Monthly Archives: September 2016

The Fruit of the Pawpaw Tree

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I spent way too much time trying to make the baby donkey look cuter and fluffier.

I read that the pawpaw is the only tropical fruit native to Michigan. I don’t really understand how, because I lived in Michigan for 4 years and there is absolutely nothing tropical about it. From the beginning of September until the end of May, it’s cold, and I always assumed that tropical fruits came from the tropics. Maybe they mean that it’s the only tropical fruit that can survive living in Michigan. I could not thrive in that weather, so I moved to Arizona. I have never eaten a pawpaw, not this kind of pawpaw, anyway. Some people refer to papaya as pawpaw, but it’s a totally different fruit.

“The Fruit of the Pawpaw Tree” is the last story in the book (but the penultimate story of our BJC comic journey) and a lot of people list it as their favorite, because it’s the happiest, most optimistic story in the book. It’s like Susanna in this story redeems all the hurt and broken women in all the other stories. Sometimes life is hard, but sometimes if you’re hard, you get through it OK. Sometimes you close yourself off to certain emotions, but then one little thing gets through your armor, and you realize you don’t have to be closed off to everything, all the time. People totally do find love at 64.

 

To You, as a Woman

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I don’t think there’s anything even darkly funny about this one. 

“To You, as a Woman” may be the most difficult story in this book, the hardest luck, the saddest progression. It took a long time to see my way into the comic, and it wasn’t until I took a big step back from the second/first narrative and to a distant, plural, third that it was even possible to reframe the piece into this format. For a while it seemed insurmountable. Just like real life trauma, the story jumps around in time and emotions, jumbling an entire sequence of terrible events together so that each cut runs together while standing alone with its own bright pain, less simple to pull out the threads.

About an hour before I sat down to write the script, a woman who’s been reading these comics asked where she could buy Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, and I sent her an Amazon link, and then, because it’s my regular habit on Amazon, I clicked to see the 1- and 2-star reviews, which are usually hilarious. Not today. Here we have people wholly incapable of engaging with literature on a critical level, disguising their misogyny with crude dismissal of nuance and reality, blithely unaware of their own massive prejudices. These are the people who read a book about 16 different characters and claim that all the stories are the same, not because they are, but because they think all women are the same.

You don’t have sympathy for substance abusers, or unwed mothers, or people who receive food assistance? Maybe you should ask about the myriad, lifelong jabs of physical and emotional pain that led them to make those choices before you judge. You don’t like authors discuss rape too often? The 1 in 3 women who are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes don’t like experiencing it. And let’s face it: if you’re born into poverty and raised up in poverty and struggle through your life in poverty, the odds of being sexually assaulted are probably higher. Go read Fifty Shades of Gray and tell everyone what a remarkable piece of quality fiction it is if you think there should be happy stories about rape and you’re just the informed critic to spread the good news. This book is about the way people actually are: vulnerable, flawed, attempting, every day, to pull themselves out of the miasma of their circumstances despite the constant pain of being alive.

It’s sickening, how easily some people manage to look at huge segments of the human population and decide those people aren’t human. You expect that kind of ignorance in the comments section of YouTube, or Reddit. Not from an Amazon book review. I wonder, what circumstances in your life taught you to be so self-centered, so casually cruel, so unwilling to exhibit empathy? Why do you read literature at all if you’re only content with work that reinforces your narrow beliefs? Isn’t the point of literature to better understand the human condition, one point of view at the time?

 

A Multitude of Sins

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Those are some extremely nasty feet.

Admittedly, the interpretation, “She doesn’t need religion anymore,” has been filtered through my experience, but this is the only story in the book that really depends on religious references to forward the plot*, and it doesn’t look good for Christianity. The idea that a man could spend an entire marriage physically, emotionally, verbally, and sexually abusing his wife, and then be worthy of heaven because his fear of the flames of hell caused him to seek Jesus while lying delirious in his deathbed, is sort of deplorable to me. I know plenty of Christians who believe the way to heaven is good works, and that people of any denomination will be rewarded if they live righteous lives, but I probably know more who cry and pray over perfectly wonderful human beings who don’t happen to be saved, and are therefore damned.

By this metric, the Dalai Lama is damned, but Jeffrey Dahmer is in heaven. Chew on that. Or don’t, if you find jokes about cannibalism in poor taste. Whoops, I did it again. I am also damned. I think Mark Twain summed it up best in Huck Finn when Huck says that if Tom Sawyer isn’t going to heaven, he doesn’t want to go either.

