Pretty in Punk Mandala

1 Reply
My love is amorphous, like a single celled organism dropped in a vat of acid.

My love is amorphous, like a single celled organism dropped in a vat of acid.

What’s black and red and pink and spiky and full of love? This lopsided septagonal mandala which potentially looks like a Hot Topic exploding over an Orange Julius stand at the mall. It appears to be comprised of equal parts death, hearts, and sugar. It looks sharp. It will probably cut you if you try to pick it up. And it’s probably ornery, too. I bet the tips break off in your hand and you have to dig them out with a sterilized sewing needle.

On a wholly unrelated note, if you like webcomics and/or binge-reading, and you haven’t already, why not head over to Panels and check out my new article about webcomics you can read straight through, beginning to end, online?

Dragon Comics 101

1 Reply
Because seriously I will know if so much as a single cup is removed! And just because I'm feeling super-nerdy, that was NOT an LotR reference. My guess is that Tolkein was undoubtedly foreshadowing Oakenshield's death by referencing the act that led to Beowulf's death in the Old English epic of the same name, which predates The Hobbit by roughly 1000 years. Nerd cred!

Because seriously I will know if so much as a single cup is removed! And just because I’m feeling super-nerdy, that was NOT an LotR reference. My guess is that Tolkein was undoubtedly foreshadowing Oakenshield’s death by referencing the act that led to Beowulf’s death in the Old English epic of the same name, which predates The Hobbit by roughly 1000 years. Nerd cred!

While the comic Fox would naturally be the one who couldn’t understand why Dragon wouldn’t buy chicken and waffles if Dragon had the capital to do so, the real life Fox and I share similar views on cash: it is a thing you acquire. It is not a thing that you dispense of without great forethought.

The majority of people don’t sit down and puzzle out their opinions on how to establish wealth once they finish high school (although I imagine that the few people who do this manage to succeed in acquiring wealth). Rather, we inherit our attitudes about money from our parents. If our parents live on credit, we’re more likely to function under the assumption that borrowing is the best way to get what we want, and that we deserve to get what we want, and we deserve to get it right away. If our parents teach us to spend what we have when we get it, we’re not likely to think about future finances or consider why saving is a good option. If our parents exhibit extreme frugality, we learn to be suspicious of conspicuous consumption and to stack rather than spend.

I started working when I was 11; my parents almost never gave me cash, so when I did buy frivolous stuff, it was always balanced by the knowledge of how much time it had taken me to earn that stuff. My own parents didn’t make large purchases lightly or buy useless things, ever. Their tastes were never influenced by fashion or indeed the possibility of upgrading. My dad bought an Apple IIe in 1980 and I’m pretty sure he was still using that machine when I graduated high school more than a decade later. He still has the same stereo–the same speakers–in the same entertainment center–he acquired in 1987.

Admittedly, there’s a part of me that really really REALLY wants to upgrade my 4-year-old MacBook Air, but I can’t justify it. This one works fine; I don’t really have any income. Even though I could easily finance a $1,099 computer out of my savings, or with my excellent credit, rationally it’s a terrible decision, and I would never make it, even though I really really REALLY want a new computer. (The new ones have better batteries! And yes, I recognize that I could have a non-Mac laptop for 1/3 the cost, but then we’re in an entirely different discussion about money and possessions and why we make certain decisions.) Because there are just better things to do with $1,099, including leaving it in the bank, and I don’t have an immediate plan for raising another $1,099. Ergo, buying a computer is short-sighted.

And that’s the secret to how I’ve been able to spend so much of my life focused on art: I don’t spend money. During the 6 years I made bank as the Lead Copywriter for an international Internet company, I did get used to having discretionary income and being able to get whatever I wanted, but it didn’t change my overall attitude toward money. (Toward the end it did make me realize that the more money I had, the more money I needed, and the less joy I felt in that money.)

If I had a hoard, my attitude wouldn’t change. I’d fix the house, pay off the mortgage, travel more, and yes, get a 2015 Air. But I would probably still buy my clothes at Target and drive my mom’s old Honda. It’s just a matter of figuring out what’s important to you.

Something to Squawk about…

Leave a reply
This T-shirt has the pre-school seal of approval.

This T-shirt has the pre-school seal of approval..

Another satisfied customer models the Punk Rock Raven kids’ T-shirt size 7 in green.

My thoughts on the magnificent corvid being well-documented, there is not much more to say about this shirt other than it’s adorable, almost as adorable as this kid. Especially adorable on this kid.

I took another stab at using Photoshop to color correct an image today. It didn’t come out bad, except that somehow I managed to make a tree in the background look completely fake, and by the time I even noticed, it was too late to undo it, so I had to go down to the pixels and fix it up by hand. As this was only my second attempt, we can call it a qualified success. Will continue to learn.

Dragon Comics 100!

Leave a reply
And the next thing you know you're lying at the bottom of a lake with a black arrow sticking through your chest and there's 5 armies shoving each other around your front yard, and nobody wants that.

