Tag Archives: comic

I Love Endless War

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i <3 war_edited-2

I forgot the very best part, which is how war enriches those who already have power and inflicts suffering on the people who are already marginalized.

There’s this old story–I can’t recall the origins–about a righteous man who is given the opportunity to see hell, which is presented as a long banquet table, weighted down with the most scrumptious and delectable of foods. Everything looks tasty and enticing, but the sinners, seated along both sides of the table, have their arms encased in rigid sleeves. They can see the food, even touch and it and pick it up, but they can’t bend their elbows, so they can’t get it into their mouth.

The righteous man then asks for a glimpse of heaven and is surprised to find that it’s the exact same scenario–table, food, unbending sleeves. The difference is, in heaven, people are feeding their neighbor across the table.

That’s the world we live in, actually. It’s heaven when we care for those around us, and it’s hell when we selfishly think only of ourselves.

But this is all beyond the people with the power to make big decisions, it seems. Being hugely sarcastic seems to be my only remaining defense in a world increasingly populated haters and those with zero regard for anyone else. More guns, more war, more class stratification, more needless consumption of nonrenewable resources. Why not?

Many of the people with the power to make big decisions–a frightening number, really–want war, for financial or religious reasons. The only defense against this type of thinking is to point out, repeatedly, how ridiculous it is, how the suffering of some brings suffering to us all.

Trying out some different cartooning styles. Photoshop makes it easy to get lazy and my intention is to become a better artist. I don’t need any practice being lazy. I saw a comic where the artist drew black and white characters with colored hair and it looked pretty cool there, and here, too. This is me, of course, and Mrs. Kitty with her unicorn hair.

 

Narrow Tolerances

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tolerance_edited-2

It’s one ten-thousandth of a inch, not a sliver more, and if anyone has a problem with that, we’re switching to Angstroms, do you hear me?

The Man assures me that no one is going to understand this comic, but I’m not personally an aerospace engineer, and I wrote it. Furthermore, I’ve read every single xkcd comic, even though I have a liberal arts degree and haven’t even attempted to learn anything about coding since giving up on BASIC in 1982, and Randall Munroe specifically states that his work may not be appropriate for me.

The Man does work in this industry, but the idea of a 1/10,000 of a inch tolerance is kind of mind-boggling to me. He doesn’t have to actually measure the 1/10,000 of a inch himself–he programs robots to measure for him–but if it’s not right, back it goes. Some things won’t function properly if they’re, say, 1/1,000 of an inch too big. People could die. Or not die, as the case may be in that industry.

Math is sort of a foreign language to me, once that I’ve tried to learn on numerous occasions, and failed miserably every time. The only math class I ever did well in was statistics for the social sciences, and 100% of everything I mastered in that class vanished like morning mist as soon as I finished taking the final exam. Otherwise, I probably would have gotten a BS instead of studying psychology, which is an interesting, but inconclusive discipline. My parents would have been happier to start with, but probably more disappointed when I gave it up for art, which is what I told them I wanted to do to begin with. Imagine how much farther along I would be if I had ever in my life taken a drawing class instead of learning to calculate standard deviations.

Integrity

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I only signed up because I loved that freeze-dried ice cream when I was a little kid.

I only signed up because I loved that freeze-dried ice cream when I was a little kid. 

Where this comes from, there’s no way to say. Just pure ridiculousness, I guess, like a vegetarian butcher or a Republican presidential candidate calling for tolerance and diversity. Ah, there it’s gone and gotten political. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to draw astronauts, although now I wonder if the astronauts should have been bigger. It would have been more fun drawing bigger astronauts. Then again, maybe it’s funnier if you get the vast perspective of being so high above such a large expanse of the Earth. Maybe adding the ISS was a mistake. Maybe this comic is only a qualified success. It wasn’t the best day for my art, to be honest. I wanted to block out 2 hours to write an article, but instead I accompanied The Man on an unusual but informative adventure. And here we are.

You need urgent care after you get the bill

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If you think WebMD is bad, whatever you do, don't subscribe to the CDC's mailing list where they send you updates on all the latest and deadliest diseases you might have.

If you think WebMD is bad, whatever you do, don’t subscribe to the CDC’s mailing list where they send you regular updates describing in graphic detail all the latest and deadliest diseases you are probably suffering from right now.

It was the Rabbit who told me about the CDC mailing list and diagnosed herself with every global pandemic for a year before she realized that this in itself probably didn’t constitute healthy behavior and unsubscribed. Personally, I don’t like going to the doctor because my experience is that doctors typically don’t listen to or help me. Usually they tell me there’s nothing wrong, and if they do treat me, it has minimal effect. Fortunately, I do have good health insurance, courtesy of my wholly legal marriage to The Man, who is gainfully employed.

As for WebMD, it’s really fairly useless for diagnosis, when you get down to it. If you want to look up the course of a particular disease, it’s an OK resource, but if you search your symptoms, you pretty much always have cancer.

Kids can’t play doctor anymore, anyway. If they get caught, they have to have psychiatric evaluations and become registered sex offenders. And why would they bother looking at each other when they can just Google porn?

