Mountain Lions Love Babies

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What the heck are *you* guys looking at?

What the heck are *you* guys looking at?

There is something, to me, unspeakably comical about this photo of a baby and a mountain lion. The mountain lion is real and alive, behind a thick wall of plexiglass. This mountain lion is relatively young; I remember he came to ASDM when he was still a cub, and he was very active, pouncing all the vegetation in his habitat flat. Once, a couple months ago, a dove flew into his enclosure and he stalked it for a good 5 minutes. He looked just like an enormous house cat: chest down, tail up, hips twitching. However, he didn’t have the slightest clue how to hunt. While a group of humans waited in anticipation, cheering him on (did you know in America it’s illegal to feed live animals to other live animals for spectators who have paid to be there?) he slowly crept forward and then, still a good 15 feet from his prey, pounced.

The bird flew away.

The humans sighed and laughed.

Undoubtedly, that mountain lion would pounce that baby if he found it in his habitat, but since it’s at the window, the mountain lion is used to just looking. Anyway, I know it’s not the best photo I ever took, but none of the other ones from that shoot really blew me away, even when I cropped them. This is the most interesting one from that day.

I think I’ve finally come through to the other side of this sinus infection. Hallelujah! I woke up this morning only slightly congested, took a handful of OTC meds, and was basically able to breathe all day. It’s a modern medical miracle. Last night I seriously thought I was going to have to live with impacted sinuses for the rest of my life. Although I have a zero percent chance of finishing my entire list tonight, I got through a good part of my week’s goals. There’s one more project I can squeeze in tonight.

Butterflies Are Pollinators, Too

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Taking Flight

Taking Flight

Wow, am I ever having hardware problems. The computer is getting old and it gets weirdly sluggish at times. I deleted thousands and files just to make it work at all, but somehow Photoshop was having trouble with this image, so I wasn’t able to play with it much. Monarch butterflies in the pollination garden at ASDM. I’ve been trying to get this up for an hour and I’m all out of patience. I’m starting to really miss comics, but I have a few more things I have to accomplish this week before there’s headspace for that. So: butterfly. Maybe my sinuses will clear up, and then I can stop taking all this medication, and then my head will clear up, and everything will be easier.

I’m dizzy because I took Nyquil. Perhaps I should call it a night.

Bee Cool, People

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She works hard for the honey, so hard for it, honey.

She works hard for the honey, so hard for it, honey.

Here’s a crisp little honeybee for your pleasure. Captured this image near the pollination garden at ASDM, which was simply buzzing not only with her close kin, but also her cousins, the solitary carpenter bees. Despite the fact that carpenter bees are unreasonably large and fairly slow moving, I was unable to get a clear shot of one that day. This is unfortunate, because they’re shiny and astonishing and people don’t seem to be familiar with them. At my old place, there was a particular one living in a dried agave stalk who used to always hang out when I was doing yoga. They’re perfectly comfortable with humans.

I did minimal color correction on this one. It was already pretty sharp. I like the little grains of pollen on her head. I guess bees don’t suffer from allergies.

Tonight, The Man and I attended a Yelp Elite event at the Tucson Botanical Gardens in conjunction with Natures Connects, which is a traveling exhibit of giant Lego sculptures. In addition to free nighttime access to the gardens (very nice this time of year) we got tamales from the Tucson Tamale Company, small batch paletas (a kind of Mexican popsicle, if you’re not from around here), much booze (a hallmark of Yelp Elite events), a chance to play with Legos (with an Instagram contest for best Lego tree), and a scavenger hunt (tied for first, winning 2 free passes to the gardens–usually we have a membership but ours has lapsed, so this is a nice bonus). There were also gift bags with nature-themed playing cards, a jigsaw puzzle, a tie tack, a highlighter that’s also a Lego block, and a coupon to the gift shop.

Last night I wrote a sonnet. Tonight I’m playing with fonts.

What Goes Up

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Sometimes you have to land.

Sometimes you have to land.

This hummingbird lives in one of the aviaries at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum; this picture was taken last Wednesday in the late afternoon. It’s cropped pretty closely and then I played with the color until it matched my mind’s eye a little more closely. The brightness is correct, but I’m afraid the color at the bird’s throat might not be. If this is, as I suspect, an Anna’s hummingbird, the tone should be more purple than red. Still can’t trust the camera. But the untouched image doesn’t come close to demonstrating the brilliant dazzle of a hummingbird in sunlight and this is a little more indicative.

Like the hummingbird, I need to rest between flights. I have a couple more pictures like these, from that same day, which I’ll try to share this week, but I’m taking a little vacation from comics. They’re noisy in my brain and I need some space to think. I want to write a poem, and an article about comics, and finish at least 2 T-shirts, so it’s time to land for a few days. I think I’ll sit on the floor, with a notebook and a pen, and write.

More space than time mandala

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Things fizzle

Things fizzle

I had a lot of big plans for the end of the year, art-wise, but maybe they were too big. Or maybe I’m not equal to the task. Anyway, there’s a strong possibility that I’ll take a few days off from the blog to focus on the T-shirt shop. I’d like to add at least 3 new designs before Thanksgiving, and possibly figure out some type of advertising scheme to help me sell a couple of them. Lately I have multiple ideas for comics every night, but drawing them seems daunting and time-consuming and they’re hard to realize, ultimately. It’s easier if I get started earlier in the day, but lately The Man has been staying up late and I don’t sit down to work until close to midnight. It’s not conducive to great art.

This weekend could have been the ideal time to catch up, but instead some friends decided that it was actually the ideal time to party like it’s 1999.

Bottom Feeders

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It's an online relationship? Come on! You know he's probably catfishing you.

