Tag Archives: webcomic

Dragon Comics 107

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If you've been paying attention, you've noticed that the appropriate pronoun for Dragon is "dragon."

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed that the appropriate pronoun for Dragon is “dragon.”

This story arc has been brewing almost since the beginning of the comic, which is why it has never happened, in 107 comics, that Dragon has been referred to with a gender pronoun.. For a while it seemed like I was going to chicken out and not go with it, but it’s been on my mind for a long time. As is true for most of my comics, I have some person stuff to work out. The time is right. Everyone’s talking about gender right now. Of course, some of us have been talking about it for decades, but now your granny is talking about it.

To start, I think most open-minded human beings can admit that gender behavior occurs along a spectrum. We really meet comparatively few men who, say, don’t think puppies and kitties are adorable. We rarely find women embracing the quality of weakness. And since gender is expressed through choices and behavior, if its expression takes place on a continuum, then gender itself can’t truly be a binary either. You could describe it as a quaternity (one, the other, both, neither) but even that doesn’t get at the nuances of who we feel like inside.

Little kids are taught the binary, which leads some of us to hide the parts that don’t fit, or else to be become saddled with derogatory tags. But why does a kid’s gender matter? We don’t want kids pairing off and mating in our society, and we no longer force adults into rigid gender roles for their entire lives to reinforce a social order for which they must begin relentlessly training at a young age. So, frankly, why should we care about little kids’ gender at all? Why shouldn’t we let them be who they feel they are?

Dragon Comics 97

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How about just a postcard, maybe?

How about just a postcard, maybe?

Souvenirs get expensive actually. I used to bring the kids things, but they already own so many things. New things that were actually in my budget (and I go away at least 4 times a year) just ended up in already existing piles of things, forgotten minutes after they were received. Postcards, though…postcards I approve of. You can get lot of postcards for a little bit of money (it’s a good idea to travel with your own stamps, though: touristy places are usually out, and it’s not always easy to get to a post office) and it’s always nice to get real mail, especially when you’re a kid and no one sends you mail.

I have pretty much every postcard anyone’s ever sent me, which is a decent number of postcards, but, being mere scraps of paper, they still fit in a single milk crate, with room left over for another couple of decades of postcards. I imagine that I’ll want them toward the end of my life. Every once in a while I dig through them for a bit, but mostly it’s nice to just have a box of tangible proof that people think of you from time to time.

Dragon Comics 95

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The times they are a-changing...

The times they are a-changing…

I was force fed a lot of antibiotics as a child. Once, when I was about six or seven, I was prescribed some really foul-tasting white fluid; I suppose it was suggested as an alternative to the excruciating intramuscular shots in the gluteus maximus they used to give me before that. I remember being held down by several people and screaming through those, but at least when you’re held down and given a shot in the ass, there’s nothing you can do and it’s over fast.

This medication, though, was beyond disgusting. It was the absolutely worst thing I’ve ever had in my mouth, ever. It was the taste of moldy shrouds and rotting corpses. It was the taste of nightmares. The first time they forced it into my face, I threw up back up. I cried and begged and pleaded but they gave me a second dose anyway. I also threw that back up. They didn’t make me take it a third time. They claimed it was because I was allergic to the medication, but it had nothing to do with allergies, unless a person can be allergic to being disgusted.

Now, when you go into a pharmacy, they have a list of 150 different flavor additives they can mix into your children’s medicine so they don’t have to taste unpleasant things. My mother wouldn’t have bought that even if it were available then; she felt that children should not expect separate categories of flavoring. We were supposed to eat when adults ate, and that included medicine and toothpaste.

The Girl is actually pretty good at taking medicine. She did state her preference for chocolate cough syrup over tropical fruit cough syrup, but she took the tropical fruit, albeit with a lot of muttering. Last week, I also taught her how to take her allergy medication in pill form, which is a pretty big milestone for a little kid.

Anyway, this comic is just a little bit of silliness. I’m happy about what I’m doing. The world is a funny place.

Also today, Panels ran my love letter to the graphic novel, Beautiful Darkness, which is a really stunning book

Dragon Comics 93

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Some things are just private. Sheesh.

Some things are just private. Sheesh.

Bees are fascinating. I can watch them for a long time. Some people freak out about bees, but generally speaking, unless you’re doing something to aggravate them, they’re not going to bother with you. You can just go stand right next to the hive and watch them zooming in and out, hovering as they maneuver through the traffic, zipping off and landing again like little helicopters.

