Tag Archives: webcomic

Spring Break!

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Mom’s gonna be spring broke, too, once she’s done paying for a new bed. 

Come for the political/nerd mashup humor, suffer through the dead baby jokes, and stay for the light-hearted child-friendly puns. We’re all over the map this week.

It is spring break, which means 1000s of extra tourists clogging up our roadways, and kids home all day. They’re too old for jumping around and breaking things, though. They’re at that age where you have to outwit them just to get them to look up from their devices. But I got them excited about making cheese, so we did that instead of spending the entire day staring at screens. We made a block of paneer cheese, a 1/2 cup of ricotta, and a quart of whey. Actually, I think we ended up with more whey than the amount of milk with which we started. It’s a cheese-making paradox.

I was going to make some finger paneer, but one block isn’t all that much cheese, and after the kids ate their share, there wasn’t too much left. But now I really want some finger paneer. We had planned a communal dinner with some friends, and I ended up making spinach mushroom pakoras. At our hosts’ house I conjured some apple chutney out of the stuff they had in the fridge, and also salad dressing, which I whipped up on the fly because nobody brought any. Also, strawberries and whipped cream for desert. Other people made Indian curries, salad, and rice. And then, once again, it was late and I hadn’t even considered funny ideas for comics, and this is what I got.

Babies on Boards

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Cookies are for closers.

This is what happens when I don’t sleep at night and then go about my business during the day and then work on this blog the next night. I draw Modest Proposal-themed comics. And boy, did I powerfully not sleep last night. Yes, this is the third child cannibalism themed comic I’ve drawn this year. If you think panel 4 is bad, you should have seen its original paint job, in which I attempted to color the baby like a roast suckling pig. Some blasphemies are too much even for me, though. See? Things could always be worse. That baby just looks like it’s sleeping, right? Easy mistake. Someone plated a sleeping baby by accident. It’s not like we went all The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover on a baby because it was evil or anything. That baby is just fine. That’s not even an apple in its mouth. It’s a pacifier. No choking hazard.

When I told The Man about what I intended to draw and got to the last panel, he appeared mildly distressed and then said, “It’s your career.” It sure is. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you stop caring what anyone else actually thinks of you. It’s nice to bounce ideas off of him. If he’s really disturbed, then I know I’m hitting my target audience, which is people who are more demented than me.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is an excellent film, by the way. I highly recommend it if you enjoy being disturbed by the depth of human depravity. I was just a little bit too young to get into rated R movies when it came out in 1989, so I only saw it for the first time in 2014, which is a pity, because as much as I liked it, I would have liked it 10 times more in 1989.

How am I still even awake? Literally, The Man got up for work this morning and I was sitting in my office, having not yet fallen asleep the night before. When I said something about not wanting to take sleeping medication because I wouldn’t be able to get up tomorrow, he said, “It is tomorrow.” And now it’s almost tomorrow again, and here I am, eating chocolate and writing about cannibalism. Again. Might as well be 1996. Nothing has changed.

Enjoy. Or don’t. No skin off my roast baby. I’ve even honed my ability to not respond to people who irritate me on the Internet. So go ahead. Let my know how you feel. I don’t care.

Dragon Comics 126

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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.

 

The Art of Negotiation

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Don’t knock cauliflower crust pizza until you try it. It’s pretty good! And yes, it has to be a Mexican Coke. And yes, I can taste the difference. So no funny business. No Pepsi. No Tab. And definitely no high fructose corn syrup. 

Today’s comic is a bit of a shout out to Joe Martin, one of the great old-school newspaper comic strip artists, a dude who has been writing not one, not two, not three, but FOUR dailies for something like the last 38 years. (He apparently got married at 16 and had a passel of kids, so it was probably a survival/escape mechanism.) His wikipedia page is a bit threadbare, but his website claims that the Guinness Book has awarded him the designation of the world’s most prolific cartoonist, having published well over 20,000 gags. Mind-bogglingly, he is still funny after almost 4 decades at it.

