Category Archives: webcomic

When Harry Potter Fanfic Mashups Go Wrong

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I guess I could have worked a lizard in there somehow but I could only think of Daniel Pinkwater novels and a minor character from Fullmetal Alchemist.

I guess I could have worked a lizard in there somehow but I could only think of Daniel Pinkwater novels and a minor character from Fullmetal Alchemist and this is weird enough as it is. Do kids still read Daniel Pinkwater?

The odds that anyone gets all 5 references here are kind of slim. Harry Potter’s pretty universal among a certain cohort, as is Snoopy, but there’s not a tremendous overlap there. I’m sure kids recognize Peanuts, but I don’t know how many of them, outside of the music theater group, know You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. A lot of people love His Dark Materials but the first movie flopped and it’s not as popular as it ought to be considering how the book is. Guardians of Ga’hoole is a terrific story, too, but it’s even more obscure. The movie was straight up awful, and there are so many books that you have to be pretty committed to the story. I highly recommend it, though, if you would like to read something that riffs off of Lord of the Rings, is written for kids, and stars a large cast of owls. And then I threw in a terrible, but catchy, pop music song from 5 years ago.

So, like everything I do, its potential appreciative audience is already minuscule before I even ask anyone to read it. But here it is. The idea’s been cracking me up for a couple weeks already. I’m dying to see if anyone else gets even a chuckle out of it.

At least it pleases me.

I like this black and white style too. I’ve been using color and fancy backgrounds to cover up inadequacies in the artwork, but it’s time to scale back and let the lines start speaking for themselves. I have another idea that will look better in this style too, or at least in black and white with only a few colored accents.

Pumpkin Is the Spice of Life

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Look, it's that time of year and I really felt like it needed to be said.

Look, it’s that time of year and I really felt like it needed to be said.

It may be an unpopular opinion, but it’s my opinion. I like pumpkin pie as much as the next person, and I can enjoy pumpkin (strictly in the months of October and November) in a variety of forms: soup, pie, perhaps in a savory dish like ravioli. I even enjoyed the unusual mashup of the Danish kringle with pumpkin yesterday. But, I have to draw the line. I don’t need my tea to taste like pumpkin spice, or my Oreos. Pumpkin spice, I believe, goes with actual pumpkin.

Anyway, I’m trying to get into the Halloween spirit. I need to find someone who wants to watch all the scary movies that have come out recently: The Babadook, Good Night, Mommy, The Visit. (No spoilers!) And The Man has acquired a pumpkin, which he promises to turn into a pie. Typically, I do the cooking around here, but I don’t have a lot of patience for fidgety things like pie crust, especially since I like mine gluten-free, which makes them twice as tricky. But the man is good at measuring things in a way that I am not. In fact, in his day job, he is a metrologist: a measurer of very, very small distances for very, very precise purposes. So he makes the crust. And since he’s making the crust, he can make the rest of it too while he’s at it.

So, while it seems obvious that the world disagrees with me on this, given the proliferation of weird pumpkin spice flavored things this season, and the fact that every year there are more of them in stores, I like to make a distinction. Pumpkin spice is for pumpkins, and you’ll never change my mind.

More Insomnia Comics

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The heavenly cloud sleeping Monica dreams that she can write comics in her sleep.

The heavenly cloud sleeping Monica dreams that she can write comics in her sleep.

My inability to full recharge my brain each night on a regular basis is an endless source of inspiration. Sorry if the final panel is too creepy. I promise you, it’s worse on the inside. I was up until 3:30 or 4 a.m. last  night, and then up at 6 because the A/C finked out again and it’s still about 100 degrees here once the sun rises. And even though I fell back asleep after helping The Man fix it, FedEx rang the doorbell at 9. So my head is buzzing.

Also started a new bulletin board and finished a Panels piece today. Ain’t no rest for the wicked.

Two Versions

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Is a picture really worth 1000 words?

Is a picture really worth 1000 words?

Usually the words come before the images, and this comic was no different. When I start drawing, sometimes I put the words into the file first, just so I could see how much space they would take up, but for this comic, there weren’t that many words, and I was feeling very out of sorts, so I wanted to get the more complicated part out of the way before I lost my eye hand coordination and ability to focus. So, I saved the dialog for later, and once I had the black and white outlines I started to wonder if it could be equally, or possibly even more entertaining, as a silent comic.

Here’s the textual version:

...aaaaannnddd, the snake is back again...

…aaaaannnddd, the snake is back again…

Yeah, neither of them are as entertaining as the actual idea I really couldn’t draw because I was too tired to even imagine Legolas as a rhinoceros (OK, no, that wasn’t the gag, but it’s a similar type of a problem) but this is the thing I created today.

At least I received both a request to reprint my article about refugees and comic (my 2nd reprint request this year) plus I found out that I have been put on the media list for Tucson Comicon. Finally! I will fulfill a lifelong dream: employing a press pass to get into an event I want to attend without paying for a ticket. Whee! My writing is really paying off. Also, I’m going to Comicon.

