Tag Archives: webcomic

I Am Incapable of Shutting up

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That’s my secret. I don’t know how to be quiet. Actually, it’s probably not much of a secret.

It would be great if I could go back to trying to be funny. Maybe people could stop being awful for a couple weeks? But no. Instead, we have news aggregators that do nothing but track current events that are NOT NORMAL, except that they are rapidly becoming everyday sorts of occurrences. But still not normal. White supremacists fomenting terror in the daylight, knowing that the president of the United States won’t condemn their actions: NOT NORMAL.

 

Purim is a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar, but one that remains shockingly relevant. It’s popular for the reasons mentioned in the comic: costumes, cookies, booze, and a general atmosphere of revelry. Because there are treacherous people about, but again and again, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Eventually. All tyrants fall. Eventually.

Purim cookies are called hamantaschen and I I noticed they are selling them at Costco this year. The noisemakers are called groggers. They are highly annoying to adults, but, obviously, children love them. This year, the holiday falls on the 12th and 13 of March.

Panel 3 references Nazi death camps (20th century), the Maccabean Revolt (2nd centure BCE), the golem of Prague (16th century), and a bad forgery that refuses to die.

I don’t know the name of the cemetery where my ancestors are buried but my family is from Philadelphia and the images in the news certainly look a lot like my memories of the place.

I’m not saying people don’t get scared. But not scared enough to roll over. You know what I mean? Vandalism and bomb threats only help us remain vigilant. When evil rears its head, that makes it easier to strike down.

Un-American

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I guess it depends on what values you believe the symbol actually stands for, and whether or not you can recognize when that symbol hangs from an incongruent foundation.

Not much more to say about this. America has been guilty of atrocities, but I like to think injustice is not the foundation of the system. Rather it’s a human flaw that can be addressed. We don’t have to embrace it. We don’t even have to accept it as inevitable. We can recognize it, bring it to light, and address it. Then the Rabbit told me today that genocide and slavery are the structural supports of the nation, and that we will have to tear the house down and rebuild.

History is ridiculous. And living through it is nerve-wracking. This comic comes from a place of fear, but I guess most of significant human events comes from that place.

I’m not sure how my brain connected to this James Thurber story, which I probably haven’t read in 20 years. Everyone should read James Thurber. Actually, everyone probably has and just doesn’t know it. His most famous story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” figured prominently in my freshman English class in high school. He’s a wicked, funny man. I wish I could write with his clarity and wit.

As for the last panel, I don’t know all that much about HUAC and Joe McCarthy, and I imagine there probably were plenty of Nazi sympathizers running around in the ’50s, but of course they weren’t open about it. They didn’t publicly host Nazi gatherings. They didn’t freely state their intentions to dismantle the federal government. Anyway, McCarthy claimed that the State House was “infested with Communists.” Later, as I understand it, he died penniless and friendless. In between he made a lot of people’s lives miserable.

He was a terrible human being, but in Bizarro America he gets to point his finger.

 

 

 

 

Do You See How Ridiculous This Is?

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And they all lived without the oppressive weight of the assumed binary ever after.

Wrote this little script last week but nothing visually stunning came to mind even after so many days, so the artwork doesn’t really hit any sort of meaningful level, for which I am sorry. We were at the Bear’s house and didn’t get home until after 11 and my energy level kind of started flagging before we even left the house.

I know some people feel very strongly about identifying on one end of the spectrum or the other, but I don’t, and I never have. But if you do, I support your right to express that in whatever way that works for you without letting it inform my sense of what you can and cannot do. Sorry there’s nothing more today. I should have done a comic about the 7 earth-like planets discovered by NASA. Maybe tomorrow. Although Google kind of already beat me to it.

Here’s an article I wrote on Book Riot about a new horror anthology called Sycorax’s Daughters.

Poetry Is in the Air

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Always searching for words to explain.

This is my friend Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, the Liberian-American poet, in the first panel. We went to graduate school together. She came to America as a refugee, one of a million people displaced by a war that killed 200,000. There were only like 2 million people in Liberia before the troubles. She knows something about how bad the world can get.

Most of my poet friends seem to write Facebook statuses that are also poetry, and when I saw this update, it felt like it had the same rhythm of some of my 4-panel comics, so I asked her if I could adapt it and she kindly said yes. I love the line, “If you ain’t start writing poetry this year, you might never.”

If you’re unfamiliar, panel 3 is Harry Carey, a popular sportscaster whose catchphrase was “holy cow,” and panel 4 is an iconic picture of activists Gloria Steinham and Dorothy Pitman Hughes illustrating solidarity.

Facts

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I only believe ideas that conform to my previously held beliefs, and those are sufficient facts for me.

Nuances of style, voice, and tone in writing can be difficult to understand even for students interested in writing, which is a very small subset among college students taking freshman composition. Almost everyone who likes writing tests out of this course, so you don’t expect much more than average ability from your students to start. But some people defy your expectations, like this kid. I swear, this is a true story. He told me he was writing like a stereo manual on purpose, because that was the only good way to write, and he wouldn’t alter his written voice, even though revisions accounted for a huge percentage of the semester grade.

That’s the nature of reality. One person can spend five years studying the structure, detail, and elements of language that place Lolita among the pantheon of the most wonderfully written novels ever written and still feel that they have much to learn on the subject of verbal expression, and this freshman can proclaim with equal or greater certainty the stereo manuals are objectively the best, most effective use of English. This guy gave up an easy A because considering my perspective would mean compromising his own powerful belief.