And fifteen minutes later you’re lying at the bottom of a lake with a black arrow sticking through your chest and there’s 5 armies shoving each other around your front yard, and nobody wants that.

I’ve published 100 4-panel webcomics! That means I get to recycle this panel:

Ooohh...cake...

Ooohh…really old recycled cake… 

It’s even more relevant now than it was the first time around, because the snake is well and truly vanquished.

For a while it seemed like I should end this experiment with a big bang on the 100th comic, but it seems like there are other places to go with Dragon. At the same time, there are a bunch of other projects that are calling my name, too. So the best course of action seems to be that I will work on whatever I feel like when I feel like it: do some Dragon, but not as much, work on old projects, and start new project. There will probably come a point in the near future when I’m not drawing Dragon Comics 3 times a week or updating this blog 5 times, but I’m not going to stop entirely, either.

One of the other projects I intend to get going this year is going to be a big one, something a lot more serious and considered than what I’ve been working on this some, something that will hopefully interest an audience outside my friends and family and the few people who have randomly stumbled upon and then managed to appreciated my casual late night humor. Believe me, I appreciate you guys too. But badly drawn comics, however amusing to me, are not my final aim, and some of these panels take a couple hours. I want to do something in a very different style, something that’s more story and character driven than a webcomic, and more lovely and detail oriented than this artwork.

I’ll probably take a vacation from QvD in the near future, but I’ve already got a couple more comics scripted as well as a super-cute photograph of a little kid wearing my merch, in addition to a scanned mandala, so this week will be business as usual.

Roots and Branches Mandala

Leave a reply
It's alive!

It’s alive! Alive and full of pointy microscopic tree ejaculate.

Do you know what pollen looks like? It looks like this, which may explain why it hurts so freaking much when you get it in your eyes.

Some people say that the desert is dull and colorless, but this is only because some people only visit the desert in the middle of winter. So, yeah, it’s all tawny and dusty in the middle of winter, but who are you to talk? You came here because it’s all white right now where you came from!

Now spring is a very colorful season in Tucson. There are wildflowers galore, and then every single tree explodes into flower. Imagine that: hills dotted with red, orange, purple; blanketed in yellow and chartreuse. And every last one of them spewing microgametophytes in every direction.

It’s sort of perverted if you think about it.

It’s also debilitating if your immune system treats tree pollen like a deadly pathogen and mounts a full scale defense. Which mine does. And then you take every allergy remedy known to man in an effort to simply breathe. Which I do.

It’s only a couple weeks in a year of generally clean air, but it’s been gradually knocking me over for days, but yesterday and today have been the worst. Last night was almost completely sleepless and today has been a near total loss. I’m barely aware of what I’m writing right now.

And that’s all. And that’s why that’s all.

Dragon Comics 98

Leave a reply
Not all who wander are lost. But some percentage of those who wander are lost. And it's probably not a small percentage either.

Not all who wander are lost. But some percentage of those who wander are lost. And it’s probably not a small percentage either.

Getting lost in the woods is a way of life.

Antioch College, where I earned my psych degree, faces a 500-acre nature preserve, Glen Helen, which a lot of people consider a sort of hotbed of magic. Whether it is or isn’t, I spent a lot of time wandering around there, getting deliberately lost so I could find my way out again. As a result, I know those woods very well, well enough to walk around them in the dark and know where I am. You could probably drop me in them now, almost 20 years later, and I wouldn’t have any trouble getting out again.

I used this same technique to learn how to navigate in Chicago when I moved there after college. Even though I grew up in the north suburbs, we rarely visited the city, and when we did it was typically to very specific destinations, usually with detailed instructions. When I lived there as an adult and got irritated with the traffic, I would simply find some other way. Yes, I got ridiculously lost all the time, but after a couple months, that didn’t happen anyway. When I thought I was lost, I would suddenly realize that I had been lost in this exact place before. All I had to do then was remember how I found my way out the previous time.

This was before GPS, of course,

Now I have The Man, whose sense of direction is unerring, except for this one time that the VA prescribed him a very powerful headache medication and he became disoriented in an IKEA parking lot. Typically, though, he can look at a map and recall all the salient features, even in a city he’s never visited before. Seriously, I’ve probably flown into Miami-Dade Airport over 30 times in my life, and the idea of renting a car and driving myself out of there is terrifying. The Man not only tackled this task with no anxiety, he also refused to pay extra for the SunPass and managed to drive us all over the state without ever once getting on a toll road. He can drive from my dad’s cousin’s in Coral Gables to my mom’s sister’s in Boca Raton without even thinking about it. At least that’s how it looks. He does have GPS, so I could be wrong about the extent of his abilities.

Cool New Products from My RedBubble Store

2 Replies
Instant hipster cred for your legs!

Instant hipster cred for your legs!

