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Kid Logic II, Simple Solutions to Complex Problems

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It’s like walking in a winter wonderland in June. With strawberries and organic greens.

Kid Logic, part 2, the sweatening. Pretty self-explanatory. This would have been the segue if I had done an 8-panel comic. The punchline didn’t come to me until after I had drawn the entire thing. Originally, it was just setting up the next part of the comic and less funny. Personally, I don’t like going into the walk-in fridge at Costco at all, but at least in the winter I’m dressed for it.

Today the heat backed off and it was only 103. They’re predicting the monsoon will start this week, 2 weeks ahead of the historical schedule and probably 3 weeks earlier than it’s been since I’ve lived here. We haven’t even turned on the air conditioner yet; we’re still on evaporative cooling, which you usually can’t use during monsoon conditions. Weird summer.

Kid Logic I, or Same Planet, Different Worlds

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I get chills just thinking about it. But that’s probably just this fan blowing over the sweat.

Originally, this was panel 1 of a much longer comic based entirely on actual things that the Girl did/said this week, but the day got out of hand and it would have been hubris to imagine that I could complete 8-panels in the time allotted, especially since I had already been to the Fox’s writing party and gotten 1500 words out.

The point is, it’s hot. Like, sick hot. Well up over 100 degrees hot. And despite the fact that they have lived here their entire lives, certain children seem constantly surprised by desert summers and repeatedly ill-equipped to deal with them, which is hilarious if you can remove yourself from the situation of being the person in charge of helping those children deal with them.

This hypothetical little person didn’t actually think that Frozen pajamas were cold; I suspect she was wearing them for more idiosyncratic reason, probably connected to a desire to wear all her clothes equally, in their turn, but she was wearing long sleeved flannel pajamas, and she did complain that she had trouble sleeping because she was too hot, and she does habitually wrap herself up in a warm blanket, regardless of the ambient air temperature. She also willfully fails to comprehend the use of evaporative cooling, despite the fact that we’ve explained it to her 100 times. Ergo, she never, ever considers opening her window, even when we tell her to open the window, meaning she is deliberately keeping her room 15 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. No matter how many times I outline the process by which she could end her suffering (wear less clothing, use less bedding, open the freaking window), she continues to act as a fully autonomous human, choosing to create an uncomfortably warm environment, and then complaining about it and ignoring any real solutions.

She did have her own solution, though. She got a fan and pointed it at her bed. So she could blow hot air at her heavy quilt and winter pajamas.

Return of the Helicopter Kids

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In case you’re wondering, the book in panel 1 is Fifty Shades of Gray. There is way better bdsm literature available to satisfy your prurient interest.

I wasn’t even going to draw a comic today, but then I wrote one by accident, and it seemed silly not to finish it. It’s fun to revisit certain ideas. Revenge of the Helicopter Kids from last year is still one of my favorite comics. Hopefully the sequel lives up to the original and stands the test of time. There are probably more of them in my head. But now my hand is all stiff and achy.

Banking fees are bull. I’m letting you hold all of my money, on which you are paying me basically no interest, something like .01%, but you’re loaning it out to other people–at 13%!–and then you’re going to slap me with a fee for automatic transfers to cover overdraft? You have the money. It’s right there. You’re not even doing anything; a computer is moving it. Why does that cost $13? Don’t even get me started on the number of times we’ve been assessed monthly fees just for having accounts. Accounts that we were told were free.

I don’t know about the drunk painting classes. I’ve never been to one, but I’m not much of a drinker and I don’t really care to paint the same thing as everyone else.

 

All the Colors of the Whine

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If you think that’s colorful, you should see all the purple prose I left out.

It’s weird how dialog is always full of swear words in my head. Like, it seems funnier when it contains f-bombs. But I edit them out anyway. If you depend on that kind of language for humor, you might start substituting shock for actually being funny. This is still cute when it’s rated G.

This comic was fun to draw. I had to go back and put little faces on all the natural wonders to anthropomorphize them. And then I had to write about it so I could use the word “anthropomorphize” in my blog.

Also, I really like the white test on a black background. I have an entire story I want to tell that way. Realizing that doing all the letters in all caps would increase readability.

Communication

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Pretty sure that would be a hard limit for me. I don’t care how big your paws are.

The couple in a the marital counseling office is a pretty common comic theme. I wouldn’t call it cliche, because there are so many places you can go with it, but it is a trope, because two people who ostensibly love each other but still fail to communicate at the most basic level is such a common occurrence in real life that it’s natural comedy fodder. I was thinking about comedy fodder because tonight The Man and I attended a live improv performance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve never done, even though I’ve seen a million standup comedians in a wide array of venues. To my eyes, it appears pretty universal that one half of a couple will state their ideas or feelings or desires and the other half of the couple will interpret that in a way wholly unlike what was intended.

