Happy birthday, dear Foxy…
This was a fox card, for the Fox, obviously. One thing and another, I didn’t actually see him on his birthday because he was busy with Otter stuff, and then I ended up looking at this piece all week and seeing all these little mistakes I wanted to fix, but he loved it, so it’s good, I suppose. Except for the 5000 times my terrible cat knocked it onto the floor; that part was less good.
Tissue paper, butcher paper, matte medium, on heavy cardstock.
It’s not just about inviting strange dragons in for pizza and cake. Sometimes the Fox takes me out for chicken and waffles.Can also do chicken without waffles. Or sushi.
An overwhelming sense of impending doom can mean a few things: it can be a symptom of neurosis; it can be a symptom of an impending heart attack; it can be a symptom of menopause; it can be a symptom of living in a world where catastrophe is actually imminent. My doctor says it’s not menopause and the fact that I’m still alive suggests it’s not a heart attack, so either I’m crazy or the world is. But everything just seems precarious. At the same time, sometimes I spend months freaking out about problems that could be settled in a day.
The world needs magical dragons. But some part of the world fears anything that isn’t regimented and catalogable, anything that can’t be controlled or compelled through conventional means. They try to shame it out of you when you’re little and they try to legislate it out of you when you’re big. But that doesn’t change what someone is on the inside. It just terrorizes them.
No matter what you have, someone else always has more. But then again, someone else always has less. Really, only 2 people out of 7 billion could say otherwise.
The Man tells me that most people would be satisfied to be as good at one thing as I am at many things, but I guess I was raised to believe that being good at many things is insufficient if you’re not the best at at least one thing. Obviously, I have everything a dragon could need. but dragons can want things, too. Dragons can have dreams, after all. And dragons can be happy for other people and still covet what they have. And that’s all I have to say about that.
An old grad school colleague texted me about her residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, urging me to apply for the fall. It’s sort of exactly what I want to do. But maybe not exactly. Definitely, I don’t have the 10-page sample comic, and I’m not sure if my skills are quite ready to tackle my big graphic novel project yet. This is what I really want to do: artist in residence on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Can you imagine? Best job in the world.
Anyway, it’s been a while since the last Dragon Comic. Over thinking is one of my special skills.
For when you want to sit on something soft as a bunny.
Been so caught up in comic and scrambling to figure out what to do when life leaves little time for comics that my RedBubble shop has been totally neglected. This week I also made 2 greeting cards in similar styles with different subjects for very different occasions. Giving art away is great, because it leaves you room to make more art, and with the flatbed scanner, I need never leave a new design behind. That is to say, these 2 new animal images are now available on a wide variety of fine products in my shop.
First, we have Bunnies in the Clover, in green and pink. An assortment of rabbit silhouettes meander around the cool green meadow. They look pretty adorable on this pillow, although the square products cut off designs sized for T-shirts. You can see the entire design in this print.
A rectangle of rabbits reside on this range
You can get it in its original card format, or as a sticker, or a pair of leggings, or a drawstring bag. There’s something like 37 products now, including clothing, home decor, and, print products.
Feeling foxy?
The second designs features a woodland creature that would happily eat the bunnies depicted in the first design. It’s the Fox in Clover, and you can see how it strikes you as a pillow, a pencil skirt, an iPad case, a poster, and plenty of other fun products.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing this week in addition to all the stuff I normally do.
Tomorrow will be a more productive day.
Foxes like chickens, according to cartoons I have watched in my squandered youth.
It’s Fox’s birthday! Happy birthday, Foxy! I made him this Foxy play set, which includes 1 fat little fox, 1 splendid otter, 1 roast chicken, 1 green salad, 1 mushroom pizza (he was so confused last week when I sent him an email that just said, “What’s your favorite kind of pizza?”), 1 gallon of whole milk, and 1 birthday cake. We’re going to have a real life picnic of Jamaican takeout and I will give him this present and maybe even bring 3D Dragon with me, so our alter egos can have a picnic too.
I probably could not ice a real cake so beautifully. My real life chickens look a little bit better, though.
Normally I wouldn’t post pictures of his present online until after he received it, so as not to spoil the surprise, but the odds are against him reading this blog before I see him.
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.
The pencil is mightier than the fang.
Usually, I like to think of myself as a pretty calm and thoughtful dragon, but sometimes, lately, for example, the little foibles of humanity can enrage me. I was seriously screaming at clueless drivers who were completely innocent of the rules of the road, especially those pertaining to the 4-way stop, and one car in particular not only almost caused an accident, then made 2 turns and a lane change without signaling. The driver remained blithely unaware of the mayhem he left in his wake.
It’s rare that someone dates to disrespect me to my face, though. Not since the late ’80s, anyway. Usually, if anyone tries, I cut them right down because I’m proactive like that. Every so often, for political reasons, I find it more prudent to smile and pretend. And then stew. And then make them a low level villain in a novel. Anyway, I think this comic helps.
The greatest thing you can do to someone who is rude to you is kill them with kindness. Smile and give them a big hug whenever you walk by. Call out their name and wave if they unexpectedly enter the room.
Or, you can draw a hilarious caricature of them and pass it around to people sympathetic to your cause.
