Tag Archives: comics

Triumvirate Mandala

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Next slide, please.

Next slide, please.

Reddit is so unpredictable. I can put the same comic into 2 different subreddits, and one link will get 2 upvotes and the other will get 147. Come on! Do I suck or not, people? Make up your minds. Friday’s comic was not my best work, I don’t think, but it’s gotten almost as many views in 24 hours as my bullying comic, which has been getting steady traffic for weeks. But neither of them got much play in /r/comics, which leads me to believe that people who read /r/sadcomics and /r/webcomics are simply more intelligent and discerning readers.

I like today’s mandala, which is unusual in that it is based off a 3-pronged symmetry, and also looks like something you would use to summon demons, or a portal into HP Lovecraft’s brain.

Posted my article on Tucson Comic-Con and am halfway through tomorrow’s comic. Sold a T-shirt. Also: paying work this week. Still scratching away at some bigger projects and…um…thinking about novels.

Dragon Comics 117

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Who has time to read when there's a Buffy sing-a-long starting in 10 minutes?

Who has time to read when there’s a Buffy sing-a-long starting in 10 minutes?

Honestly, I think one of the nicest things about Comic-Con is that it’s a venue for the weirdos to let their freak flags fly, and to see that they’re not alone. I get that this subverts the intended purpose of the Con, but we live in a tough world, and if spending 3 days out of the year dressed at Pikachu is what you need to survive, I wholly support that, and will work to make the Con a safe place for you to do so.

I love comics, obviously. I don’t buy a lot of them, because I am poor, and because I am partial to graphic novels/trade paperbacks, having little patience for story lines that are doled out a dollop at a time over a space of years, and because I have very little shelf space left and would rather borrow comics from the library or a friend and not have to store them if I don’t love them enough to make them part of my permanent collection. The allure of that type of acquisition eludes me, as well. If I buy a comic, I’m damn well going to read it, and I’m going to use my bare hands to turn the pages. I maybe even dog ear it as I do so. But I’ve known serious collectors, and I support that madness too.

There were probably fewer than a half dozen straight up comic book dealers at this convention: we have 3 major independent shops in this town, all of which were represented, and maybe 1 or 2 retailers came out of Phoenix. Most of the vendors weren’t selling comic books. They were selling swords and wigs and T-shirts and plushies and stuff that’s of interest to people who come to comic book conventions. Even the artists weren’t primarily selling comic books, but were instead selling paintings of dragons, or their own drawings of popular characters, or books with more words than pictures.

But comic books are the catalysts. And while the Star Wars area was bigger than the Marvel section, and I don’t even know what to make of the replica cars from non-comic related movies and TV shows, there’s room for every fandom at a good Con.

So Many Circles Mandala

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Hey, even the Earth is slightly egg shaped, really.

Hey, even the Earth is slightly egg shaped, really.

How is that I’m still awake? I had a press pass to Tucson Comic-Con this weekend, so I felt compelled to spend almost the entire 3 days at Comic-Con. I only left Saturday because I had to go to a birthday party, and I only left Sunday because I wanted to march in the All Souls’ Procession, and I like to hang out downtown for 3 hours before the procession starts to just be in the middle of everything. So I walked a LOT. Plus, I wore combat boots for 10 hours today. My feet are kind of complaining. The introvert side of me was actually kind of freaking out about these plans, and there was a moment on Thursday when I thought, “I can’t do this.” But I did it. I took some great pictures and talked to plenty of artists and cosplayers and writers and publishers and I will write a sweet article and next year maybe I’ll get the press pass to the (MUCH larger) Phoenix con. Maybe I’ll even have enough cache for San Diego. Stranger things have been known to happen.

Dragon Comics tomorrow!

More Insomnia Comics

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The heavenly cloud sleeping Monica dreams that she can write comics in her sleep.

The heavenly cloud sleeping Monica dreams that she can write comics in her sleep.

My inability to full recharge my brain each night on a regular basis is an endless source of inspiration. Sorry if the final panel is too creepy. I promise you, it’s worse on the inside. I was up until 3:30 or 4 a.m. last  night, and then up at 6 because the A/C finked out again and it’s still about 100 degrees here once the sun rises. And even though I fell back asleep after helping The Man fix it, FedEx rang the doorbell at 9. So my head is buzzing.

Also started a new bulletin board and finished a Panels piece today. Ain’t no rest for the wicked.

A Shonda for the Vays Menschen

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I've seen some stuff, you know?

I’ve seen some stuff, you know?

