Category Archives: webcomic

Super Fun!

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Other super fun activities in which you could participate over spring break might include lobbying your local legislature to enact environmental legislation and turning your stupid baseball cap around.

Other super fun activities in which you could participate over spring break might include lobbying your local legislature to enact environmental legislation and turning your stupid baseball cap around.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 is a federal law that provides for the cleanup of some of the most contaminated sites in the United States. It is most commonly referred to as the “Superfund,” which is actually the money set aside to help the EPA and other agencies complete this task, although sometimes the parties responsible for the pollution are also required to pay. There are hundreds of these sites across the country. Most likely, one of them sits pretty close to your backyard. For example, I was surprised to learn that the Tucson International Airport is on the list.

Most of these sites don’t look like ugly pits of mine runoff. Many of them have been allowed to grow over with wildflowers and support abundant wildlife. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the ground is full of mercury, or mustard gas, or some terrible byproduct of industry that will cause your entire family to die of cancer.

There are approximate 1300 sites on the list, with over 100 more whose addition has been proposed. These are only the ones we know about. Undoubtedly, there are many places that would qualify for the list but lack the activists necessary to get that attention.

Fewer than 400 Superfund sites have been successfully decontaminated in the last 35 years.

Check out this handy list to find your nearest pile of toxic waste.

Dictionary Definition

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You lack both the language skills as well as the perceptive capacity.

You lack both the language skills as well as the perceptive capacity.

I won this particular copy of Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary in the 8th grade, when I won the all-school spelling bee on the word “forfeit.” It’s been with me a long time, and the cover is askew from years of abuse. Now, of course, I usually use the Internet, or sometimes the lovely but cumbersome “Compact” Oxford English Dictionary, which was a gift from the Fox. It’s the one that has 9 pages printed in minuscule text on each oversized page, and come with a fun magnifying hemisphere.

As for defining other people: the dictionary is just doing its job, after all, when it offers definitions. I’m not sure what’s up with people who think they can define total strangers who don’t want and haven’t asked for their opinion. There are the critics who insist on telling other people what their gender or sexuality *really* is, and the ones who explain the life experience of people from different economic classes, and even the ones who say, “Well, I can easily do XYZ, therefore everyone should easily do XYZ and if they don’t they’re lazy and deserve to fail.”

The solution, of course, is to shut up and listen. It’s not easy. When you have your own, perfectly valid perspective, you don’t necessarily see the need to hear someone else’s point of view. Personally, I think that empathy is one of the things that separates us from wild creatures. If you lack the ability to put yourself into another person’s shoes, the DSM would probably define you as having antisocial personality disorder, more popularly known as being a psychopath., If you have the ability but choose not to exercise it, I’d love to know how you define yourself. Also, how you live with yourself.

Unfortunately for me, I seem to have come across a great many of these people online lately.

The TSA’s War against Reality

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It's funny because it's true. Actually, it's not funny because it's true.

It’s funny because it’s true. Actually, it’s not funny because it’s true.

These are all true stories, every single panel. I did overhear a TSA agent laughing about a dildo in a carryon bag on the X-ray conveyor belt. My husband did get detained because the TSA determined that gluten free flour tested positive for explosives. A TSA agent did take my unopened packages of hummus and yogurt, insisting they were liquids, because, if you turned them upside down, they would fall out. My father does say what he says in panel 4, female Israeli soldiers with Uzis do interrogate you if you walk through the door of El Al, and I really did accidentally carry a switchblade through security, and a TSA agent really did find it, decide it couldn’t possibly be mine, and ask me what I wanted him to do.

Airport security in this country feels broken, perhaps because we’ve given the TSA so much power, and so many of those agent don’t seem especially intelligent, generating a system where ignorant bullies have carte blanche to take out their insecurities on people who just want to go see their families. It would be nice if we weren’t all treated like terrorists, considering that the TSA apparently couldn’t catch a terrorist if they ran naked through security with a stick of dynamite in their mouth. Everything about airline travel is pretty messed up, but security is just a joke. I can’t count the number of times people have told me they didn’t even realize they had knives in their bag until they got home. The TSA misses all the dangerous stuff, and then ruins people’s day over 3 bags of gluten free flour. Plus, they talk to you like you’re the idiot.

It’s frustrating, and all we can do about, as far as I can tell, is bitch on the Internet. I actually wrote the “hummus is liquid” story on one of my old blogs, and I get a lot of mileage out of the switchblade story at parties. We’ve given up real freedom for imaginary security.

The Pancake Paradox

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I assure you, god does not play dice with breakfast.

I assure you, god does not play dice with breakfast.

It’s universal, and the lighter and fluffier your pancakes are, the more pervasive the problem. You get the perfect amount of butter and syrup spread evenly across your meal. There is just as much flavor on one bite as there is on another. And yet, a few minutes later, you need more. You can’t taste it; your pancake might as well be a piece of white bread. The pancake has soaked up all the excess syrup on the plate, and yet you clearly need more.

