Tag Archives: comic

The Great Brush Off

2 Replies
Rapunzel_edited-2.png

Yes, is this Locks of Love? I was wondering if it would be possible to schedule a pickup. No, actually, the postal charges would be kind of astronomical. 

Given the utter failure of my last fairy-tale based comic, which was reviled and downvoted across a wide variety of Internet platforms, I naturally decided to do another fairy tale based comic, this time omitting any references to cannibalism, my stepchildren, or the putative desire to combine the two.

Just to set the record straight: I don’t eat children. I was a vegetarian for half my life. I’ve never even eaten veal, or suckling pig.

Oh, OK, lamb, yeah.

Anyway, my interest in Rapunzel is of 2 parts. Part the first is the historical derivation and evolution of the story. Most of us know a tale in which a girl is held prisoner by a witch, who punishes her when she inadvertently lets slip that she has a boyfriend. The Grimms cleaned it up a bit for their middle-class, proto-bourgeois audience. The version they originally collected was about a fairy who finds out her young charge has strayed only once the kid is so super-pregnant that her clothes don’t fit anymore.

Part the second is my obsession with long hair. According to my Internet research, being obsessed with hair can be referred to as chaetomania. If you’re sexually obsessed with it, it’s usually called trichophilia. But I just like having it on my head, and I like it on other people’s heads too.

Truth be told, I haven’t even had a trim since autumn of 2011. Of course, Rapunzel should call Locks of Love or Wigs for Kids and have her discarded crowning glory reworked to crown a child with none. (I’ve heard some rumors about Locks of Love not being on the up and up, but according to Snopes it’s either a malicious lie or a lack of understanding about how charities work or how human hair wigs are made.)

What I like about this comic, aside from the puns and the hair, are the ways that Rapunzel’s oppression is bound up in her hair, which is what a lot of modern reworkings of the story conclude. By severing her own bonds, Rapunzel liberates herself, removing the prince and the witch from the equation. There are quite a few stories set in the 1920s in which this is a theme. Cut your hair and fuck the patriarchy!

That said, I’m not cutting my hair. The patriarchy can go fuck itself.

The calligraphy in the last panel isn’t 100% to my liking, and I was going to redo it, but the Fox said he liked it and I have a headache, so I guess I’ll let it stay.

 

Success

3 Replies
success_edited-2

I’m literally standing right behind you.

Criticism I can handle. Handling criticism is one of the skills they teach you in Iowa-style writing workshops, of which I have participated in 10. Criticism isn’t personal. Good criticism is useful. It helps you learn how to improve. Unlike insults, which are not useful. But even insults I can handle, having become inured to verbal abuse during my traumatic childhood.

Whether total strangers love me or think I’m a moronic talentless hack, I can still console myself with the fact that I am producing original content 5 days a week. Are they doing that? There is a line in the Tom Robbins book Skinny Legs and All where the main character, an artist displaying her canvas, is told, “My 5-year-old could do that.”

“But he didn’t,” the artist says. “I did.”

It’s like the band Nickelback. They’re hugely successful, and yet so many musicians despise them as talentless hacks, writing heroic couplets and playing 3 chords. But love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Nickelback created something. They created heavy metal music that could be played on the soft rock station. They created it and you didn’t, so try not to be too jealous that you didn’t figure that one out first, because if you had, you’d be the big rock stars, live in hilltop houses, driving 15 cars.

I’m just saying, make it useful criticism.

Anyway, 1 a.m. again. But I made something.

Wicked

2 Replies
stepparenting_edited-1

Don’t be shocked. You know babies are so tasty you could just eat them up. 

After writing yesterday’s comic, I flashed back to this flash fiction I wrote a couple years ago.It took a while to figure out how to compress 8 sentences into 4 sentences and 2 pictures, but judicious editing is another one of my talents.

I do love my fairy tales. Classic tropes and all. So much fun to deconstruct.