It’s an online relationship? Come on! You know he’s probably catfishing you.

The main thing about catfish is that they’re one of the most sustainable sources of seafood, and they’re extra delicious due to their high fat content. They’re not kosher, so I never tried them until well into adulthood, but they’re definitely the favorite dinner fish in my family. The reason I possess 2 Beanie-baby style catfish dolls is that the catfish lobby produces them to spread the word about catfish being a responsible choice for your gustatory delight, and organizers kept giving them to us at a sustainable seafood event. People get grossed out by bottom feeders, but farmed catfish mostly eat vegetarian pellets, not whatever disgusting gunk falls to the bottom of the tank, which, apparently makes them even tastier than wild catfish.

I really wanted to do a 3D comics with these dolls but other than that I have no idea where this came from, except that I was trying to avoid using any of the puns in the old Dr. Demento classic “Wet Dream” by Kip Addotta, even though I probably haven’t even heard that song in well over a decade. Maybe it would have been funnier if the first fish told the second fish she was being shellfish, or she didn’t hook up with the dude because she had a haddock. This is possible more weird-funny than haha-funny, but that’s cool too.

We Never Wordplay Anymore

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boring_edited-2

It was a love of precise description that brought them together, but it also tore them apart.

This nerdy little comic is a sort of a riff off something I drew in August using the same banged-up copy of Webster’s 9th for reference. That book is about 30 years old, and my Roget’s model is even older: that one has my mom’s name and “Room 209” written on the first page, and my mom stopped teaching for a long time after I was born, meaning the thesaurus is at least 40. I like the idea of them being an old married couple, but it’s hard to believe they’d really split up. They absolutely go together. They even line up perfectly in juxtaposition on the bookshelf and I’m pretty sure that Roget is going to go back to Webster after taking a few days to think about priorities and remember their shared love of linguistics and wordplay.

I’m not totally sure how the arms are attached. If I were a better cartoonist these books would have more and better extremities and possibly some kind of faces, and Webster would be in a La-Z-Boy, but I need photos for reference because my mind’s eye is more turned toward words than images, and couldn’t quite picture how a hardcover book would fit into a recliner.

It’s probably only funny if you’re the kind of person who reads dictionaries and thesauruses for fun. Which I do. Clearly, there must be others.

Dragon Comics 115

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It's the dust rhinoceroses that you really have to watch out for.

It’s the dust rhinoceroses that you really have to watch out for.

I don’t know if the weird stuffiness in my face is allergies or a sinus infection, but I do know for certain that I am a terrible housekeeper. Very little motivation to clean exists in my mind, and while I enjoy a tidy environment, the actual act of putting things away tires me, the vast majority of commercial cleaning products make me sick, and I am definitely allergic to dust. Typically, I live in chaos. But, I have guests coming, so even though my head has been threatening to explode for the last couple weeks, I felt compelled.

Between my lack of natural talent and the debilitating effects of congestion, combined with a steady diet of antihistamines and pseudoephedrine, it took me about 4 hours to do what a normal person could accomplish in less than half that time. And the house still doesn’t look especially clean. If you manage to avert your eyes from the floor, it’s passable. But the floors are pretty gross. I vacuumed (with the haunted Dyson from Dragon Comics 21) so the dust bunnies are mostly conquered, but nobody’s mopped in months. And here I am, with a thousand pounds of pressure in my skull, nowhere near bed despite the Nyquil I took 2 hours ago.

Anyway, dust bunnies. They’re disgusting.

Yesterday’s Mandala…Today!

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Fancy and off kilter

Fancy and off kilter

This one skews a little to the right but features a nice sense of depth. The center is pretty symmetrical but then it just sort of meanders off to the side and starts ballooning. It features a lot of my favorite colors, too.

This might be kind of a lean week. There’s some family stuff coming up and I’m not sure how much time it’s going to take up. Today marks the 9th consecutive day that I have sworn to myself I will clean my office and failed to do so. Washing the floors seems far out of reach. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a weeks. Tonight we went to see The Martian instead of doing anything remotely useful, and now I have a headache. So, mandala.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day

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I discovered this joke in a Garfield comic. Just kidding! No one's ever found a joke in a Garfield comic.

I discovered this joke in a Garfield comic. Just kidding! No one’s ever found a joke in a Garfield comic.

I don’t believe in holding historical figures to our modern standards, but I also don’t believe in celebrating shameful chapters of history. It’s important to study the past from every angle and to acknowledge the parts of it that make us uncomfortable along with the parts we want to glorify.

There was a bravery to the life of Christopher Columbus, the explorer, in sailing across the ocean in a direction that none of his people had ever sailed before. Columbus was acting in accordance with his time and his station in life, and according to the morality of his culture; by the standards of the time, he deserved glory and accolades for his success. Yet, there can be no bravery in the exploitation of people who couldn’t compete with him in terms of weaponry, and were unaware that his overtures, designed to gain their trust, did not reflect truly friendly intent.

There’s no honor in being the progenitor of the American slave trade.

We can’t hold Columbus entirely responsible for the genocide on the mainland, and yet his arrival in the western hemisphere still marks the beginning of the subjugation of native people in the Americas by white people of European descent. It’s 2015, and I don’t think we should be teaching schoolchildren a happy cartoon story about what happened in 1492 without discussing the enslavement and eventual murder of most of the continent’s original occupants. I don’t think we should celebrate Columbus Day as a national holiday. I think it’s a lot more honest to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day and talk about what really happened, even if it makes us uncomfortable.

I like a day off as much as the next person. It just seems like we should be more careful with our shared history, and more conscious of how our decision to frame that narrative reflects on our culture, and on people who continue to experience racism and oppression as a result of the brutality of history.