Here is the part where I try to sell things even though I’ve never been interested in selling things and throughout my career have put the most lackluster effort into any aspect of selling things required by any job I ever held. Only creating things interests me. For example, I drew this picture of a truck that The Man admires greatly, and then I used the Internet to make available to you this item: The ’52 Ford Bus Leggings. Designing for leggings is complicated, due to the fact that the image or pattern has to wrap around a person’s legs and so on. Personally, I think these pants are hilariously weird. However, I’m sure that someone, somewhere in this world, wants these leggings. There is at least one human being who would be amused to go around wearing a pair of orange leggings festooned with the image of an old rusty bus. It is the power of the Internet that makes it possible for me to offer such obscure bottoms, as well as the power to allow that mythical person to access the ’52 Ford Bus Leggings, so, even though I’ve probably not done a successful job of selling them here, I can leave it up to the universe to connect these fabulous pants with their rightful owners.

Keep an eye on your caffeine consumption

Keep an eye on your caffeine consumption

Here’s another relatively new product at RedBubble, for people who need to drink coffee everywhere and also either admire the abstract concept of beauty for the sake of beauty or else appreciate reminders regarding their own concept of themselves: The Vanity Has a Thousand Eyes Travel Mug is basically a painting of a peacock, emblazoned on a travel mug. What you see is what you get. It’s also available on a ceramic coffee mug, a canvas clutch, and a variety of other products, but it looks especially good on this mug, and if you like it, it will probably look especially good in your hand, in the cup holder of your automobile, and on the corner of your desk at work. See, that’s what advertising sounds like to me. It’s a coffee cup with a picture on it. Either you like it or you don’t. The point is to convince enough people to look at it so that there’s a statistically good chance that it appeals to one of them.

Sleep softly, sleep in beauty

Sleep softly, sleep in beauty

This Golden Barrel Cactus Flower Duvet Cover is available in three sizes–twin, queen, and king– and is a lovely accent to the natural environment of your bedroom. What else can be said about it? I assume it’s soft and comfortable and I’m pretty sure it’s machine washable and color fast. What I do know for absolute certain is that it’s the first digital painting I ever did where I was 100% happy with the result. These flowers look really, really good. I know I’m proud of what I painted and that this design is a good one. I know that if you like it here, you’ll love it on your bed.

Perfect in any weather

Perfect in any weather

This is one of the newest products: big scarves, great for wrapping around your neck or head. You could probably use it as a beach cover up or fold it in half and wear it as a skirt. Cheer up with the Rainbird Scarf.

Zip your stuff up in beauty

Zip your stuff up in beauty

Finally, the last new product is this canvas clutch. It’s just right for holding pencils, pens, and other art or school supplies, and with this Blue Morpho Butterfly Studio Pouch, you can contain all your small details in a pretty package. /endpitch

Funny comic tomorrow!

Dragon Comics 97

Leave a reply
How about just a postcard, maybe?

How about just a postcard, maybe?

Souvenirs get expensive actually. I used to bring the kids things, but they already own so many things. New things that were actually in my budget (and I go away at least 4 times a year) just ended up in already existing piles of things, forgotten minutes after they were received. Postcards, though…postcards I approve of. You can get lot of postcards for a little bit of money (it’s a good idea to travel with your own stamps, though: touristy places are usually out, and it’s not always easy to get to a post office) and it’s always nice to get real mail, especially when you’re a kid and no one sends you mail.

I have pretty much every postcard anyone’s ever sent me, which is a decent number of postcards, but, being mere scraps of paper, they still fit in a single milk crate, with room left over for another couple of decades of postcards. I imagine that I’ll want them toward the end of my life. Every once in a while I dig through them for a bit, but mostly it’s nice to just have a box of tangible proof that people think of you from time to time.

Dragon Comics 96

Leave a reply
dragon comics 96_edited-1

I don’t know if there’s something *wrong* with these kids today, but there’s definitely something suspicious about all that energy so early in the morning.

Kids like me; my mom calls me the Pied Piper. I remember what it was like being a kid, and usually, I understand what they’re going through, even if I don’t always have the energy or inclination to deal with them. Your food is touching, you’re not ready to leave the park, nobody understands your deep, abiding need to stay up 5 minutes later. I get it.

I felt like I was a kid until I turned 35, so I guess there’s nothing to complain about there, but it is weird to wake up and realize, wherever the finish line, I’m probably at least halfway there. In a lot of ways, I still feel like a kid, but at the same time, it’s hard to hang on to that “I’m gonna accomplish everything I ever wanted” feeling after a certain period of life. Not if this is as far as you’ve gotten. Not that I haven’t done a lot of amazing stuff and racked up some serious accomplishment and enjoyed myriad enviable life experiences, because I have. I’ve got some great stories.

It’s just that you can’t have everything. Except when you’re a kid and every single avenue is still open. You really could do all those things, if you just make the right choices. Of course when you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily get how important those choices are, that your attitude toward homework, or exercise, or practice can make or break your dreams. But those doors haven’t shut yet. You still could become an astronaut. You still could break a world Olympic record. You still could be a pop star.