In Prague

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Truth be told, the marionette maker was hot. I would have let him put 4 strings on me.

In 2003, I went to Prague to study writing with the late, great Arnošt Lustig. I was his TA, and the Rabbit was the administrative assistant in the program office, havin–neither of us could have afforded these classes otherwise–and almost every single day I came close to being run over by a tram. All the lanes in Prague are martyr’s lanes, not because their public transit system murders absent-minded students, but because Prague is a city of churches and martyrs, and someone had the misfortune to be killed for their beliefs on pretty much every corner. There are plaques everywhere, notifying you of who was martyred on that spot, and why and how. Prague is an old, old city. The part of Prague called New Town (Nové Město in Czech) was built in 1348. The old part is much, much older.

I have sharp memories of Prague because, when I went, my brother asked me to write him this travelogue, so not only did I record everything that happened, I’ve read over it a few times through the years. I wasn’t that into photography at the time, though. I just had a couple disposable cameras, and I didn’t take a lot of pictures. I mean, I have a whole album of pictures from Prague, but I was there for a while and there are notable lacunae. For example, I never took a picture in a puppet shop. I had the worst trouble finding a good source image, but the last panel shows a decent sampling of the sort of thing you’d find in one.

Originally, I planned to do this comic in black and white, but after looking at a photograph of Kafka’s lover, Dora Diamant, along with images of wet cobblestones under streetlights, it seemed like a more sepia toned image would convey the proper gravity. I’ve been tinkering with a black background for a much longer comic I’d like to do, and this one helps me see how the other one could go together. This comic took close to 8 hours to draw (over the space of 2 days), and I could probably tinker with the lines another 4 hours before it satisfied me. The astrological clock came out pretty cool, but could be tighter. Same with the marionettes. And the perspective on the cobblestones is a bit wobbly on the left side of the panel, although I guess that could just symbolically highlight the tripping part. All in all, I pretty happy with it. I just don’t have 8 hours every day to ensure that every comic hits this standard. I mean, I can’t hold the stylus that long. My hand hurts. How do other artists do it?

Not a Yin Yang Mandala

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We’re not going to line up in an orderly fashion for you.

Last week, admittedly, I was coasting, and it showed. Nobody was impressed. There were reasons, but they’re not important, since my commitment is to myself and that’s who I let down. Every weekend I swear I’m going to start a comic, but most weekends, I fail. This weekend I succeeded, and there will be a nice one Tuesday, and there’s 2 more scripted. There was another, but it slipped away before I wrote it down. Sometimes they come back, though.

This mandala is a little departure, experimenting with unusual elements and an imperfect symmetry. The shapes remind me of fish. The color reminds me of a medium rare steak with some rare bits in the middle. Of maybe I’m just hungry.

Making Mardi Gras Masks Last Minute (with tiny rosette tutorial)

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At dinner the Girl mentioned how excited she was for the Red and White Dance. It’s a daddy-daughter dance held at her school every year. I will reserve my thoughts on the concept of daddy-daughter dances and state only that this kid LOVES this event. I don’t think she’s ever missed it. This year, they decided to make it a masquerade, and the RSVP envelopes came with 2 paper masks, which Daddy and daughter were meant to decorate in advance.

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Someone is very happy.

There was zero possibility that The Man would be wearing this paper mask, because his head is simply enormous. I don’t mean that he’s full of himself. I mean he wears a 7 3/4 size hat and even if the string were long enough, he wouldn’t be able to see out of both eye holes at the same time. Fortunately, I made him a rather elaborate Mardi Gras style mask a few New Year’s Eves back for a masquerade party, so he could wear that. The Girl was excited to decorate her mask.

Except she was sick and missed a week of school and we didn’t see her and we all lost track of time and when The Man asked, “When’s this dance again?” the answer was, “Tomorrow.” It was already 6:30, and she had to go to her mom’s at 7:30. We found the blank mask and sorted through some craft supplies and talked about concepts. She has a very specific sense of style. I thought she’d want to make it herself, but I guess she didn’t, because I made it. She designed it, more or less, but I tried to steer some of her choices. Otherwise, it would have had about 50 more design elements to it.

