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Top Tier Mandala

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It’s a wedding cake! It’s an insect colony! It’s an MRI of a human brain!

This weekend I got very little sleep and spent almost every waking hour in public. This is stressful for chronically fatigued introverts. However, it was gratifying to have the opportunity to meet like-minded people and shore up friendships with people I knew I liked but didn’t know very well.

Still, it’s hard to take an entire weekend off from regular life. Now my brain is everywhere but here. Feel like I’m behind schedule somehow. Things to think about. Nothing to draw, at the moment.

I have a theory about creepy clowns

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Being a bit of a motley fool myself, I sort of resent the way this trend has appropriated the value of tomfoolery.

Someone asked me the secret of being such a prolific writer, and I replied (in jest, natch), “I sit and think about what I’m going to write for 3 months before I write it.” Sometimes, not always. But usually I don’t work fast enough to write about trends while the trends are still relevant. I think my Pokemon Go comic was the last time I managed to be timely and topical in a comic. I don’t know how Matt Parker and Trey Stone do it week after week. Today I had this idea about creepy clowns, and it got enough traction as a Facebook status that I dared try it in this space instead of copping out and posting a photograph of my comic book.

I have a similar theory about zombies and the dehumanization of strangers in a society that’s too large and impersonal, where strangers are dangerous and individual lives have no meaning. We’re all completely jaded, many without compassion, most having learned to mistrust and possibly fear those who are the least bit different.

Even if it is a hoax or an urban legend or a guerrilla marketing tactic, there’s a reason it resonates in the collective consciousness, and I think it’s safe to say that some people are taking advantage of that fear for their own weird, personal reasons: to get attention and stay anonymous at the same time, I guess, or else because they’re violent freaks, or just want to be. The Man got a robocall from the Boy’s school explaining that there had been no threat at the school, but given that the student’s safety and comfort were paramount, anyone who showed up dressed or made up like a creepy clown would be suspended.

All of which seems totally normal in a world where kids regularly practice their active shooter drills because they know it’s entirely possible that a violent freak will shoot up their school.

It’s Not a Table Set for Ants

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These items are still too big for daily use by ants.

My actual kitchen table is 50% kitchen table and 50% workbench/junk drawer/stuff The Man doesn’t know what to do with, but I can set some lovely miniature tables with dishes and fruit and vegetables. Last night, I made this cute bowl and a single lemon and 3 roses and a vase, all out of the little scraps of clay left over from other projects. I didn’t fire them last night because it was pretty late, here they are now. My tiny vase-making skills could use improvement, but I think I’ll try some other, more complicated kinds of flowers and fancier vases in the future.

Yesterday I sent what I believe to be the final files for the Bonnie Jo Campbell comic book to the printers. I can scarcely believe it, but they should exist as physical objects in meatspace within the next week or so. I’m terrified there’s a mistake somewhere, or that I could have made them better with more work. It’s a strange balance, since I started this blog with the intention of giving up the drive for perfection, but somehow, print seems more momentous than pixels.

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.

The Greatest Show on Earth, 1982: What There Was

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Today I learned that pregnant women can’t sell cotton candy at the circus.

Another of my favorite stories in this book: “The Greatest Show on Earth, 1982: What There Was.” Stripping out all the circus background leaves a core that I can’t help but compare to “Hills Like White Elephants” if Hemingway wrote race and class issues into the story. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” I think the characters are only victims of their own desire to keep having a good time, to keep drinking new drinks, and making clever but meaningless observations, whereas Buckeye and Black Mike in “The Greatest Show on Earth, 1982: What There Was” have this avalanche of societal pressures, combined with their substance issues, holding them back.  Their obstacles seem insurmountable.

The people in Hemingway’s story seem like they’re most interested in maintaining the status quo: having fun. They could easily go the other way; they just don’t want to. In Campbell’s story, the characters would love the luxury of settling down with a baby, and living mundane, healthy lives but they don’t have the resources to change. It’s not even an option for them. They know that, even in a 2-parent family, their child would be worse off than they had been as children of single mothers.

I like the circus car in the last panel, and I didn’t want to excise the circus theme entirely, but I’m afraid it takes too much focus off Buckeye, sitting on the ground, feeling her own pain, and Mike’s too. But that’s what I believe she’s doing.

Tell Yourself

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I think we’d all jump off a bridge if Amber dared us to. Am I right?

This comic seems a little graphically threadbare to me, compared to the previous ones, and I think it’s because “Tell Yourself” just doesn’t have as much definitive imagery as some of the other stories in Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. “Playhouse,” yesterday, for example, has the peonies and the playhouse and the alcohol and everyone’s hair and the rabbits and the fruit stickers and the Tasmanian devil tattoo. The central visual feature in “Tell Yourself has got to be Mary’s clothes, and frankly, I also find the idea of a barely-adolescent girl wearing low rise jeans and a crop top with a pair of cupcakes over her cupcakes slightly discomfiting. I didn’t want to spend too much time focusing on her “darling new breasts.”

My mother would have done anything to persuade me to dress in a more feminine fashion when I was in 8th grade, but she never in a million years would have let me out of the house in that outfit, even when I was in high school. She would have been highly critical if she saw me dressed that way when I was in college. But I see little kids dressed like that all the time. The supply seems equal to the demand.