In the end, dragons stay dragons. And vulgar, constipated people stay vulgar, constipated people. Eventually, most people work out which is which.
I discovered this joke in a Garfield comic. Just kidding! No one’s ever found a joke in a Garfield comic.
I don’t believe in holding historical figures to our modern standards, but I also don’t believe in celebrating shameful chapters of history. It’s important to study the past from every angle and to acknowledge the parts of it that make us uncomfortable along with the parts we want to glorify.
There was a bravery to the life of Christopher Columbus, the explorer, in sailing across the ocean in a direction that none of his people had ever sailed before. Columbus was acting in accordance with his time and his station in life, and according to the morality of his culture; by the standards of the time, he deserved glory and accolades for his success. Yet, there can be no bravery in the exploitation of people who couldn’t compete with him in terms of weaponry, and were unaware that his overtures, designed to gain their trust, did not reflect truly friendly intent.
There’s no honor in being the progenitor of the American slave trade.
We can’t hold Columbus entirely responsible for the genocide on the mainland, and yet his arrival in the western hemisphere still marks the beginning of the subjugation of native people in the Americas by white people of European descent. It’s 2015, and I don’t think we should be teaching schoolchildren a happy cartoon story about what happened in 1492 without discussing the enslavement and eventual murder of most of the continent’s original occupants. I don’t think we should celebrate Columbus Day as a national holiday. I think it’s a lot more honest to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day and talk about what really happened, even if it makes us uncomfortable.
I like a day off as much as the next person. It just seems like we should be more careful with our shared history, and more conscious of how our decision to frame that narrative reflects on our culture, and on people who continue to experience racism and oppression as a result of the brutality of history.
Sometimes a dragon just wants an aloe rub, a glass of ice water, and to get a little appreciation around here!
After reading Wednesday’s comic, The Man was immediately incredulous that a fire breathing dragon could possibly burn. Game of Thrones has taught us that much. I must attribute his newfound ability to anticipate me to my excellent tutelage in understanding story structure.
At least my real life sunburn has faded. The Man, of course, cannot say the same, because he is so very white.
Relationships, of course, require mutual caregiving. Even when one party doesn’t have an expressible need. Sometimes you just need someone to bring you a glass of water.
Because seriously I will know if so much as a single cup is removed! And just because I’m feeling super-nerdy, that was NOT an LotR reference. My guess is that Tolkein was undoubtedly foreshadowing Oakenshield’s death by referencing the act that led to Beowulf’s death in the Old English epic of the same name, which predates The Hobbit by roughly 1000 years. Nerd cred!
While the comic Fox would naturally be the one who couldn’t understand why Dragon wouldn’t buy chicken and waffles if Dragon had the capital to do so, the real life Fox and I share similar views on cash: it is a thing you acquire. It is not a thing that you dispense of without great forethought.
The majority of people don’t sit down and puzzle out their opinions on how to establish wealth once they finish high school (although I imagine that the few people who do this manage to succeed in acquiring wealth). Rather, we inherit our attitudes about money from our parents. If our parents live on credit, we’re more likely to function under the assumption that borrowing is the best way to get what we want, and that we deserve to get what we want, and we deserve to get it right away. If our parents teach us to spend what we have when we get it, we’re not likely to think about future finances or consider why saving is a good option. If our parents exhibit extreme frugality, we learn to be suspicious of conspicuous consumption and to stack rather than spend.
I started working when I was 11; my parents almost never gave me cash, so when I did buy frivolous stuff, it was always balanced by the knowledge of how much time it had taken me to earn that stuff. My own parents didn’t make large purchases lightly or buy useless things, ever. Their tastes were never influenced by fashion or indeed the possibility of upgrading. My dad bought an Apple IIe in 1980 and I’m pretty sure he was still using that machine when I graduated high school more than a decade later. He still has the same stereo–the same speakers–in the same entertainment center–he acquired in 1987.
Admittedly, there’s a part of me that really really REALLY wants to upgrade my 4-year-old MacBook Air, but I can’t justify it. This one works fine; I don’t really have any income. Even though I could easily finance a $1,099 computer out of my savings, or with my excellent credit, rationally it’s a terrible decision, and I would never make it, even though I really really REALLY want a new computer. (The new ones have better batteries! And yes, I recognize that I could have a non-Mac laptop for 1/3 the cost, but then we’re in an entirely different discussion about money and possessions and why we make certain decisions.) Because there are just better things to do with $1,099, including leaving it in the bank, and I don’t have an immediate plan for raising another $1,099. Ergo, buying a computer is short-sighted.
And that’s the secret to how I’ve been able to spend so much of my life focused on art: I don’t spend money. During the 6 years I made bank as the Lead Copywriter for an international Internet company, I did get used to having discretionary income and being able to get whatever I wanted, but it didn’t change my overall attitude toward money. (Toward the end it did make me realize that the more money I had, the more money I needed, and the less joy I felt in that money.)
If I had a hoard, my attitude wouldn’t change. I’d fix the house, pay off the mortgage, travel more, and yes, get a 2015 Air. But I would probably still buy my clothes at Target and drive my mom’s old Honda. It’s just a matter of figuring out what’s important to you.
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