He does a periodic bit about his “Uncle Leon” and what the world would be like if this out-of-touch relative held a variety of professional and historical positions. I’m pretty sure that’s where this comic came from, except that I am probably a little weirder. Like Uncle Leon, I am wholly unsuited to a wide variety of professions, but, unlike Uncle Leon, I think I’m aware of my shortcomings and could at least fake it for a while before people caught on.

I’m pretty pleased with this stereotypical looking police detective and his skewed tie. There are a couple details I couldn’t iron out, like the right side of his collar and the specifics of how men’s mustaches go gray, but by and large, he actually looks like the caricature I was trying to draw. It’s weird how the solution to little issues seems so simple once the comic is published when they’re impossible in Photoshop and I’ve erased and redrawn them 50 times. But I am the queen of second guessing myself. Dragon came out fine, although I don’t usually draw my body so skinny or angular. For a really long time, when I started cartooning, I was always trying to draw the whole body of every character, but obviously, in many cases, you only need the top part.

In the future, It would probably behoove me to start drawing backgrounds, too, but I’m still learning. But getting to the point where I can always get the idea down and I don’t need a jillion reference photos to figure out how the human body goes together. I want to develop a more cartoony style, and you can’t do that if you’re always dependent on photographs.

Dr. Morimoto Has Priorities

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Snapple? Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke? How about one of those ectoplasm flavored Ghostbusters themed Kool-Aid juice boxes? Did you know you could still buy a Jolt Cola?

History has its own legitimate reasons for committing mistakes. In hindsight, they probably seem like bad reasons, but history isn’t made by the people with the most information so much as it is by those with the most decision-making power. This story about the engineers who tried their best to scuttle the Challenger launch has been circulating since the 30th anniversary, and we’ve all read reports that the CIA was warning the White House about Bin Laden’s intention to use commercial planes to attack American soil months before 9/11. The data was there, but it was lost in a sea of other considerations.

Warnings are probably a double-edge sword, à la Macbeth. You get warned in one direction and make a mistake in another.

My stepson brought up Crystal Pepsi, the other day, which I thought was strange, as he is 13 and can’t possibly be nostalgic for it. But then I learned that there is a (growing?) Internet campaign to bring it back. The very concept seemed funny to me. I liked this quote from David C. Novak, the guy whose idea it originally was:

It was a tremendous learning experience. I still think it’s the best idea I ever had, and the worst executed. A lot of times as a leader you think, “They don’t get it; they don’t see my vision.” People were saying we should stop and address some issues along the way, and they were right. It would have been nice if I’d made sure the product tasted good.

History has its own legitimate reasons for committing mistakes.

The Other Side

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The playing field is actually pretty equal when you consider that real men are a lot more dangerous to women than bots are to real men. 

It seemed only fair, after 3 days of online dating for women comics, to show the flip side. Here’s what online dating looks like for heterosexual dudes. As far as I can tell, anyway. It’s rough out there for people looking for love. It seems difficult to believe that anyone could be desperate enough to fall for any of this, but people do, all the time. I personally witnessed a guy falling for it to the tune of about $7000 despite his roommate and I providing plenty of evidence over the space of several weeks that he was being taken and begging him to be rational. He was living on hope, I guess.

Look, the human reproductive strategy is ridiculous from start to finish. Finding love and companionship is not for the faint of heart.

I Have Seen Things

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When Google achieves sentience, how is it going to judge us in the future?

This one’s a bit rough; there’s something very wonky about the perspective on the desk. I have a massive migraine right now. It’s frankly astonishing that I even managed to draw a comic at all.  How that weird skewed computer even came to be is a mystery.

So, something about artificial intelligence, and the role of technology in society, and the number of single dudes in San Francisco, and the creepy things that women who visit online dating sites are used to seeing on a regular basis. And good night.

Something Fishy

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Seriously, what is that supposed to be? A nudibranch? A sea cucumber?

Sometimes people ping me to talk about their problems–OK, pretty often people ping me to talk about their problems–and I couldn’t really say where the advice that moves from my brain to my finger to the keyboard comes from. But the bit about the pickled herring was an actual sequence of words that I typed in response to a discussion of inappropriate men making inappropriate overtures through dating sites.

Let’s face it: dating is gross.

