We could have this stuff 5 days a week, what do you think?
No, I don’t want to talk about it. Unless you think you’ve got something to say to me.
I know that a lot of people think Smarties are gross. I used to think I liked them. Tonight I didn’t even want the good chocolate.
On the plus side, I’m a finalist in a writing contest. If you want to cheer me up, you could vote for me. You can check out the complete list of finalists and all the entries here.
Until you’ve known the pressure of summer one you can’t love the release of summer two.
Oh, god, I’m so pleased with this comic, especially the first and last panels, but also the sense of motion in the second panel. The guy in the third panel could look more oppressed by the heat, but anyway I drew this without any help from Photoshop or the digital tablet. Just pencil, paper, and a ruler (OK and some reference photos) (OK I fixed a few lines in Photoshop after I scanned it because I’d already lost my eraser). Somehow, just sitting down and committing to doing it is the hardest part, yet, it didn’t take me any longer than it would have had I used the computer, and I’m still happier than I’ve been with the more polished stuff you get with more advanced tools. The drawing part start to finish took about an hour. I never know how long it takes me to write things. My lettering probably needs work.
It’s monsoon in Tucson, and it rained intermittently all day, which is lovely and refreshing and also kind of heavy and bittersweet. The Girl, who is now a full-fledged teenager, said she had been wishing for a full day of rain. Can you even wholly appreciate the beauty of a rainy day until you’ve been a teenage girl?
What’s the use of feeling blue?
How do people build entire careers on drawing political comics? I can’t even look at a photograph of our new kleptocratic overlords without wanting to vomit lately. There is so much material–so many things that are clearly not OK and therefore in desperate need of mockery–that picking 1 thing out of the day’s new is overwhelming, and by the time you get to the end of the list it’s not funny anymore, if it ever was. There’s too much of it, legions of alleged humans working with all their might to make the world worse for the mast majority of its inhabitants and acting as if it’s perfectly reasonable to watch other suffer and die as long as corporations profit. Who am I even supposed to shame?
It was another hard day. My sister probably had the right idea, getting her Canadian citizenship, but apart from the racism and most of my elected officials, I really like where I live. Still, running away has its merits.
I just spent the last 3 hours drawing an insomnia comic. It was 99% finished, lacking only the word bubble. And then Photoshop just…closed itself. I didn’t close it. I didn’t click anything as far as I could see. It didn’t even ask me if I wanted to save. It just closed and lost all the changes I had made since the last save, and I was working so intently that the last save had been about 2 hours and 55 minutes earlier, even though I thought I had been saving as I went. So it’s 2 a.m. and I don’t have anything. Plus, it was an insomnia comic, so…you know. Sad Dragon. It was visually a very interesting comic. Challenging details. Gone. Gonna cry myself to sleep now. I really did draw a comic today.
The end of the world won’t hurt at all. The end of the world won’t feel like anything.
At the Women’s March last month, packed, unmoving in the park because 15,000 people showed up when they expected 2,000, I overheard an old leftie explaining to her companion, “Every time we won a battle, there was always another battle. There will always be another battle.” I don’t know if the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice or not, but I do know everything always changes all the time. Wheel of Fortune. Tides of history. No kingdom lasts forever, nor any joy, nor any suffering. And if the end of the world ever does come, it won’t worry anyone. If it’s really and truly over, there will be nothing to worry about, and no one left to worry.
Or, as Edgar says in King Lear, “The worst is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.'” So rejoice! You’ve lived to fight for your life another day. Rise up and give thanks for the opportunity.
It’s a testament to the power of the human ability to heal from trauma and go on going on that I drew that little corner of the Twin Towers in panel 1. The last time I referenced 9/11 in QvD, it required a screen grab cut and paste because there was no way I could bring myself to draw it.
Panel 2 is the second time I’ve referenced King Lear. King Lear never gets stale.
Life is trauma. Over and over. You just keep getting up and going on because if you don’t, you’re not alive.
Seriously, though, I’m feeling burned out already.
If your official position is that your neighbor’s made a deal with the devil in order to cause your sheep to have a weird looking baby, you probably aren’t interested in reason or enlightenment.
Clearly, there’s no point in quoting John Adams: “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Or James Madison: “The civil government functions with complete success by the total separation of the Church from the State.” Or Noah Webster: “[E]very preference given to any religious denomination, is so far slavery and bigotry.” Or any one of the men who dreamed of democracy in America during the American Revolution. The people who believe that their religious prejudices should influence federal policy don’t care that imposing your religious beliefs on others is wholly unAmerican.
Yesterday, the Owl asked me to try to contact the junior senator from Arizona, Jeff Flake, because she had heard that he was persuadable in the matter of Betsy DeVos’s confirmation. I had not heard that, and I could not get through to any of his offices, or even his voice mailbox, presumably because everyone else in the state was trying to beg him not to confirm her. But he did tweet “Lest there be any doubt about how I’m voting on Betsy DeVos she had me at ‘school choice’ years ago… ” The last I looked, the vote was tied 50-50, and, as you know, in the event of a tie in the Senate, the Vice President gets to cast the deciding vote. Something tells me Mike Pence will be happy to install a Secretary of Education who believes that the purpose of schools is to “advance God’s kingdom.”
Please, instead, let’s make the function of school to advance the ability of our population to think critically. Or, if you insist on a regressive government, let’s go back all the way to the best intentions of the Enlightenment, when faith was a private mystery and reason a guiding light.
La la la I can’t hear you and if I can’t hear it it doesn’t exist.