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It’s not bad for a scant 3/4 hour’s work. Could have finished some of the edges more, but I bet it’s still one of the best masks at the party.

The main fabric piece is very soft, left over from a year I made Christmas stockings. The braid on the bottom I braided myself; it’s just a coincidence that I had 3 different shades of green ribbon. The big thing was that she wanted it to be mostly red, and she wanted flowers. But I only had silver, blue, and orange flowers. I ended up making these little rosette bouquets out of a scrap of shiny red cloth, and since I didn’t start working on this blog until after 11 tonight, I decided to make one more bouquet and take process pictures, which I never do (and no wonder–do you know how hard it is to point and shoot a DSLR with a macro lens at your own hand?) and make a little rosette tutorial.

So, if you would like to make tiny rosettes, here’s how.

You will need:

  • red fabric or ribbon
  • scissors
  • hot glue gun
  • green fabric or ribbon

Cut a piece of fabric about 3 inches long and 1 inch wide. Draw a bead of hot glue lengthwise down the middle.

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Before the glue dries, fold the fabric in half lengthwise, with the glue in between the 2 halves.

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The folded edge is the top of your flower. Now, fold over a few centimeters of the skinny end. Add a drop of glue.

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Start rolling the fabric over onto the glue. Pinch the bottom part of the fabric as you go, to create a flower shape, with a flare at the top.

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Roll, glue, roll.

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If you keep pinching the bottom, the center petals should get squished up, contributing to the flower shape. You can force it into shape with more glue if it doesn’t comply. When you come to the end, glue it down. Now make another rosette. Glue the unfinished sides to each other so you can’t see the glue ends.

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Make a 3rd rosette and hide the glued end by sticking it to the other 2.

Now, take your green ribbon or fabric. Here, I used 2 shades. Twist them up to make them skinny and round.

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Then, twist them together.

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Now, make a loop, just the right size to form a nest for the flowers. You may want to make an X and pull it through (like you’re starting to tie your shoes) first. Or you can tie it after.

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You’re almost there. Insert the rosettes into the loop, tie the loop, and glue the knot.

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Turn the whole thing upside down and glue around the bottom of the circle where the green meets the red. You can add some glue to the bottom of the flowers, too.

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Now, trim the edges of the ribbon, gently remove all the excess glue (it’s easier to remove when it’s warm; you may need scissors or a razor once it’s cooled).

Viola: rosette bouquet from scraps.

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Glue it on things and delight little people who like tiny flowers

I wanted to link to my photo of the original masks, but I couldn’t find it, which apparently means that I never posted these masks here. That seems weird. But, for continuity’s sake, here are the first Mardi Gras masks I ever made.

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Good at Heart

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You can tell which letter I did yesterday and which I did today, because yesterday’s letter are all too skinny. Still, a cool effect.

Some bulletins boards I make for the kids, but every once in a while I make one strictly for me. Hopefully the kids enjoy and get something out of it, but I needed the reminder. The lift.

The quote, of course, is from Anne Frank, written not terribly long before she and her family were betrayed to the Nazis and sent to the death camp where all of them, except for Anne’s father, died. About 70 MILLION people died in World War II. But Anne was right. In general, people are really good at heart. Just sometimes, they fall for the darkness. The darkness seems to be cyclical. And catching.

The political situation in America right now is terrifying to me. The darkness has a platform and a voice, but I have to believe that the light always prevails. Still, I cried in the car going home after I made this bulletin board, contemplating all the commonplace hatred that has bubbled to the surface of society in the last 20 years.

