This comic is basically a Facebook status that I read many months back. The person who posted it gave me permission to turn it into a comic. The fact that the person who posted it is the wife and mother of these characters and not directly involved in the anecdote obviously doesn’t bother me at all.
“Why don’t you draw comics anymore?” people often ask me.
Well, here’s a comic I made, for all the good it will do you. Does this answer your question?
It started, I suppose, with my morbid but not the least bit irrational fear of having a metal bit drilling into my skull while I am conscious to experience it, which morphed into a generalized and perhaps slightly irrational phobia of dentistry in general, which I have been working to overcome for the last couple years. And then there’s the component where my lawyer friend told me that if you don‘t have a “No Trespassing” sign up, then it isn’t illegal for people to trespass on your property. Even if you have a wall of giant teeth surrounding it. Without the sign, you could be liable for the trespasser’s injuries. With the sign, you’re protected.
That lady, naturally, started out as McKayla Maroney being unimpressed, but then morphed into Morticia Addams being unimpressed, for obvious reasons.
I have like 6 posts that I should have put up on this blog: a super cool bulletin board and a bunch of greeting cards.
Just because you’re dressed like a hobo doesn’t mean you have to eat like one.
We are going somewhere, though. That’s the thing about travel. You always get somewhere. Once I missed a turn in Indiana and, instead of getting on the interstate, spent hours driving farther and farther away from civilization until I found myself creeping along below 15 miles an hour behind a horse and buggy. No kidding: lost in time as well as in space. But I was somewhere. Amish country, maybe.
Of course, in 30 years, they’ll teach it in completely different way than you learned, but at least you’ll be able to empathize with your child’s frustration.
There have seriously been moments in my marriage when the greatest stressor we faced as a couple was the elementary math curriculum. I never mastered anything beyond algebra myself, and of course mathematics education just looked a lot different in the ’80s. The Man is pretty good at math—he can do calculus—but he doesn’t know how to teach little kids like I do. So sometimes the only way for the Girl to get her homework done is for The Man to explain it to me so I can explain it to her. I wasn’t sure how funny this joke was, but I told it to one of the volunteer moms and the librarian at my library and they both laughed.
Presumably, knowing algebra is something of an achievement, because I still scored in the 66th percentile on the math section of the GRE despite being, of course, a liberal arts major. That means I’m better at math than 66% of all people who have, or are about to have, completed a bachelor’s degree and hope to attend graduate school. This tells me that most people must not know any math at all.
There’s also a little joke here about the kind of helicopter parents who would call the school to challenge the basic curriculum because their kid didn’t like it, because these people exist. They are not uncommon today, but that’s another thing you didn’t see too much of in the ’80s.
As I overheard an old leftie saying during the Women’s March, “Every time we won a battle there was still another battle to be won.”
According to Facebook, I was wrong, and some people did notice my lack of comics, but I guess they were all people who were too polite to say something about it. And I missed my comics. I miss expressing myself in a public forum where I can see that my words have been read by 100s, and sometimes 1000s of humans/sentient creatures trapped within humans. And the people who like my comics the most seem to prefer Dragon Comics to my better-illustrated work. I actually wrote a not-Dragon comic earlier in the week, but it will keep until Dragon works out some of Dragon’s issues.
The line about the kitty litter also went over very well on Facebook, where I used it, in a slightly different form, to describe what middle age could go do. Seriously, when you are still about 9 1/2 inside, it’s disconcerting to hear the words “shingles” and “astigmatism” from 2 different medical professionals in the same week. Also shingles medication is terrible. The pills are 800 milligrams and the side effects can also eat a bag of kitty litter. (Yeah, shingles are bad too.) I declined the prescription to correct the impending near-sightedness because I can still read books without issue, and I can barely afford prism lenses, let alone bifocals, and because I am in denial about this middle age thing.
You might think that two pairs of spectacles would give birth to a litter of spectacles but they only grow a second lens and earpieces after they pupate.
The Man gets credit for this idea. We were driving around in the desert both lamenting the loss of our glasses, but apparently he found his under the seat, whereas mine have been gone for a couple of weeks. Doubtless they will turn up again after I have spent several hundred dollars and several hours of my life replacing them. Anyway, he said our glasses were probably together having little baby monocles. Monocle is a funny word. We also like to imagine our cell phones mating. We are funny people.
Our go-to has long been the woman who can’t eat anything but cheesy potatoes.
Today was a better day, obviously. The Man was a great comfort to me. Of course, staying mostly off the internet is the best medicine. But if you, like many people, find that you can’t do that, if you’re staring at photos of people you hated in high school and former lovers whose lives all look more put-together than yours, there’s always the woman who eats nothing but cheesy potatoes, or old clips from Maury Povich or Judge Judy, and, of course, People of Walmart. It’s crazy easy to feel superior to the rest of the world if you just know where to look.
Anyway, I’ve got your number, basement dwelling neckbeard troglodytes. I know just where you live. In your mom’s basement.
What’s the use of feeling blue?
How do people build entire careers on drawing political comics? I can’t even look at a photograph of our new kleptocratic overlords without wanting to vomit lately. There is so much material–so many things that are clearly not OK and therefore in desperate need of mockery–that picking 1 thing out of the day’s new is overwhelming, and by the time you get to the end of the list it’s not funny anymore, if it ever was. There’s too much of it, legions of alleged humans working with all their might to make the world worse for the mast majority of its inhabitants and acting as if it’s perfectly reasonable to watch other suffer and die as long as corporations profit. Who am I even supposed to shame?
It was another hard day. My sister probably had the right idea, getting her Canadian citizenship, but apart from the racism and most of my elected officials, I really like where I live. Still, running away has its merits.
Thank goodness somebody cares enough to ask.
I didn’t feel like drawing a comic, but I drew a comic. Just general stuff; don’t worry. I have The Man to lean on. Everything is a metaphor for something else anyway.
Totally crushing it here.
I don’t judge. Seriously.
This comic is probably moderately not safe for work, but why should I care? I don’t have a job. Even so, I got almost nothing accomplished today. The gag here was out of my sketchbook because I didn’t feel like I had any jokes in my tonight, so I just redrew the sketch and colored it in and here we have a pretty terrible comic. I wouldn’t have run it at all but I showed it to someone–the Fox, I think–who laughed, so here it is. Blame him if you’re offended. Just kidding. It’s entirely my responsibility. He just eggs me on, like a hundred other people I know.
Tomorrow I’ll try to make a beautiful bulletin board and it will be much more wholesome than whatever cesspool I pulled this gem out of.
It’s OK to look at reverse mermaid centerfolds. It’s just not OK to share reverse mermaid centerfolds with those who have not consented to view them.
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