And that is how we get to a place where people can proclaim that anything that isn’t personally a problem for them, isn’t a problem for anyone, anywhere, period. When you’ve already decided the truth about the world, you can’t hear further information on any subject.

So I repeat. It’s pointless to argue after you realize that the person you’re arguing with is choosing not to evaluate information that contradicts their predetermine notions. All the facts in the world won’t persuade someone who’s already made up their mind.

You’ve Made It! Now Where Do You Go?

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Crippling hand pain is a side effect of pretty much everything good, and a lot of bad things too.

Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, maybe my outrage meter needs recalibration, or maybe nothing outstandingly egregious happened in Washington today. Nothing struck me politically, and I didn’t even start thinking about this comic until midnight, so if it’s a little light, blame my running-on-fumes brain.

When I took up ukulele, I usually couldn’t hear how out of tune it was. I asked some musicians if it was possible for someone with little musical talent to develop and ear for that sort of thing and they assured me it was. Now I can tell, more or less, if it’s not right, but I can’t tell you if it’s flat or sharp, and I can only tune it with an interactive device that visually tells me whether I’m flat or sharp. And even then I’m not great at it. But I love playing it.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that I realize, now, that never in my life has it even been a particular desire of mine to be successful. All I ever wanted was to spend my days immersed in the arts. Society and my family told me that it was only important to be successful, and after I achieved success then I could do the things I actually wanted to do. Just doing art without worrying about success or whether the world would agree that that’s what I should be doing with my time seems like a real crime sometimes. But now that I’ve achieved a modicum of success I guess it’s all right?

Not that the world needs more successful people. But it probably needs more happy people.

To Russia, with Love

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I knew I should have sent flowers. Or chocolates? Oh! Caviar! He probably loves caviar.

Meanwhile, in Bizarro America, Congress remains blissfully unaware of the increasingly documented facts of Russian interference with the presidential election, or else, they’re well aware of it and, in Bizarro America, conspiring with Russia is no longer considered treason so there’s no reason to investigate or act on any of these details. In either case, it’s just one more indignity that the portion of American people who enjoy the full use of their brains must attempt to assimilate as they ponder the massive tapestry of lies, incompetence, and behavior unbecoming the federal government of a nation that once wore the label of “democracy” with pride. With each passing day, it becomes more difficult to accept the legitimacy of an administration whose sole aims seem to dismantling the republic and appropriating its resources for their own gain. With each passing day, the question of whether America will have any qualities in common with an actual democracy in four years becomes more urgent.

In case you never hang out with Russian people, “Dima” is a friendly diminutive for the name Vladimir. Perhaps Putin’s mother called him Dima when he was a little baby dictator. Maybe that’s what bears call him when they snuggle up through the long Russian winter.

I hate drawing the president with his beady little eyes, lumpy face, and ridiculous hair, but I kind of like blushing, smiling Donald in the last panel. He looks kind of happy and at peace at last, contemplating his love. Poor Melania. I bet he never smiles like that at her.

Happy Valentine’s Day 2017

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Like I always say, you never really know what goes on inside other people’s relationships.

You know how I sometimes let my husband write my comic and then I just illustrate it? This comic was not my idea. It was not my idea. It was his idea. The Man’s. The Man thought of this. Not me. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, Happy Valentine’s Day. I guess we’re not exchanging gifts this year for financial reasons, so this comic is our gift to each other.

I wanted him to pose for the reference photo with me but he refused.

You have no idea what goes on in other people’s relationships.

This would have have been an insomnia comic if he hadn’t come up with this idea. I had a couple scripts in varying degrees of completion but none of them were going to get finished before I passed out from exhaustion. Good thing he’s sometimes timely. And funny. And I love him. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Persuasion or Debate

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I’ve also tried rationale, common sense, deduction, induction, inference, judgment, and ratiocination, but nothing works!

This comic is based on the millions of people asking the internet why they can’t make other people understand what they perceive to be simple fact, and this informative piece from the Atlantic: The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion. Granted, it’s hard to assimilate, or even believe, and I can’t figure out how I would personally use this information to persuade people of anything, but it’s pretty clear at this point that reasoning with people who seem unreasonable isn’t going to make the world over according to my utopian vision.

I had another, much longer comic riffing off the riffs off “Nevertheless, she persisted,” but somebody asked and this felt a bit more urgent. Maybe tomorrow. It’s hard to plan out 24 hours ahead in this climate.

 

Dragon Comics 153

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I don’t need anything but my precious, precious gold. 

Last night was a mini-insomnia night: I got enough sleep to access basic functions for part of the day. In the afternoon I worked on my Linda Addison project but by the time I started thinking about a comic there wasn’t much charge left in the battery. What little I actually drew of this comic seemed very difficult. Even typing it took a ridiculous amount of time. Tonight will be better.

The funny thing about taco trucks is that you can barely throw a rock around here without hitting one. So you wouldn’t really need directions. You would just need to pick one direction and walk 1d6 blocks, scanning the desert for a truck with a taco sign on it.

Seriously, how great must it be to achieve the level of greed and selfishness needed to be happy about American politics. I almost wish I had a billion dollars and no conscience, because it’s kind of a massive to burden to have feelings all the time and actually care about the world around me.