Category Archives: mandala

Violet Eyes Are Watching You Mandala

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Look into my eyes. All of them.

Friday’s comic, as readers of my Facebook page probably know, roused the “Reddit Republican army,” which is pretty much the best thing that a blog post can do in terms of reach. It’s received nearly 3,000 hits so far, thanks in part to a group of people whose belief in their own righteousness is so strong that they are willing to publicly come out in favor of bullying elementary students. That’s totally what Jesus would do, right? Mock those who are different and then shout out those who speak up for the oppressed. Thanks for generating sufficient controversy to drive traffic to my often-overlooked page.

Of course, the haters didn’t account for all those page views on their own. It was also one of my most-shared posts on Facebook, and has more Facebook upvotes than anything else I’ve ever done. And more WordPress likes. And it gained me more WordPress followers than any single post in 2 years. I didn’t even think it was that big of a deal. Seriously, who gets up in arms about a picture book that advocates not mocking and bullying people? Oh, yeah. The people who have decided to make their stand on the gender binary. Because that’s crazy important. We already saw what happened once women started wearing pants. Can you imagine what the world would look like if we just let people dress however they wanted? Can you picture a world in which we do not deride and ostracize children who can’t conform?

So: my passions for mocking uptight people who advocate censorship in schools, speaking out against bullying, and fucking the gender binary have joined together to serve me…somehow.

Anyway, my psyche can only take so much criticism, and it’s been a weird weekend. Here’s a funny little purple mandala full of eyeballs. They’re always on you, making sure that you adhere to their preconceived notions of everything you are capable of achieving in life based on the presumed shape of your genitals.

Purple Haze Mandala

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Getting sleepy? Dizzy? Disoriented? Are you sure you don’t feel like lying down? ‘Cause I do.

Apparently, updating my operating system rendered my scanner drivers obsolete, and I can’t even begin to deal with that situation; I still haven’t installed the new Photoshop drivers. I. Can’t. Deal. I don’t even care if my smart house refuses to let me eat junk food and my self-driving car always goes the speed limit; I’ll be very happy when computers can program themselves. You know what you need, computer. Why don’t you just get it and run it yourself? Fortunately, the app that pulls images off my camera came with the OS, so that works at least. I was even able to easily crop the image. So: mandala.

There were myriad other interesting things I intended to write about in this post, but they all seem to have slipped away. It’s midnight. My head hurts. My lungs now seem to require a vast quantity of medicines in order to perform their basic and previously involuntary function. Rather than dropping pithy creative wisdom bombs, I will be sucking on Ventolin with a Nyquil chaser and marathoning  Grace and Frankie until I pass out.

This mandala is fairly pleasing, though, in its wabi sabi way.

Straight Lines and All Mandala

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Every once in a while, I find myself accidentally in balance.

Change is in the air, lifting the wings of a paper crane as it floats over turbulence, rustling the unkempt spikes on a dragon’s back. Mesmerizing. This week, probably. For a lot of years–maybe 7 or so, I should think–the Fox and I kept up a daily correspondence about our creative output in the previous 24 hours. Then I got cranky and disillusioned with the industry and he met and fell in love with the Otter and that all got put on hold for 2 years. Then he married the Otter (I married the Otter and him, because that is something I am totally qualified to do in the state of Arizona, and he had kindly married The Man and me 3 years earlier) and I got my groove back and we have been writing each other emails again. This is very exciting.

Tomorrow I’ve been invited to participate in a panel on gender and sexuality at a near-ish college, and I’m really excited. I think this–adult sex ed–is something I want to get more involved in. I guess I’m suffering from a little chest cold (6 airplane flights in 5 weeks, not surprising) and I’m not feeling like much of a dragon, but I’m determined to put my heart into this, because it’s important to me that young adults see that the world is not 100% heteronormative and cis-gendered, that’s it’s OK to not fit into a false binary, that you can be happy and fabulous without conforming to arbitrary life expectations based on someone else’s perception of your genitals. I was lucky to attend Antioch College, so I heard these messages when I was 17, but even with the Internet, I guess a lot of kids still don’t know that they’re OK.

But if you’re reading this, and your gender and/or sexuality don’t match up with your community’s stereotypes of acceptable outcomes, know that you are OK.

Love Is Real Not Fade Away Mandala

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I didn’t leave it in the window. It started out this pale.

Sunday night as I write this, and I already have scripts for 3 days’ worth of comics, plus a couple cool macros. As The Man and I have another exciting adventure coming up this week (2 more days of airline travel…I shudder to think) and if I can’t get a couple days ahead, I’ll probably accidentally miss half a week like I did the last time I had to endure the tender mercies of the airline industry.

Tonight we counted and I have 900 of my 1000 cranes, which is also exciting. I’m completely out of origami paper, and everyone in town seems to be out of it, which is frustrating, but with only 100 to go, I’ll probably start cutting squares out of random pages.

OK, back to Tuesday’s comic, and maybe Wednesday’s if my brain can stay on that long.

