I had a few (local) requests for this design on a T-shirt, so here it is. I tweaked the colors and fixed the font, but otherwise, it’s the same design as the Halloween bulletin board that inspired it. And it can be yours on a T-shirt, sticker, mug, water bottle, and dozens of other functional products.
Check out Respect Your Local Monsters in my RedBubble shop. (This is a great time to buy from RedBubble. Pretty much everything is on sale!)
I once read that after writing “Night Moves,” Bob Seger fell into a deep depression, fueled by the belief that he had hit the pinnacle of his career and would never write another song as great and meaningful as that one. Personally, I prefer “Old Time Rock and Roll,” but when I look at this image, I think to myself, “You might as well retire from graphic design because this is the greatest thing you’ll ever do.”
But Bob Seeger didn’t retire and neither will I. People are already asking for T-shirt versions of “Respect Your Local Monsters,” so that’s what I will make next. Plus I have another cool commission in the works.
The quote here is, of course, a riff off Woody Guthrie’s, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” message, which the folk singer wrote in black across his acoustic guitar. And the ukulele being a sort of baby guitar, its power is not as lethal, but still shots fired against the enemy.
As it’s looking more and more likely that this country is willing to go full Fascist in the next couple years, and Gen X is old and has back pain, and this is about the level of resistance I’m able to muster currently. I personally plan to get shot in the face in my own home if they start hauling off antifa. I’m Jewish and don’t have the stomach for going quietly.
It gets the message across, I think.
I said I was going to do this and I did it. Poly Pride, Poly Love is available on many fine products in my RedBubble shop. So now I have 3 non-heteronormative designs in my shop, I have to create a new portfolio to house my message. I had way more to say about this design and accidental representation spotting but it took me way longer to draw than estimated and now it’s late and I’m tired.
Anyway: T-shirt! And I actually have a comic in the works.
Featuring one of the most charming retro style rocket ships I’ve ever drawn.
This rainbow colored design took up most of my drawing time this week. I’m the kind of person who could easily spend another week tinkering with it but I’m also the kind of person who can let it go. It’s cute and it gets the message across. “The Future is Non Binary and Intersectional.” I prefer “nonbinary” spelled as one word, actually, but this is how it went up in the shop.
The main thing is that I’m sick of people using erroneous binary assumptions to tell other people (me) how to dress, act, think, talk, or fit into society. Open your freaking mind.
The man’s got a plan. And a van. But he’s not getting this bus.
Just a quick shout-out to the ’52 Ford Bus T-shirt! This is the one I drew for The Man after he saw the Vampire Bat posing gothily on a real ’52 Ford Bus and became unreasonably obsessed with owning a ’52 Ford Bus. I told him this was the only rusty old bus he was going to get while he was married to me. I did it out of love. Tough love.
And he finally got around to acquiring one, and here you see a rare shot of The Man modeling like the handsome hunk of manhood he is. I really neglect hyping my RedBubble shop, where you can buy this, and other fine designs, on a wide variety of quality products. Someone should get this design on a onesie. It would be charming.
Someone did buy a onesie with my Athena, Goddess of Wisdom design. I thought it was the Fox but he said it wasn’t, and then I saw that the customer had actually sent me a message about how happy he was to find an Athena onesie because his daughter was named Athena. You go, baby Athena. You are the most classical baby on the block.
You can get your own ’52 Ford Bus here!
What can I even say about this? Well, I’m all about being not ashamed. So I am not ashamed. Whimsical designs haven’t made my rich. Maybe off-color ones will do the trick. Perhaps small town orgies will by my claim to fame.
The words aren’t mine; they came out of a serious conversation with my friend the Coyote. He was only trying to be a little funny. Obviously, the statement is objectively true. You can’t do it alone. As soon as it came out of his mouth, I said, “That’s a T-shirt,” immediately seeing the design fully formed in my mind. So why shouldn’t I draw it and post it in my RedBubble shop? I work fast now.
RedBubble has a bunch of new product types, including wall clocks and acrylic blocks. I’m not sure what you do with an acrylic block. I remember them being a thing in the ’70s, but now we can just use obsolete electronics for paperweights. But surely, someone, somewhere would be delighted to received an acrylic block as a present.
Keep your phone warm and fuzzy.
Some people fail. Some people fail spectacularly. Kaija failed mythically, and now she’s trapped in the part of the fairy tale when the monster appears.
When Kaija couldn’t find contentment in the human world, she checked out, turned in the key, and went off the grid. For fifteen years, she’s lived between worlds, hiding in the desert, holding herself apart from nature just as she has from civilization, but when disaster strikes, she finds that no woman is an island. She is dragged, kicking and screaming, to the realization that no woman is an island.
