Tag Archives: comic

Aerobics of the Night

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Now playing on VH1. And my imagination for all time.

Can you believe that no one has ever drawn this comic before? Google couldn’t find it, so it must be original, right? It works on so many levels. In other news, yesterday’s story was that of course the president met with the Russian ambassador during the campaign. Of course he did. Does this surprise anyone? That’s the world we live in now. But at least I got my funny back (accidentally—it was a solecism, and The Man insisted). Gene Simmons, Sweatin’ to the Oldies.

KISS had their first hit in 40+ years ago, so they’re basically oldies. This gag probably makes me basically an oldie.

More Surreal Life Hacks

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Basically, you can do whatever you want and when people question your behavior, just explain that it’s supposed to be surreal. Or don’t. 

Everything’s off-kilter, and being angry about it doesn’t seem to help. In fact, I feel like my attitude is probably starting to annoy people, so I tried to shift back to something resembling my previous brand of humor without completely abandoning the perspective that the United States of America is completely screwed up right now. I cannot authorize a federal investigation into Russian interference with the US election. I can’t force John McCain to rally Congress around the goal of restoring sanity to politics. I can’t protect my own health coverage. But, here and there, if you look around, you can fix little things, sometimes.

Of course, if we had just done a better job of teaching schoolchildren to recognize and reject logical fallacies for the last 30 years, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Ditto germ theory and the role of vaccinations in preventing the spread of infectious disease.

Organizing books is my personal meditation. You don’t have to break into people’s houses to do it. Public school libraries will usually let you just come in and do it for free. Some places actually pay you to do it!

Footsies

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I swear, I’m a goooood boy. I would never go past second base before the election.

If I wanted to stay totally topical, this should have been a comic about Mike Pence’s hacked AOL account, but at this point, it’s just the same thing over and over. Hypocrites and liars being hypocrites and liars. And the fact that Mike Pence uses AOL is like…post-humor. It’s gone past comedy into some other realm where political theater and the theater of the bizarre have merged into one horrific blacklit broken mirror Wonderland where events defy categorization or comprehension.

Anyway, at least he recused himself from an investigation into the Russian election hacks he already knows didn’t happen because facts are malleable and you can discard the ones that don’t fit your world view.

My truth is that last night, after I posted the Sessions/Ozymandias comic, I realized that I had made the better joke in the blog post. So I started to draw that comic, because it was only 1 a.m. and knocking out another comic felt totally doable. But them I remembered my promise to myself when I started this project to let go of the drive for perfection, and also things that trigger insomnia, and I just let it ride and played the ukulele in the dark for an hour instead.

And then tonight, I thought I’d try a little caricature, which I haven’t done lately, because, let’s face it: Jeff Sessions looks like a kewpie doll with muppet ears. From a design perspective he’s sort of adorable. The gag was already written and all I had to do was not cross the line between big-eyed coquette Sessions and Peter Jackson’s Gollum. You would not believe how fine that line is. And here we are. I drew a comic.

Have a great weekend. Enjoy your freedoms.

No Contact

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There is definitely nothing to see here. I’m pretty tight with the administration and I can assure you that none of them did anything wrong.

Remember when these guys lost their freaking minds because Bill Clinton didn’t count fellatio as sex? But now they’re all cool with not counting multiple meetings with a Russian ambassador “considered by US intelligence to be one of Russia’s top spies and spy-recruiters in Washington, according to current and former senior US government officials,” as having “contact with the Russians.”

Jeff Sessions: “Oh, by contact with the Russians, I thought you meant playing footsies under the table with Ambassador Kislyak. We never did that. It was strictly above the waist.”

Remember, if there were to be an investigation into Russian interference with the election, this is the guy who would lead it.

Like Ozymandias, I’m sure he thinks he’s the good guy saving the world.

I Am Incapable of Shutting up

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That’s my secret. I don’t know how to be quiet. Actually, it’s probably not much of a secret.

It would be great if I could go back to trying to be funny. Maybe people could stop being awful for a couple weeks? But no. Instead, we have news aggregators that do nothing but track current events that are NOT NORMAL, except that they are rapidly becoming everyday sorts of occurrences. But still not normal. White supremacists fomenting terror in the daylight, knowing that the president of the United States won’t condemn their actions: NOT NORMAL.

 

Purim is a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, but one that remains shockingly relevant. It’s popular for the reasons mentioned in the comic: costumes, cookies, booze, and a general atmosphere of revelry. Because there are treacherous people about, but again and again, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Eventually. All tyrants fall. Eventually.

Purim cookies are called hamantaschen and I I noticed they are selling them at Costco this year. The noisemakers are called groggers. They are highly annoying to adults, but, obviously, children love them. This year, the holiday falls on the 12th and 13 of March.

Panel 3 references Nazi death camps (20th century), the Maccabean Revolt (2nd centure BCE), the golem of Prague (16th century), and a bad forgery that refuses to die.

I don’t know the name of the cemetery where my ancestors are buried but my family is from Philadelphia and the images in the news certainly look a lot like my memories of the place.

I’m not saying people don’t get scared. But not scared enough to roll over. You know what I mean? Vandalism and bomb threats only help us remain vigilant. When evil rears its head, that makes it easier to strike down.