It just gets worse and worse, and although the Rabbit reassures us all that everything will turn out fine, it’s still hard to hear. Today was not in the least a funny day. I made the observation on Facebook that we’ve moved through Orwellian to Kafkaesque. There isn’t actually an evil order behind events. There is a complete lack of order whatsoever. Nightmare chaos despair insanity stubborn pernicious confusion. Reason no longer exists in American current affairs and we citizens can expect no better existence than the lives of despised giant bugs and no reward greater than the release offered by death.
Ha ha! Just kidding! Or am I?
Random animal facts have greater meaning than the news. Just read an article on a new book about octopus intelligence in The Atlantic, even though I already know a lot about octopuses. Did you know that octopuses have 3 hearts? And, in effect, they have 9 brains: 1 big one in their big squishy heads, like us, and 8 nerve bundles, one for each arm, that are big enough to be analogous to little brains, in my opinion. Even the longest-lived octopus species only live a few years. The males become senescent almost immediately after they mate and then die shortly thereafter. The female waits until her eggs hatch and then she achieves senescence and dies.
Octopuses seem pretty smart. Maybe they have the right idea.
Also, music offends me. You’ll have to replace it with the sound of a two-stroke engine.
I’m worried about public education in Arizona. I mean, it’s worrisome all over America, but I live in Arizona, which typically ranks about 49th out of 50 in educational funding. It just doesn’t seem to be a priority for a lot of the population, which includes many aging retirees who just don’t care about other people’s children. But public school funding is important, if only so you don’t end up in a state full of ignorance. You wouldn’t believe how important education is to an outcome of competent adults.
There are 2 schools of thought concerning the nature of education. For me, education is a process of teaching people how to think, so that can adapt to new conditions and make intelligent choices as situations arise. For some people, education is about teaching people what to think, so they parrot your opinions and don’t believe in the validity of any others. Facts are facts, and if your facts cannot stand up to independent analytic scrutiny, your facts are actually opinions, and if your opinions are so frail they fall apart upon examination, why would you expend so much effort to protect them?
That’s what education is for, to keep humanity moving forward, to improve our odds as a species to achieve the best possible outcome. To prevent us from making the same mistake over and over.
I’m gonna have to advise a complete teardown and rebuild.
What a spectacular note on which to end this spectacular year. I tried to resist the miasma of 2016 hating, but there’s no escape from the vortex of suck. My heart has been broken for a long time and acknowledging the facts doesn’t change them.
In case you’re wondering, I received a suspended fine for my yard, and a year’s probation, if you can believe it. The judge was actually more or less reasonable and understanding (I mean, he could have not issued the fine at all, but I guess not making me pay it was a big deal) but the inspector who cited me after I spend 3 days fixing up the property was clearly a terrible human being with no friends. I almost did get in a fight with her before the hearing when I realized that she didn’t care how many weeds had been removed, that she was going to harp on the few that remained. I told her that if my efforts at cleanup didn’t have any impact on her report, that I wasn’t going to be highly motivated to be compliant in the future. Then she threatened me with a $2500 fine. Then I said, “You can’t get blood from a stone. Are we done here?” And then we had the hearing.
In case you’re wondering what probation for tall weeds looks like, it looks like this [expletive redacted] snooping around my property for the next 12 months with a freaking ruler, waiting to measure any unauthorized plants that might pop up. Lady, if I had $2500 dollars I would build a goddamn wall so you and the snooty neighbors and also all the morons who throw their trash wherever they feel like it would keep their everything off my property.
Really, I’m trying very hard to be calm about this, but I need an extended stay in an empty room.
Look, there is *nothing* wrong with a man having small hands. But speaking as an artist who spends a lot of time thinking about what hands look like, the guy has small hands.
I’m not entirely sure how long I’ll be able to keep drawing webcomics, in part because drawing webcomics is not a lucrative profession, but also because I started drawing webcomics with the intention of being funny, and increasingly, as the days go by, I don’t feel funny. I hear myself making jokes at parties and people laughing at them, and I still don’t feel like anything’s funny. I feel like I’m pretending to be funny. Being funny right now is like dressing in drag. The end result may be stunning, but it knows it’s playing an imitation game.
Watching my work become increasingly unfunny scares me, despite the positive feedback for telling the truth.
The effect of the Desmond Tutu comic–3 serious panels, followed by a punchline–seemed like a good compromise, so I tried it again. I leave it to the reader to decide. Can I put swastikas in panel 2 and banana cream pies in panel 4? Admittedly, this piece has a little less cohesion than The Fourfold Path.
Panel 2 was troublesome. I Googled “anti-semitic graffiti,” but I couldn’t bring myself to reproduce most of the things I found. I’m not saying “kike” is the line for me–I bet a lot of people wouldn’t even recognize it as a slur, and it certainly isn’t an n-bomb–but I didn’t want it in my comic, either. It’s hard enough going through life knowing that there are people who flat-out want me dead because of the shape of my nose.
Anything I could say about panel 3 has already been said by commentators more eloquent than I. As we transition into a world where the president of the United States thinks it’s perfectly fine to publicly, in front of a large audience and many cameras, mock a man’s physical disability while that man is attempting to do his job, who can really predict the depth of the rabbit hole? What does comedy even mean in this world? Reality is more bizarre and unpredictable than any joke I could think of. I’m the rare person who never enjoyed The Daily Show because it frankly depresses me that comedians were the only people telling the truth, and that they had that much to say.
If you would like to read the sad comic reproduced in panel one, you can find it here: The Weight of the World.
Dave McKean, if you are unfamiliar with his name, is the artist who created the covers for Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, among other things.
In real life, my hips are not that small. But I guess in real life, the president-elect is not that orange. The size of his hands, the color of his skin: these are the least of the problematic concepts that those who believe in equality, freedom, and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America will struggle to explain to ourselves and the children in our lives in the coming months.
qwertyvsdvorak 