I don’t know that being a stepparent is as fraught as people make it out to be. Before I met The Man I dated a couple guys with kids and they all liked me very well. Most kids like me. Obviously, I have a very good relationship with my stepchildren or I wouldn’t be joking about eating them, which I also do to their faces, sometimes. It probably helps that they’re very well-behaved, but I think it’s just like any relationship. If you go into things with generosity and empathy and an open heart, you can go pretty far, and if the other person comes into it with the same qualities, you can’t fail.

At any rate, they’re too old to eat now, all adolescent and full of artificial colors and flavors. They’re more interesting as human beings, but they’re probably less sweet.

The candy house and gingerbread kids were super fun to draw. I could easily spend another 90 minutes making them look even tastier, but it’s late and today was kind of rough, physically, so I’m hoping to be asleep in less than that.

 

His Song Went on Forever

2 Replies
bowie_edited-1

I’m not that deep. I’ll never be that deep. But I can see into the depths. 

I don’t usually do stuff like this, not being one for idols, but David Bowie was such an phenomenal creative spirit that it’s hard to imagine the hearing, seeing human being who wouldn’t be inspired by his work. He was a true artist in every sense of the word, a man who wrote what still stands, in my mind, as one of the greatest commentaries ever created on love, aliens, and rock and roll (let alone one of the greatest albums of all time) when he was 24 year old, and then, rather of resting on his laurels, invented himself again and again, for every album, for every movie role.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars played in the background as I drew this comic, and while I’ve listened to this album start to finish literally hundreds of times in my life, I kept hearing new ideas, new notes. It kept offering new inspiration.

I can’t even talk about “Lazarus” right now.

If you notice that I have chosen the silhouette of Jareth, the Goblin King to represent the dozens of faces that Bowie wore in his career, it is because I am 9 years old, and because when we fall in love, we always remember the moment, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love The Hunger or The Man Who Fell to Earth, brutal and adult as both those films were.  

This is sort of what I feel about any really great artist finishing their work here: it’s sad they had to go when they did, but it’s wonderful that they got to stay as long as they could. The world is a better place for the existence of people like David Bowie and Robin Williams, and I’m a better artist for having walked in their light.

Compatibility

Leave a reply
shark compatibility_edited-1

We just come from such different backgrounds. We belong in such different worlds. And we’re just made of such different materials.

And this concludes our inadvertent shark week triumvirate. I think. I can’t promise no more shark comics, but I don’t intend to make any more. I didn’t intend to make this many, though. Shark comics just happened. You know how it is. Someone gives you an idea about sharks, which makes you think about sharks, so then you make a polymer clay shark, meaning you have to create some kind of polymer clay shark themed art even though you’ve already done some digital shark art, after which then you remember that you also have a Lego shark, and wouldn’t it be funny if the two sharks met, and what would they say to each other, keeping in mind that the last time we saw our little polymer clay shark, he was pumping himself up and thinking about mating.

I never had Legos as a kid; my parents rejected any toy that inspired us to keep asking for more of the same toy, and obviously, you can never have enough Legos. To wit: I received the shark as a gift from a guy I dated in college, who had 20,000 of them. That’s not hyperbole. He counted them. And he brought them to college in a foot locker. Periodically he would let other people play with them, but mostly he just built increasingly elaborate castles in the dorm room we shared, none of which were ever finished because he always ran out of Legos. He was good though. He could have been one of those professional Lego artists.

Since he had multiples, the Lego shark lived in our fish tank for a year or so. When we got rid of the fish I cleaned the calcium off it and it was good as new, but I never had any other Legos to stick it on until last month, when The Man received the Google Fi holiday package, which contained a quantity of Legos and instructions for using them to build a shrine to your cell phone.

They were calling it a “phone holder,” but we built it, and I promise you it was a shrine. An altar. A monstrance, if you will.

The other side of the page offers instructions for building a “cable tidy.” We did not build the cable tidy. We may worship our phones, but I promise you, we never organize our cables.