Un-American

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I guess it depends on what values you believe the symbol actually stands for, and whether or not you can recognize when that symbol hangs from an incongruent foundation.

Not much more to say about this. America has been guilty of atrocities, but I like to think injustice is not the foundation of the system. Rather it’s a human flaw that can be addressed. We don’t have to embrace it. We don’t even have to accept it as inevitable. We can recognize it, bring it to light, and address it. Then the Rabbit told me today that genocide and slavery are the structural supports of the nation, and that we will have to tear the house down and rebuild.

History is ridiculous. And living through it is nerve-wracking. This comic comes from a place of fear, but I guess most of significant human events comes from that place.

I’m not sure how my brain connected to this James Thurber story, which I probably haven’t read in 20 years. Everyone should read James Thurber. Actually, everyone probably has and just doesn’t know it. His most famous story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” figured prominently in my freshman English class in high school. He’s a wicked, funny man. I wish I could write with his clarity and wit.

As for the last panel, I don’t know all that much about HUAC and Joe McCarthy, and I imagine there probably were plenty of Nazi sympathizers running around in the ’50s, but of course they weren’t open about it. They didn’t publicly host Nazi gatherings. They didn’t freely state their intentions to dismantle the federal government. Anyway, McCarthy claimed that the State House was “infested with Communists.” Later, as I understand it, he died penniless and friendless. In between he made a lot of people’s lives miserable.

He was a terrible human being, but in Bizarro America he gets to point his finger.

 

 

 

 

All about Me

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You might think it’s about you. But it’s not. It’s about me.

Radical self care. For me it tends to take the shape of being incredibly selfish. Sometimes it seems like something I don’t get to do very often, but on the other hand, drawing webcomics is incredibly selfish in many ways. It’s absolutely all about me. My art has always been all about me. The difference is, it used to be novels that a half dozen people read, and now it’s comics that 100s or 1000s of people read. But they’re still about me, my life, my experience, what I’m going through. Even if they seem political or altruistic, even when I do something like the Patricia Jabbeh Wesley comic the other day, or all those Bonnie Jo Campbell comics, I’m still in it. It’s still about me.

My brother told me yesterday that my comics were getting very dark. I say the world is getting dark. The comics just reflect my perception of it. But actually, I’ve been taking great care of myself since the election.

Not, of course, as good as my kitty, Lupin (pictured above). We could all take lessons on radical self care from cats.

Do You See How Ridiculous This Is?

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And they all lived without the oppressive weight of the assumed binary ever after.

Wrote this little script last week but nothing visually stunning came to mind even after so many days, so the artwork doesn’t really hit any sort of meaningful level, for which I am sorry. We were at the Bear’s house and didn’t get home until after 11 and my energy level kind of started flagging before we even left the house.

I know some people feel very strongly about identifying on one end of the spectrum or the other, but I don’t, and I never have. But if you do, I support your right to express that in whatever way that works for you without letting it inform my sense of what you can and cannot do. Sorry there’s nothing more today. I should have done a comic about the 7 earth-like planets discovered by NASA. Maybe tomorrow. Although Google kind of already beat me to it.

Here’s an article I wrote on Book Riot about a new horror anthology called Sycorax’s Daughters.

Poetry Is in the Air

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Always searching for words to explain.

This is my friend Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, the Liberian-American poet, in the first panel. We went to graduate school together. She came to America as a refugee, one of a million people displaced by a war that killed 200,000. There were only like 2 million people in Liberia before the troubles. She knows something about how bad the world can get.

Most of my poet friends seem to write Facebook statuses that are also poetry, and when I saw this update, it felt like it had the same rhythm of some of my 4-panel comics, so I asked her if I could adapt it and she kindly said yes. I love the line, “If you ain’t start writing poetry this year, you might never.”

If you’re unfamiliar, panel 3 is Harry Carey, a popular sportscaster whose catchphrase was “holy cow,” and panel 4 is an iconic picture of activists Gloria Steinham and Dorothy Pitman Hughes illustrating solidarity.

Facts

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I only believe ideas that conform to my previously held beliefs, and those are sufficient facts for me.

Nuances of style, voice, and tone in writing can be difficult to understand even for students interested in writing, which is a very small subset among college students taking freshman composition. Almost everyone who likes writing tests out of this course, so you don’t expect much more than average ability from your students to start. But some people defy your expectations, like this kid. I swear, this is a true story. He told me he was writing like a stereo manual on purpose, because that was the only good way to write, and he wouldn’t alter his written voice, even though revisions accounted for a huge percentage of the semester grade.

That’s the nature of reality. One person can spend five years studying the structure, detail, and elements of language that place Lolita among the pantheon of the most wonderfully written novels ever written and still feel that they have much to learn on the subject of verbal expression, and this freshman can proclaim with equal or greater certainty the stereo manuals are objectively the best, most effective use of English. This guy gave up an easy A because considering my perspective would mean compromising his own powerful belief.

And that is how we get to a place where people can proclaim that anything that isn’t personally a problem for them, isn’t a problem for anyone, anywhere, period. When you’ve already decided the truth about the world, you can’t hear further information on any subject.

So I repeat. It’s pointless to argue after you realize that the person you’re arguing with is choosing not to evaluate information that contradicts their predetermine notions. All the facts in the world won’t persuade someone who’s already made up their mind.