The thing about her identity is unquestionable, though. One really cool technique that Bonnie Jo uses in this story is to offer clues in the form of nomenclature. To wit, in the exposition at the beginning of the story, the main character is referred to as “the wife.” Then, as she starts to react to her situation instead of lying back and taking it, she becomes “Mrs. Betcher.” Finally, at the very end of the story, when she ignores the preacher to work on the fascinating theater curtain (a project her husband would have never allowed her to take for pecuniary reasons) she is “Mary” at last. This may be why Bonnie Jo has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and I have not. But I guess the fact that I can point this out is why I’m drawing these comics, and everyone else is not. I bet I could write a 2000 word essay just on the use of this naming convention in “A Multitude of Sins,” but I guess I’ll leave that to people who write more conventional and less personal literary criticism.

*In some ways the Corinthians quote in “Somewhere Warm” could be the flip side to the terrifying Revelation visions in “A Multitude of Sins,” but religion plays a very different and less prominent role in that story, whereas this one even takes its title from the New Testament.

Natural Disasters

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Status: I’m just drawing a human placenta here. 

The world is a terrible place to bring a child. It’s full not only of sharp and hot objects, but also of dangerous plants, animals, geologic and meteorological phenomenon, and, most corrupting influence of all, human beings. I don’t actually understand how anyone over the age of 30 can even consider it. I get being young and naive and optimistic, or being a kid who doesn’t fully grok birth control, but surely by 30, most reasonable people have become cynics, no matter how much love they have in their hearts. Our world is inherently dangerous, and more so if you happen to be a completely helpless and dependent organism. And yet my Facebook feed is constantly full of babies and sonograms, even though I turn 42 this November and have a number of friends who are grandparents. My cohort keeps creating new humans, on purpose.

I’ve been to parties where people brought gifts of baby products to a pregnant woman, but I’ve never attended one of these weird-baby-themed-games kinds of baby showers. It sounds demeaning for everyone involved. Most likely, anyone who actually knew me would know better than to invite me to such a gathering, but it’s always interesting to see what “normal” people think is normal.

While I share the narrator’s belief that the world is wildly dangerous place, I’m not afraid of babies breaking. I’ve worked with many babies in my life. Babies are actually more resilient than adults in many respects. A lot of new moms seem overly cautious, in my opinion.

Superstar Mandala

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Beyond gold stars, we have fuchsia and gold stars with the Eye of Sauron hidden in every ray.

Less productive weekend than usual, but sometimes you have to take a little time to screw around. Friday night I went roller skating with the Fox and the Otter, and sort of lost that evening. Saturday was the day I write at the Historic Y with SFWA, and then I was up late with The Man, so nothing got accomplished then. Today I ended up bringing my equipment to Mrs. Kitty’s house and working there, so I got tomorrow’s comic mostly accomplished. Now it’s accomplished, so if I write a comic tomorrow, I won’t be pressed for time on Tuesday, when I go write with the Fox.

The Wacom tablet is on its very last legs. Yeah, that thing is almost 3 years old, and it’s really taken a beating. Right now I’m using the smallest size of tablet, because the Boy happens to have gotten one some years ago, and he doesn’t use it much. Otherwise, who knows where this project would be? But I’ve got $50 Amazon credit, so I will purchase my own larger version and try to take better care of this one.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Daughters of the Animal Kingdom

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If you’ve never Googled “slug love dart,” go ahead and do that now. We’ll wait. 

Yesterday’s comic being so busy, I wanted to get back to a simpler style, but, having already decided to only draw the animals mentioned in the story, rather than any people, I sort of got carried away with their various textures. Still, this took less time than any other story out of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters so far.

In the story, the narrator doesn’t answer her mother when her mother asks her where she was, but the reader knows that she was at the women’s clinic, getting an abortion, because having a baby at 47 when you’re already a grandmother several times over and your husband is a dog and you’ve been working on your PhD thesis forever is bad idea. I totally feel this one. It’s such a tremendous relief–throughout the whole story she is thinking nice things about being pregnant and having a baby, but she’s also thinking about everything she’ll lose, and more to the point, all the complications that come with sexual reproduction and the raising of an autonomous individual who feels like they’re part of you but makes independent decisions you don’t want them to make–and when she makes the choice that’s for her, not her husband, or her daughter, or her mom, it’s like a wave of possibility washing over the last page. And there’s the sweet parallel with the silkie walking away from her nest (isn’t that a fluffy silkie I drew?) except chickens are kind of dumb and don’t have tons of potential besides eggs and meat, and the woman is really smart and still has a lot of things to accomplish in her life.

I’m bummed I couldn’t find a good picture of a love dart sticking out of a slug. But that’s a love dart, zooming toward the slug (magnified for clarity). Sexual reproduction is really complicated. And ridiculous.

If it doesn’t make sense, read the book.

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

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I’m counting on you, my flesh and blood, to somehow read my mind.