Dragon Comics 120

Leave a reply
dragon comics 120_edited-3

There are trolls everywhere. You can’t avoid them.

Pretty straight forward here. Usually I ignore the trolls, but every once in a while it amuses me to troll one back. Only if they start it. Clearly, I’m adept at arguing, but I try not to exercise that skill. After the immediate thrill of pointing out how terrible another human being is passes, it doesn’t feel good to engage in that kind of exchange. Once you realize someone is deliberately baiting you, versus just possibly being uninformed, you have a choice about whether or not to wallow in the mud.

That said, there may be more trolls in Dragon Comics.

Yesterday: best ever traffic in a single day on this blog, almost 5000 page views. Even my RedBubble store is seeing some bounce. Appears that I am doing some things right. Feeling hopeful and fortunate.

 

The Problem with Symbols

3 Replies

symbols_edited-2It’s a good thing that Google doesn’t judge (I hope Google doesn’t judge), because I can’t imagine what a sentient search engine would think of me after the search terms I used to find my source images. It paints a very particular, but not accurate, picture.

Sometimes we have to touch on uncomfortable subjects, because uncomfortable things are happening.

A lot of people have objections to certain parts of the Pledge of Allegiance, primarily the “under God” part (and the fact that we don’t all enjoy equal access to liberty and justice), but I’ve long been troubled by the idea that we indoctrinate school children to pledge allegiance to a flag. Beyond the problem that the vast majority of elementary kids have zero idea what they’re actually saying, and are in any event too young to understand the implications of pledging themselves knowingly to any system, the concept of promising to follow a flag is, if I may be blunt, utter bull, as panel 2 illustrates. You can put a flag on a moose; that doesn’t qualify it to run for public office. We don’t need kids growing up believing that they’re obligated to honor that symbol wherever it’s found.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably familiar with the quote about Fascism in America arriving wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross, and we’re watching this prediction unfold before our eyes right now. (I’m not a person who throws around the word “Fascism,” but when you’re spewing rabid nationalism, and talking about closing the borders, and trying to justify a belief that your neighbors are different and don’t belong here, with you, in the greatest country on earth, that’s more or less the textbook definition of Fascism. Ergo: le mot juste.) I love America, but my America is the First Amendment America. My America is the one where people use their freedom to think, not to espouse blind jingoism.

I’ve never understood why people would swear on the Bible when we have the First Amendment. I just read about a public official swearing on the Constitution, which I’ve long thought should be the standard, and various public officials through the years have thought the same thing, even though it’s not a standard. The Bible doesn’t even agree with itself. (I know. Unlike many people who believe in it, I’ve actually read it cover to cover.)

What the stars and stripes means to me is most likely not anything like what it means to Sarah Palin, just as Mother Teresa and your average white supremacist obviously would find very different meaning in the image of a cross. The swastika one might be less obvious. The symbol of the Third Reich is also known as the whirling log in Navajo culture, although my understanding is that most Navajos don’t use it much anymore, probably because most Navajos are more culturally sensitive than Sarah Palin. The Buddhists also use this symbol to mean, “all is well,” although it’s usually reversed. But the point still stands. You can’t follow a symbol, because a symbol is a cultural construct, not an actual idea. Wrapping Fascism in an American flag does not make Fascism patriotic.

As for the Statue of Liberty, it’s almost too stupid. It’s hard for me to imagine the person so tone-deaf that they created this meme explaining why new immigrants were dangerous to their way of life using the most inappropriate symbol available. Presumably, the person who created it was not Navajo. (If they are, I apologize, because unregulated immigration did mess up their world.) Speaking as a 5th generation American, I feel sorry for the non-native person so blind to reality that they feel it’s possible to draw these lines. In defense of the person whose Facebook page I saw it on: she’s very young and uneducated. It’s not a very good excuse, but that’s hers, I guess. If you think the Statue of Liberty should be holding a giant “Keep Out” sign and you’re not indigenous, you’re actually not thinking.