After the outfit, the only big visual symbol is the rocking chair, because I couldn’t figure out how to work in the gum-cracking or the terrible baby perfume. For the first time in this project, I was really at a loss for how to illustrate the final panel. I settled on the potatoes; it locates the narrator in this role she has created for herself: being a mother comes first, even though Mary’s already gone. But she did change her shirt. And I’ve left mom with the knife. She’s not wholly defenseless.

Playhouse

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All things considered, the results are pretty pleasing.

This being one of my favorite stories in the book, I wanted to really do it justice. Unfortunately, today was the day that all my equipment decides to rebel: both the computer and the Wacon tablet failed over and over again, in a variety of new and enraging ways. I must have unplugged and replugged the tablet a hundred times, and closed and opened Photoshop fifty times, and rebooted the box twenty-five times. Hundreds of times I had to go back because the tablet either did something I didn’t tell it to do, or didn’t do something I did tell it to do, or just didn’t do anything at all because the power cable is frayed and sometimes disconnects. It was the perfect storm of resistentialism. At least I’ve learned my lesson about saving everything all the time. If only I didn’t require so much technological assistance.

At this point, I’m leaning strongly toward using my savings to invest in entirely new machinery.

Despite all that, the comic seems right. Not sure if there will be a comic tomorrow. Gotta work out these gremlins before I spend another 8 hours cussing at a hunk of metal and plastic.

Special thanks to the Bear, who didn’t mind me freaking out on him and invading his home for tech support just before midnight.

ETA: I went back and fixed the 2 typos pointed out to me oh so gently and lovingly by the trolls at Reddit. I also gave Pinky some eyelashes in panel 6.

Open Hearted Mandala

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Love is the answer.

Normally, I like to think of myself as proactive and focused, but those words do not describe the me of recent months. Sleep deprived and foggy, more like. I don’t know how many days in a row it’s possible to lay out lists of imperative tasks for yourself and accomplish none of them, but I decided not to find out. I assigned myself only 1 task: clean the kitchen. It took 3 hours, and didn’t include most of the floor, but it got checked off. Then I made 2 quiches and a peach cobbler, which is more proactive than reading 8 years’ worth webcomics in 3 days.

Last night it was sort of getting to me, all the unfinished tasks, my own abysmal sense of potential and achievement. Just before bed, I looked at my Kindle page and found that I had sold a few more books and gotten a 4th review on my Amazon page. So really, I need to let go of my own issues and just worry about the important things. Much work to do on that front.

BTW, if you’d like to write me an Amazon review but can’t afford $4.99 for the book, let me know and I’ll send the ms. I’m totally cool with review copies for people who intend to actually review it.

If you do have $4.99  and want to help me along, please consider buying my book, supporting my Patreon,  or ordering my merch.

Brave Back-to-School Bulletin Board

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The great thing about this is that, the more you doubt it, the truer it is. Theoretically.

Once or twice a year, my insomnia gets so bad that it comes full circle and after a week of falling asleep around dawn, my circadian rhythms get pushed back so far that I literally miss my window of opportunity for that night and never get to sleep at all. Last night hurt. Probably by 10 a.m. or so I could have slept, but at that point it makes more sense to power through for another 12 hours and get back onto a schedule that puts me in alignment with the majority of humans.

But I had to make a bulletin board! On zero hours of sleep! Fortunately, I had hung the orange background Friday and cut all the letters Monday, so I just had to reinforce the background, space and attach each individual letter, and then get some graphic elements. Due to the no-sleep, walking-around-basically-hallucinating situation, the lion cubs somehow came out half the size they were intended to be but by that point my brain was done. I scarcely felt competent to hold scissors, let alone pilot a car, and I really needed to use the reserve for the driving part, since The Man randomly stopped by, hung out for a while, and then left the Girl in my keeping.

So, I feel like this design could have been 10 times better but I also feel like it’s good enough, and if I get tired of looking at it I can change it later. School starts Thursday in my district (the kids to the south went back last Thursday; the kids to the north, including the Boy and the Girl, start next Thursday). The teachers all seemed to like it.

Normally this is a weird color combination for me. I don’t care for orange unless it’s food and typically I only like secondary colors if they’re right next to their primaries, but it’s just as with the mandalas: I forced myself to choose a different color (orange, to go with the yellow lions) and then convinced myself that purple would stand out against orange, and it really did.

It’s Not Just You

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Clearly, something terrible is going to happen whether or not you open your eyes. 

Halfway through, the realization came to me that this would have worked better as a Monday comic. Although maybe Jim Davis already nailed the “Mondays suck” trope into the ground. At any rate, I never get tired of the “everything sucks” trope. Disaster is definitely imminent, which you can prove by waiting between 1 and 24 hours, during which space of time you will always learn about the occurrence of something disastrous.

I love how the person on the rights’s face came out. The skepticism in the eyes is so great. I couldn’t have drawn that if I tried. I can only draw expressive eyes by accident. I made about 6 attempts on the eyes of the person on the left and gave up. Dots it is. I’m not funny, and I can’t draw. And something truly awful will hit your radar between now and this time tomorrow night. Guaranteed. What are you gonna do? What can you do?

Keep on creating, kids!