Queen of Hearts Mandala

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Off with her head. Off with all their heads.

I’m starting to suspect that posting mandalas actually decreases the traffic on my blog, but goddamnit I have all these freaking mandalas and they need to be uploaded and I’m going to post them on the Internet. So there.

In other news, I read that the standard style book is changing and “Internet” will no longer be capitalized come this summer. That makes zero sense to me. That’s like saying that we’re going to stop capitalizing “America” or “Europe.” The Internet is like its own country and deserves to be a proper noun. Sigh. /end nerd rant.

This weekend was a wreck. I’ve been sick all week. I thought it was just a combination of allergies and the residual stress of my bullshit nightmare journey at the beginning of the month, but The Man, who also thought it was just allergies, has had all the same symptoms, but 2 days in advance of mine, so clearly he caught a weird cold and then gave it to me. And I’ve probably given it to everyone I’ve hung out with since I got back, because our friends are all pretty casual and we sharing drinking vessels and other things that touch your face. Sorry guys. It’s really just a mild cold. But still annoying.

Also, it rained all weekend, which is just completely ridiculous. I didn’t move to the goddamn desert to watch it rain constantly. On the plus side, in 50 years when the entire east coast is under water, climate change may very well turn the desert verdant and arable. If the Big One hits California and it falls into the ocean, Arizona could be the next Garden of Eden. Still, it wasn’t what my brain needed.

I’m writing a sad comic for Tuesday. It’s about my life.

Sunflake Mandala

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Enjoy this one before it melts. 

The Fox and the Otter are getting married tomorrow! And the Dragon is officiating the ceremony, as is only proper, since the Fox officiated the ceremony when the Dragon married The Man. That probably gives the Fox and the Dragon a special bond, since he married me and I married him in the process of each of us marrying other people. Anyway, I’ve been working on the ceremony since my return from the nightmare journey, and I’m afraid I’m second guessing myself all the way. I read the latest draft to the Rabbit, who seemed to approve, but the Fox and the Otter want to be surprised.

I mean, they’re going to be surprised no matter what. But I assume they would like to be pleasantly surprised, rather than otherwise.

I wrote the ceremony and officiated the wedding when the Misseses Kitty got married, too, but they worked with me on the ceremony and approved the draft beforehand. All I have this time is a page of suggestions and the grooms’ assurance that they trust me to do it right. Anyway, I want to make this one perfect, too, and it makes me nervous not to have workshop, even though the Otter said he knew he’d be thrilled with whatever I wrote.

Easing back into more formal writing is good. Blogging and journaling are effective for what they are, but they don’t require the same sort of cohesion, weight, or order as the kind of writing I used to do every day.

After this wedding, my life will return very briefly to normal before The Man and I have to jet off to California for more family stuff. I guess real life is a process of having to jet off when you want to be still. And being still when you want to jet off.

Three Days Ago’s Mandala, Today

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Play with your vegetables.

This week began with best intentions but even though the mandala was scanned weeks ago and I started a comic on Friday, somehow the time slipped out and the first never got posted and the second never got finished and THEN I lost 2 days of my life to circumstances best forgotten but permanently scarring, and they weren’t even the worst 2 days of this month.

Do you think it’s possible for a human brain to forget how to sleep? Because I’m starting to wonder.

It makes one much less effective, and there is really a lot to do around here.

This is really, as you may have guessed, The Asparagus Mandala. It seems like the original intention was to create an assortment of vegetable but after the asparagus I just couldn’t stop laughing and didn’t want to mess with perfection.

In case anyone wondered, QvD still exists as a daily blog. Just a little blip there.

Big, Hexy Mandala

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You just have to visualize the parts that don’t fit on the page.

There’s this phenomenon I’ve noticed around my comics, which is that, typically, if I’m really pleased with one and certain that it’s funny, and happy that I managed to draw exactly what I wanted to draw, and satisfied that I’ve really produced something worth my time, it will get 12 hits and someone on Reddit will say something rude about it. On the other hand, if I’m uncertain about whether it makes any sense and I feel like the art is confusing or lazy and it’s far from my best work, that’s the comic that gets 112 upvotes and 50 Facebook shares and reposted on the Cheezburger Network.

Last week I drew 3 comics, and 2 of them bombed utterly and I know they were funny. The one that got a lot of likes was one of those comics where I could sort of visualize the punchline but didn’t have the exact phrasing for it until the last second, and was never really happy about the impact of that last line, but time was up and I had to stand with what I had so far.

Sometimes I tinker with the idea of only writing stuff that I don’t like, because obviously, it would perform better. That’s how it was when I was writing for money, too. If I threw my heart into something and tried to make it really special and well-written, the client would hate it and want a million changes until it sucked, and then they’d be happy. If I phoned it in, scrawling some shit on a napkin at the last second and didn’t bother to try to make it good in any way, the client would be ecstatically pleased and tell me what a great writer I was and how they wished they could afford to pay me more.

I can only conclude that people have no taste. Or else I don’t.