I was also thinking about fairy tales, because I’m always thinking about fairy tales, and I wanted to do Little Red Riding Hood, even though every single one of my fairy tale comics bombed. They were funny to me. The one-panel comics are actually the hardest for me. My inclination is to pile words upon words. So I deliberately kept this one simple, and then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to shade things, which I never do, because it takes forever and always looks terrible. This time it only took sort of long and only looks kind of bad, so that’s an improvement. Usually I erase the entire layer. The nightgown and the pillow came out OK.

My favorite version of Little Red Riding Hood, is the very, very old one where the wolf kills grandma, and forced Red to eat her meat and drink her blood, which is arguably, more twisted than what’s going on here. But I also like the sexual aspect of the story about a girl who goes into the woods and comes out, if she makes it out, a woman.

Actually, I think the real theme of this comic was inspired ny something I wrote yesterday in a comments forum. Someone wrote a letter to Dear Abby  a couple days back, about her mother wandering around her house at night, putting her ear to the married adult daughter’s door. The daughter had stopped sleeping with her husband because she was terrified of her mother hearing their conjugal relations taking place, but she hadn’t told her husband that was why she was shutting him down. A lot of commenters didn’t really understand that course of action, myself included. I wrote that if I thought my mother was deliberately listening at my door to catch my husband and me in action, I would make more noise. “Oh,” someone commented, “to show her how great it is?”

And I said, no, it was to be respectful, because if someone if straining to hear you, the polite thing to do is to speak louder.

Of course, in this comic, we don’t know that Grandma’s participation is consensual. Fortunately, it’s only a comic, and no fairy tale characters were traumatized in the making of it.

 

Where Should You Complain?

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To complain about something that happened 10 years ago? MySpace.

Twenty-two hours ago, I posted what I believe to be my most-viewed contribution to the Internet of all time. Sadly, it was not a comic, or something I wrote, or any sort of artwork. It was a photograph I took of a 16-pound brisket The Man roasted. No joke, this image now has over TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND views, proving once again that the Internet sucks and can seriously go to hell. I create and upload original content 5 days a week for 2 years and I’m lucky if I get 1 or 2 thousand views on a comic that might have taken me 3 days to draw. But 28,000 people clicked to look at this piece of beef in less than a day.

Tasty brisket, though.

Like a lot of creatives, I struggle to grok the force that is social media. I hope it’s not too apparent that I don’t understand some of the platforms I’ve drawn into this comic. Some of them I’ve never even used. But I do my best to appear that I know what I’m talking about because, like everyone who understands that Google is master, I want to remain relevant.

This is, of course, one of those comics that took me 3 days to draw, and will probably get 1000 hits, which is better than some people are doing, but damn. Can I get half the love that a photo of roast beef gets? Special thanks to my sister in law, who gave me the fancy 50mm 1.4 lens, which really makes your subject POP. Maybe that’s why that brisket looked so good.

Kidding aside, I spent a lot of time thinking about social media platforms. In drawing this I realize that they’re pretty much all the same. The difference is mostly in who’s there and how they’re using it. But by and large, the digital community spends a lot of time shouting into the air. I also noticed that, even though computer screens are landscape orientation, most sites seem more optimized for mobile, and even if the display is wide, the important stuff on the screen tends to be long. That’s why the app names are all written differently: I had to shuffle them around after I figured out the shape of the content, because I just visualized everything as it looks on my laptop and didn’t realized until after I started that I would have been better off with long, skinny panels.

These templates can also be limited, too. It’s easier to use a template than to draw new panels every day, but the predetermined shape can get in the way.

And yeah, this probably isn’t that easy to read. Probably need to click the image to get in closer for the text. Or try this link for an even larger and higher resolution image: big version.

Not that I want to complain on WordPress. WordPress, as everyone knows, is for important applications, for corporate blogs and serious artists. And people who just aggregate other people’s content (i.e. steal photos) and repost them with nonsensical 5-sentence ramblings about life, and then somehow get 42,000 upvotes and, even more curiously, manage to monetize those blogs, sell them, and retire from blogging.

 

Totes Inappropes

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Microsoft? Ew? Not going to touch that one.

It’s sort of a wonder that this blog is as accessible as it is; in person, I can be extremely inappropriate. Maybe I’ve never been thrown out of a day spa for using salty language during a company team-building exercise like some kitties I know, but, on average, outside of the elementary school and my dealings with children, I’m really not rated for anyone under the age of 17. I can make anything sound inappropriate. That’s why I’m not allowed to accompany the man to the hardware store or to the car parts store. I am totes inappropes all the time, but especially when the world is asking for it.

