They are tasty fried. Although I will eat flowers however they’re served.
Presumably there was some real-world inspiration for this design, perhaps my next door neighbor’s garden, but that original motivation has been lost to time. Even though the page is mostly white and the axes of the mandala aren’t even approaching symmetrical, this still amuses me. Nine arms and no sense.
I have seen Star Wars. I have attended holiday parties. I have made impossible New Year’s resolutions. Yay, December.
I know it sounds cliché but I just feel like I need to spread my wings right about now. It’s, you know, time for me to fly.
Eventually he should catch up, right? But by then she’ll be dead, because butterflies don’t live that long. These May-December romances can be problematic. For example, mismatched sex drives (nonexistent in caterpillars). It’s imperative to start therapy immediately upon recognizing the problem or there’ll be nothing left to save.
In addition to this very silly comic, today, in honor of Miss Kitty’s birthday, I also baked the richest chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten. Thirty years too late for me to truly enjoy it. Ah, well. I’ve metamorphosized, too. Also into something more colorful.
Seriously, you *never* hear people talking about goodwill in the spring or summer.
It’s not my holiday, and I’ve never understood it. For most of my life, Christmas comprised a glorious chunk of time in which everybody left me alone long enough to focus on whatever consumed me in that moment. The few years of my adulthood I was invited/persuaded to participate in some sort of seasonal celebration I felt like a martian.
Well, even more of martian than usual.
In panel 4, I guess I was going for some kind of tannenbaum/dreidel mashup. The tree came out well and it deserved a little spotlight attention.
You know what would have helped? If I had any idea how to paint.
Well over a year ago Ms. Kitty was extolling the virtues of her heart collection–a series of paintings by various artists, which she’d acquired over the years, and which all featured prominently the image of a heart–and asked if I would contribute. But I don’t paint all that much (the last really big painting project I did was like 18 years ago) and I didn’t have any real canvas and it just kept getting bumped. But she had asked me again a little before Thanksgiving, and during Thanksgiving my sister was cleaning out her room at my parents’ house (my parents are retiring and threatened to throw all her stuff away, which is something they would totally do and had already started doing) and she was going to toss a painting she did in high school, so I just painted over it.
I know that’s not how you’re supposed to do it, but, as I said, I don’t know how to paint. Unlike me, my sister has taken painting classes, and she told me to cover the canvas in gesso, but I skipped that step and just laid the paint on thick enough to mostly obscure the original image, although you can still see a prominent line on the left side (through the wrist) and there are a couple places where her textures or colors peek through.
For all that, I think it came out decently, even though when I look at it all I see are its myriad flaws and I’d like to paint over it again and do it right this time. But Ms. Kitty seemed to like it. At this resolution, you can’t see the 6 ghost cats hidden on the bottom right.
The canvas itself is about 18″ x 24″ and the paints are acrylic, just the common stuff you can get at Michael’s or any art shop. I think the brand might even be called Basic. Most of the paints were fairly old but still seemed fine. I had to acquire 2 new brushes and 1 new paint. Even in acrylic, painting is a really expensive hobby.
This took me about a week, working between 2 and 5 hours every day. I imagine, if I knew how to paint, it could have gone faster.
Painting made me want to paint more, but I don’t have more canvas. I was actually thinking about trying that thing where you buy terrible landscapes at Goodwill and then paint monsters into them. I bet I could make a killing if I painted Pokemon into them. But actually, getting paintings at Goodwill is not as easy as you’d think.
In other news, The Man decided to give me an early Christmas present by teaching himself bookbinding and creating a hardcover version of The Hermit! I am astonished. It’s really remarkable work. If you’d like to see the step-by-step tutorial of his process, you can follow this Reddit link (and upvote if you’re a Redditor and you like me and you think his work is worthy, which, of course, it is). Now that the paperback version is available, the ebook will be offered, for a limited time, as a free download.
The flaws in the pattern almost give it an Escher-esque dimensionality.
I was a little bit sick last week, and a lot painting (more on that tomorrow) but mostly I was low and apathetic and in need of a vacation after my non-vacation vacation. Usually I take a little break around Thanksgiving and again around Christmas but I didn’t take off any time from the blog the entire 2 1/2 weeks we were on the road. I’m hoping I’ll have lot of cool projects to showcase at the end of the year anyway. If I can stop feeling low and apathetic. Which I could do. By distracting myself with cool projects.
It’s just hard. The forces of darkness seem to be surging.
It’s not just about inviting strange dragons in for pizza and cake. Sometimes the Fox takes me out for chicken and waffles.Can also do chicken without waffles. Or sushi.
An overwhelming sense of impending doom can mean a few things: it can be a symptom of neurosis; it can be a symptom of an impending heart attack; it can be a symptom of menopause; it can be a symptom of living in a world where catastrophe is actually imminent. My doctor says it’s not menopause and the fact that I’m still alive suggests it’s not a heart attack, so either I’m crazy or the world is. But everything just seems precarious. At the same time, sometimes I spend months freaking out about problems that could be settled in a day.
The world needs magical dragons. But some part of the world fears anything that isn’t regimented and catalogable, anything that can’t be controlled or compelled through conventional means. They try to shame it out of you when you’re little and they try to legislate it out of you when you’re big. But that doesn’t change what someone is on the inside. It just terrorizes them.
