Tag Archives: webcomic

A Career in the Arts!

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The Unicorn of Creativity supports this message. So does the Moth of Poverty. Your parents are just disappointed.

I say “get older” because I’m not sure “growing up” is something that is compatible with the creative life. At least, it’s been a couple decades now and I don’t seem to be doing it, at least not in the sense that my parents used the term. Maybe other creative types have had better luck, but I’m pretty sure that we’re all just big kids going through the motions of putting on pants in the morning and driving cars.

This comic isn’t 100% representative of my life, because I did try to have a career in my 30s, and after the novelty of having a lot of money wore off, I hated every second of it, and it wasn’t like I needed so much money anyway. It just felt like squandering my creativity. Even now when I get desperate and take the little freelance jobs that still come to me sometimes, I feel guilty.

Anyway….

I’m really digging this very web aesthetic of drawing black and white designs with small but meaningful hints of color. A lot of web artists seem to employ this style, and it’s pretty effective. Berk Breathed has been using it in the new Bloom County strips, for example. I hope it’s apparent that panels 1-3 feature colorful butterflies while in panel 4 you see a gray moth. The comic still works if that’s not apparent, but it has a nicer balance if you see that.

The really important part is that you know that mystic unicorn is always right behind you, whispering in your ear: You have made all the right choices. If you can hear her, just keep skipping through that flowery meadow. Tra la la.

Pleading Insanity: An Artist’s Defense

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And that’s just what comes out of my head. Don’t even ask about what I’m keeping inside.

This comes out of two things. One is that, knowing my tendency to second guess myself, I try to force myself go with the first thing and then worry about it until given reason to stop. So, when I drew yesterday’s comic, the thought crossed my mind that something that came to me in a dream might not be a good idea in the waking world, but I went with it anyway and then spent all night worrying that it was too dark, too grotesque, too confusing. And then people related to it anyway. (That’s supposed to be panel 2 from yesterday’s comic in panel 3 of today’s comic but it’s probably too small to see.)

The other thing on my mind was a dark comedy essay I wrote about 8 years ago for a pretty successful blog the Rabbit, the Bear, and I, and some other people used to have, until everyone drifted away and stopped posting. And we were getting pretty good traffic, too. Eventually, we stopped paying for the domain. For some reason, I thought the posts would revert back to Blogger, but that is apparently impossible. Someone is sitting on our URL and the same name on Blogger and I can’t figure out how to repost the articles even though I can see them and edit them when I’m logged in.

So, at the risk of exposing myself to utter ridicule, I’ll reproduce it here, but keep in mind that it’s super dark, and super sophomoric, and super sarcastic, and that I do not condone drowning children or making light of mental illness, and that I know this will not work (especially not now). I’m actually kind of embarrassed just thinking about it. But maybe I’m second guessing myself. Seriously, I wrote this in 2008. I’ve grown since then. Please don’t judge me too harshly if you don’t see the humor. I would not do well in prison.

The Devil Made Me Do It: Pleading the Insanity Defense or How to Get Away with Murder

****Disclaimer: if you are a complete moron, this is a comedy article. Please do not commit murder, and if you do, don’t tell the cops that Dragon told you how. And clear your browser cache.****

You can’t simply kill your enemies and claim to be cleansing the world of demons. Park Dietz, or an even funnier-looking forensic psychologist, will explain that you are a liar. The McNaughton defense is based on whether you comprehend the wrongness of your actions. Consider Jeffrey Dahmer, who was obviously batshit crazy, but still knew it was wrong to drill holes in his lovers’ heads. Dietz saw that Dahmer got drunk to overcome his guilt. Also, Dahmer lied to the cops prior to his arrest. Lying to the cops is a sure sign you know you’re breaking the law. If you want to plead insanity, you’ve got to tell the truth about your actions. In this scenario, the only thing you can lie about is your insanity.

But it’s not even so simple as that. If you make 200k a year, own a big house, lead a glamorous life, and off your annoying mother-in-law, it’s going to be pretty hard to argue that you really believed she was an alien. You’ve got to set up your insanity defense in advance. The first thing to do, if you want to get away with it, is worry friends, family, and coworkers.

