Tag Archives: funny

The Fourfold Path

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Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just do the releasing the relationship thing?

It’s not like I intentionally hold grudges, but some people just crawl under your skin and poke at you like so many grass seeds stuck inside a pair of wool socks. Maybe reading this Desmond Tutu book (The Book of Forgiving) will help me find release from the irritation. But also, nothing’s sacred.

So far it’s an interesting work. It’s hard to imagine people embracing their torturers, the murderers of their loved ones, but apparently people do it. Perhaps the truth and reconciliation process will seem more obvious when I get farther into the book. He’s probably onto something with this fourfold path. Definitely, hanging on to anger and seeking revenge is terrible for your mental health. I think I’ve shared the avuncular Syd Lea’s “The Feud” before; it pretty much spells out what that mentality does to a person.

It’s magical that I managed to draw this comic tonight. I started to get a headache, took some medicine, wrote the script, and then got hit with a tidal wave of migraine, that kind of pain that makes you think you might throw up at that very moment. So I turned off all the lights and sat quietly in the dark drinking fizzy water and breathing until the pain got bearable again, and then I drew the pictures. My head just hurts a normal amount; I think the full-blown migraine happened because the winter sun comes into the kitchen at just the right angle to hit me in the eyes when I make dinner this time of year.

I tried to to the shading but it’s not all there and my eyes just couldn’t look anymore. It’s still a good comic.

It’s OK If You Don’t Get Me

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Just keeping it weird here.

This is the latest T-shirt design. I know it’s completely weird and unsellable, but literally my entire M.O. is to just do the thing that my muse tells me do, regardless of how ridiculous it seems. Then, later on, I wonder what the heck I was thinking, but some percentage of the time it works out for the best. The poet Syd Lea once told me that I should keep doing whatever felt right to me regardless of what anyone else said. He said, “Be stubborn, woman.”

Not that I needed that advice. Maybe he figured I was just going to do that anyway.

The original version of this design was the last panel of the first BJC comic, about how sometimes your own mother doesn’t understand you so you can’t expect much from the rest of the world. Even in context, it’s bizarre. The benefit of this sort of extremely niche design is that if anyone else does appreciate it, you know you truly have commonalities at the core.

If you’d like to purchase this bizarre comic panel on a variety of clothing, paper products, and household items, you can obtain It’s OK If You Don’t Understand Me in my RedBubble shop.

Tomorrow I guess I’ll go back to drawing longer comics. Maybe.

Just Because We’re Inhuman Doesn’t Mean We Have to Be Inhumane

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Technically speaking, knight errant must be free-range by definition. 

Back when I was single, after the invention of the internet, but before newspapers seemed completely obsolete, I placed a personal ad in the local alternative rag, which included an anonymous voice mailbox where my suitors might woo me by recording spoken word messages, to be retrieved at my leisure. I ended up dating the glibbest of these guys for a year, and still talk to him occasionally, but most of the wooers failed to wow me with their woo. One of them failed really spectacularly.

His message began by saying that he was a vegetarian, which was actually fine with me. At the time, I was a vegetarian, too. But this guy was very passionate about his vegetarianism, to the point that his entire message was about how important it was to him that he never find himself in the vicinity of meat, and how disgusting meat was, and how he could never date someone who ate meat because the smell of it, the idea of it upon his lover’s lips, was overwhelmingly vile. He spent so long complaining about his distaste for meat and meat-eaters that the voice message cut him off in the middle of the sentence. Undeterred, he called back and continued his tirade for several minutes more.

Needless to say, he did not get the callback.

As to this comic, I just keep thinking of Temple Grandin saying, “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.”

If I felt better I would have taken the shading further (like, but making the tower look cylindrical instead of 2-dimensional) but you can see I tried. I really tried.

 

I’m OK with the Events That Are Unfolding Currently

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This is not me and this is not my problem. Because I’m smart. I took all the batteries out. 

Smoke detectors save lives. But also, I have never had my life saved by a smoke detector and have never set one off doing anything other than ordinary cooking, and eggplant seems to be the worst culprit. For a long time, I only fried in olive oil, which has a low smoke point and is not recommended for frying, but it still happens with coconut oil. And if there’s one thing you want to do while you’re frying massive quantities of food at high temperatures, it’s walk away from the stove and spend 5 minutes trying to shut off a wailing alarm hung several feet above your head.

