Tag Archives: weird

The Perfect Lawn

2 Replies
waoa 8 the perfect lawn_edited-1

Hope springs eternal, especially when you’re optimistic and delusional.

This kid is great, so thoroughly convinced of ideas that are so patently false, so willing to act on those beliefs. He sees the couch in the basement catch fire, and his instinct is to run to the bedroom on the first floor and carry a girl out of the house. And this is after she warned him to stop following her. She refuses to eat in her own house if he’s there, and he still thinks that she’s going to marry him if he just keeps kissing up to her mom.

And the girl: all she can think about it getting away from him, from her mom, from that house, from that town. She’s destined for urbane sophistication, she just knows she is, and all of this is beneath her. Otherwise, she’d be more worried about this crazy, obsessive kid.

The mom is special. I considered drawing her and Kevin making out in Madeline’s bed (omg yes) for the last panel, but the smoldering cigarette is such a big image in this story and I wanted to give it more air time.

If you can, you have to zoom in on the first panel. I drove myself crazy trying to draw the house, the kids, the mom, and the girl all in one panel and it looks tremendous up close, but it’s perhaps a bit jumbled when you shrink it down.

Dragon Comics 165

Leave a reply
dragon comics 165_edited-2

The Horsehead Nebula is actually a lot smaller than you’d think. 

In my original script, The Man’s line in panel 1 reads, “I didn’t even know you had the Horsehead Nebula in here,” but while lettering the comic I realized that The Man did know that Dragon had the Horsehead Nebula in there, because Dragon said as much in Dragon Comics 29, which I drew an astounding 2 1/2 years ago.  And by golly my prediction was correct. I haven’t gotten any worse at it. And clearly  The Man knew that they did have the Horsehead Nebula in there. It had just slipped his mind.

The Horsehead Nebula is definitely made out of cotton candy, right? The one is Dragon’s cave is, anyway.

So Superior

2 Replies
SUPERIOR_edited-1.png

Our go-to has long been the woman who can’t eat anything but cheesy potatoes.

Today was a better day, obviously. The Man was a great comfort to me. Of course, staying mostly off the internet is the best medicine. But if you, like many people, find that you can’t do that, if you’re staring at photos of people you hated in high school and former lovers whose lives all look more put-together than yours, there’s always the woman who eats nothing but cheesy potatoes, or old clips from Maury Povich or Judge Judy, and, of course, People of Walmart. It’s crazy easy to feel superior to the rest of the world if you just know where to look.

Anyway, I’ve got your number, basement dwelling neckbeard troglodytes. I know just where you live. In your mom’s basement.

More Surreal Life Hacks

Leave a reply
surreal strategies_edited-1.png

Basically, you can do whatever you want and when people question your behavior, just explain that it’s supposed to be surreal. Or don’t. 

Everything’s off-kilter, and being angry about it doesn’t seem to help. In fact, I feel like my attitude is probably starting to annoy people, so I tried to shift back to something resembling my previous brand of humor without completely abandoning the perspective that the United States of America is completely screwed up right now. I cannot authorize a federal investigation into Russian interference with the US election. I can’t force John McCain to rally Congress around the goal of restoring sanity to politics. I can’t protect my own health coverage. But, here and there, if you look around, you can fix little things, sometimes.

Of course, if we had just done a better job of teaching schoolchildren to recognize and reject logical fallacies for the last 30 years, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Ditto germ theory and the role of vaccinations in preventing the spread of infectious disease.

Organizing books is my personal meditation. You don’t have to break into people’s houses to do it. Public school libraries will usually let you just come in and do it for free. Some places actually pay you to do it!

I’d rather talk about augmented reality

Leave a reply
img056

This means something, I promise.

The uncorrected proof of my comic book arrived today. I found a missing quotation mark in the text and none of the italics got set, but I think they already printed the run. No big deal; I knew there would be one typo no matter what. No one can edit themselves. It’s a gorgeous thing, this comic book, otherwise pretty perfect. But I have other feelings about it. Maybe tomorrow. I’m not ready to share yet. Besides, I couldn’t get a decent photo in the available light.

So, I was sitting at my desk searching for inspiration. Like, literally searching. I keep some weird bits in the drawers, all sorts of random tiny materials and pieces of projects, including my magic bottle from exercise 32 of The Trickster’s Hat. Some of the elements had fallen off, maybe 2 years ago, and formed a part of the whimsical detritus of the drawer that I always open in search of a working pen, but which never contains a working pen. And I decided to fix the magic bottle. Yes, I did. I fixed it. Then I improved it a little.