I mean, don’t lose your cool if there’s one on your head. It probably just likes the smell of your shampoo. Just having a bee on you usually doesn’t result in a bee sting, unless you freak out and do something threatening, like slapping at it. Most creatures don’t like to be slapped. Try gently brushing it away. If you’re in nature, try to walk through some leaves.

In the summertime, they like to visit my swimming pool, which I don’t understand, because it’s saltwater, but that doesn’t seem to deter any creature. The bees misjudge and break the surface tension a lot, though. I’m always pulling them out of the water. I just use my bare hands. They never sting. I like to hold them in my palm and watch them dry their fuzzy selves before they lift off again. I guess they’re too heavy to fly when they’re waterlogged. They’re certainly completely unthreatening in these situations. The only place I’ve ever been stung by a bee is the bottom of my foot: in other words, I actually had to step on one before it tried to hurt me.

Bees are super important, obviously, in terms of the health of the environment that sustains us, but also super cool.

To me, there really is something very passionate about the bee at work. I’ve had moments watching one penetrate the depths of a flower with regular thrusts, then suddenly turn around and look at me in a way that seemed sheepish. It definitely felt like I was interrupting something.

Bees don’t have a work ethic, but they do seem to work ceaselessly. When they’re too old to gather pollen, they do tasks at home. Bees don’t give up; they keep at their job as long as they’re able, and they never require creative inspiration. They just know what to do, and then they do it, and they keep doing it until they die.

I’m no busy bee, but in a way I envy their steadfast intention and finality of purpose. If only I could go about my task, day in and day out, with such unyielding determination.

ETA: A kindly redditor has informed me that I have the work-life cycle of the bee backward, and that it is the youngest bees who stay at home and care for the hive and the oldest bees who fly out to gather pollen. Reddit has a thousand and one household uses.

Dragon Comics 92

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Their sister site offers a sustainable sourced, fair trade, medium roast Ethiopian coffee for manticores

Their sister site offers a sustainable sourced, fair trade, medium roast Ethiopian coffee for manticores.

My Internet connection has been intermittent all week for no discernible reason, and tonight it was down for almost an hour. It started to get to the point where it didn’t seem like there would even be any possibility of uploading a comic at all tonight. Also, I had a headache. So I almost didn’t draw it. But it all worked out in the end.

I am a fan of sustainably sourced, fair trade, dark chocolate, and I don’t mind paying more for it. Chocolate is one of those things that we really shouldn’t take for granted. It’s worth it to get the highest quality you can, and to make it economically feasible for the people who farm it to continue farming it. People who grow cocoa should be able to live a good life in exchange for their crop, and cocoa should be grown in such a way that humans can continue to grow cocoa indefinitely.

Usually I wouldn’t eat a whole bar, or even half of one, in a day. Typically, about 20% of a good dark (72% cocoa) bar satisfies me. Sometimes (like yesterday) it takes about 75%. But even as I gave myself license to eat as much chocolate as I wanted while drawing this comic, I only wanted 20%.

When I was little, a Hershey’s Bar was one of my favorite things. I can’t eat any of that type of candy now. If you can get it at the mini mart, it doesn’t do anything for me. Last Halloween I couldn’t even finish a single miniature. It doesn’t satisfy anything. You can’t even get the really good kind of candy at a regular grocery store. You have to go somewhere a little bit upscale. Elitist chocolate. Call me a snob, but the older I get, the less I want to consume low quality anything. My pants are probably from Goodwill, but if it’s going inside me, there are standards.

My favorite chocolate, right now, is Endangered Species Chocolate. I like the hazelnut toffee, the almond sea salt, and a couple others (all 72% cocoa). It’s totally fair trade and sustainable and also vegan and organic and gluten free and, if that doesn’t grab you, kosher. I eat between 1 and 3 of them a week, usually, at night, after everyone else has gone to bed, by myself. I almost never share.

Dragon Comics 88

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Also, dragons are so pretty they'll get everything for free.

Also, dragons are so pretty they’ll get everything for free.

This comic is about privilege. White privilege, class privilege, cis privilege, hetero privilege, whatever. It’s pretty much all the same. I should know, because while people who know me will attest that I’m a freak on, like, a lot of levels, to the casual observer all of that is hidden. What shows on the surface are the lucky accidents of birth. I’m super-privileged.

I think about it a lot, even if I’m not talking about it. But it happened again yesterday: I got waved through to the pre-screen security line in one of the world’s largest airports. I didn’t have to wait in line, I didn’t have to take off my shoes or my jacket or take out my computer or my phone. A guy sized me up as I took 3 steps toward him and determined I was not a security risk and forced a privilege upon me.