I’ve been trying to spend less time online. The real world has some things to recommend it, too.

Etiquette 2015

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What I'm saying here is that technology has really transformed every aspect of our lives.

What I’m saying here is that technology has really transformed every aspect of our lives.

Some relationships are just closer than others. Or maybe some people are more forgiving. I have a couple friends who fall into the third category. All this constant communication technology is a huge imposition on my life, and if people want to v-chat me, they have to do it on my terms.

We’re talking really good friends.

This is easily the grossest comic I’ve ever written. Or am every likely to write. But the fact of the matter is, 20 years ago the idea of bringing a computer into the bathroom was unthinkable, and using the telephone in there was really reserved for teenagers with really long cords and no other privacy options, or for people staying in fancy business hotels. Now it seems totally normal. For some people, not bringing their smart phone into the bathroom would feel weird. Friday night I was at a party in a really loud bar, and I got overwhelmed, and went and played Words with Friends in the bathroom, and that was a totally unremarkable thing to do. No one looked twice.

At any rate, this comic should discourage people who don’t know me well from v-chatting me.

Batman (Ends before It) Begins

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Honestly, I've had enough of crime to last me two lifetimes.

Honestly, I’ve had enough of crime to last me two lifetimes.

The Man and I are really enjoying Gotham but you have to admit that everyone in that town is insane. I get why the disenfranchised people stay there–because they have no money to leave–and I get why the rich corrupt people stay there–because they are insane, and because they can be corrupt with impunity and prey on the weak–but it doesn’t make sense for someone like Bruce Wayne to stick around. Kind-hearted, level-headed, wealthy people would, in reality, move somewhere else. Batman’s supposed to be intelligent. Seeking vengeance for an unsolvable murder isn’t really that intelligent.

But people in stories don’t make the smart decisions, the ones that would eliminate conflict. I’d say if this show can maintain the same level of inventiveness and insanity, it could easily run long enough for the kid to grow up and put on the cape. The body count by that time would be astronomical.

What if Wonder Woman has listened to her mother and never left Themyscira? What if the Clarks had left the alien baby in the field? You have to be pretty baby-crazy to adopt something that falls out of the sky in a UFO

The violent crime rate in America, compared to that of northern Europe is hilariously high. I also toyed with the idea of Bruce wanting to go to Bhutan, where they have declared Gross National Happiness (GNH) rather than Gross National Product (GNP) to be the most useful measure of a country’s success. But I guess that would be more my thing than Bruce Wayne’s Then again, so would divesting myself of Wayne Enterprises and getting out of the city.

Cats don’t comprehend insomnia

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Cats recognize faithful servants and reward them well.

Cats recognize faithful servants and reward them well.

Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I walked through a darkened hall and stepped on something cold and slightly moist with my bare foot, and I knew exactly what had just been squished beneath my naked skin, because I’ve stepped on dead mice before. The cat helpfully leaves them in my path, on the only rug in the entire house, because, despite the fact that I feed her regular food and treats every day without fail, she apparently considers me a terrible hunter. The mice are pretty easy targets; they live in the compost heap and even I’ve killed one (by accident, with a pitchfork, while turning the pile). I can’t get myself worked up over mice living in the compost heap–they’re kind of cute when they’re alive, and even though my neighbor in convinced they probably carry the hantavirus, the heap is a pretty safe distance from the house–but the cat is vigilant about their community, and spends many hours a day sitting on the wall, gazing down at their home with dedication to an ultimate goal.

The dead ones are better than the disabled ones. In her quest to teach me how to hunt, she tried bringing me creatures with broken backs, still alive, but unable to walk. She must be perplexed when I let The Man finish them off for me. He grew up on a farm, and has more experience killing animals. In addition to mice, she has gifted me with many lizards, a sizable number of songbirds, and on one memorable occasion, a snake. It was a worm snake with a broken back, able to dart its head around, but paralyzed on the back end.

To her credit, we had a terrible cricket problem in here before she decided to move in, and, mysteriously, since her arrival, the house is no longer infested with crickets chirping their heads off all night in the walls.

In case it’s not obvious, this is another insomnia comics. Insomnia comics are drawn the night after insomnia, when the gears of my mind are sticky and don’t want to turn. I’m sure plenty of funny things happened today, but they didn’t want to be comics. There was the mom pushing a kid in a stroller even though that kid was clearly old enough to walk, and threatening to take away his dinosaurs every time he made a sound even though we were in a room full of screaming kids, for example. That’s weird, right? But I’m too tired to make sense of it. Oh, and then there was a conversation I had with my 86-year-old grandmother, during which she made fun of climate change deniers. And at dinner, we bumped into some friends we hadn’t seen in a while, one of whom is a physicist, who told me that his Ph.d. thesis disproved the concept of teleportation. There’s got to be a joke in that somewhere. Maybe tomorrow I’ll remember how to be funny. Right now I’m just kind of stressed out.

