Tag Archives: babies

Shifting Gears

Leave a reply
waoa 14 shifting gears_edited-1

So, according to this story, raking leaves makes you have a baby.

Poor Tommy. He’s skinny, he has no life outside work, and the only woman he interacts with on a regular basis thinks he’s an idiot. His ex-wife found him selfish. Meanwhile, he still thinks they’re both great. He knows Sharon is mean and critical and he still thinks she’s great. I bet if we saw more of Tommy moving through the world we would see that, like Jim in “The Burn,” he thinks all women are interesting and magical. He would admire them all and never figure out what he was doing wrong in regard to relationships.

“Shifting Gears” once received an honor that I’m not sure any work of short fiction has been granted before or since, which is that, in 1999, it was the official story of the Detroit Automobile Dealers’ Association Show. Perhaps no one has ever captured the raw but quiet emotionality of a man’s love for his truck before. No one has ever so accurately parsed a truck’s redemptive power.

I could have drawn one more dog in this comic. Sorry I couldn’t fit him in.

Nature…Finds a Way

Leave a reply
baby glasses_edited-1.png

You might think that two pairs of spectacles would give birth to a litter of spectacles but they only grow a second lens and earpieces after they pupate.  

The Man gets credit for this idea. We were driving around in the desert both lamenting the loss of our glasses, but apparently he found his under the seat, whereas mine have been gone for a couple of weeks. Doubtless they will turn up again after I have spent several hundred dollars and several hours of my life replacing them. Anyway, he said our glasses were probably together having little baby monocles. Monocle is a funny word. We also like to imagine our cell phones mating. We are funny people.

Natural Disasters

Leave a reply
bjc-natural-disasters_edited-2

Status: I’m just drawing a human placenta here. 

The world is a terrible place to bring a child. It’s full not only of sharp and hot objects, but also of dangerous plants, animals, geologic and meteorological phenomenon, and, most corrupting influence of all, human beings. I don’t actually understand how anyone over the age of 30 can even consider it. I get being young and naive and optimistic, or being a kid who doesn’t fully grok birth control, but surely by 30, most reasonable people have become cynics, no matter how much love they have in their hearts. Our world is inherently dangerous, and more so if you happen to be a completely helpless and dependent organism. And yet my Facebook feed is constantly full of babies and sonograms, even though I turn 42 this November and have a number of friends who are grandparents. My cohort keeps creating new humans, on purpose.

I’ve been to parties where people brought gifts of baby products to a pregnant woman, but I’ve never attended one of these weird-baby-themed-games kinds of baby showers. It sounds demeaning for everyone involved. Most likely, anyone who actually knew me would know better than to invite me to such a gathering, but it’s always interesting to see what “normal” people think is normal.

While I share the narrator’s belief that the world is wildly dangerous place, I’m not afraid of babies breaking. I’ve worked with many babies in my life. Babies are actually more resilient than adults in many respects. A lot of new moms seem overly cautious, in my opinion.

Babies on Boards

8 Replies
baby on board_edited-1.png

Cookies are for closers.

This is what happens when I don’t sleep at night and then go about my business during the day and then work on this blog the next night. I draw Modest Proposal-themed comics. And boy, did I powerfully not sleep last night. Yes, this is the third child cannibalism themed comic I’ve drawn this year. If you think panel 4 is bad, you should have seen its original paint job, in which I attempted to color the baby like a roast suckling pig. Some blasphemies are too much even for me, though. See? Things could always be worse. That baby just looks like it’s sleeping, right? Easy mistake. Someone plated a sleeping baby by accident. It’s not like we went all The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover on a baby because it was evil or anything. That baby is just fine. That’s not even an apple in its mouth. It’s a pacifier. No choking hazard.

When I told The Man about what I intended to draw and got to the last panel, he appeared mildly distressed and then said, “It’s your career.” It sure is. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you stop caring what anyone else actually thinks of you. It’s nice to bounce ideas off of him. If he’s really disturbed, then I know I’m hitting my target audience, which is people who are more demented than me.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is an excellent film, by the way. I highly recommend it if you enjoy being disturbed by the depth of human depravity. I was just a little bit too young to get into rated R movies when it came out in 1989, so I only saw it for the first time in 2014, which is a pity, because as much as I liked it, I would have liked it 10 times more in 1989.

How am I still even awake? Literally, The Man got up for work this morning and I was sitting in my office, having not yet fallen asleep the night before. When I said something about not wanting to take sleeping medication because I wouldn’t be able to get up tomorrow, he said, “It is tomorrow.” And now it’s almost tomorrow again, and here I am, eating chocolate and writing about cannibalism. Again. Might as well be 1996. Nothing has changed.

Enjoy. Or don’t. No skin off my roast baby. I’ve even honed my ability to not respond to people who irritate me on the Internet. So go ahead. Let my know how you feel. I don’t care.