Tag Archives: magic

Dreams of Sushi

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It’s just a matter of motivation. It’s hard to made decisions on an empty stomach.

A fish dinner is a fish dinner, but if you start messing around with wishes, you might end up with nothing, which is less than a fish dinner. When I was a little kid I made wishes all the time: on the evening star, on dandelions, on birthday candles. Not on coins thrown in fountains, though. My mother did not condone the throwing of currency into pools, or anywhere else. But I noticed a trend, which is that my wishes pretty much never came true. I’ve had the same wish for decades and even with concerted effort, I can’t make it come true. Maybe in another 20 years I’ll make some progress.

Although I feel like I failed to complete any of the things I set out to accomplish today, I did draw a comic. And I guess I did some other, possibly meaningful things that were not on my list.

If I had wishes, I probably wouldn’t use them on personal things that I really want. In the long run, I think we’d all be better off wishing for peace, for people to be less greedy and more empathetic, for equality and liberty and justice and safety.

3D Dragon Comics 3

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And if you mess that one up, just turn over a new leaf and try once more. 

Not much to say about this; been in a weird space but didn’t want to write more depressing comics. It’s more fun to play with your toys, sometimes. Dragons need to go on interior journeys. Dragons need to lay their burdens down and only carry magic. Dragons need some empty space. Dragons need to relax.

Dragon Comics 76

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It's like deciding to ignore your lungs's need for oxygen.

It’s like deciding to ignore your lungs’s need for oxygen.

You know how you sometimes have these eye-opening dreams where everything seems infused with wonder and meaning and there’s some kind of message or idea you want to carry back to the real world but once you wake up and try to explain it to other people, even if you can actually remember the dream in its entirety, you still can’t communicate the deep and sublime feelings that it instilled in you as you slept? It’s like that.

My 2 guest essays ran on Panel.net in the last couple days: the first one is about world-building and the graphic novel Aya, and the second is about reading comic books to a blind person. It seems like people liked them and I will be writing more in the future. Pretty excited about that. I’ve also been trying to keep my book review blog updated. I probably only read about 2 adult books a month, but sometimes I read 10 or 20 kids’ books.

This week I have a bulletin board to create, too. Everything depends on whether I have to serve jury duty, though. Ug. I really believe in democracy and the right to a trial by jury, I just don’t like being personally put out to ensure that it happens. I hate the courthouse and I hate being awakened too early and I hate being bossed around and I hate being forced to sit in merciless plastic chairs in huge rooms packed full of strangers. Jurors should be allowed to serve online. I would be much less uncomfortable if I could watch a trial on my laptop in bed.

Magic and Whimsy in T-shirt Format

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QWERTYvsDvorak: The Desert is Magic!

QWERTYvsDvorak: The Desert is Magic!

These lovely ladies are modeling their new, magically delicious QvD raglan shirts. On the left, Robyn is inspired in a green-sleeved “We Make Our Own Magic” rainbird shirt, while her charming wifey, Lisa boldly shows off a Dragon Comics “You Know What Helps Me Feel Magical? Glitter!” shirt in blue. The 3/4-length sleeve baseball-style shirts are made of a super-soft lightweight cotton that’s perfect for fun in the sun. It’s thinner than the standard style T-shirts and very comfortable.

We’ve also got a bonus image of “Giralicorn,” now featuring an actual human head with attractive features.

Daft Punk was not available for your party. Would you accept this charming substitute? She plays the ukelele like a champ.

Daft Punk was not available for your party. Would you accept this charming substitute? She plays the ukelele like a champ.

It’s been a strange day for art. I must have spent 90 minutes trying to write a comic script, which entailed writing a sentence, then crossing it out, over and over, until I had 2 pages of crossed-out dialog, which I then mined in desperation until I had 4 panels of material. Not sure I’m entirely satisfied with the punchline, but at least I can get 90% of the way through. I also spent an inordinate amount of time drawing a background I ultimately didn’t love, but had invested too much into to scrap it. You can be the judge, tomorrow.

Strangely enough, I already have the punchline and visuals for Friday’s comic laid out, even though I don’t really know what the rest of the script will look like. All things being equal, it’s probably easiest to start with the punchline. I consider myself lucky if I have one.

Dragon Comics 34

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Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Possibly followed by some intense nausea.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Possibly followed by some intense nausea.

In reality, you won’t catch The Man outside without shoes, but let’s imagine that Dragon talked him into a good faith effort at practicing yoga. For the sake of the visual gag, of course.

Somersaulting down a hill backward: now, that’s real. It’s a lot easier than it looks, and it’s good fun. You’ve just got to be careful about your cervical spine, which is not a problem for Dragon in any event, because Dragon’s skeleton is a lot tougher than a human’s, and more resilient, and some of Dragon’s external parts function as an exoskeleton. Dragon is very tough.

Yes, I’ve thought this out.

This comic really came down to the wire. What with the election and the crying afterward, there wasn’t much time in the day for drawing and writing. I’d love to get a bit of a backlog again. There was a nice one before I went to the Grand Canyon. Now it seems like every night I’m racing the clock. How do people even draw dailies? I suppose the people who do that probably draw better than I do. What about those artists drawing 2 to 4 dailies? Maybe they don’t have families.

Anyway: Dragon can curl up into a perfect ball and then roll down a hill. That’s basically the essence of the joke here.