It’s all true, anyway. An African cab driver really did ask me if I was raped, and a bitter, critical, English professor really did tell me that there was no way that could ever happen when I tried to tell the story in an undergraduate fiction writing workshop. I suppose that’s a big difference between fiction and non-fiction. Readers just won’t accept certain types of events in fiction: you can’t write too many tragedies into a story, or too many coincidences, even though strings of tragedies and coincidences of course happen in real life.

We’re used to reading clean dialog, too, and heaven knows people don’t really speak the way their words appear in books. People say “um” and “ah” and “like,” and they stutters and repeat themselves in a way that would be utterly annoying to read. Fiction isn’t like life, after all. Fiction wraps up. There are metaphors and meanings. Life is messy and crises don’t always happen for a reason, and people don’t always learn from them.

A “shonda for the goyim” is a Yiddish sentiment, which expresses that a Jewish person has done something shameful in the sight of non-Jews, which will then reflect badly on all Jews, because anti-Semitism. I’ve since been told that black people would say, “a scandal for white people,” or something to that effect. I had mixed feelings about having an entire panel depend on a phrase in a foreign language, but that’s really what was going on in my head, too, and I think it reflects an important parallel, the kind of point upon which fiction depends, but which life often fails to deliver.

When I was looking up how to say “white people” in Yiddish for the title (I hope vays menschen is correct; I known “menschen” is “people” and if “vays” is pronounced like the German word “weiss”  then it makes sense) I came across a couple articles asking if the Yiddish word “schvartze” was considered racist. Schvartze is the word that some elderly Jews used to refer to black people, and let me tell you, it’s racist as hell. At least it was when my late grandmother said it, usually in the context of, “Lock the doors, there’s schvartze everywhere.” And that’s what I was taught about black people as a child.

I could pretend otherwise, but it’s the truth, and that’s what fiction and nonfiction have to have in common.

Revenge of the Helicopter Kids

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Listen, you don't know my parents like I do. My parents are better than those other parents and they deserve special treatment.

Listen, you don’t know my parents like I do. My parents are better than those other parents and they deserve special treatment.

If you, like me, have 150 Facebook friends with school age children, you’ve probably seen a bunch of photographs in the last couple weeks featuring kids in new clothing and various attitudes of excitement or embarrassment holding signs proclaiming “First Day of Kindergarten,” or some similar sentiment. Well, my cousin posted a picture of herself hugging her 5-year-old with a caption explaining that she was probably the worst mother in the world because she wasn’t going to make him hold an adorable sign before he went off to school, and that the child would probably be scarred for life because of this moral failure.

So that’s where this comes from. But it comes from other things, too, like the Boy once again losing his Kindle privileges because he was watching YouTube when he was supposed to be doing homework. I’ve been thinking along similar themes, how we hold our kids to higher standards than we hold ourselves, and most of us would find ourselves without smartphones if some higher power took them away when we used them to screw around on the Internet instead of work.

My feelings on helicopter parents are well-documented. OK, there are worse things you could do to your kids, but when we’re talking about good intentions gone wrong, wrapping your kids in bubble wrap and protecting them from every possible bump the universe might have to offer while arguing with teachers, coaches, and other experts on particular aspects of childhood why your kid is better than other kids and deserves to be treated differently is a terrific way to raise a completely helpless and ineffective human being. How long do you plan on doing this, I wonder? When I taught at the college level I heard of parents trying to advocate for their kids, and a couple kids told me their parents were going to call me, but my standard response was that I wasn’t going to talk to their mommies and daddies because they were grownups and responsible for their own behavior. Legally, I wasn’t supposed to discuss their grades with their parents either.

Still, my supervisor assured us that parents would call anyway. From the kids, I heard firsthand that their overbearing parents didn’t prepare them for life after high school. They didn’t know when to go to bed without being told; they didn’t know when to get up. All their lives they’d been told they were the best, and suddenly it turned out that they were just like everyone else. And, having never been allowed to fail, they didn’t know how to succeed on a level playing field.

Seriously, moms and dads, back off! Your kid should be given more responsibility every year so that they have actual adult experience when they are 18. They should be allowed to fail, over and over, so that they learn about consequences and how to make better decisions. They should be taught not to throw a fit when they don’t get everything they believe they deserve. Otherwise, they are going to be mightily disappointed when college spits them out into the real world and they don’t get every job and raise and promotion they think the world owes them.

However, if any children would like to argue that I deserve something more than I’ve achieved in life, I would welcome the effort.

Boiling Hot Mandala

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Summer’s end in the desert means it only gets up to 95° during the day.

This one sort of reminds me of an electric range as well as a pot of boiling water or that game where the floor is lava. You might think I’m feeling the heat, but in fact, it’s cooled off significantly around here. When the temperature is in the 90s, I find myself gravitating back to long pants and even to long sleeves in the evening.