This one started with “clapback.” I guess that term was IRL slang before it was all over the Internet but I definitely associate it with semi-famous people arguing on Twitter, to at least the same extent that I associate “clap” with “gonorrhea.” Every time I hear it, which is increasingly over the past few months, all I can think of is a ping pong clap infection. You have to both get treated, people! Hashtag and Buzzfeed really speak for themselves; I know (from experience) that what I’ve done in panel 2 never works in real life, though. Nothing stops those people. Only the last one eluded me for a while. Originally I was going to make a 3-panel comic but the truth is that this template is easier to work with, so I ran through my knowledge base to find a 4th thing to make fun of so I could use this one, and “Google Doodle” it is. I guarantee if you asked someone to check out this Google doodle 25 years ago, their response would be much, much different.

And speaking of semi-famous people on Twitter, the author of Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, Christine Baldocchino, retweeted my comic making fun of people who didn’t like her book. I still don’t understand Twitter, but it is beginning to work for me on some level.

Happy Friday! Make sure you don’t get that clapback and remember to keep your Google doodle to yourself unless you have enthusiastic consent to share it.

Dragon Comics 134

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The moral of the story is: do or do not. There is no try. 

Comic finished 7 hours early! Although I did start this one over a week ago. But considering that I spent 3 days being obsessed with my web traffic and sad about bigotry, I’m plenty pleased. It was super motivating that the Fox suggested he come over for a writing party. It’s a thing he does: a bunch of writers sit around and write. I haven’t been to one in a while. So I had to finish this comic so I could actually write at this writing party. Then the Fox cancelled on me. Fine! I’ll have my own writing party! With hookers and blackjack! Well, maybe not those things. But things that are just as fun but less likely to give you a disease or get you arrested or clean out your bank account.

When you start out in an artistic pursuit, you do it out of joy. And probably for a long time you do it for yourself and it’s completely joyful. And then sooner or later, if you want to do it at a higher level, you’ll show it to someone who is more vested in honesty and craft than loving you. That someone will offer criticism, and you will start to see the imperfections. But if you’re an artist, you keep honing your craft. Maybe you take classes. You keep getting better and better. If you take a lot of classes–perhaps if you become, technically, academically, a “master” of your art–you get the opposite of beginner mind. You approach everything critically. You accept nothing with joy. You’re 100 times better than you were when you started, maybe 1000 times. But you can only see the flaws.

That happened. I thought about this book I wanted to write for more than 6 months. Close to a year, I guess. And I got really worked up about it. And I put all these conditions on myself, and finally I allowed it to start. And I wrote a pretty pleasing prologue. And then I said, OK, where does this story start? And I started it with the main character getting off an airplane to start his new life and meeting some characters who would figure prominently in the first part of the story.

But then master mind kicked in. No, no, no. That’s prosaic. This meeting has nothing to do with the story; these characters are of minor importance. The story starts with something important to the story, with major symbols and recurrent themes and a focus on tone. Meaning I wrote an entire chapter I will now throw out. Not an auspicious beginning. But possibly better than writing for a year and then having someone better tell you, “No, no, no, that’s prosaic and doesn’t advance the narrative.” Actually, I know what I’m doing.

The point of this comic, though, is that none of that matters. What matters is that you sit down and do the thing. And then you do it again and again and again until the thing is done.

Enough

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I don’t even eat ice cream. Ice cream is just a metaphor. For giving up.

This comic pretty well speaks for itself. I basically forgot how to write and how to draw today, in addition to still not remembering how to breath like a normal human being without medical assistance. It’s very sad. But at least the precious, precious roof has been protected.

There are scripts for real comics on my desk. But this is what came out.

I Have a Cold

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Ain’t no rest for the wicked.

When I was a kid, I used to fake being sick all the time. I hated school with its rigid rules and social structures, where I was frequently bullied and rarely interested. Middle school was the height of it, and even though my mom was pretty suspicious, I managed to get away with it more than half the time. The old thermometer against the light bulb trick. I don’t think you can do that anymore, not with digital thermometers. The trick with the mercury thermometer was that you had to shake it back down because there was no way Mom would believe in a temperature of 107. The sweet spot is about 101. Too sick for school, but not so sick that you would need a doctor or an adult to stay home and look after you.

Now, of course, I fake being not sick all the time. Like every day if you count ignoring chronic and basically untreatable conditions that affect my performance as I move through the world. But after a couple days of a chest cold, it’s hard to play tough. Yesterday I got through the day (getting up 2 hours early, traveling almost to the border, being on as a speaker for 2 college classes, being on as a friend through lunch with the other speakers, and through the afternoon, and then riding back and then running errands with The Man and then being on for more people and for dinner, after which I was at negative spoons) with a lot of medication along with the help of a handy TENS unit, but I also passed out long before midnight. And today I have more important things to do, and have to keep pretending not to be sick as long as possible. But I still wanted to update my blog with this very important comic before I try to repeat my performance, except with 2 kindergarten classes instead of 2 college classes, and slightly less traveling (but lots more driving).

Just sneezed all over my screen and keyboard. Gonna be a long day.