Did you want me to call you a pizza? OK, you’re a pizza.
Originally, the artwork on this comic was much better, but all my electronics have been conspiring to drive me insane lately. I thought it was just a fluke, or my imagination. I had an incident a couple months back where 1600 words just disappeared from a text file I was working on. Maybe I forgot to save it, and then Word crashed, and I didn’t notice, but that seemed kind of unlikely. I always save. And even in Word crashes you don’t lost everything. But I let it pass. And there were a couple similar, but smaller, issues, I dismissed.
Tonight, I worked on the art for about an hour, then went to cuddle The Man. My work was still there when I sat down. Then I checked 1 thing on the internet, and when I came back, it was gone. The app had closed on its own and when I opened it the original text remained, but not the corrections I had done today, or the art. Then I looked and noticed that the art for yesterday’s comic had also disappeared. The PNG file I uploaded remained, but the original PSD was gone. It was like my computer had just reset to 24 hours earlier.
I’m perplexed. I almost gave up but decided just to bang it out anyway. Not my best work. Not like I would do my best work after 2 days of hard driving: Chicago to Little Rock and Little Rock to San Antonio. We are just eating up the map. The same way my computer is eating up my work.
It’s good to have friends who can tell it like it is.
Of course I recognize that the world is a vale of sorrows with or without my existence. Most likely, 1 dragon alone doesn’t have much of an effect on the overall level of misery experienced by the average earth creature. Still, why should l’esprit de l’escalier impact my ability to think of the right thing to do in the moment? Ms. Kitty tried to tell me it was all right, but this happens all the time. I’m not the dragon of action I could be.
I’ve been out of my comfort zone for 2 weeks now. It’s good but also anxiety provoking.
Jazz with some electric blues thrown in.
At first glance, it looks pretty even, but of course it’s not. Pieces bulge and bunch and stretch and skew, but they do so in aid of maintaining the illusion of symmetry and balance.
Like my life.
It feels like some Dragon Comics coming on, maybe more of the slightly serious ones. This trip has offered a lot of time to think. Also, I should try to carry a notebook around and write down comic ideas when I have them instead of having great ideas and believing that I’ll remember them again when it’s time to make a comic. That’s not been a great policy for me in middle age. Also, a stand-up comedian suggested that I should attend her comedy brainstorming sessions sometimes. I should do that. Currently, I have 6 monthly fiction-writing meet-ups. Could definitely add 1-2 comic writing events.
Special thanks to readers who bought my book or shopped my RedBubble shop. If you want to participate in Cyber Monday while supporting my work, you can use the coupon code GOGIFTGO to get 20% off of everything in my shop! And if you’d like to read a thrilling contemporary fantasy novel with elements of horror and romance, plus a strong female protagonist and an assortment of talking animals, you can purchase The Hermit on Amazon!
Every time I travel, I pack my computer, my tablet, and my camera bag, and then look wistfully at my flatbed scanner and wish it were a little more portable.
Welcome to a special Saturday edition of QvD. If you don’t know what this is all about, you can check out this Facebook event, or search “postcard avalanche.”
The general details are:
Join in and send a postcard directly to Trump! Here are the basic instructions to participate:
** IMPORTANT – Don’t mail your card until NOV. 26th **
1. Get a postcard from your state – any picture that represents your state.
2. In the message section, write this simple message: NOT BANNON!
3. Sign your name if you wish
4. Address it as follows:
Donald Trump
c/o The Trump Organization
725 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10022
5. Affix a stamp – you can use a 34 cent postcard stamp, or a normal letter stamp.
6. Take a picture of your postcard that you can share on social media on Nov. 26-28th
7. Drop it in the mail between Saturday, Nov 26th and Monday, Nov. 28th to create a concentrated avalanche of postcards.
8. On Nov. 26-28th, Tweet and share the heck out of your photo using the hashtags #postcardavalanche #stopbannon
Why “Not Bannon”?
Because this guy is an insidious enabler of the modern-day Nazi. This Mother Jones article sums it up nicely. Bannon may or may not be a racist himself, but his work has consistently empowered and normalized the racist community (for his own personal profit) and is probably responsible in part for the 2016 election results. Although I have not been a practicing Jew for a good quarter century, speaking as a person who was raised in a traditional Jewish household, I’m personally terrified about the possibility of American turning into the Fourth Reich. I think I’ve seen more swastikas in the weeks since the election than I did in an entire semester of Holocaust studies.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think Jews are even the primary target. Muslims, black people, trans people, queer folks, and recent immigrants are more at risk under this upcoming administration, in this weird political climate. But seriously, anti-semitism was a distant concept to me most of my life, and now it’s right out in the open all the time, all over the internet. That’s telling.
Anyway, since I’m spending the holiday in Illinois with my parents, I didn’t have any easy way to obtain an Arizona postcard, and since all the art supplies in my parents’ house are 25 years old, there wasn’t a wide variety to choose from. Basically, it was a can of broken crayons and a half dozen colored pencils. And I couldn’t get a really good photograph of it either. But I made an Arizona postcard in order to participate in this action. And it’s not too late for you to participate too. Just follow the instruction above and mail your postcard out Monday.
qwertyvsdvorak 