Tag Archives: cats

Dragon Comics 32

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If we’re using the Andy Kaufman metric, this comic is a complete success because it amuses me.

The danger of time travel is not that you might become your own grandpa. It's that you might have to clean up your own mess.

The danger of time travel is not that you might become your own grandpa. It’s that you might have to clean up your own mess.

We’re just taking our meta experiment as far as it can go. The 4-panel layout has some particular limitations in terms of what you can do horizontally and vertically, but it also allows for this perfect setup mocking the passage of time.

Personally, I find time travel to be primarily comedic. I’ve never seen a time travel story that actually made sense, and while I was a big fan of Quantum Leap in its time, a lot of what was going on there was more fantasy than science fiction. There’s an X-Files episode that covers time travel as well, but the storyline has a guy from the future returning to the past to kill the people responsible for discovering time travel, because the knowledge of how to conquer time has made the world a horrible place. Generally speaking, though, time travel stories are ridiculous. Looper, for instance. If you can send people back in time, wouldn’t it made more sense to just send them farther back? Instead of sending back assassins and paying them in precious metal and then forcing them to assassinate themselves and run the risk of them balking at that task, why not just send your targets directly to the Jurassic era and let them be eaten by dinosaurs for free? I know people loved that movie, but I found it completely nonsensical. If I were a criminal and going to break the time travel law anyway, I can think of a million better things to do in the past than kill people.

As for the comic, originally the gag was just going to be that Dragon goes to all this trouble to see the future, only to learn that the future holds no surprises: Dragon will be drawing. But I think having the kids in there adds another dimension: Dragon realizes that jumping ahead to the future means that certain things have been left undone in the interim, and then we get a final zinger when the girl references traveling back in time.

I also like some of the poses I’ve gotten the different characters into. In reality, The Man cannot kneel like that, on account of a sudden and unplanned high-velocity meeting of his knee with a guardrail, which resulted in the metal volume of his patella being somewhat higher than that of a normal human. The rabbit really would wrap her ears around her eyes, if she could, to unsee anxiety producing activity. In panel 2, I guess the fox is jumping off the otter’s back to whack the remains of the shattered 4th wall with the broom. That is what is happening. And I also like the way the otter’s tail wraps around the panel frame for balance. And I’m glad the animals in panel 3 have taken it upon themselves to clean up the mess, so that panel 4 Dragon can draw in a clean environment.

That’s the shocking revelation of adulthood. Whatever it is that you do, you will most likely keep doing it.

Dragon Comics 9

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I apologize in advance to any splendid otters who may just randomly stumble upon this comic strip, and also potentially any foxes even though obviously any similarity of these characters to any people/animals/mythical creatures, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Clearly, drawing a comic that is really only a thinly veiled depiction of ones friends and family could be a very dangerous pastime, unless all of ones friends and family have a really great sense of humor. Which, of course, mine do. But still. Purely coincidental.

I drew that otter around 1 a.m., looked at it, and then laughed for about 10 minutes straight.

I drew that otter around 1 a.m., looked at it, and then laughed for about 10 minutes straight.

I definitely do not know any large, muscular, barrel-chested otters. That would be utterly ridiculous.

Comics! Part 3

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I’ve probably drawn hundreds of one-panel things that are like surreal cartoons, I’ve never quite gotten the hang of telling a story in pictures. My words tend to overwhelm the pages, I can never make the characters look like the people from panel to panel. And I’ve tried.

Crack Cats in Suburbia. Unfinished, but a high-res scan. If you blow it up, it’s possible to read.

These two unfinished comics, Crack Cats in Suburbia, were drawn in 1996 or 1997. I was heavily immersed in the counterculture at the time. We didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio. The strip was about a sense of alienation in a mainstream world, but also about finding a person to be an outcast with, as Dr. Seuss said: someone with a compatible weirdness.

I wanted so badly to draw this comic but could never get it right, and the more I worked at it, the further it was from completion.

I didn’t try to draw a full-page comic strip again until 2010, when I read this funny article by Shalom Auslander. I actually really enjoy his writing, but there was something so upsetting to me about the “loathsome writing jobs” reserved for people who didn’t know enough about writing, because of course, I was working at one of those loathsome writing jobs at the time, and I was ALSO writing fiction. Which no one liked. Whenever I read published authors with actual audiences complaining about how hard writing is or how they are crippled by their own self-doubt, I want to find and punch them. Although I did find it amusing that one of his demons was whether or not Philip Roth had done it first, since he’s easily compared to Roth. Anyway, I don’t want to hear any successful artists complaining about being successful artists, especially if they have spent years doing a loathsome job in the field.

I must have tried a dozen different punchlines but they never came out right. I was searching for that balance between comedy and outrage.

I must have tried a dozen different punchlines but they never came out right. I was searching for that balance between comedy and outrage.

Kitties!

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If your cat requires entertainment and Animal Planet does not capture its attention, you can always get a fish.

If your cat requires entertainment and Animal Planet does not capture its attention, you can always get a fish. This is a watercolor I did in my late 20s. I’d like to offer this design on a T-shirt.

I’m in mourning for my cat right now. Algernon was geriatric at 17, and he suffered from a rare slow-moving cancer called multiple myeloma, and, at the end he was deaf, and blind, and incontinent, but he was the best cat, absolutely full of devoted love. In fact, he was my husband’s cat, and had been since he was young. My husband had Algernon before he met his first wife, but once we moved in together, the cat decided to love me best. He would purr so loudly you could hear him from twenty feet away whenever I walked into the room. He used to sleep next to my head (he had his own pillow) and purr into my ear when I had a headache, and he would head butt me repeatedly if he didn’t get enough pets. He was also prone to tender love bites.

Fast cat

Fast cat

I can’t find the sketch I want to include here, of my friend’s imperious cat, Suna. I know it’s around somewhere, because it’s one of the nicest cat sketches I’ve ever done. Possibly, I gave the picture to my friend. Instead, here is a super-fast drawing I did on the Wacom tablet in a minute or two. I was trying to look at the proportions of a child’s body, and the cat was a convenient way in.

Another fast cat

Another fast cat

Cats make terrible subjects. While they may lie, unmoving, for hours a day, the second you try to sketch one, it will move. You have about fifteen seconds to limn a cat before it changes poses.

I miss him a lot. You were a good cat, Algernon.

I miss him a lot. You were a good cat, Algernon.