The butterflies refer to the poem “I Never Saw another Butterfly,” and the eponymous book in which it appears. It’s a collection of poetry written by Jewish children who were interned at Terezín, the Nazi’s “model” camp outside of Prague. While Terezín wasn’t a death camp, over 90% of the Jews who went sent there did not survive the war. The single yellow leaf is a reference to Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a book that should be required reading for human beings. It’s partially a Holocaust narrative, but it’s also a manual for life, written in a time of death: a light in a the darkness.

The moral of the story is that you have to remain hopeful, or the darkness will swallow you.

Tiny Flowers of the American Southwest

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Lime bud

Springtime starts early in southern Arizona. We’re halfway to summer already, and there are tiny flowers everywhere. This first image is from a lime tree in my backyard. It took years to make up its mind as to whether it was going to live or die, but it finally decided to live and be 8 feet tall and make limes. Last year it made 3 limes. This year should be better; there are tons of flowers.

I took another picture where the tinier bud is more in focus. I might play with combining the 2 images, but this one is not retouched. None of these images are retouched.

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Tomato buds

My husband’s ex is a professional grower of exceedingly large hydroponic tomatoes, so we often end up with her extra. Sometimes it’s tomatoes (her major customer is the food service at the local university, so she always has extra when school’s out) and sometimes it’s plants (since she only has room for a fixed number of starts). These plants seem pretty happy in the back yard. We’re keeping them in pots, because tomatoes are so sensitive to the heat. I have trouble keeping them alive in beds.

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Santa Catalina prairie clover

Now we move out of my backyard and into the desert. I had a little trouble identifying this one at first, but I believe it is probably a Santa Catalina prairie clover. I was confused at first because there’s another type of prairie clover that doesn’t look at all like this one, but when I dug a little deeper, this seemed like a good match. The fact that I took the photograph in the Santa Catalina Mountains lends credence to this hypothesis.

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Baja Fairy Duster

I could photograph these things all day. And every picture would be different. Different bits of the flower could come into focus. In different light, the colors would change. I like this image because you can see the tips of each petal-like structure. I assume there’s a name for the parts of this kind of flower, but I’m not finding it.

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Common fiddleneck

I’m not 100% on my ID of this one, because you can’t see enough of the stalk to be certain, but I looked at a couple 100 pictures of yellow desert flowers and common fiddleneck seemed like the best match. This was the only tiny trumpet-shaped non-tree flower of the lot. And these things are tiny. They’re the tiniest flowers in this post, even tinier than the lime bud.

 

Respect

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In Tucson, the city sends registered voters a packet about ballot initiatives every year. This booklet includes the text of each initiative, a less formally worded explanation, and a collection of pro and con statements from members of the community. Anyone can write one. Often, these citizens’ arguments point out details that the city isn’t discussing. For example, a ballot initiative might say that the city wants to sell bonds to improve the roads, but what the initiative will really do is destroy wildlife habitat to pave a road that will only be used by 12 rich people living on top of the mountain.

However I’ve decided to vote on a particular issue, this guy, Jim Click, a rich local dude who owns a bunch of car dealerships, had ALWAYS published an argument in favor of the other side. So, after a while, instead of trying to wrap my head around some of the more complicated issues, doing hours of research, discussing the hidden intentions of each initiative with the politically savvy…well, sometimes I just look at how Jim Click is going to vote, and then I vote the other way.

Certain people just do not have your best interests in mind.

There’s this phenomenon regarding reviews of children’s literature. The phrase “promotes disrespect for adults” is code for a few things. First, it tells you that the writer believes that children cannot be trusted with anything like agency, that children are naturally wrong about everything and must be forced onto the proper path. They believe education involves telling people WHAT to think, rather than teaching them HOW to think. Second, it tells you that the kids in the book think for themselves, and break rules because they know better than the adults in the story. This charge was leveled at Harry Potter pretty often. Those kids are constantly breaking rules, and there are rarely any real negative consequences to rule breaking. In fact, by breaking rules, the kids prevent absolute tragedies, time and again.

Most good modern books for kids and teens involve young people living by their own rules with little regard to what adults think, even if they love and respect those adults. The point of children’s literature is to help kids grow up, and to grow up, you have to think for yourself. You have to go against authority when you think authority is wrong.

