Category Archives: webcomic

The Great Brush Off

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Yes, is this Locks of Love? I was wondering if it would be possible to schedule a pickup. No, actually, the postal charges would be kind of astronomical. 

Given the utter failure of my last fairy-tale based comic, which was reviled and downvoted across a wide variety of Internet platforms, I naturally decided to do another fairy tale based comic, this time omitting any references to cannibalism, my stepchildren, or the putative desire to combine the two.

Just to set the record straight: I don’t eat children. I was a vegetarian for half my life. I’ve never even eaten veal, or suckling pig.

Oh, OK, lamb, yeah.

Anyway, my interest in Rapunzel is of 2 parts. Part the first is the historical derivation and evolution of the story. Most of us know a tale in which a girl is held prisoner by a witch, who punishes her when she inadvertently lets slip that she has a boyfriend. The Grimms cleaned it up a bit for their middle-class, proto-bourgeois audience. The version they originally collected was about a fairy who finds out her young charge has strayed only once the kid is so super-pregnant that her clothes don’t fit anymore.

Part the second is my obsession with long hair. According to my Internet research, being obsessed with hair can be referred to as chaetomania. If you’re sexually obsessed with it, it’s usually called trichophilia. But I just like having it on my head, and I like it on other people’s heads too.

Truth be told, I haven’t even had a trim since autumn of 2011. Of course, Rapunzel should call Locks of Love or Wigs for Kids and have her discarded crowning glory reworked to crown a child with none. (I’ve heard some rumors about Locks of Love not being on the up and up, but according to Snopes it’s either a malicious lie or a lack of understanding about how charities work or how human hair wigs are made.)

What I like about this comic, aside from the puns and the hair, are the ways that Rapunzel’s oppression is bound up in her hair, which is what a lot of modern reworkings of the story conclude. By severing her own bonds, Rapunzel liberates herself, removing the prince and the witch from the equation. There are quite a few stories set in the 1920s in which this is a theme. Cut your hair and fuck the patriarchy!

That said, I’m not cutting my hair. The patriarchy can go fuck itself.

The calligraphy in the last panel isn’t 100% to my liking, and I was going to redo it, but the Fox said he liked it and I have a headache, so I guess I’ll let it stay.

 

Success

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I’m literally standing right behind you.

Criticism I can handle. Handling criticism is one of the skills they teach you in Iowa-style writing workshops, of which I have participated in 10. Criticism isn’t personal. Good criticism is useful. It helps you learn how to improve. Unlike insults, which are not useful. But even insults I can handle, having become inured to verbal abuse during my traumatic childhood.

Whether total strangers love me or think I’m a moronic talentless hack, I can still console myself with the fact that I am producing original content 5 days a week. Are they doing that? There is a line in the Tom Robbins book Skinny Legs and All where the main character, an artist displaying her canvas, is told, “My 5-year-old could do that.”

“But he didn’t,” the artist says. “I did.”

It’s like the band Nickelback. They’re hugely successful, and yet so many musicians despise them as talentless hacks, writing heroic couplets and playing 3 chords. But love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Nickelback created something. They created heavy metal music that could be played on the soft rock station. They created it and you didn’t, so try not to be too jealous that you didn’t figure that one out first, because if you had, you’d be the big rock stars, live in hilltop houses, driving 15 cars.

I’m just saying, make it useful criticism.

Anyway, 1 a.m. again. But I made something.

Wicked

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Don’t be shocked. You know babies are so tasty you could just eat them up. 

After writing yesterday’s comic, I flashed back to this flash fiction I wrote a couple years ago.It took a while to figure out how to compress 8 sentences into 4 sentences and 2 pictures, but judicious editing is another one of my talents.

I do love my fairy tales. Classic tropes and all. So much fun to deconstruct.

I don’t know that being a stepparent is as fraught as people make it out to be. Before I met The Man I dated a couple guys with kids and they all liked me very well. Most kids like me. Obviously, I have a very good relationship with my stepchildren or I wouldn’t be joking about eating them, which I also do to their faces, sometimes. It probably helps that they’re very well-behaved, but I think it’s just like any relationship. If you go into things with generosity and empathy and an open heart, you can go pretty far, and if the other person comes into it with the same qualities, you can’t fail.

At any rate, they’re too old to eat now, all adolescent and full of artificial colors and flavors. They’re more interesting as human beings, but they’re probably less sweet.

The candy house and gingerbread kids were super fun to draw. I could easily spend another 90 minutes making them look even tastier, but it’s late and today was kind of rough, physically, so I’m hoping to be asleep in less than that.

 

Compatibility

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We just come from such different backgrounds. We belong in such different worlds. And we’re just made of such different materials.