I especially like how the test subject is the one volunteering to go to Costco, although, after I drew panel 3 I realized that Costco doesn’t carry Mrs. Butterworth’s. You can only get pure maple (that’s what we use) or Log Cabin. However, Mrs. Butterworth’s is clearly the funnier brand name, so let’s call it comedic poetic license.

Also, the scientists are kind of half-baked, because I have a headache and couldn’t focus well enough to redraw them more sharply when I moved them to the foreground. So, while I’m pleased with the joke, it’s just a small one, and not my best illustration work.

Anyway: comic. Laugh. Like. Share.

Pictures from the 123rd Annual Meeting of the International Cryptozoology Association

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Not pictured: Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Abominable Snowman, and Skunk Ape. Best session of the weekend!

Not pictured: Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Abominable Snowman, and Skunk Ape. Best session of the weekend!

If you don’t get it, then query “Bigfoot” or “Loch Ness Monster on Google Image Search. It’s just a little joke. That’s all I wanted to tell today.

We used to report a lot of cryptozoology news on the defunct website, In the Weird. I’m sorry I let the domain expire, because we had done some cool stuff there. At one point we had a dozen regular contributors and were regularly getting 100s of hits a day. Even after we still updating the site, it was still seeing about 500 visitors a week. I’ve been thinking about hosting some of the content on this blog, at least some of my favorite posts. It’s very different stuff from what I would write now, much darker and more sarcastic than what I do here. I guess I thought that when the domain expired the content would still be available as a Blogger blog, but apparently I would have to reupload every single post, and there were many posts.

My big project is about 90% done, and should be visible here on Friday. It’s coming out pretty well even if it’s taking 4 times as long as I intended. Only one more complicated piece and then 2 more easy bits.

It’s a flat, 2-dimensional work that I’m giving as a gift, and tonight a woman suggested that the best way to get a cheap frame is to go to a thrift store and buy an ugly painting of the same size. Brilliant.

Submission

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For my followup, I guess I'll have to vent a spleen.

For my followup, I guess I’ll have to vent a spleen.

This one might be a bit abstract. I guess it either works or it doesn’t.

It’s true that I know I don’t completely suck due to the fact that I sometimes get personalized rejection letters, and sometimes agents or publishers write me back once or twice before ignoring me, and every once in a while someone actually enjoys my fiction enough to pay for it. It’s sort of like being in the top 1% in a field where only the top .01% really succeed.

I really wanted to do a funny 1-panel comic tonight, but my ideas were either not funny or not 1-panel. My brain was in the mundane sphere due to the fact that I remembered, just as I was about to start working on my project, that my car registration needed to be renewed, and that if I didn’t go down to the DMV and get my emissions tested right that very minute, there was an extremely strong chance that I would soon be driving around with expired tags. That ate up about an hour of my life, after which I needed to do other mundane things like acquire food.

Passing emissions also reminded me that Honda had recently sent a notice that all my airbags were being recalled because they had been suddenly proven to be deadly projectile weapons that would just as soon shoot bits of metal into your chest as to save your life. But at that point I really didn’t have time to deal with the situation. So it’s entirely possible that my car is going to kill me, but at least I can prove to the government that it’s not spewing too much poison into the air.

Microclimate Change Deniers

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Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a meeting of anti-vacuumers to get to.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting of anti-vacuumers to get to.

Back in elementary school, in the very early ’80s, I remember hearing about global climate change for the first time. I was probably in second grade, and our class was talking about the future. (Speculating about the year 2000 was a popular diversion in the ’80s.) My project for this unit was building a model of the moon base that we were supposed to have by 2000, and just thinking about such a distant time was very exciting.

Even back then I was a skeptic, and I recall listening to the discussion of how industrial pollution combined with the greenhouse effect could raise the temperature of the earth by a noticeable amount and thinking, “Well, I’m going to wait and see before I believe that one.”

After 30 years of observation, I’ve determined that global climate change is undeniable to me, and I don’t get how anyone who’s been alive more than 20 years can pretend that things haven’t changed. Do you know how hard it is to get 97% of scientists in a particular field to agree on any new idea? I mean, you can wave the correlation-does-not-equal-causality flag all day if it pleases you, but you have to admit that hurricanes, tornados, blizzards, earthquakes, floods, and heat waves are happening with greater frequency/intensity. You don’t even have to admit that this has anything to do with human activity, but you do have to admit that it’s happening.

And yet some people don’t.

This is baffling to me. A recent issue of National Geographic addressed what seems, in America, like a basic war on science, but the concept that a person’s religious faith or political belief could dictate their perception of observable phenomena remains perplexing. Large freighters are navigating the Northwest Passage. The entire population of an island in Papua New Guinea was forced to relocate because their home is now underwater. Sugar maple production in New England has dropped measurably.

If you honestly believe that there is no such thing as climate change, you’re hanging your laundry in the rain.

Rejection Collection

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Jack also collects life experiences, but he can't sell those. Not in this market, anyway.