We had a super-hilarious experience last spring at my brother’s for Passover. My sister-in-law is a nurse who works 12-hour overnight shifts 3 days a week, so her sleeping schedule is both wonky and important. Preparing for the holiday, my mom was frying eggplant one morning, several hours after my sister-in-law had returned from work and finally gotten to sleep around 9 a.m or something. Of course, the smoke alarm goes off. And then a second. And then a third. My sister-in-law is a really sound sleeper, but the ceilings in that place are wonderfully high, and we could find no ladders. Standing on a chair, The Man could not reach the ceiling to silence any of the devices. We opened all the doors and windows but all 3 of these things were wailing for what felt like 30 minutes. I didn’t time it. But it was a while. My sister-in-law was very confused when she finally woke up.

But, safety first, kids!

I like the look of dawning realization on the girl’s face in panel 3. And I think I got mild confusion down pretty well in panel 2. I can be taught.

Understanding

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My mom would definitely categorize “blow job” as a dirty word.

I asked Bonnie Jo if it was OK for me to share this anecdote, which I can do because she was my master’s thesis advisor 12 years ago and she still answers my text messages. I offered to change her identity, and she said, “Don’t you dare.” She also insisted that I name her mother, Susanna Campbell, and suggested that I give the donkey’s name, which was “either Jack or Don Quixote,” but it didn’t really fit in the panel.

Bonnie Jo was also the person who told me about the sitcom moment of the day, which is her idea that in every day something extraordinarily funny happens, and you just have to look for it to keep your spirits up. Pretty often, the sitcom moment of the day informs my comics. This situation with the author’s mother standing always strikes me as an ultimate example of a sitcom moment. If you’ve never read Bonnie Jo Campbell, I highly recommend her work, which is often about the salt of the earth people of the American midwest, but also about other things, and always fresh and unusual and provocative. In addition to the above link to my interview with her (long story), you can also read my reviews of all 5 of her books, or purchase them from Amazon.

The text for this comic practically wrote itself, except for the last panel, which took an extra day. The images of Bonnie Jo were easy; she’s all over the internet and I think I captured her likeness. I’ve met her mom once or twice, plus I knew how to find a reference picture of her. No idea what her uncle looks like, though. I Googled “redneck reading” to find a source image. Please let that be OK.  The donkey might be overly complex; whenever possible, I like to use my own photographs, and I always found that image funny, but it’s so close up that it required a lot more details than the others. The final panel also took me a while; originally it was going to be someone crying, but this is better.

My mom loves me, but she doesn’t understand my work. That’s OK. I’m a niche experience. Not everyone can get into me.

Popcorn!

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I’m all about needless complication, especially when it comes to my snack food.

This is the real way to make popcorn in my book. You take a pot with a lid, add a generous dollop of oil, drop in one kernel, close the lid, and turn the burner onto high. Then you wait. When the first kernel pops, you open the lid, dump in the rest of the popcorn, close the lid, and shake the pot vigorously until it all pops. You can’t let it sit on the heat once the popping stops or it will burn, but 100% of the time, some kernels don’t pop until you open the lid.

That’s my story for today, as the Rabbit says.

The Life Cycle

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In the next chapter, we will discuss the organism’s mating strategies, which vary depending upon which university it attends and whether or not it decides to rush.

For a very long time, I’ve suspected that butterflies have the right idea. Their larva are grubby but not without their charm, often visually pleasing, even if they are prickly and disgusting to touch. Their final form is, of course, stunning. And while they’re stuck in that transitional phase, which is almost certainly disgusting beyond measure, they get to do it in peace and quiet. They go into a room as a baby and come out as a lovely adult.

Humans, on the other hand, suffer the animal kingdom’s most distressing adolescence. Everyone can see them struggling along awkwardly, not babies, but not grown up, either. Awash with terrifying chemicals, all their body parts are growing at different rates, bizarre and unpleasant changes are taking place inside and out, and they’re constantly being forced to compare their development to those around them.

I posit that the human way to go through adolescence would be with an option, around the 11th birthday, to lock oneself away from the world and stay in hiding until age 15 or so, at which point you emerge, gorgeous and confident and ready to take the driver’s exam and make out with other recently reintroduced teenagers. How much less psychological distress would we have to overcome if we could spin cocoons?

There are 2 adolescent humans in this house, although we count ourselves pretty lucky that they have not yet shown any signs of hormone poisoning. There’s no arguing or sullen silence or anything like that. Just a fairly constant direct connection to screens. But, MAN, when I was 12, I would have given almost anything for the privilege of going into my room and not coming out until at least my junior year of high school.

Kid Logic I, or Same Planet, Different Worlds

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I get chills just thinking about it. But that’s probably just this fan blowing over the sweat.

Originally, this was panel 1 of a much longer comic based entirely on actual things that the Girl did/said this week, but the day got out of hand and it would have been hubris to imagine that I could complete 8-panels in the time allotted, especially since I had already been to the Fox’s writing party and gotten 1500 words out.

