My Hero

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If you’re wondering why past Mallory has curly hair and future Mallory’s hair is straight, that’s because it’s 1989, so past Mallory is sporting a bad perm.

Just some standard silliness. If I could travel back in time and give 3rd grade me some advice, I’m not sure what I’d say. It’s tempting to joke about stock tips and the outcomes of sporting events, but in fact I don’t really have a great sense of what that would be, and 8-year-old me probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

If picking a past me to meet and offer advice, I’d probably pick 7th grade me, because she could really use some assurance that she’d show them, she’d show them all. And it would have been nice if future me had clued hormonal adolescent me in about pointless relationships and the fact that I wasn’t actually going to get married until I was 38.

I learned my times table eventually. But, like, not until high school. It wasn’t a huge priority. I was never going to become a physicist. Unlike Mallory Morimoto, who, most likely has further heroic time traveling adventures to pursue. There are wrongs to be put right.

Green Machine Mandala

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I love it when a mandala comes together.

This is pretty sharp mandala, good symmetry, complexity, and layers. It’s based on a principle of 12, which gives it a powerful foundation. There’s so much repetition and less variation. It’s easier to not make a mistake in proportions, especially when you’re mostly dealing with triangles all going the right way. It looks complicated, but it’s actually a little easier than some mandalas with fewer layers.

If I am a green machine, I am a worn down one that requires recharging. Friday and Saturday night were each strenuous in their own ways, and it catches up, even though today all I did was write an article about Lost Girls and cook and clean. There is a bit of a comic in my head but it would be funnier if the joke were expanded, although it could still work in a simple form.

Someone else told me how much they loved the Rapunzel comic from last week. Everyone I know personally who read it thought it was hilarious, but strangers on the Internet didn’t seem impressed. However, my David Bowie tribute was randomly trending somewhere for almost 24 hours Saturday and Sunday so traffic was up all weekend.

No more art news. Only sleepytime news.

 

Immature Behavior

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You can’t take Molly and suck on a pacifier! You’re 68. But I guess if you haven’t grown up by now, it’s never going to happen.

Everyone over the age of 27 has realized the great secret of adulthood, which is that growing up doesn’t exist. You just get increasing amounts of responsibility piled on your head until you no longer have the time or energy or connections necessary for enjoying opportunities to have fun. That doesn’t mean you stop wanting fun. You just start to believe that fun is too difficult to obtain, and then you stop noticing opportunities for fun because you can’t get your head up above the responsibility. Plus, if you do manage to have fun, people tell you to grow up. The older you get, the more taboo it becomes to let on that you’re still having fun. Other grown-up people who have succumbed to the pressure disapprove of your happiness.

But truthfully, you can have more fun as an adult. And, let’s admit it, we’re all immature on the inside.

 

 

1000 Times More Fair

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So the good news is that she’s not really dead. The bad news is that she has to spend the rest of her life with a pedophile necrophiliac. 

Given the continuing unpopularity of these fairy tale comics, it was definitely imperative to write a third. Basically, I could go on for a while, because when you look at this kind of story through a modern, scrutinizing lens, ignoring the magic, they’re all subject to ridicule, and there are 250 of them in Jack Zipes’s Grimm translation alone.

According to Zipes, when the prince sees the beautiful dead girl he said, “Let me have the coffin, and I’ll pay you whatever you want.” The dwarves reply, “We won’t give it up for all the gold in the world,” and the prince answers, “Then give it to me as a gift.”

Of course, the dwarves are already complicity in the objectification of the dead girl, having interred her “in a transparent glass coffin so that she could be seen from all sides.” All the better to transform you into the object of the male gaze, my dear.

The illustration in the Zipes edition goes one better, omitting the glass entirely, showing the dwarves laying flowers on her midriff and kissing her hand, while forest animals weep.

Creepy. But it all works out for her in the end. I guess. Except for the part where the prince likes to play that game where she lies very, very still and doesn’t respond to anything. Happily ever after. The End.

A Stock Photo Is Worth 1000 Inexplicable Words

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In the real world, birthday parties and boxing gloves mean something. In stock photo world, they mean something else. 

Feeling a bit out of sorts and unable to finish the 3rd fairy tale comic, I went for another ridiculous stock photo caption comic. These images all happened to come from a BuzzFeed article entitled “60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos,” and I chose them primarily to prove the headline wrong. They’re totally usable. You just have to stretch your imagination a bit.

Curated collections are always nice.

People rag on BuzzFeed, but I like it. You don’t have to sift through as much crap to get to the lols like you do on Reddit, and they actually produce some pretty credible journalism. You have to read their news section; there are good longform investigative articles on interesting topics, and you can also get the latest current events, often with original material if they have a reporter on the ground.