Making Friends IRL 2015 (Introvert Edition)

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Next time: Losing Friends Online,, Scrabble edition

Next time: Losing Friends Online,, Scrabble edition

Those of us who have never felt quite human can only utilize the great social equalizing power of the Internet to a certain degree. After a while, you have to venture out into the world of realtime flesh interaction, where, if you screw up, you can’t just delete your profile and start over. If you’re fairly young, maybe you can move to another city and try again, but after a certain age, you probably own too much stuff, including real property, to make that a feasible option, and you must, instead learn how to pass yourself off as a normal person who can periodically attend crowded events and make conversation with unfamiliar people.

I would not attend as many parties if not for The Man, so I usually have the option of hiding behind him, although I sense that he would prefer not to have to drag his wife around like a leaden shadow when he wants to socialize (which is all the time).

Other strategies include offering to help the host/hostess with their duties, scrupulously reading the titles of all the books on the shelf, and making friends with the household pets. Or, you could just be a bit more aware and a little more confident. If you have access to someone’s social media profile, you could browse it in advance in order to prepare yourself with topics of mutual interest. Or, you could simply be well-informed or opinionated, which will also give you many things to talk about.

Just remember, no one else can see inside your head. If you sound confident, everyone is going to perceive you as such. If you act like you’re OK, the world will respond as if that’s the case.

Pressing Issues Faced by Real Adults

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Remember how, when you were a kid, you couldn't wait to be an adult because adults could do anything they wanted to do?

Remember how, when you were a kid, you couldn’t wait to be an adult because adults could do anything they wanted to do?

1) I’m the health nut who loads the fridge up with fruits and vegetables and then gets all annoyed when there isn’t any cake in there, even though I can’t really eat any amount of cake without making myself sick.

2) Even when I worked out miles from my house, I still recognized the irony of driving to the gym. The Man and I are considering membership at a gym 1 block away. I’m curious as to whether he’ll want to drive there.

3) It’s perplexing that my stepkids have yet to find their father or me mortifyingly embarrassing. They still hug and kiss us, even in public. I don’t know what I have to do to fill these children with the shame that comes from thinking other kids are judging you based on your parents’ weirdness, and we are pretty weird.

4) My parents wanted me to be a doctor. Pretty much nobody’s parents want them to be an artist. Definitely nobody’s parents gaze lovingly into the crib and say, “One day, she could draw webcomics!”

5) How do lawyers and judges even work? The few times I’ve been in court I just wanted to scream and break things and punch a cop. I mean, I know they get recess and all, but I’ve never seen a playground at the courthouse. I’d rather stare at a wall than work in a courthouse.

6) The age-old debate.

A Shonda for the Vays Menschen

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I've seen some stuff, you know?

I’ve seen some stuff, you know?

It’s all true, anyway. An African cab driver really did ask me if I was raped, and a bitter, critical, English professor really did tell me that there was no way that could ever happen when I tried to tell the story in an undergraduate fiction writing workshop. I suppose that’s a big difference between fiction and non-fiction. Readers just won’t accept certain types of events in fiction: you can’t write too many tragedies into a story, or too many coincidences, even though strings of tragedies and coincidences of course happen in real life.

We’re used to reading clean dialog, too, and heaven knows people don’t really speak the way their words appear in books. People say “um” and “ah” and “like,” and they stutters and repeat themselves in a way that would be utterly annoying to read. Fiction isn’t like life, after all. Fiction wraps up. There are metaphors and meanings. Life is messy and crises don’t always happen for a reason, and people don’t always learn from them.

A “shonda for the goyim” is a Yiddish sentiment, which expresses that a Jewish person has done something shameful in the sight of non-Jews, which will then reflect badly on all Jews, because anti-Semitism. I’ve since been told that black people would say, “a scandal for white people,” or something to that effect. I had mixed feelings about having an entire panel depend on a phrase in a foreign language, but that’s really what was going on in my head, too, and I think it reflects an important parallel, the kind of point upon which fiction depends, but which life often fails to deliver.

When I was looking up how to say “white people” in Yiddish for the title (I hope vays menschen is correct; I known “menschen” is “people” and if “vays” is pronounced like the German word “weiss”  then it makes sense) I came across a couple articles asking if the Yiddish word “schvartze” was considered racist. Schvartze is the word that some elderly Jews used to refer to black people, and let me tell you, it’s racist as hell. At least it was when my late grandmother said it, usually in the context of, “Lock the doors, there’s schvartze everywhere.” And that’s what I was taught about black people as a child.

I could pretend otherwise, but it’s the truth, and that’s what fiction and nonfiction have to have in common.

Insomnia Comics Ah Ha HA ha ha ha

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Heeeelllllpppp mmmeeeeeee....

Heeeelllllpppp mmmeeeeeee….