Another friend mentioned “ghosting,” which is obviously a lousy way to dump someone, but in the case of inappropriate men making inappropriate overtures, I think no response is the most powerful one. If he’s gross, you don’t have to exist for him.

Only once in my odyssey in dating did a guy ghost on me. Very frustrating and confusing. But I got the last laugh, because a year later, he sent me this email recalling how much fun we’d had together and asking me to spend a month at a beach house in New Jersey with him. The simple solution seemed à propos. Now you know how it feels when someone disappears, sucker.

Not sure I can find the humor in it, though. Maybe tomorrow.

Dr. Morimoto, for the Future of Mankind

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You can ride a quantum sledge through space-time because space time is low friction. 

Even from a bipartisan standpoint, I think most people would agree that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was nothing but an embarrassment for America, a colossal waste of money, and wholly counterproductive to the effort of running the country. Yeah, he shouldn’t have cheated on his wife with an intern, but the fact that he did so actually had zero bearing on his ability to do the job for which he was elected. Personally, I feel more comfortable knowing the commander-in-chief has adequate release. Uptight, unsatisfied men tend to make angry decisions.

More importantly, I think the ripples from the impeachment and the Starr report were far-reaching. Would Al Gore have won the election if Clinton hadn’t lost so much face? Would Gore have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Would Trump be running for election in 2016? It really seems to me that a lot of world issues were negatively affected by Monica Lewinsky’s decision to confide in Linda Tripp.

For Monica personally, it would have been better to stay silent as well. Some people accuse her of wanting the attention, but based on the course of her life and things she’s said recently, I bet she wishes she hadn’t said anything either. She could barely leave her house for a decade, and she was still the butt of 1000 jokes even after it all blew over. In 1999, I visited Jordan by walking across the border from Israel, and while waiting for border control to deal with my visa while simultaneously being subject to the type of low-level sexual assault that large-breasted young women experience frequently when certain dudes figure they can get away with it, I also failed to enjoy a tiresome litany of broken English jokes about the woman who shares my first name. Border guards half a world away were making jokes about her a year after the impeachment trial. That kind of infamy doesn’t lend itself to a successful adulthood.

It’s especially sad, because even though she made a string of bad decisions, she really liked the guy. I can’t fault her. The universe knows I made some terrible choices about men. I’m just lucky mine weren’t so high profile.

So, after my last Dr. Morimoto comic I worked out that there are rules to her time traveling. She can only stay for the space of 4 panels, and she can only visit the person for whom her message is intended, and maybe she can only travel within the span of her lifetime, say, 41 years. So, if I could only tell 1 person 1 thing in the past, for the sake of making the world a better place, I think this would be a good one.

The History of Rock and Roll

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Everyone wants to feign short term memory loss about all that weed they smoked in college, but no one smokes that much weed.

When I see Facebook pictures of some of the people I went to high school and college with holding their children, looking quite responsible and PTA-friendly, it makes me snicker. I remember what you did! You were crazy in the ’90s! And now you have to look your kids in the eye and tell them not to do the exact same things you had so much fun doing? How?

So this is a long-running joke I have with The Man, and it’s what we actually do, every time the subject comes up, whether we’re listening to old music, watching old movies, or reading current events. History of a brilliant career, et cetera, et cetera, “but then they took too much heroin and died.” I’m absolutely sure these kids will never, ever take heroin. Hooray!

For this comic, I attempted to draw 13 celebrities, most of whom came out looking more or less like themselves. In panel 3, on the left, is Nancy Reagan, the First Lady who famously implored the nation’s youth to “Just say no” to drugs while simultaneously working to ensure that the President of the United States never made any important decisions without first consulting a psychic.

To her right is Bristol Palin, the world’s most fertile argument against abstinence only education.

The dead music and theatrical personalities in panel 4 are Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Belushi, Jim Morrison, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holliday. They didn’t all actually die of heroin overdoses, but they arguably all took too much heroin and they all died. If I had more space, I would have also drawn Dee Dee Ramone, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Cory Monteith, at least.

Finally, in panel 8, Keith Richards, who has taken all the psychoactive substances known to science and lived a long, productive, successful life.