to finish) I was toying with the idea of just featuring the clay shark. But just the shark alone isn’t all that much to look at, and I’m more into the short narrative than the visual showcase, so it seemed like the shark better have something to say. Then I thought about the Dragon Affirmations comic and then I wondered what affirmations a shark would make. Then I set up the shoot and observed that the shark would have the same problem with mirrors that Dragon does, namely that it’s difficult to see directly in front of your face when your eyes are on either side of your head.

Poor shark.

In researching funny words associated with sharks, I came across the term “hypercarnivore,” which refers to creatures whose diets are at least 70% meat. Most sharks are hypercarnivores, although, in researching yesterday’s comic, I learned that at least one shark has been observed following a vegan diet.

Poor shark.

At the Sharkcuterie

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This may be the most abstruse, esoteric comic I’ve ever posted here. Who even knows what charcuterie is? Personally, I refuse to eat any type of processed meat. Sausage, cold cuts, anything that gets ground up and smushed back together is not OK with me, and nitrates/nitrites tend to give me a migraine. If I am going to eat meat, I prefer it to look like the actual animal, or at least be the largest possible chunk of that animal, and I would rather get it fresh and cook it myself so I know exactly what’s in it. After 20 years of vegetarianism, it’s hard not to be picky about eating animals.

Besides, do you know what’s in processed meat? No, you do not. Nobody does, not 100%. Not even the garde manger chef who made it. Anything could be in there. Karen Cushman nailed it when she wrote, “sausages are where butchers hide their mistakes,” even though she meant it as an example of snobbery. If not wanting to eat this makes me a snob, so be it.

The original gag is not mine. My brother, probably the only person in the world whose ideas I actually use, sent me an email saying he thought the idea of a “sharkcuterie” would make a funny T-shirt, but he had no idea of what a sharkcuterie would be. And then I spent literally an entire day thinking of puns for stuff that sharks would buy in a preserved meat market. Some of the rejects: mako bacon, porpoisemeat/toroisemeat (I was trying to make a pun on “forcemeat,” the very idea of which sends waves of nausea rippling through my gut, but neither of them really work), and some kind of joke about scotoplanes, which are also called sea pigs. But seriously, who knows that? I had to look all of this up, and it bummed me out that I couldn’t think of anything for terrine, galantine, or confit. Clam chops is funny, even though lamb chops aren’t really charcuterie because they’re not preserved. Poetic license. Or, comic license, I guess. In addition, I also considered making the sausages hanging on the wall look like eels, sea urchins, and anemones.

Anyway, those are some goofy looking sharks. They both need orthodontists.

Also: head cheese. Ew.

New Year, New Boob Mandala

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Breast cancer turned my friend into a comedian. “Last year, my boob tried to kill me,” she says, “so I killed it first.” Then she makes a kind of ninja sword slicing sound–“Wah-CHAA!”– while whipping her hands around and everyone laughs. Because the alternative is worse.

I seem to average about 2 friends surviving breast cancer a year. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t beaten it yet, but it’s a rough year and people keep doing battle with the monster. This mandala was actually drawn in honor of my mother-in-law’s victory, which was several years ago, but I probably know 10 people who’ve dealt with it since then.

It’s a good thing a strong mandala came up today, because I don’t feel wholly prepared to start up another year of webcomics and art blogging. This is because I had what I think of as a “mom vacation,” which means that everyone around me is on vacation and my workload actually doubles because everyone’s around all the time and everyone needs things from me and by the end of the day I’m too intellectually worn out to actually create anything, which then enervates me even more. So, since I can’t afford to go away for a couple days by myself and sit in absolute silence without taking care of other people, my “vacation” will actually be going back to business as usual.

Maybe I’ll draw a comic about it. Or maybe I’ll use the ridiculous gag my brother sent me yesterday, because who doesn’t like lame, esoteric puns?

I’ve also got a New Year’s bulletin board to hang. And about ten thousand other things to do.

So it’s even odds as to whether tomorrow you’ll get a comic or some macro photography. It’s such a massive surprise even I don’t know.