And this concludes our inadvertent shark week triumvirate. I think. I can’t promise no more shark comics, but I don’t intend to make any more. I didn’t intend to make this many, though. Shark comics just happened. You know how it is. Someone gives you an idea about sharks, which makes you think about sharks, so then you make a polymer clay shark, meaning you have to create some kind of polymer clay shark themed art even though you’ve already done some digital shark art, after which then you remember that you also have a Lego shark, and wouldn’t it be funny if the two sharks met, and what would they say to each other, keeping in mind that the last time we saw our little polymer clay shark, he was pumping himself up and thinking about mating.

I never had Legos as a kid; my parents rejected any toy that inspired us to keep asking for more of the same toy, and obviously, you can never have enough Legos. To wit: I received the shark as a gift from a guy I dated in college, who had 20,000 of them. That’s not hyperbole. He counted them. And he brought them to college in a foot locker. Periodically he would let other people play with them, but mostly he just built increasingly elaborate castles in the dorm room we shared, none of which were ever finished because he always ran out of Legos. He was good though. He could have been one of those professional Lego artists.

Since he had multiples, the Lego shark lived in our fish tank for a year or so. When we got rid of the fish I cleaned the calcium off it and it was good as new, but I never had any other Legos to stick it on until last month, when The Man received the Google Fi holiday package, which contained a quantity of Legos and instructions for using them to build a shrine to your cell phone.

They were calling it a “phone holder,” but we built it, and I promise you it was a shrine. An altar. A monstrance, if you will.

The other side of the page offers instructions for building a “cable tidy.” We did not build the cable tidy. We may worship our phones, but I promise you, we never organize our cables.

Shark Affirmations

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I may have no idea what I look like, but I promise you I *smell* amazing.

It’s not that I have any particular affinity for or interest in sharks, beyond a general interest in nature and marine creatures. It’s just that Monday, while thinking about puns for Tuesday’s Sharkcuterie comic, the Girl asked to do some polymer clay modeling, and when she wanted to know what I was going to make, I just said, “a shark,” because that’s what was on my mind.

I also made a watermelon (not pictured here).

So while sitting here, feeling tired and uninspired (already spent a couple hours making something else today that I wasn’t able to finish) I was toying with the idea of just featuring the clay shark. But just the shark alone isn’t all that much to look at, and I’m more into the short narrative than the visual showcase, so it seemed like the shark better have something to say. Then I thought about the Dragon Affirmations comic and then I wondered what affirmations a shark would make. Then I set up the shoot and observed that the shark would have the same problem with mirrors that Dragon does, namely that it’s difficult to see directly in front of your face when your eyes are on either side of your head.

Poor shark.

In researching funny words associated with sharks, I came across the term “hypercarnivore,” which refers to creatures whose diets are at least 70% meat. Most sharks are hypercarnivores, although, in researching yesterday’s comic, I learned that at least one shark has been observed following a vegan diet.

Poor shark.

At the Sharkcuterie

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This may be the most abstruse, esoteric comic I’ve ever posted here. Who even knows what charcuterie is? Personally, I refuse to eat any type of processed meat. Sausage, cold cuts, anything that gets ground up and smushed back together is not OK with me, and nitrates/nitrites tend to give me a migraine. If I am going to eat meat, I prefer it to look like the actual animal, or at least be the largest possible chunk of that animal, and I would rather get it fresh and cook it myself so I know exactly what’s in it. After 20 years of vegetarianism, it’s hard not to be picky about eating animals.

Besides, do you know what’s in processed meat? No, you do not. Nobody does, not 100%. Not even the garde manger chef who made it. Anything could be in there. Karen Cushman nailed it when she wrote, “sausages are where butchers hide their mistakes,” even though she meant it as an example of snobbery. If not wanting to eat this makes me a snob, so be it.

The original gag is not mine. My brother, probably the only person in the world whose ideas I actually use, sent me an email saying he thought the idea of a “sharkcuterie” would make a funny T-shirt, but he had no idea of what a sharkcuterie would be. And then I spent literally an entire day thinking of puns for stuff that sharks would buy in a preserved meat market. Some of the rejects: mako bacon, porpoisemeat/toroisemeat (I was trying to make a pun on “forcemeat,” the very idea of which sends waves of nausea rippling through my gut, but neither of them really work), and some kind of joke about scotoplanes, which are also called sea pigs. But seriously, who knows that? I had to look all of this up, and it bummed me out that I couldn’t think of anything for terrine, galantine, or confit. Clam chops is funny, even though lamb chops aren’t really charcuterie because they’re not preserved. Poetic license. Or, comic license, I guess. In addition, I also considered making the sausages hanging on the wall look like eels, sea urchins, and anemones.