And it occurred to me that this happens as often as not in any big airport. I’ve gotten waved through to the special lane lots of times, and I never get pulled out for extra scrutiny. The only time my luggage has ever been searched was when I borrowed someone else’s suitcase, and unbeknownst to me, this person had left a 6-inch switchblade in the side pocket. The TSA agent pulled it out, laughed, said, “This isn’t yours is it?” and let me go.

I was caught carrying a switchblade through airport security, and the federal employee whose job it is to address crime took a single glance at me, determined I was not capable of criminal activity, and laughed it off. We laughed about it together. There was a heartbeat when I thought, “Well, I’m not going to LA today; I’m going to jail.” But I look white, and female, and straight, and well-off, and not like a security risk, so that TSA agent never suspected that I have carried contraband through airport security on more than one occasion.

And then there’s all the times in my life that I was doing something illegal and cops didn’t even bother to look twice.

Privilege means knowing that mistakes are going to be made in your favor. It’s the freedom to assume that the rules don’t apply to you. It’s a careless security.

Dragon Comics 87

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Silly Dragon...beds are for sleeping in, not for obsessing about things you can't do anything about at the moment. Don't get me started on what daytime is for.

Silly Dragon…beds are for sleeping in, not for obsessing about things you can’t do anything about at the moment. Don’t get me started on what daytime is for.

This comic sort of seemed like it should have another punchline in the 4th panel, but the punchline is: insomnia. If have it, you get it. If you haven’t got it, you’re lucky. I’ve had it my entire life. I can literally remember lying in my bed at the age of 3, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, even though my parents had long since gone to bed and it was the middle of the night. On a good night, it typically takes me about 45 minutes to go under. Since I’ve been here, it’s more like 4 or 5 hours. Tossing and turning and rolling over to note that the sky is lightening and another day has dawned despite my inability to put the previous day to bed (so to speak) provokes a scary mix of dread and futility.

Of course, I still wake up at approximately my regular time, even if I’ve only passed out a few hours before. Then I sleepwalk through the day, vaguely hurting and feeling ineffective. All week.

In real life, of course, I sleep next to The Man, who could not accompany me on this trip. So I’m sort of used to his presence, and it makes me comfortable. And I’ve grown accustomed to the sound of his CPAP, which is a sort of reassuring reminder that he’s still breathing, and helps me relax. And we sleep in a queen sized waterbed, which we’ve had for 5 years. When you like sleeping in a waterbed, there’s really no substitute. Well, maybe there is, but a 30-year-old twin mattress on a bunk bed is not it.

If there’s an upside to chronic insomnia it’s that lack of sleep skews your perception of time, which can be an upside if it makes the day go by quickly, or if it makes the recent past feel like the distant past. In other words, insomnia makes you suffer, but you experience the suffering in a compressed way, and then file it in your brain as a long-ago memory.

Dragon and the Urban Jungle Gym

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The work of the child is to play.

The work of the child is to play.

As threatened, this day was spent in taking a commuter train into a big city for no particular purpose except to entertain children. The children were entertained. They very much enjoyed the train ride. When we arrived in the big city, the children wanted to eat. Although this big city, like all big cities, is known for offering a wide variety of excellent cuisine, we ate at the food court in a mall. It was an upscale food court, but it was a food court. We walked past some very interesting food trucks and a few famous restaurants in order to eat at this department store food court.

Then we walked on to what is possibly the finest urban playground $55 million can buy. When completed, this playground will cover an astonishing twenty acres land. Even in its unfinished state, its structures are too many to easily count. We didn’t even visit every section of the playground, let alone use every piece of equipment. The slides are without number, and some of them are sort of ridiculously fast. Above, you can see a good chunk of an actual tube slide, on the inside of which I hit my head the first time because it’s hard to navigate that sort of curve while protecting a small child on your lap. You can only see a fraction of the climbing structure you need to maneuver through to read the tube slide. The structure is deliberately designed to make it fairly difficult for full-size adult humans to reach the top. I am a good bit smaller than a full-size adult human and it was tight.

In the picture, Dragon and a trio of dragonets slide down one of the more conservative slides. In the picture, Dragon and a trio of dragonets have the entire park to themselves, which, as you can imagine, is not the case with the actual park, which is filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of children and their parents.

Dragon Comics 84

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Some people smell what they want to smell.

Some people smell what they want to smell.

Hooray Friday! This one seems to have been a long time coming, but it’s here at last. Finally, I’ll be able to catch up on the rest of my life. Anyway, it’s 1:30 in the morning. I have drawn a comic and now I am tired and I don’t have 100 words to describe this comic, my process, or anything else concerning my art or my life. Happy Friday.