The Hermit is a novel for adults who still love fairy tales, people searching for transformation and magic, readers open to contemporary fantasies with elements of horror and romance, grown-ups who still wish they could talk to the animals.
Not that Kaija wants to talk to the animals–she’s a hermit, after all, and hermits don’t want to talk to anyone–but she can’t make them stop talking her. She can’t force them to quit sharing their fears about the legendary monster stalking the Sonoran Desert. She can’t run away anymore; she’s run as far as anyone can go. If she wants to maintain her sliver of solitude, she’ll have to shrug off the hermit’s mantle, gather allies from both worlds, and go on the offensive to defeat the true monster.
The paperback version of The Hermit will be available this Thanksgiving, but if you want to read it now, it’s already available in the Kindle store ($4.99 for 426 pages of delicious mythopoetic rampage) for your reading pleasure.
If you just love the cover, you can purchase the image of Kaija and her coyote companion on this cell phone case (and pretty much anything else on which you can emblazon images) in my RedBubble shop.
Confidential to all the people who, according to my stats page, woke up this morning, visited QvD in search of a new comic, and got nothing at all: better 15 hours late without a comic than no update, right? If people love my comics as much as they say they do, I hope they’ll consider laying out $4.99 for my book. It’s like reading my comics, but you create the pictures with your brain, so they’re much better drawn, and the word part lasts a lot longer.
Time for you to fly?
Yesterday’s comic had a positive reception, which is really all you can ask for. Today all I have is this sweet butterfly sticker, but who cares because we are going to Comicon! I got media passes for being a contributor to Panels.net, which means free media badges for me and my photographer’s assistant, aka The Man, and I got paid for the wedding shoot, which means, for the first time in my history of going to Comicon, I’m actually going to be able to buy comics.
Every year we say we’re going to cosplay but I never get it together. Mrs. Kitty thinks I should do Garnet from Steven Universe, which would be fun, but the character I’d most like to cosplay would be Agatha Heterodyne from Girl Genius. Alan Moore’s Promethea would also be a riot, but no one would know who I was. Or I could just be Poison Ivy like everyone else in the world. Except, no, I’ll just be wearing my Comic Book Legal Defense Funds T-shirts and probably skorts because this is Phoenix and it’s likely to be very hot and somewhat sticky.
As for the butterfly sticker, it is available in 4 sizes, from small to really rather large for a sticker, prices ranging between $2.40 and $14.00. You can check out the various options and acquire your own Blue Morpho Butterfly sticker (seriously, the extra large one is 14 inches across, pretty stunning) or some other product with the Blue Morpho Butterfly design, in my shop. I’m not sure why I haven’t sold more of these stickers; I’ve sold a ton of Blue Morpho Notecards. Anyone wanna show this sticker some love?
For when you want to sit on something soft as a bunny.
Been so caught up in comic and scrambling to figure out what to do when life leaves little time for comics that my RedBubble shop has been totally neglected. This week I also made 2 greeting cards in similar styles with different subjects for very different occasions. Giving art away is great, because it leaves you room to make more art, and with the flatbed scanner, I need never leave a new design behind. That is to say, these 2 new animal images are now available on a wide variety of fine products in my shop.
First, we have Bunnies in the Clover, in green and pink. An assortment of rabbit silhouettes meander around the cool green meadow. They look pretty adorable on this pillow, although the square products cut off designs sized for T-shirts. You can see the entire design in this print.
A rectangle of rabbits reside on this range
You can get it in its original card format, or as a sticker, or a pair of leggings, or a drawstring bag. There’s something like 37 products now, including clothing, home decor, and, print products.
Feeling foxy?
The second designs features a woodland creature that would happily eat the bunnies depicted in the first design. It’s the Fox in Clover, and you can see how it strikes you as a pillow, a pencil skirt, an iPad case, a poster, and plenty of other fun products.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing this week in addition to all the stuff I normally do.
Tomorrow will be a more productive day.
Coffee tastes better on time.
So much for going out with a bang. I did intend to finish up the week slash month with a real powerhouse of a depressing real life comic, but alas, it seems not meant to be. It’s almost midnight and I’ve only got about half the script nailed down. I lettered the part that felt certain, but even if I had the entire script, it would be 1 a.m. before I even started the illustrating part, which takes a lot longer. So, instead, please welcome the newest addition to the RedBubble QWERTYvsDvorak store: the Flying Sea Turtle Express. Get it on a mug!
Yeah, it’s the design from my sister’s wedding, but I thought it would look good in other formats, too.
It works as a poster, too.
Hang it on the wall.
If you would like to peruse a wide selection of Flying Sea Turtle Express projects, including shirts, hoodies, skirts, and leggings, you can click here.
In the meantime, I’ll head back to my depressing comic and try to get the script worked out tonight and you can see it in November.
qwertyvsdvorak 