Early stage schizophrenia is simple to emulate. Laugh at inappropriate times, like funerals and board meetings, or cry at inappropriate times. Deny your actions when accosted. Get paranoid for no reason and make groundless accusations of those around you. Allude to vague suspicions that you are being watched or have enemies. Don’t overdo it. Act generally normal and just bust out with these little personality tics a few times a week. You don’t want to end up committed before you commit your big crime. You want people to have nagging worries in the back of their heads, stuff they can tearfully recall at your trial, adding, “If only we had recognized the signs.”

Step two is a little crime. A really little crime. Something likely to make News of the Weird and set people to nervous laughter, something even the judge will agree to cover up. For instance, obtain a small dead animal. Remove your clothes. Walk naked through a public place clutching your small, dead animal. You will be arrested. Provided you are not rushing a fraternity or a member of Greenpeace or PETA, you will be declared mentally ill. Take it further by insisting your dead animal is a living child, or an accordion, or a letter of commendation from the president, and refuse to relinquish it until you are granted protection from the Pope, or Steven Spielberg, or your trash collector.

You will be rewarded with court-ordered psychiatric treatment. It’s free, and it’s likely to be a short stint! The downside is those psychotropic drugs really slow you down, and your state mental health facility is not the Bellagio. The food is crap and you have to share a room. But no one said it would be easy. You’re on the right track. The moment you start taking anti-psychotic medication, drop the schizophrenia act. Admit you were out of your head. Claim you’ve been under a lot of stress and you just want your life back. Agree with everything the doctors say. Soon, you will be free, at which time you can flush your meds down the toilet.

Now you are ready to commit a real crime. Don’t overthink. Premeditated murder does not result in a verdict of insanity. Careful planning indicates sanity. It’s got to appear spur-of-the-moment. Consider common household implements as weapons. Fit murder into the routine of your life.

Do not, at any time, act surreptitiously. If you are found to be hiding anything, you’re disqualified. If the jury knows you bought a new hammer and hid it on your boss’s bookcase, you can’t pretend something came over you just before you bash his head in after hours. You’re better off bludgeoning him with his own Blackberry during your weekly sit-down in a glass-walled conference room. Smile at your coworkers as you do so. If you have to drown your kids, do it in the bathtub with your cousin downstairs. Don’t lock them in a station wagon and push it into the lake in the middle of the night and claim, “A black guy did it.” Not only will you look like a cold-blooded killer, you’ll look like a racist. The jury will not sympathize.

Finally, let’s say you’ve committed the act. Don’t cover it up! This is the most important part. If you cover it up, this is evidence that you knew it was wrong. The best thing you can do is stay with the body of your victim until the police arrive. Confess immediately, with a big smile. Bonus points if you do the deed in front of a cop. That makes you look really insane

The Things You Carry (a comic from my subconscious)

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It also teaches you a lot about balance.

This comic appeared to me, more or less fully formed, as an idea in a dream. No kidding. This scenario wasn’t the dream; it was an idea I had for the comic *in* the dream, which was a pretty normal dream about being back in college (at which time I wasn’t into cartooning). In the dream I wasn’t totally sure it was funny, but it seemed imperative to remember it and bring it back from the dream world. (I’m still not sure it was funny, but the few people I bounced it off of seemed to think it was worthy.) Originally, as I dreamed it, the punchline in panel 3 has the artist saying, “It’s OK, I guess,” but this feels better. Upon waking, I recalled that I had dreamed an idea for a comic, but I couldn’t remember what the comic was. A couple hours later, it came back to me while I was pinging Misses Kitty. So random.

It’s just about mortality, and the way the idea hangs more heavily on you the older you get. You watch your parents getting old, you have friends die of terrible diseases, your heroes start to die, and you can’t deny that you’re further from 15 than you are from 50, and that you too will, inevitably die. You can begin to carry around the weight of your own fragility wherever you go, if you’re not careful. It helps you make more careful choices about how to live, if you can focus on what you have left. But there comes a point where you start to understand the true meaning of being over the hill. You have an expiration date. You started some decades ago, and most surely, some decades hence, you will stop.

So you better draw a lot of comics while you still can.

Check, Please

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I can also validate your parking if you like. But I can’t validate you as a human being. 