Today also should have been the day that I started my holiday bulletin board, but I was too tired to think of a picture or decide on any text. As my mother always said, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Empathy

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Go ahead. Criticize this comic. I dare you.

Go ahead. Criticize this comic. I dare you. Your opinion means nothing to me. Unless you like it, in which case your opinion means everything.

Usually, I don’t use people’s real names in my comics out of respect for their privacy, but in this case, I feel the need to write the name. If, by some magical coincidence, that dude recognizes himself as the perpetrator and wants to apologize for the 3 years of hell through which he put my vulnerable, pre-adolescent self, he’s welcome to step up. I get that I was an annoying kid, that I was weird and a know-it-all and and a tomboy, that I dressed all wrong and didn’t comb my hair enough and had zero ability to read social cues. So you know what would have been cool, if you found me so terrible? Leaving me the hell alone. Not calling me names, not encouraging everyone else to call me names, and definitely not punching me in the face on the school bus. I can attest that it actually does not kill you to be compassionate toward people you don’t like. I do it all the time and have not yet died from it. Sometimes, if you’re really compassionate, you can offer them a few words that may actually help them become less odious. Sometimes people really don’t know what they’re doing wrong, and they could use a little help.

But we still get people like the ones in panel 6, who go around justifying their own jerkiness with circular reasoning. You know how you could stop bullying? By not being a bully. It’s so simple. If it’s not simple to you, then guess what: you are what is referred to in popular parlance as a sociopath. Unless you actually believe that you’re the only real human being in the world and other people are merely set pieces for your drama, you can reduce the amount of suffering in the world by not causing it. Don’t hurt other people to make yourself feel better.

Obviously, there are always going to be narcissists, but we have a choice. We can bow down to the tiny percentage of cruel humans out of fear that we might be singled out as the next target, or we can stand up to tyranny by protecting those who have less power, because there are actually more nice people than horrible ones, and there is power in numbers. We don’t have to fight. All it takes is a few kind, honest words. If today’s kids get anti-bullying lessons (i.e. are taught empathy and compassion) then maybe tomorrow’s adults can fix the terror of a world that wants us to believe that might makes right and that self-esteem is a zero sum game where you can only win by taking from someone else.

I’m not thin-skinned, but bullying is just another form of abuse, and like all abuse, it leaves its mark. It’s an indelible trauma. Yes, it will happen, but no, we can’t ever normalize it. The crimes of childhood have to be forgiven, because children’s brains aren’t done yet, but for adults to condone awful behavior is not forgivable.

Having grown into my dragonhood, I’m over my childhood, but I’m never to going to be over the childhoods of people who are still children. I’m never going to stop protecting people from monsters.

It’s the Hypoallergenic Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

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The rock is also suitable for children with lactose intolerance, nut allergies, and chemical sensitivity.

The rock is also suitable for children with lactose intolerance, chemical sensitivity, and peanut allergies. Not recommended for kids with behavior disorders, though. 

There will be no teal pumpkin in front of my house this Halloween; at the rate I’m going this year, there will be no pumpkins at all, let alone jack-o-lanterns, unless we obtain and carve them Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. I feel for kids with allergies. Personally, the list of things I can’t eat anymore is almost as long as the things I like these days, but there are just too many variables, and my budget for candy is pretty small anyway. Plus, we rarely get more than 2 dozen kids, and half the time we take off around 8 to go to a party.

If you haven’t seen It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it’s worth 21 minutes of your time. I mean, media-wise, the ’60s were a simpler time. There are no explosions, no gore, and nothing the least bit scary, but it’s still a Halloween classic, in its way.

For many months now, I’ve been turning over an idea for another big, serious, depressing comic about my childhood, something that I’ve written about in longer prose work, but couldn’t quite figure out how to frame it in comic format. Today the way in seems to have revealed itself, but there wasn’t a chance to get it started because I went to 6 shoe stores unsuccessfully searching for a pair of minimalist sneakers identical to the pair I’ve been wearing since 2012 instead of drawing a long comic. Maybe tomorrow. Or at least get it started tomorrow, as I now realize that today is only Thursday.

Halloween Insult Comics

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You're both so ugly people go as you for Halloween.

You’re both so ugly people go as you for Halloween.

Special fangs to the dear friend  (referred to, here and there in Dragon comics as the Vampire Bat, for reasons that must soon become clear) who sends out Halloween care packages every year and in whose honor this spooky insult comic was created. Most of the items in the image are from this year’s Halloween box; one is from a few years ago, and there’s also a commemorative matchbook for Bonnie Jo Campbell’s first novel, Q Road. You can’t make it out that well, but it’s a pumpkin with a butcher’s knife sticking out of it. Anyway, these buttons cracked me up the most. The jack-o-lantern especially looks like a real jerk.

Sadly, I still live in the desert, so all the chocolate in the Halloween box melted. However, the box itself is pretty nice. 1000 household uses. Skull Face and Jack-o-Lantern may insult each other in front of it again in the future. So spooky!

Ah, it’s all in good fun.

Tomorrow I have a photo shoot for a hair color blog. Financial remuneration has been suggested. Art!