The last panel is about the Japanese internment camps of WWII, one of the more shameful chapters in our country’s history, at least on American soil, at least in the 20th century. And yet certain people have been making noise in this direction, that the only way to protect American citizens is to imprison certain demographics of American citizens. If you don’t see the ridiculousness of this proposal, try to imagine that it could be your demographic one day. After all, the vast majority of terrorist attacks in America are perpetrated by straight, white, Christian men. Chew on that.

#notallhumans

Leave a reply
speciesist dolphin_edited-2

I promise, this comic has a porpoise, and it’s a good one, too. 

I’d like to believe that dolphins and whales don’t judge all of us on the behaviors of some of us. You can find plenty of videos of cetaceans in some sort of anthropogenic trouble–usually being bound up in plastic trash we’ve left in their habitat–approaching humans as if they hope we might be able to help. And of course there are stories of dolphins rescuing humans foundering at sea, helping them to shore or boats.

And if they know we come from boats, they must know that some of us are dangerous.

Some of us are dangerous: to dolphins, and to ourselves. But most of us are OK. You can’t tell from the outside, though.

Probably, dolphins aren’t bigoted. You never hear about dolphins attacking humans, and there are certainly times when they would have cause to hold a grudge or feel that they might have to defend themselves.

Anyway, you can’t judge all of us by the actions of some of us, or even a large group of us. You sort of have assess us on a one by one basis, because we’re all individuals. At least, we should be.

If Stock Photos Could Talk

1 Reply

 

stock photos_edited-2

These things had to be said.

Some weird things are going on in my country. We’re having a difficult time being respectful to one another, and it seems like the value of human life has diminished in the eyes of many. People are hurting, but everybody hurts, and really, hurting other people doesn’t help us to hurt any less.

I try to answer hatred with love, but, admittedly, a lot of the time I fail at that and the best I can muster is sarcasm. At least I’m really good at sarcasm. But if I had 100% control over my responses, I would go with love every time.

For example: I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Tucson about 10 years ago. While we were queueing up to get into the convention center, we had to pass a protestor holding a large sign declaring that the Dalai Lama was going to hell. This upset everyone who read it, and no one really knew the right response. We all sort of uncomfortably shifted our gaze away from this person and tried–unsuccessfully, because he was also yelling–to ignore him.

Later, in his talk, the Dalai Lama discussed his own encounter with some protestors in Europe, carrying signs angrier and more virulent than the one we had seen outside. But he didn’t ignore them. He bowed to them. And they were so–surprised? enchanted? shamed?–that they bowed back.

That’s who I want to be. I want to be the person who bows to my detractor, because I know that their anger steals from them, not from me, but that my love builds us both, and that ultimately, there is nothing between me and anyone else on this planet. We’re all the same, once we look past the surface.

Anyway, yesterday was a difficult day. I couldn’t think of anything funny on my own, so I Googled “hilarious stock photos” and captioned the 4 most ridiculous ones.

What It Feels Like for a Grown Woman

Leave a reply
manstruation_edited-2

I’m just going to come out and say it: manstruation.

To me, it’s just another argument against intelligent design, like why would an omniscient creator build an amusement park next to a sewage treatment plant (so to speak)? This body is 41 freaking years old, and I have no desire to incubate a tiny human inside it. Why must my uterus so frequently prepare for an event that will never come to pass, and why must it be exhausting?

So here it is: period humor. Super unpopular. Inaccessible to 50% of the population and unwelcome to most of the other 50%. But when that’s all you have, that’s all you have. It’s been a pretty lousy day. And now the world knows.

The point is, if your period was a person, it would be a tone-deaf dudebro in a backward baseball cap who didn’t get that every single one of his pranks fell flat, so he just kept making them, laughing to himself and elbowing you in the ribs even as you begged him to please stop because he wasn’t funny.