Anyway, those are some goofy looking sharks. They both need orthodontists.

Also: head cheese. Ew.

Dragon Comics 124

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Money, religion, politics. Just keep your mouth shut. 

Thus concludes the tale of the dragon and the troll, a complete journey from innocence, to experience, to rage, to remorse, to empathy, to remembering what caused the rage in the first place. It’s important to engage in meaningful with individual who hold a variety of beliefs, but it’s also important to do so with respect and, when needed, restraint. A little empathy helps. We need to be able to talk to each other rationally, no matter how much we disagree.

Otherwise, it’s best to walk away.

But it’s better if we can talk.

Peace on Earth. Good will to everyone. And if you can’t manage that, if you can only communicate your point through insults and puerile behavior, maybe your point isn’t as firm as you believe.

Dragon Comics 123

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The OED has a 1000 household uses. In addition to beating trolls with it, you can also use it to insult them. It’s actually full of rude words. 

Ha ha. Love that Compact Oxford English Dictionary with quirky bubble-shaped magnifying glass. The Fox gave it to me a couple years ago, when he was downsizing everything in his life, which he’s done like 3 times in 4 years. I don’t know if he even has any stuff left. He certainly doesn’t have as many giant dictionaries as I have.

I mean, if it were absolutely necessary, I could pack what I need into a couple bags. But I happen to like living in a library. I thought about that too, during his last purge. Foxy was reading some kind of Japanese extreme cleaning manual that advised only keeping things that bring you joy. After some consideration, I determined that while some individual books might not bring me joy, the library itself does.

And so, the troll-defeating fantasy continues.

Dragon Comics 122

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The problem that I have with myself when dealing with issues such as yesterday’s troll-baiting, is that I am a pantheist. I wanted to link to an interview I did on this subject, but it seems to have disappeared. The important part about being a pantheist in this context is that when I believe there is only one thing in the universe: we are all one thing, you and me and people we don’t like and people we do like and blades of grass and quasars and everything. So if I tear a ignorant little troll to shreds on Reddit, I am also tearing myself to shreds.

We’re the same, and it’s only the veil of material illusion that causes us to think we’re separate. So that’s sort of senseless and demoralizing. Why should I put so much energy into proving other people wrong? I know they’re wrong. Everyone who hears them knows they’re wrong. Possibly, they know they’re wrong, but either way, what does it matter? Am I really going to set someone straight? If the best I can do is make them feel bad, shouldn’t I feel bad about it too? Especially if it makes me feel good?

This is how it always goes when people rub me the wrong way. Because I love the universe in a general sense, but some of the elements of the universe are a trial to tolerate. Not you, though. You’re cool.

Dragon Comics 121

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Or skinks. You might also be thinking of legless lizards. But not dragons.

Some guy called me an idiot on the Internet and I eviscerated him with words.

He probably didn’t realize that he was reading original content on Reddit and that the author would see his comments. He definitely didn’t realize he was the idiot in the scenario. A couple people tried to point out the flaws in his reasoning, and then they just downvoted him into oblivion, so that the site hid his comment.

But…uh…I didn’t let it go.

Something snapped and I dug in and tore him to pieces, pointing out over and over again how ignorant he was. To his discredit, he kept responding, which only made him look stupider, and I kept ripping him to shreds until he actually apologized for insulting me and started sobbing about how mean I was.

And the thing is, I was mean. I was vicious. Because people who go around insulting people anonymously usually do it because it helps them feel superior, and usually no one has the time to knock them down, so they just go around being jerks and thinking they’re right and everyone else is wrong. But every once in a while one of them bumps into me, and I happen to have a little time on my hands, and a more impressive vocabulary, and ability to use logic, and understanding of how to argue, and they learn that once you wake the dragon, the dragon just presses forward until the opponent is destroyed because dragons do not like waking up.

And this guy was destroyed. I almost felt a little bad. I almost thought I should say, “Yeah, sorry, I took it too far,” because when he finished Googling all the big words, he probably felt way more insulted by the thread than I was by him calling me an idiot, especially since my insults were based on his actual intellectual shortcomings while his were based on an utter lack of understanding of anything. But I didn’t apologize. Instead, I picked his last shred of dignity and finished him with a final humiliating truth bomb that, I imagine, helped him understand just how outclassed he was.

So…I actually felt kind of bad/weird about excoriating a common troll in such a nuclear fashion. Blame it on the dragon part. I may be but little, but I am fierce. I try to be nice, all the time, to everyone, no matter who or what they are, but sometimes, something else takes over and I stop feeling like everyone deserves compassion, and get punitive instead. When I have this kind of cognitive dissonance, it always ends up in the Dragon Comics, and there are probably 2 more days of this thread, because I feel bad about feeling good about it.