Dragon Comics 28

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dragon comic 28_edited-2

You can never have enough magic, can you?

Never enough hours in the day.

The silly season has begun, the time of year when it’s not unusual to be invited to 6 different events in 4 days. Everything is mellow and pleasant in the autumn desert. Everyone is suddenly active and planning things and trying to squeeze the last drops of sunshine out of the year and if you blink you’ll miss it and there is never enough time. This isn’t a problem for Dragon, of course, because Dragon never goes outside and always has enough time to draw comics. Lucky Dragon.

We could all use a little extra magic, that fine spun stuff found in the theater of the imagination. You just have to find a ticket, or be in the cast, or else sneak in through the side door when someone goes out for a smoke.

Synergistically magical. Exponentially magical.

Boynton Canyon Vista

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Boynton Canyon Vista is a short and sweet trail through the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness around Sedona. From the sandy red earth a forest of pine and oak, yucca and prickly pear twists its way up a gradually sloping path toward a peaceful saddle known as one of the region’s seven spiritual vortices.

Rows of rock balances

Rows of rock balances

The forest might make be magic, or people might make it magical. Wordless cairns mark the way. A seemingly natural proliferation of heart-shaped rocks encourages the custom of setting these cordate stones into the forked and spiraling branches of juniper trees, sharing “a gift of love from mother earth” (not my words) with visitors . Around the saddle, hundreds of rock balances ring the last levels of the gentle rise like a prosperous miniature city strung out along a series of plateaus.

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The Man was the champion of rock balancing. I said, “You’re an artist.” He said, “No, I’m an engineer.”

Jutting toward the sky on the south side of the side, a tower of red rock presides over the landscape. Heart-filled junipers shade the open land. The stones glow copper-gold against the surrounding forest.

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My little balance, which I built 3 times, because I knocked it over twice while doing something else.

We climbed the spire of rock, although 3 out of 4 of us didn’t believe, at first, that we could do it at first. Climbing down was the hard part, which we completed without incident. Feeling empowered, we began our own rock balances on the wall to the north.

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The Man combines 2 Boynton Canyon activities: rock balancing in a tree.

The first time I visited this site was with the rabbit and the fox. The rabbit was in an anxious mood because of a sign mentioning bears in the area. A strange forest spirit in the guise of an old hippie offered us heart shaped rocks along with a lecture on the power of positive thinking and all encompassing love. The same man gave us rocks on this trip. “A gift of love from mother earth,” is his greeting.

Dragon Comics 6

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And I am only escaped to bring thee this webcomic.

From now until eternity, everyone who enters that cave will enjoy the gift of glitter.

From now until eternity, everyone who enters that cave will enjoy the gift of glitter.

The persistence of glitter and dragon’s identity issues notwithstanding, how much more magical could it get? This comic seemed to take a very long time to draw. I don’t know if it’s because I tried a few new things, or because I drew  it while coming out of stomach bug and finished it after a night of insomnia. Per usual, I’m pretty satisfied, although I of course still see a bunch of things that could be improved. But I can get better with practice.

There’s Always Room for Dragons

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A wyrm type dragon, very chthonic.

A wyrm type dragon, very chthonic.

These are the other 2 dragons from the set of 4 mentioned in the previous dragon post. While I did enjoy playing with light on the mountains, water, and clouds in the red wyrm image, not to mention the sweet reflections on the knight’s shield, I never liked this image very much. Possibly, I was just unhappy with my color choices. I felt that they couldn’t all be blue and green (by this point I think I had acquired a full set of high quality colored pencils, and wanted them to wear down more evenly) but red and purple, at the time, were very daring choices for me.

Another western dragon

Another western dragon

Here, the princess never satisfied me. She seem cartoony, and I wanted her to look, at the very least, comic booky. The dragon is pretty solid, though. Love that twist at the bottom of his tail. The colors in these images has faded over the years, revealing some of the textural imperfections.

The Trickster’s Hat Part 11

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A magic bottle

A magic bottle

Part of being a trickster is embracing whimsy. Exercise 32 involved creating a magical object: here a magic bottle. The vessel itself once held a single shot of a very high quality absinthe we drank in Prague; the herbs were still in there, along with a number of perfect tiny seashells, petals from the first roses my husband ever gave me, beads from my wedding gown, blue glitter, and a few other things. The pink flowers I ripped off a headband my stepdaughter hadn’t worn in over a year.

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Envelopes made out of old maps

Exercise 34 was one of the most fun ones; I’m sorry I haven’t got a picture, because the final step was to mail the completed project to someone. It began with directions on how to cut and fold an envelope out of an old map. Fortunately, I am the kind of person who owns many old maps. Then, the reader was asked to create some strange, whimsical work of art and mail it to someone with no explanation.

My best friend Jack knew about the Tricksters’ Hat and had done one partner project with me. I cut out a large image of Abraham Lincoln’s hat and then cut and paste letters, ransom-note style, to spell, “The trickster wears many hats.” Then I cut out a couple dozen tiny images of hats, all different: baseball hats, construction hats, fishing hats, Santa hats, an astronaut’s helmet. I folded the big hat, filled it with the little ones, inked a beautiful address, and then decided, since I had the key to his place and was taking his mail in while he was out of town, to create another fake stamp and also a super-fake jeweled return address label. Then I hid it in his real mail. I’m only sorry I didn’t get to see his face when he opened it. But he appreciated it very much.