This is the central story of the book, of course, and the one that stayed with me the longest. When I think of this book, I think of this story, and when I first thought of starting this project, this is the story that came to mind. So I’ve been thinking about how I would portray it for a long time. Still, it always changes once I start working.

Originally I thought the middle aged daughter would appear in the background, along with the house, and the memories would be small elements, but the memories sort of loom larger and larger; this woman only has the past. And then I didn’t draw the middle aged daughter at all, because the mother hardly sees her. I mean, she feels her anger, she watches her, but she doesn’t see her child. She’s busy justifying herself.

 

Blood Work, 1999

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So much imagery, so little time.

This comic was a lot of fun to draw, although after I drew it, I realized that Marika should have been wearing a lab coat, not scrubs. But that’s a minor point and I don’t think it detracts from the overall theme. Here’s another character who just loves too much, just like yesterday’s comic, except that Marika is (apparently) a virgin who’s never had  real relationship, so she pours her love into people and places and things that don’t even know her. It’s a sad story to me. At least the protagonist in “Somewhere Warm” has a her ungrateful daughter back in the end, and a military son, and a tabula rasa grandbaby. Marika, it seems to me, is going to end up with a pink slip. Her awakening is unlikely to make up for whatever would happen in panel 7 if the story kept going.

I love how the burned boy came out, and the window with the cardboard sign. Panel 5 has to be my favorite, even though every time I have to cut an idea for space, I get a little sad, and even in that panel I ended up leaving a lot of the material out. If you haven’t read the book, the crazy homeless guy is referred to as the Lightning Man, having been, as far as anyone can tell, hit by lightning preceding what seems to have been his first visit to the hospital. When human being are hit by lightning, they can exhibit Lichtenberg scars, fractal-shaped burn marks created by electricity. Lichtenberg figures are observed most commonly inside insulation materials, but they can form in solids, liquids, or gases, so it’s not strange that electricity etches upon human flesh. The background of panel 5 mimics the shape of a Lichtenberg scar.

Being obsessed with lightning, I’ve always thought this would be a wicked tattoo.

Somewhere Warm

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In Dad’s defense, I also fled Kalamazoo for the southwest. Those winters were killing me. 

Believe it or not, this comic took longer to draw that any of the others. I must have drawn the girl’s face in panel 3 about 50 times. Same with panel 5, and the mom never came out quite the way I wanted. Panels 2 and 4 are perfect, though. That’s my biggest obstacle drawing comics. I can usually draw one character the way I want them to look 1 time. But drawing the same character over and over, with different expressions and postures, from different angles, and make them still appear to be the same character feels impossible. I need a life drawing class. Or a bunch of live models.

I left the clothes and skin intentionally blank so as not to detract from the girls’ freckles.

It’s kind of a sad story. The mom just starts to thrive on being alone when the kid comes back, and the kid coming back is going to be a massive burden on her. The mom doesn’t exactly change as a character, although she does grow. It’s sort of like she’s choosing to stay the course, even though she never gets the outcomes she expects, but the growth is in her understanding that some people are just awful. At least, in the future, she’ll understand that she’s pouring her love into an open sewer. I mean, I guess the baby can be seen as a chance at redemption, like maybe this time, if she just loves enough, the baby won’t grow up and leave her. But personally, I sort of think she’s going to keep getting the same outcome. The fact of the matter is, if she ever met a man who she didn’t drive away with her creepy, cloying talk, he would suck her dry.

Star Scallop Mandala

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A little bit feathery, a little bit pointy. 

Productive weekend! Got a really nice comic finished for tomorrow, which is helpful, because tomorrow is the day I go to the Fox’s house and we sit and silence and write for 2 hours, and also the day that I volunteer at the elementary school, and I have another engagement as well, so that doesn’t leave a lot of time to make comics. Also got a good chunk of the next day’s comic started, which is helpful.

Also, I got a new phone, because my giant ZMAX died an ignominious death after an entire week of not really letting me play Pokemon Go. Sadly, they don’t make this kind of phablet anymore. The Man found one on Craig’s List but someone else got there first, so he bought me an LG, which will probably be OK, once I get everything arranged the way I like it. How anyone can not organize their icons by alphabetical order is beyond me.

This is a really pretty mandala, only slightly askew.

And that’s Labor Day weekend. There goes summer, once again. The autumn always gets me a little bit down, and it’s hard not to compare the year to my life, i.e. if my life were a meteorological year beginning in the spring, it would now also be the beginning of autumn. On the other hand, The Man and I went to the last late night of the season at the Desert Museum on Saturday, and in the weird fluorescent light of the bathroom, I thought I’d found my first gray hair. But it was just the lighting. So maybe it’s still the 4th of July.