This is the story that’s probably going to do the least for a reader who hasn’t actually read the book, and required the most careful note taking on my part, so I could really get a sense of each of the six “knights” and what they specifically had to be sorry about.
Also, tiny mermaid boobs, tee hee. Always gotta have at least one naked body part in each of these comic books to ensure that I can’t show them to my elementary students.
Sweet Lorena is probably the most blameless character in the book, even though she certainly has to suffer through the nonsense everyone else creates. The story puts some distance between her and the reader, while marveling at what a standup person she is.
As mentioned previously, I wrote most of these stories in a kind of fugue state, which led to me writing Lorena’s story twice because I forgot I had already written it. I ended up discarding the second one, in which she is characterized as “the strong girl” but has to go through basically this same nonsense. (Rose is a siren in that one.)
After I drew this image, I felt like it wasn’t quite done and then I realized it needed a squirrel laughing at the prince in the tree, so I added that.
I’m very pleased with Princess’s bloody arm in the last panel. I’m afraid that I just couldn’t get a background that I was happy with for either image and gave up. Imagine that these picture are drawn in the royal seer’s dark workshop.
This egg is awesome. What do you think could possibly hatch from such an artifact? I guess you’ll have to check back tomorrow.
I spent a very long time trying to think of what would be written on the sorceress’s book in the bottom right of the page but then I decided it was so arcane that mere mortals could not even perceive it.
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.
Triangles and diamonds
Once I read a Navajo fairy tale in a picture book about a weaver who became some obsessed with perfection in her work that she became trapped in her own art, as if she sewed her soul into the design. Navajo weavers always leave a “way out,” some imperfection in their pattern, to prevent this spiritual entanglement, a fact of which I was reminded when we visited Tuba City in the Navajo Nation last week.
This mandala also reminds me of that legend. The turquoise color and the shapes reflect some of the art we saw on our journey. Of course, I never have to worry about leaving myself a way out of my mandalas, since it’s been many years since I even imagined that perfection was possible in drawings. This one is pretty tight though, even if it skews a bit.
qwertyvsdvorak 