The book drawn in this comic is By the Side of the Road, written by Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist, Jules Feiffer. The story goes something like this: a kid is fooling around in the back seat of the car, and his dad flips out and tells him if he doesn’t get it together, he can just get out and wait by the side of the road. So the kid opts to get out and wait by the side of the road. And the side of the road is a blast. He has a better time by the side of the road than he ever does with his family. And when his dad comes back for him, he decides to stay by the side of the road. Permanently. And he does just fine. He leads a great life, by the side of the road, without his dad’s rage hanging over his head all the time.

I wanted to reread it, but they didn’t have it in my library system, so I’m waiting for the ILL, and while I was looking for a couple details to fill out the ILL request, I came across the 1 and 2 star Amazon reviews that used that phrase: “This book promotes disrespect for adults.”

This book is amazing. It’s hilarious. It’s smart. It’s a 5 star kids book. I’ve read it to many kids, and they all loved it. No child has ever read it and then ditched their family to live by the side of the road. Only starched shirt nut jobs read this book and think, “I can’t read this to a child. That child might get ideas.” Kids get the joke. Kids get that it’s the adult in this story who is being disrespectful to the child. The story returns power to children by allowing the kid to overcome unfairness.

But some people don’t seem to believe that children deserve respect.

Let me tell you something else about respect, and children.

You can’t get respect by demanding respect. You earn respect, by being fair and by treating people like human beings. If you make ridiculous rules and treat kids like livestock, you might teach them to fear you, or loathe you, but you won’t get their respect.

So, I’m actually pretty serious about this, because I deliberately read 1 star reviews of things all the time, and when it comes to books, the phrase “promotes disrespect for adults” is ALWAYS hung on the very best books, the ones that children love the most. So, if you want to earn the respect of a child, if you want to give them a book that they will enjoy reading, if you want to promote critical thinking skills in the young, it’s a tremendously useful metric.

Personally, I have never once tried to force a child respect me, and I have worked with literally thousands of kids in my life. And pretty much all of them treated me with respect.

Big, Hexy Mandala

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You just have to visualize the parts that don’t fit on the page.

There’s this phenomenon I’ve noticed around my comics, which is that, typically, if I’m really pleased with one and certain that it’s funny, and happy that I managed to draw exactly what I wanted to draw, and satisfied that I’ve really produced something worth my time, it will get 12 hits and someone on Reddit will say something rude about it. On the other hand, if I’m uncertain about whether it makes any sense and I feel like the art is confusing or lazy and it’s far from my best work, that’s the comic that gets 112 upvotes and 50 Facebook shares and reposted on the Cheezburger Network.

Last week I drew 3 comics, and 2 of them bombed utterly and I know they were funny. The one that got a lot of likes was one of those comics where I could sort of visualize the punchline but didn’t have the exact phrasing for it until the last second, and was never really happy about the impact of that last line, but time was up and I had to stand with what I had so far.

Sometimes I tinker with the idea of only writing stuff that I don’t like, because obviously, it would perform better. That’s how it was when I was writing for money, too. If I threw my heart into something and tried to make it really special and well-written, the client would hate it and want a million changes until it sucked, and then they’d be happy. If I phoned it in, scrawling some shit on a napkin at the last second and didn’t bother to try to make it good in any way, the client would be ecstatically pleased and tell me what a great writer I was and how they wished they could afford to pay me more.

I can only conclude that people have no taste. Or else I don’t.

 

 

The Art of Negotiation

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Don’t knock cauliflower crust pizza until you try it. It’s pretty good! And yes, it has to be a Mexican Coke. And yes, I can taste the difference. So no funny business. No Pepsi. No Tab. And definitely no high fructose corn syrup. 

