Category Archives: Uncategorized

Footsies

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I swear, I’m a goooood boy. I would never go past second base before the election.

If I wanted to stay totally topical, this should have been a comic about Mike Pence’s hacked AOL account, but at this point, it’s just the same thing over and over. Hypocrites and liars being hypocrites and liars. And the fact that Mike Pence uses AOL is like…post-humor. It’s gone past comedy into some other realm where political theater and the theater of the bizarre have merged into one horrific blacklit broken mirror Wonderland where events defy categorization or comprehension.

Anyway, at least he recused himself from an investigation into the Russian election hacks he already knows didn’t happen because facts are malleable and you can discard the ones that don’t fit your world view.

My truth is that last night, after I posted the Sessions/Ozymandias comic, I realized that I had made the better joke in the blog post. So I started to draw that comic, because it was only 1 a.m. and knocking out another comic felt totally doable. But them I remembered my promise to myself when I started this project to let go of the drive for perfection, and also things that trigger insomnia, and I just let it ride and played the ukulele in the dark for an hour instead.

And then tonight, I thought I’d try a little caricature, which I haven’t done lately, because, let’s face it: Jeff Sessions looks like a kewpie doll with muppet ears. From a design perspective he’s sort of adorable. The gag was already written and all I had to do was not cross the line between big-eyed coquette Sessions and Peter Jackson’s Gollum. You would not believe how fine that line is. And here we are. I drew a comic.

Have a great weekend. Enjoy your freedoms.

No Contact

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There is definitely nothing to see here. I’m pretty tight with the administration and I can assure you that none of them did anything wrong.

Remember when these guys lost their freaking minds because Bill Clinton didn’t count fellatio as sex? But now they’re all cool with not counting multiple meetings with a Russian ambassador “considered by US intelligence to be one of Russia’s top spies and spy-recruiters in Washington, according to current and former senior US government officials,” as having “contact with the Russians.”

Jeff Sessions: “Oh, by contact with the Russians, I thought you meant playing footsies under the table with Ambassador Kislyak. We never did that. It was strictly above the waist.”

Remember, if there were to be an investigation into Russian interference with the election, this is the guy who would lead it.

Like Ozymandias, I’m sure he thinks he’s the good guy saving the world.

The Scent of Lemon Blossoms

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Maybe this year is the year that life will hand me sufficient lemons for a sizable recipe of lemonade.

If there was a technology that allowed photographs to capture smells, lemon blossoms would probably be up there with cat pictures in terms of popularity. In fact, if cat pictures smelled like cats, image of lemon blossoms might be more popular than cat macros. There are few scents in the world that compare to lemon flowers in the spring (it’s spring where I live). I had a Spanish teacher who once told us that there is a word in Spanish that means specifically the aroma of lemon flowers, but of course I don’t remember what it is.

I was happy to spend some time taking this pictures right up in the cloud of this delicious smell. Only later did I realize that the settings were all wrong for the light and the lens and everything else. But you can see it’s a lemon flower. There are probably 100s of them, although in my experience, 3/4 will fall off in a strong wind and 95 of the tiny lemons that result from the remaining flowers will die without explanation long before they reach maturity.

Most of this tree isn’t fruit-bearing: it’s whatever thorny, hardly rootstock they graft the lemony part to so it survives in this climate. I’m gradually pruning that back to give the good parts a chance to thrive but the thorny bit is the life support system and the only part high enough to get sun over the garden wall. The parts of my lemon tree that are fruit bearing are low-to-the-ground and a small percentage of the tree, but one day I know this tree will fulfill its destiny of being amazing.

Gratitude for air redolent with the esters of lemon flowers.

All about Me

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You might think it’s about you. But it’s not. It’s about me.

Radical self care. For me it tends to take the shape of being incredibly selfish. Sometimes it seems like something I don’t get to do very often, but on the other hand, drawing webcomics is incredibly selfish in many ways. It’s absolutely all about me. My art has always been all about me. The difference is, it used to be novels that a half dozen people read, and now it’s comics that 100s or 1000s of people read. But they’re still about me, my life, my experience, what I’m going through. Even if they seem political or altruistic, even when I do something like the Patricia Jabbeh Wesley comic the other day, or all those Bonnie Jo Campbell comics, I’m still in it. It’s still about me.

My brother told me yesterday that my comics were getting very dark. I say the world is getting dark. The comics just reflect my perception of it. But actually, I’ve been taking great care of myself since the election.

Not, of course, as good as my kitty, Lupin (pictured above). We could all take lessons on radical self care from cats.

Persuasion or Debate

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I’ve also tried rationale, common sense, deduction, induction, inference, judgment, and ratiocination, but nothing works!

This comic is based on the millions of people asking the internet why they can’t make other people understand what they perceive to be simple fact, and this informative piece from the Atlantic: The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion. Granted, it’s hard to assimilate, or even believe, and I can’t figure out how I would personally use this information to persuade people of anything, but it’s pretty clear at this point that reasoning with people who seem unreasonable isn’t going to make the world over according to my utopian vision.