Our long weekend was supposed to be a camping trip, but we found out on Thursday that the heavy monsoon rains had washed out the road to the campground we’d booked, and also there was a party The Man wanted to go to on Saturday night. We ended up having a blast Friday, too, staying local but running all over the city for a little bit of everything good Tucson has to offer.

I’m working on another comic about the terrible facets of my life, which people seem to like reading about. I started working on it about a week ago, but then I stopped, thinking, “Man, this is heavy; no one wants to hear this.” And then I got another PM from someone saying, “Thanks for writing all these serious, personal stories in comic form.” Every time I think I’m done with a particular form, someone contacts me to ask for more. So, soon you’ll be able to read a comic strip about chronic pain, which, clearly, you have been waiting for all your life.

I’ve also been storyboarding another comic, a more traditional kind of comic book story that I guess would fall into the category of paranormal romance. I intended to write 16 panels with a punchline, but the punchline didn’t come to the 20th panel, and by that time I had invested enough into the story that I didn’t want to play it for cheap gags. I wanted the characters to learn and grow. So instead of drawing a 4×4 grid and telling a short joke, I’ll probably end up with about 25 2×2 grids that tell a complete arc, with flashbacks and character development and plot and conflict and resolution. I’m not sure when I’ll get to write it, but I’m ready to get back into more detailed writing and storytelling. I could do more, every day.

In Which I Relearn the Love of Alliterative Language

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If I seem a little prickly to you, maybe you shouldn't touch me.

If I seem a little prickly to you, maybe you shouldn’t touch me.

It eludes me why I never thought to post the mandalas on Mondays. Not only does #MandalaMonday make a more pleasing hashtag, it gives me an extra day to think about comics without being rushed when I’ve used the entire weekend up having fun and not thinking about the act of creation.

This one looks like a sea anemone to me, something that lives on a coral reef.

My trip to New Mexico was wonderful and cleansing, but the 7+ hour drive each way, mostly through the mountains, was pretty taxing on my body. I drank one of those dreadful 5-Hour Energies, which kept my mind so relentlessly focused on piloting a vehicle that 7 hours after we arrived my brain remained on alert to the sensation of hurtling through space. Driving that long wasn’t easy on the rest of me either, and I got very little sleep last night.

There should be a comic tomorrow, a silly one, and then maybe one of those brutal personal comics about the most painful things that have ever happened to me, which seem to be the ones that most interest readers.

Dictionary Definition

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You lack both the language skills as well as the perceptive capacity.

You lack both the language skills as well as the perceptive capacity.

I won this particular copy of Webster’s 9th New Collegiate Dictionary in the 8th grade, when I won the all-school spelling bee on the word “forfeit.” It’s been with me a long time, and the cover is askew from years of abuse. Now, of course, I usually use the Internet, or sometimes the lovely but cumbersome “Compact” Oxford English Dictionary, which was a gift from the Fox. It’s the one that has 9 pages printed in minuscule text on each oversized page, and come with a fun magnifying hemisphere.

As for defining other people: the dictionary is just doing its job, after all, when it offers definitions. I’m not sure what’s up with people who think they can define total strangers who don’t want and haven’t asked for their opinion. There are the critics who insist on telling other people what their gender or sexuality *really* is, and the ones who explain the life experience of people from different economic classes, and even the ones who say, “Well, I can easily do XYZ, therefore everyone should easily do XYZ and if they don’t they’re lazy and deserve to fail.”

The solution, of course, is to shut up and listen. It’s not easy. When you have your own, perfectly valid perspective, you don’t necessarily see the need to hear someone else’s point of view. Personally, I think that empathy is one of the things that separates us from wild creatures. If you lack the ability to put yourself into another person’s shoes, the DSM would probably define you as having antisocial personality disorder, more popularly known as being a psychopath., If you have the ability but choose not to exercise it, I’d love to know how you define yourself. Also, how you live with yourself.

Unfortunately for me, I seem to have come across a great many of these people online lately.

Be Grateful for What You Have

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Happiness is a choice.

Happiness is a choice.

Somehow it can be easier to feel jealousy about what other people have and frustration over what you don’t have than to rejoice in what you do have. Yet, the more you feel gratitude for any benefits to your circumstances, the more you realize how much you have to be grateful for. Allow yourself to see the bright side and there always will be a bright side.

I’m guilty of obsessing over shortcomings and imperfections in life, when really, I have a lot. Like, for instance, I don’t have to sit in a kiddie pool in the summertime. I have many friends and loved ones, a safe place to live, and so much food that I am more in danger making myself sick by overeating than ever suffering from hunger. When you start thinking about what you do have, every advantage is something to give thanks for.