Today’s comic is a bit of a shout out to Joe Martin, one of the great old-school newspaper comic strip artists, a dude who has been writing not one, not two, not three, but FOUR dailies for something like the last 38 years. (He apparently got married at 16 and had a passel of kids, so it was probably a survival/escape mechanism.) His wikipedia page is a bit threadbare, but his website claims that the Guinness Book has awarded him the designation of the world’s most prolific cartoonist, having published well over 20,000 gags. Mind-bogglingly, he is still funny after almost 4 decades at it.

He does a periodic bit about his “Uncle Leon” and what the world would be like if this out-of-touch relative held a variety of professional and historical positions. I’m pretty sure that’s where this comic came from, except that I am probably a little weirder. Like Uncle Leon, I am wholly unsuited to a wide variety of professions, but, unlike Uncle Leon, I think I’m aware of my shortcomings and could at least fake it for a while before people caught on.

I’m pretty pleased with this stereotypical looking police detective and his skewed tie. There are a couple details I couldn’t iron out, like the right side of his collar and the specifics of how men’s mustaches go gray, but by and large, he actually looks like the caricature I was trying to draw. It’s weird how the solution to little issues seems so simple once the comic is published when they’re impossible in Photoshop and I’ve erased and redrawn them 50 times. But I am the queen of second guessing myself. Dragon came out fine, although I don’t usually draw my body so skinny or angular. For a really long time, when I started cartooning, I was always trying to draw the whole body of every character, but obviously, in many cases, you only need the top part.

In the future, It would probably behoove me to start drawing backgrounds, too, but I’m still learning. But getting to the point where I can always get the idea down and I don’t need a jillion reference photos to figure out how the human body goes together. I want to develop a more cartoony style, and you can’t do that if you’re always dependent on photographs.

Simplicity of Emotion

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I don’t know how many times it’s magnified. But a lot.

This picture seems to encapsulate my emotional state: grains of pollen on a red tulip leaf. There aren’t adequate words, but the image works. It’s not retouched or Photoshopped at all.

The tulip, needless to say, is dead now. It was a cut flower. But The Man bought me some bulbs, which are set in this glass jar, and are supposed to bloom without being planted. Potentially, I could keep them alive for a while.

Seems like I’m getting a migraine every night. I probably need new glasses, but I don’t have eye insurance, and my prescription is an expensive one. Originally, I started sketching out a drawing that would accurately express my emotional state (hint: it was a porcupine) but there’s no way. Actually, originally I was going to paint or draw with Misses Kitty but we just spend an hour yammering. I can’t focus on anything lately.

Grains of pollen. On a red tulip.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, you can also see some other images in this set on Imgur: the stamen of that tulip, and a fleabane wearing an insect like a hat.

Dr. Morimoto Has Priorities

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Snapple? Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke? How about one of those ectoplasm flavored Ghostbusters themed Kool-Aid juice boxes? Did you know you could still buy a Jolt Cola?

History has its own legitimate reasons for committing mistakes. In hindsight, they probably seem like bad reasons, but history isn’t made by the people with the most information so much as it is by those with the most decision-making power. This story about the engineers who tried their best to scuttle the Challenger launch has been circulating since the 30th anniversary, and we’ve all read reports that the CIA was warning the White House about Bin Laden’s intention to use commercial planes to attack American soil months before 9/11. The data was there, but it was lost in a sea of other considerations.

Warnings are probably a double-edge sword, à la Macbeth. You get warned in one direction and make a mistake in another.

My stepson brought up Crystal Pepsi, the other day, which I thought was strange, as he is 13 and can’t possibly be nostalgic for it. But then I learned that there is a (growing?) Internet campaign to bring it back. The very concept seemed funny to me. I liked this quote from David C. Novak, the guy whose idea it originally was:

It was a tremendous learning experience. I still think it’s the best idea I ever had, and the worst executed. A lot of times as a leader you think, “They don’t get it; they don’t see my vision.” People were saying we should stop and address some issues along the way, and they were right. It would have been nice if I’d made sure the product tasted good.

History has its own legitimate reasons for committing mistakes.