I had another, much longer comic riffing off the riffs off “Nevertheless, she persisted,” but somebody asked and this felt a bit more urgent. Maybe tomorrow. It’s hard to plan out 24 hours ahead in this climate.

 

The Wolf Is Not at the Door

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Seriously, though. The call…it’s coming from inside the house.

Yesterday, immediately after the confirmation of the frighteningly unqualified Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Congressman Thomas Massie introduced a bill that reads, in its entirety, “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.” Around the same time, Senator Elizabeth Warren  was told and then forced to sit down and shut up for impugning the character of the nominee for Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions, a man who was rejected for federal judgement over 30 years ago because his character was widely known to be impugnable.

From where I sit, the wolf is not at the door. The wolf is in the kitchen. And the oven is already lit.

The Last Rainbow Mandala

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As good a place as any to pause and reflect.

About 6 or 7 years ago, long before QWERTYvsDvorak, I started this 100 mandala project and when I got to 100, I wasn’t ready to stop. Why not 1000 mandalas, I wondered? Because, as it turns out, 1000 is a LOT of mandalas. Ultimately, I drew about 130 of them, not counting a few drawn after the blog started, and this is the very last last one of the original set. It felt like I had come full circle from the first (also rainbow) mandala and perhaps going on would mean just repeating myself.

I’m not saying I’ll never draw another mandala again, but they won’t be my regular Monday feature/safety net when I forget the weekend is ending.

Ms. Kitty suggested that I replace it with some sort of Monday gratitude, which seems like a really good idea right about now. Must think of how best to execute within the framework of QvD re: art.

But speaking of gratitude and art: that Lady Gaga concert sure was something, wasn’t it? So many people were watching it that the roads were completely empty, as were all the best hiking trails. But I caught it later on the NFL Twitter page. Those NFL people really put on a good show. I seem to recall they hosted one last year for Beyoncé that just slayed.

Vivid Snowflake Mandala

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Crystals upon crystals

First of all, for the 17 people who insisted on informing me that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and therefore the Declaration of Independence is meaningless, great job reporting on your 4th grade social studies lesson. Yes, I am aware that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and that he could have been a more honorable and less hypocritical man by the standards of the 21st century. But it’s pretty well-documented that he was also in favor of abolishing slavery, and he did intend to say that we’re all created equal, as far as he could assert that sentiment in the 18th century.  Yes, he did many things that we can judge him for 100s of years later. Yes, he was a product of his times, and he must have been the master of cognitive dissonance, but that doesn’t make the words of the Declaration of Independence any less meaningful. “Thomas Jefferson owned slaves,” is a statement of fact, but it’s not an argument against life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. It’s definitely not an argument for racism.

Now that that’s cleared up, what the hell was this weekend? My sister, like many people, said something to the effect of what a great time to be making art. But I didn’t want to make angry-scared art about whether or not Bizarro White House is going to suspend everyone’s civil rights and impose theocracy upon the only country I want to live.

Bizarro White House. There’s a comic right there.

I wanted to write epic stories about brave protagonists fighting unspeakable evil, not live them. How great is it that I started this blog just in time to have a visible outlet to vent my impotent rage 5 days a week?

“Truth”

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In their defense, they believed they were living in the Age of Reason. How were they supposed to guess it would be followed by the Age of Willful, Deliberate, Proud Ignorance?

My characterization of America’s Founding Fathers is lifted more or less from the 1972 film version of the musical 1776, a rollicking reenactment of the events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. (I have not yet seen Hamilton, but I have had parts of the score sung at me when I least expected it.) I always think of Benjamin Franklin as being the kind of guy who could really show you a good time. He’s definitely the one out of the bunch you’d want to sit down and have a beer with. He was known as something of a lady’s man, too. The phrase “obnoxious and disliked” is used in reference to John Adams over and over again. Sometimes, you have to be obnoxious and disliked to get things done.

The Right Two Bear Arms

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You think Sarah Palin had to put up with this sort of thing as governor of Alaska?

Education is at the heart of this; when fully funded schools are considered luxuries reserved for certain classes, education becomes devalued. When education is no longer a priority, the most vulnerable populations suffer. And when people are miserable, they are easily led by liars and demagogues and charlatans with the agenda of using people’s own lack of understanding against them.

I cannot get past this woman and her refusal to answer basic yes/no questions, her utter lack of understanding of what students of all socioeconomic classes need to succeed. Or perhaps she does understand, and she’s deliberately advocating to leave huge swaths of American children behind, because that is the result of her love affair with charter and religious schools, which are not required to retain students who lower the curve. She wants to set up a tiered system wherein kids who aren’t at the top of their game receive fewer resources, where public schools become corrals for children marked for failure.

If bears are a huge threat to America’s schools, I hope the Department of Natural Resources will involve themselves in the crisis. Public schools already have enough on their hands without requiring faculty and staff to prepare themselves for bear hunts on campus. Think of how many pencils you could buy for the cost of a single bear-shooting weapon. Of course, I’m not a fan of shooting bears to begin with.

Bears are fun to draw, though.

Betsy DeVos should not be confirmed for anything except a plane ticket home.