Which got me thinking about Nick Bantok’s method, and how he changed my mind about collage. Collage always seemed too easy to me; they’re fun to make but they don’t require as much talent as other media, in the sense that you’re taking pieces from lots of other people’s work and don’t have to create any of the elements yourself. Just discover them. But going through The Trickster’s Hat requires a lot of collage, with enough variation to demonstrate how magazine scraps can be just as basic an element as paint. Besides that, the way I make my comics is in large part a collage system, even though I redraw the lines myself.

Anyway, by the time the magic bottle was finished it was kind of late and I was still uninspired so I decided to try to create an entire comic from magazine scraps. By the time I finished cutting (old National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Atlantic pages) it was way too late to try something else. I think, given more time, I could have produced something a little more cogent, but this does say a few things. I don’t know how successful it is as a comic, but Dave McKean says that any pairing of words and images is a comic, so by that metric it’s a rousing success.

Silver Bullet

Leave a reply
normal_edited-1

I gave up yearning for normalcy decades ago, but sleeping at night would be nice. 

It’s been a weird week.

Yesterday I went to the store to buy my favorite kind of chocolate–organic, fair trade, sustainable, yadda, yadda, yadda–and some angel had left a coupon for my brand tucked into the shelf display! Hooray! But then I ate all the, and that made me sad. Contemplating the absence of chocolate pushed me over the edge. And that’s where this comic came from.

 

What is this thing?

Leave a reply
IMG_1683.png

I have achieved sufficient wisdom in life that I knew better than to touch this thing.

We wanted to see some friends out in Silicon Valley before we headed back to the desert, so The Man used one of those apps that allows you to rent someone’s car for a day, which didn’t cost much more than the train would have for 2 of us, and allowed us some extra freedom. He got this zippy little Fiat, which was insane, because who drives a manual transmission in San Francisco? I was a little worried that we would roll backwards down Lombard Street and die in a blaze of fire before we got out of the city, but it worked out quite well.

Before we met our friends, we stopped at Gray Whale Cove and hiked down to the beach. It’s not too many stairs, compared to someplace like Wreck Beach in Vancouver, but it’s a decent number. Great view, though, even on a foggy day. We didn’t see any whales, unfortunately.

Down at the bottom, growing out of the cliff wall, I found these weird flowers. Some of them were more normal flowers, with yellow petals, but there were a bunch of these with bizarre little spikes and no petals, all exuding this strange, milky sap. So unusual.

We also saw a bunch of ducks surfing, and I took some fun macros of tiny dead sand crabs. There’s a very old bunker, from WWII, I guess, which people were climbing because obviously the stairs and the hills aren’t enough climbing. The Man thought he saw Wilson the volleyball rolling in the surf but I think it was actually something that broke off a buoy.

Wednesday we go home, which is where I need to be. Depending on how late we get in, there could be a Dragon Comic, or there could be more macrophotography. I don’t know why I even bother bringing the Wacom tablet when I visit my family. It never gets used.

Pineapples Make the Best Projectiles

1 Reply
surreal life hack 1_edited-2

There’s actually an almost perfectly mundane explanation for why I’m carrying a pineapple around this party, but it’s much more interesting if you don’t know that. But I guess bringing a pineapple to a party for any reason is a little bit unusual.

My life, as you may know, involves a fair degree of surrealism, but I think it’s a good idea to help the weirdness along. I really thought I was going to carve that pineapple up at that party and then probably eat most of it myself, because I can eat a lot of pineapple, but then there was all this food already and so many people to talk to and then Misses Kitty randomly texted asking me to go downtown with her while she got her lip pierced, and by the time we got back to the party I actually really wanted that pineapple, but there were even more people to talk to and by that time The Man had left and Misses Kitty was my ride and she wanted to go. So I went and retrieved my pineapple from the kitchen, to the great hilarity of all who witnessed it. People more or less said these things to me while I made my rounds to say goodbye.

There was another comment about the TV show Psych, but I only watched part of one season of that show before deciding it was too silly even for me, so I had no idea what they were talking about and didn’t know how to make it funny for the comic. But someone did tell me that they thought pineapples were natural projectile weapons.

Anyway, making the world a weirder place is just part of what I do.

Babies on Boards

8 Replies
baby on board_edited-1.png

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.