The point is, it’s hot. Like, sick hot. Well up over 100 degrees hot. And despite the fact that they have lived here their entire lives, certain children seem constantly surprised by desert summers and repeatedly ill-equipped to deal with them, which is hilarious if you can remove yourself from the situation of being the person in charge of helping those children deal with them.

This hypothetical little person didn’t actually think that Frozen pajamas were cold; I suspect she was wearing them for more idiosyncratic reason, probably connected to a desire to wear all her clothes equally, in their turn, but she was wearing long sleeved flannel pajamas, and she did complain that she had trouble sleeping because she was too hot, and she does habitually wrap herself up in a warm blanket, regardless of the ambient air temperature. She also willfully fails to comprehend the use of evaporative cooling, despite the fact that we’ve explained it to her 100 times. Ergo, she never, ever considers opening her window, even when we tell her to open the window, meaning she is deliberately keeping her room 15 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. No matter how many times I outline the process by which she could end her suffering (wear less clothing, use less bedding, open the freaking window), she continues to act as a fully autonomous human, choosing to create an uncomfortably warm environment, and then complaining about it and ignoring any real solutions.

She did have her own solution, though. She got a fan and pointed it at her bed. So she could blow hot air at her heavy quilt and winter pajamas.

Return of the Helicopter Kids

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In case you’re wondering, the book in panel 1 is Fifty Shades of Gray. There is way better bdsm literature available to satisfy your prurient interest.

I wasn’t even going to draw a comic today, but then I wrote one by accident, and it seemed silly not to finish it. It’s fun to revisit certain ideas. Revenge of the Helicopter Kids from last year is still one of my favorite comics. Hopefully the sequel lives up to the original and stands the test of time. There are probably more of them in my head. But now my hand is all stiff and achy.

Banking fees are bull. I’m letting you hold all of my money, on which you are paying me basically no interest, something like .01%, but you’re loaning it out to other people–at 13%!–and then you’re going to slap me with a fee for automatic transfers to cover overdraft? You have the money. It’s right there. You’re not even doing anything; a computer is moving it. Why does that cost $13? Don’t even get me started on the number of times we’ve been assessed monthly fees just for having accounts. Accounts that we were told were free.

I don’t know about the drunk painting classes. I’ve never been to one, but I’m not much of a drinker and I don’t really care to paint the same thing as everyone else.

 

Where Should You Complain?

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To complain about something that happened 10 years ago? MySpace.

Twenty-two hours ago, I posted what I believe to be my most-viewed contribution to the Internet of all time. Sadly, it was not a comic, or something I wrote, or any sort of artwork. It was a photograph I took of a 16-pound brisket The Man roasted. No joke, this image now has over TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND views, proving once again that the Internet sucks and can seriously go to hell. I create and upload original content 5 days a week for 2 years and I’m lucky if I get 1 or 2 thousand views on a comic that might have taken me 3 days to draw. But 28,000 people clicked to look at this piece of beef in less than a day.

Tasty brisket, though.

Like a lot of creatives, I struggle to grok the force that is social media. I hope it’s not too apparent that I don’t understand some of the platforms I’ve drawn into this comic. Some of them I’ve never even used. But I do my best to appear that I know what I’m talking about because, like everyone who understands that Google is master, I want to remain relevant.

This is, of course, one of those comics that took me 3 days to draw, and will probably get 1000 hits, which is better than some people are doing, but damn. Can I get half the love that a photo of roast beef gets? Special thanks to my sister in law, who gave me the fancy 50mm 1.4 lens, which really makes your subject POP. Maybe that’s why that brisket looked so good.

Kidding aside, I spent a lot of time thinking about social media platforms. In drawing this I realize that they’re pretty much all the same. The difference is mostly in who’s there and how they’re using it. But by and large, the digital community spends a lot of time shouting into the air. I also noticed that, even though computer screens are landscape orientation, most sites seem more optimized for mobile, and even if the display is wide, the important stuff on the screen tends to be long. That’s why the app names are all written differently: I had to shuffle them around after I figured out the shape of the content, because I just visualized everything as it looks on my laptop and didn’t realized until after I started that I would have been better off with long, skinny panels.

These templates can also be limited, too. It’s easier to use a template than to draw new panels every day, but the predetermined shape can get in the way.

And yeah, this probably isn’t that easy to read. Probably need to click the image to get in closer for the text. Or try this link for an even larger and higher resolution image: big version.

Not that I want to complain on WordPress. WordPress, as everyone knows, is for important applications, for corporate blogs and serious artists. And people who just aggregate other people’s content (i.e. steal photos) and repost them with nonsensical 5-sentence ramblings about life, and then somehow get 42,000 upvotes and, even more curiously, manage to monetize those blogs, sell them, and retire from blogging.