I predict that this comic will perform well across all platforms except for the ones where people celebrate their own lack of diversity and feel threatened when anyone questions their dominant paradigm. You know who you are. But amongst my friend, 99% of whom are academically trained lefties and front line civil rights activists, I expect a warm reception.

Or not. Who knows what people like? Not me.

I went to this bar last night. We were coming back from the Girl’s musical performance and I got a text from Misses Kitty that read, “queer munch now, 3 mins from your place.” There were no follow-up texts. Fortunately, I could read the secret bestie code and guessed that she wanted us to meet, and where, so we did, and found her sitting with about 20 people, maybe half of whom I recognized.

One woman called me over and said, “I can’t even tell you how I got there, but I was reading your blog.” But, as it eventuated, she hadn’t been reading my blog. She had been reading my old homepage, from about 10 years ago, so I’m actually really curious how she, or anyone else for that matter, could have ended up there, and also awed and amazed. She didn’t look familiar to me, but mentioned that we had met at a party about 3 years earlier. That’s pretty typical; The Man takes me to a lot of parties and I’m terrible at recognizing faces. Certainly, she hadn’t been searching for me when she stumbled upon my work, but rather clicked through and recognized me afterward.

She went on. “I’m Israeli, and I was reading your essay about Israel.”

The essay about Israel is 20 pages long, and I wrote it over 15 years ago, when I was a lot more sarcastic. “Oh, man, I hope you weren’t offended!” I said.

“No, I loved it!”

It’s nice to be recognized, and to know that people are actually reading. With pleasure. Even 15 years later. When I told the Rabbit this story, she told me about a friend of hers who write an essay 8 years ago that was suddenly picked up by a major media market this week. She was like, “Uh, OK.” But writing on the Internet is enduring. If it’s relevant, it doesn’t matter how old it is.

Which reminds me: I need to rehost some essays that I wrote for an old project that the Rabbit and the Bear and I did about 10 years ago, on a site that vanished because we stopped paying for it even though it was still getting 70+ hits a day when it hadn’t been updated in 3 years. You never know when someone’s going to need my extremely tongue-in-cheek but also technically accurate guide to pleading the insanity defense for murder, or my rant about Internet trolls.

 

The Evolution of Gaming

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Well, at least it keeps those pesky kids off my lawn.

In case you do not hang out with adolescent people, you might not be aware that this is a thing. Kids with perfectly good video game systems–multiple systems with a nearly limitless number of games available across a variety of platforms and devices–will spend hours watching strangers on the Internet playing games they could be playing themselves. This would be a hard thing to understand in the ’80s, but I guess now there are so many video games available that you get tired and worn out of playing video games? So you watch other kids playing video games to take a break from playing video games?

Maybe it’s just a testament to how amazing video game graphics and story lines have become, but it also strikes me as really passive and sort of disturbing.

Kids today have to have other kids do their playing for them.

::shakes fist relentlessly at sky and hobbles back to the nursing home to resume being old::

My Hero

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If you’re wondering why past Mallory has curly hair and future Mallory’s hair is straight, that’s because it’s 1989, so past Mallory is sporting a bad perm.

Just some standard silliness. If I could travel back in time and give 3rd grade me some advice, I’m not sure what I’d say. It’s tempting to joke about stock tips and the outcomes of sporting events, but in fact I don’t really have a great sense of what that would be, and 8-year-old me probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

If picking a past me to meet and offer advice, I’d probably pick 7th grade me, because she could really use some assurance that she’d show them, she’d show them all. And it would have been nice if future me had clued hormonal adolescent me in about pointless relationships and the fact that I wasn’t actually going to get married until I was 38.

I learned my times table eventually. But, like, not until high school. It wasn’t a huge priority. I was never going to become a physicist. Unlike Mallory Morimoto, who, most likely has further heroic time traveling adventures to pursue. There are wrongs to be put right.

Green Machine Mandala

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I love it when a mandala comes together.

This is pretty sharp mandala, good symmetry, complexity, and layers. It’s based on a principle of 12, which gives it a powerful foundation. There’s so much repetition and less variation. It’s easier to not make a mistake in proportions, especially when you’re mostly dealing with triangles all going the right way. It looks complicated, but it’s actually a little easier than some mandalas with fewer layers.