This is all I’ve got right now. Normally, I’m person who really requires 8 hours of sleep a night. Last night I got 0, with maybe a 2 hour nap in the mid-afternoon. It hurts to word. Eyeball my comic. Pencil erasers don’t really work in Tucson. Something about the dryness of the air, maybe. Like, upvote, whatever.

The Stories of Our Lives

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That's so cool! I was actually thinking about getting into smashing the patriarchy myself. Is there, like, some kind of newsletter I could subscribe to?

That’s so cool! I was actually thinking about getting into smashing the patriarchy myself. Is there, like, some kind of newsletter I could subscribe to?

I’m getting excited about writing again. As a few people know, I have written 10 novels. Two of them are bouncing around the Internet, 2 of them have been nudged and prodded by a couple agents and a publisher before whimpering off with their tails between their legs, and most of them just sort of exist. They have plans, but no executions. After completing my last novel, I massive undertaking, I sort of walked away from 25 years of constant novel writing to think about visual art; you can go back to page 1 of this blog and read it in order to get the entire story. It takes a while to tell it.

But I did send the ms for this last novel, an 800 page behemoth, out to the Desert Rats: Rabbit, Fox, and Owl. And I’m just starting to get some feedback on it, and the feedback seems good. The revision actually seems possible. I’m rereading it myself–it’s been about 2 years, I guess–and liking what I have, seeing where it could be tightened, noticing problems that didn’t get fixed in my last pass.

Plus, I’ve been working on a short story in comic form. Short stories are not my forte. I’ve only ever written a couple I was completely happy with. I can do novel, and I can do flash, but short stories elude me. But working in comic form might be liberating. I know the entire story, suddenly. It started out as a 16 panel gag, a short of blunt, deadpan, New Yorker style punchline at the end, but it took 20 panels to get to the end, and by the time I got to the joke it was more poignant than funny I was too invested in the characters to let their troubles be a joke and immediately I started to see the solutions to their problems. Now it’s 56 storyboarded panels, and if I can get out the rest of the dialog and thumbnails and actually find a style and draw the entire thing, I will feel much more confident about my graphic novel project, which is only one chapter from being completely scripted (although I stopped storyboarding before that, when I realize my thumbnails were completely useless and that you can’t put 12 panels on every comic book page if you want the images to actually express something.

As for this photo comic, it’s, as The Man has taught me to think of it, Kaufmanesque, in that I know it’s bizarre and I really couldn’t care less whether or not you think it’s funny. I think it’s funny.

Revenge of the Helicopter Kids

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Listen, you don't know my parents like I do. My parents are better than those other parents and they deserve special treatment.

Listen, you don’t know my parents like I do. My parents are better than those other parents and they deserve special treatment.

If you, like me, have 150 Facebook friends with school age children, you’ve probably seen a bunch of photographs in the last couple weeks featuring kids in new clothing and various attitudes of excitement or embarrassment holding signs proclaiming “First Day of Kindergarten,” or some similar sentiment. Well, my cousin posted a picture of herself hugging her 5-year-old with a caption explaining that she was probably the worst mother in the world because she wasn’t going to make him hold an adorable sign before he went off to school, and that the child would probably be scarred for life because of this moral failure.

So that’s where this comes from. But it comes from other things, too, like the Boy once again losing his Kindle privileges because he was watching YouTube when he was supposed to be doing homework. I’ve been thinking along similar themes, how we hold our kids to higher standards than we hold ourselves, and most of us would find ourselves without smartphones if some higher power took them away when we used them to screw around on the Internet instead of work.

My feelings on helicopter parents are well-documented. OK, there are worse things you could do to your kids, but when we’re talking about good intentions gone wrong, wrapping your kids in bubble wrap and protecting them from every possible bump the universe might have to offer while arguing with teachers, coaches, and other experts on particular aspects of childhood why your kid is better than other kids and deserves to be treated differently is a terrific way to raise a completely helpless and ineffective human being. How long do you plan on doing this, I wonder? When I taught at the college level I heard of parents trying to advocate for their kids, and a couple kids told me their parents were going to call me, but my standard response was that I wasn’t going to talk to their mommies and daddies because they were grownups and responsible for their own behavior. Legally, I wasn’t supposed to discuss their grades with their parents either.

Still, my supervisor assured us that parents would call anyway. From the kids, I heard firsthand that their overbearing parents didn’t prepare them for life after high school. They didn’t know when to go to bed without being told; they didn’t know when to get up. All their lives they’d been told they were the best, and suddenly it turned out that they were just like everyone else. And, having never been allowed to fail, they didn’t know how to succeed on a level playing field.

Seriously, moms and dads, back off! Your kid should be given more responsibility every year so that they have actual adult experience when they are 18. They should be allowed to fail, over and over, so that they learn about consequences and how to make better decisions. They should be taught not to throw a fit when they don’t get everything they believe they deserve. Otherwise, they are going to be mightily disappointed when college spits them out into the real world and they don’t get every job and raise and promotion they think the world owes them.

However, if any children would like to argue that I deserve something more than I’ve achieved in life, I would welcome the effort.