Jack also collects life experiences, but he can’t sell those. Not in this market, anyway.

Almost 1000 people clicked on Friday’s PTSD comic; of course my best reception would be for the worst things that have ever happened to me. I’m thrilled that it resonated with so many people, but it also re-traumatized me to write it. I thought maybe today’s comic could be a little bit more upbeat. Just a little

Jack is not the only person who frames his quest for acceptance by asking to be rejected. There’s some science there about giving yourself permission to fail in order to work your way into succeeding. There’s strong research on this, and yet it’s still kind of a hard concept to embrace.

Personally, I’m terrible at dealing with rejection. I have too many negative childhood memories of being rejected. Asking for more rejection when I’ve finally gotten to a point where it doesn’t happen otherwise feels dangerous.My collection of “Thanks but no thanks” letter from publishers is substantially smaller than Jack’s and so is my “works published” list. Jack is a good inspiration, but it’s hard to keep up with him sometimes. Still, that’s what it takes, sometimes: a relentless pursuit of ones goals.

In addition to a massive collection of rejection letters and a substantial list of published stories, Jack also owns an old card catalog, or at least he’s the custodian of this unwieldy but awesome piece of furniture, for which I also envy him.

If there’s not a spec fic magazine called Unusual Anecdotes, there should be.

This Is Your Trigger Warning

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When I say I feel your pain, it's probably because your pain makes me feel my pain.

When I say I feel your pain, it’s probably because your pain makes me feel my pain.

This is what we talk about when we talk about post traumatic stress. Obviously, this is pretty personal; most of my comics are pretty personal, but this one is deeper. I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about what happened in panel 3 here. A lot of people already know about it already, and it might come up in some other form later on. I don’t have any problem telling you if you ask. I just don’t want to write about it in my art blog at this time. But it did happen, and I was diagnosed with PTSD afterward. This was 16 years ago, and while trauma fades, I’m not sure it ever gets erased. What’s it like? It’s sort of like this, what I’ve inelegantly drawn here.

Panel 1, of course, riffs off the famous scene from the classic 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger. Bond does not die. He also does not show any outward signs of PTSD, although some might argue that the drinking and womanizing are symptoms.

Panel 2 is not my story, but it did happen to my friend, whose father came home broken from Viet Nam. She told me he would wake up in the middle of the night, mistake her and her brother for Viet Cong, and threaten them with a gun. So war traumatized him, and then he passed that trauma on to his kids.

Panel 3, as I said, is more or less something that happened to me in 1998, and I’m still fucked up about it, even though I’ve had therapy and go for long periods of time without thinking about it at all.

Panel 4 is basically the 9 of swords from the Rider-Waite tarot deck. Some people refer to this card as “The Dark Night of the Soul.” I think it’s a pretty universal image.

Panel 5: I wasn’t anywhere near New York on 9/11, and I didn’t really know anyone there, but this was the first time I learned that people with PTSD get to re-experience their PTSD if they hear about other people’s extreme trauma. Like a lot of Americans, I had a rough time of it that month; I had to have therapy and leave grad school for a week in the middle of the semester. I couldn’t bring myself to draw the plane hitting the WTC, so I just used a screen grab.

The guy in panel 6 did not die. He was in the coma for about a month, and he spent a year learning to walk and talk and eat again, and then he spent 5 or 6 years getting his head on, and now he lives independently, which is a pretty big deal, considering we spent 3 days not knowing if he was going to survive.

This is, by far, the most morbid thing I’ve posted in this blog. I hope I can be funny again next week, but I just don’t feel funny right now. The longer you live, the more likely you are to experience trauma, meaning the older you get, the more likely it is that you and the people around you are suffering these invisible personal catastrophes. My big one was maybe only 15 minutes of my life, but it gathered up all the small hurt from before and it amplified all the small hurt that came afterward. And my situation really is nothing, compared to some lives. It’s hard not to feel my own trauma when I hear about someone else’s, but I also can’t turn away. People want to tell me, and I want to honor their pain by listening.

Disaster Movie Sequels

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Clearly, the way to prevent all these explosions is with even *bigger* explosions.

Clearly, the way to prevent all these explosions is with even *bigger* explosions.

According to Aristotle, of the six components of a tragedy, spectacle is the least important. The most important is plot, followed by character.

In the typical big budget, special-effects heavy blockbuster action adventure disaster film, plot is irrelevant, characterization is perfunctory, and the only feature that matters is the spectacle. Much like a circus, but with death. Escalating quantities of increasingly gruesome death. Explosions, monsters, blood, that’s what people pay to see. They don’t care if it makes sense: sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That is to say, the kids talked me into seeing Jurassic World and it gave me a headache. Not since Pacific Rim have I so fervently wished that someone would recut a film so that I could watch the 30 minutes of CGI without suffering through 90 minutes of pat stereotypes and cardboard dialog holding up a flimsy excuse to showcase primal violence and random explosions. This movie was very stupid. I read that it had one of the highest grossing opening weekends of all time.