If I am a green machine, I am a worn down one that requires recharging. Friday and Saturday night were each strenuous in their own ways, and it catches up, even though today all I did was write an article about Lost Girls and cook and clean. There is a bit of a comic in my head but it would be funnier if the joke were expanded, although it could still work in a simple form.

Someone else told me how much they loved the Rapunzel comic from last week. Everyone I know personally who read it thought it was hilarious, but strangers on the Internet didn’t seem impressed. However, my David Bowie tribute was randomly trending somewhere for almost 24 hours Saturday and Sunday so traffic was up all weekend.

No more art news. Only sleepytime news.

 

Immature Behavior

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You can’t take Molly and suck on a pacifier! You’re 68. But I guess if you haven’t grown up by now, it’s never going to happen.

Everyone over the age of 27 has realized the great secret of adulthood, which is that growing up doesn’t exist. You just get increasing amounts of responsibility piled on your head until you no longer have the time or energy or connections necessary for enjoying opportunities to have fun. That doesn’t mean you stop wanting fun. You just start to believe that fun is too difficult to obtain, and then you stop noticing opportunities for fun because you can’t get your head up above the responsibility. Plus, if you do manage to have fun, people tell you to grow up. The older you get, the more taboo it becomes to let on that you’re still having fun. Other grown-up people who have succumbed to the pressure disapprove of your happiness.

But truthfully, you can have more fun as an adult. And, let’s admit it, we’re all immature on the inside.

 

 

1000 Times More Fair

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So the good news is that she’s not really dead. The bad news is that she has to spend the rest of her life with a pedophile necrophiliac. 

Given the continuing unpopularity of these fairy tale comics, it was definitely imperative to write a third. Basically, I could go on for a while, because when you look at this kind of story through a modern, scrutinizing lens, ignoring the magic, they’re all subject to ridicule, and there are 250 of them in Jack Zipes’s Grimm translation alone.

According to Zipes, when the prince sees the beautiful dead girl he said, “Let me have the coffin, and I’ll pay you whatever you want.” The dwarves reply, “We won’t give it up for all the gold in the world,” and the prince answers, “Then give it to me as a gift.”

Of course, the dwarves are already complicity in the objectification of the dead girl, having interred her “in a transparent glass coffin so that she could be seen from all sides.” All the better to transform you into the object of the male gaze, my dear.

The illustration in the Zipes edition goes one better, omitting the glass entirely, showing the dwarves laying flowers on her midriff and kissing her hand, while forest animals weep.

Creepy. But it all works out for her in the end. I guess. Except for the part where the prince likes to play that game where she lies very, very still and doesn’t respond to anything. Happily ever after. The End.

A Stock Photo Is Worth 1000 Inexplicable Words

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In the real world, birthday parties and boxing gloves mean something. In stock photo world, they mean something else. 

Feeling a bit out of sorts and unable to finish the 3rd fairy tale comic, I went for another ridiculous stock photo caption comic. These images all happened to come from a BuzzFeed article entitled “60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos,” and I chose them primarily to prove the headline wrong. They’re totally usable. You just have to stretch your imagination a bit.

Curated collections are always nice.

People rag on BuzzFeed, but I like it. You don’t have to sift through as much crap to get to the lols like you do on Reddit, and they actually produce some pretty credible journalism. You have to read their news section; there are good longform investigative articles on interesting topics, and you can also get the latest current events, often with original material if they have a reporter on the ground.

It’s just a coincidence that 2 photos have birthday themes and 2 have boxing gloves. In face, I reshuffled the panels to make it clearer that guy waiting to punch the little girl in panel 1 is not the same guy punching the professional in panel 4.

Even though yesterday’s comic was the funniest thing I’ve written in a while, it didn’t seem to impress any strangers on the Internet. Come on! The Man laughed out loud, and so did the Fox. I think it’s brilliant.

Even if this comic wasn’t my masterpiece, I guess I still made a decent mark on the world today. I went to read to kindergarteners and got about 27 hugs afterward. Then I made The Man some leek and potato soup and a strawberry pie that were apparently so good he had thirds of each. Cream soups are a bit rich for me, but he grew up on a dairy farm, so he’s got 34% butterfat running through his veins.

Tomorrow I will be super creative.