It’s just a coincidence that 2 photos have birthday themes and 2 have boxing gloves. In face, I reshuffled the panels to make it clearer that guy waiting to punch the little girl in panel 1 is not the same guy punching the professional in panel 4.

Even though yesterday’s comic was the funniest thing I’ve written in a while, it didn’t seem to impress any strangers on the Internet. Come on! The Man laughed out loud, and so did the Fox. I think it’s brilliant.

Even if this comic wasn’t my masterpiece, I guess I still made a decent mark on the world today. I went to read to kindergarteners and got about 27 hugs afterward. Then I made The Man some leek and potato soup and a strawberry pie that were apparently so good he had thirds of each. Cream soups are a bit rich for me, but he grew up on a dairy farm, so he’s got 34% butterfat running through his veins.

Tomorrow I will be super creative.

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.

 

Red Diamond Mandala

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Just slightly askew. Hopefully in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.

Earlier this week someone made an interesting comment about civil rights that I tried to spin into an MLK Day comic, but every script I wrote sounded tongue-in-cheek or off topic so I decided not to chance it today. For now, I have standard boilerplate for Martin Luther King’s birthday, which I used to tell my students when I taught college freshman. I would basically suggest to them that, on their day off, they make a good faith attempt to increase the overall level of tolerance, equality, and love on the planet, and, if they couldn’t manage that, to at least stay inside and not to talk to anyone so they wouldn’t make the situation any worse.

In fact, a lot of years I choose the second option myself.

People can be very hard to love sometimes.

Reddit has been a real mixed blessing for me; my traffic has increased tenfold since I’ve been there, but part of promoting your work on Redding involves being part of the community on Reddit, and a lot of being part of the community on Reddit involves dealing with people who use their anonymity to express massive bigotry, the kind of thing that most people don’t say out loud anymore because they know it’s not OK. But it’s apparently very OK in certain forums. It’s certainly the only arena in my life where I know I will be castigated for espousing a feminist viewpoint.

So, while I like to believe in the overall goodness of humanity and the concept that most people are basically decent, it’s hard to talk myself into that in an election year, when I can see that there are thousands and thousands of people who feel personally threatened by the concepts of tolerance, equality, and love.

It’s too bad, because we could be living in paradise right here, right now. It would be so easy. That’s really all that any civil rights activist is saying: let’s not hurt each other. Let’s just allow everyone the same rights and freedom we want for ourselves. It’s nicer that way.

It’s weird to me that it’s so hard.

Instead of my off-kilter and possibly offensive take on freedom and equality, I started a much sillier comic. “It’s probably stupid and not funny,” I told The Man, and then I showed the sketch to him, and he said it was very funny. So, possibly, tomorrow you’ll laugh, if you read this page tomorrow, and also if you have a sense a humor that’s similar to mine or The Man’s, and, of course, if life flows smoothly enough that the comic gets finished and uploaded before that. The Rabbit used to say, “Man plans; God laughs.” But we don’t really have much choice but to keep planning.

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.

 

Dragon Comics 125

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No children were bitten in the making of this comic. 

One day, one of the kids is going to read this. It’s a joke! We mean you no ill will! Ha ha. Kids are hilarious. And they taste like chicken. Joking! Ha ha! Modest proposals aside, there’s a flash fiction I wrote a couple years back on a related subject, which I think I figured out how to turn into a 1 or 2 panel comic. That will be for tomorrow, since it took me until 11 p.m. to even have an idea. And then, of course, I had 2.

Anyway, cannibalism is always hilarious. It was the topic of my senior thesis in college. Chew on that. Or don’t. I’m not sure why that subject sang to me, but it didn’t sing that loudly. I just had to pick something to graduate, and the truth was that I was graduating in the wrong major, and had therefore come to the end of my undergraduate education with very little interest in the field they wanted me to write about, which was psychology.

The topic my advisor had originally suggested I do was “a cultural history of LSD.” No joke. I went to a rather unusual school. I didn’t take her suggestion because it seemed like a really exhaustive subject, to which I felt unqualified to do justice. I wasn’t interested in doing that much work. Not that kind of work. I read a minimal number of books about cannibalism in different forms and struggled to bang out 30 pages at the end of a semester in which I didn’t even take any other classes.

Compared to my master’s thesis, which I worked on throughout my entire 3 years in grad school, and was 600 pages.

Neither of them were great works, but the cannibalism thing was embarrassingly bad. Unfocused and produced almost entirely without guidance. My MFA project was flawed, but full of good pieces too. Mostly because my heart was in it. I feel like I have to throw my heart like that into everything, but I don’t always succeed. Still, my track record improves.