Someday I'm going to do a whole little project about my obsession with the Pixies.
I was originally going to try to prove I'm a badass or maybe just really cheap by not using the air conditioning, but it was horrible and Samantha was unhappy.
For my friend Alis's 33rd birthday, she asked me for a comic. I wasn't originally going to post it, since it's hers, but she asked me to. It's probably because she's a space pirate.
Alis took me with her to the archaeology lab at Hamline when we were both doing applications for school. I'd never been in one before so I drew some bits of it, and since the media image of archaeologists is wildly inaccurate I started teasing her about the lack of exciting and priceless artifacts. Then she showed me some glass and stuff, which was cool but not something you'd see in Indiana Jones.
I get teased a lot about not being very butch, and about ways that I break or don't break the lesbian stereotypes in general. Then my dad gave me a power drill, and I made everyone shut up.
Actually, it was probably a wasp. Wasp sting doesn't sound as good, though.
This is something that came out of my experience being arrested and prosecuted.
This is based Martin's madrina's commentary on lesbian invisibility from before I met her.
This is the first comic I ever did that didn't have any words. I had to ask Peter for help with making it scroll sideways rather than vertically. It's one of the few I really like that other people also really like. Usually I'm into the heavy stuff like Eclipse and everyone else is all about the pancakes.
Like you've never wondered what happens when a vegetarian becomes a vampire. This is another one I did as a joke that my editor thought was really funny.
I ripped off the dedication from Kyle Baker's Why I hate Saturn, which you should definitely read if you haven't.
Despite being loud and obnoxious, I'm actually very shy and not terribly confident when it comes to anything close to dating.
I started taking desipramine in December of 2003, and it changed my experience of falling asleep. For the most part, I sleep much better on it than I ever did without, but the experience of falling asleep is a little disconcerting because I can't feel it anymore.
I did this one for my friend who says that I'm the little devil who flies around and wiggles her hips and tells her to have a good time.
dreams and fears of death and dying
I don't really understand this one, so I can't really explain it. It was originally going to be a section title when I was still thinking in terms of print.
A dream of a man with two heads
The original sketch for the butler's tongue was better, but there was no way to move it. This was done in crayon, collage, watercolor, ink and pencil.
This came out of two jokes, one from college, and one from high school. Further details are probably just stupid. This is one I did as a joke to irritate my editor, and she got me back by publishing it. The moral of the story is probably that sometimes I don't understand my sense of humor.
I'm pretty paranoid about cancer, and I'm in the second highest risk group for breast cancer. The first highest group is women whose mothers had breast cancer before they were born, which is described in the vernacular as "you're probably fucked". I'm in the "you're pretty likely to be fucked" group. There's some thought that my mom got cancer because she was exposed to DDT around puberty, which would change my risk from a genetic one to something a little easier to handle, hypothetically. We think this might be the case because she never had a recurrence of breast cancer; when it came back, it was in the lungs, lining of the lungs, heart casing, and liver. While I was home it spread to her stomach and other organs. All she could eat was that prepackaged Ensure shit, and she was weak and cranky and bald, but still telling everyone what to do all the time. I have a lot of conflict about my mother's death, because for most of my life she wasn't very nice to me. Anyway, about the comic. I started drawing this one in summer of 1999, and finished in summer of 2003. It was the faces of the people in the waiting room that really held me up.
I had to go to California to be deposed for the civil suit I'm involved in in November 2004. My flight there was a little traumatic.
Sometimes I feel like girls don't like me.
I'm very critical of a lot of cartoons in syndication, mostly the strips that have clearly long since died and whose authors should admit that they have no more ideas. At the top of my list of criticisms are the family cartoons, which almost never do anything innovative, but recycle the same crap about babies over and over, making them virtually interchangeable. There are two family comics I like, and these are Leonard and Larry, by the amazing Tim Barela, and For Better Or For Worse, which is one of the only syndicated strips done by a woman and which has fallen off in quality in the last few years. Please note that I'm not dissing on comics by women; most of the strips by men aren't good for even half as long as Lynn Johnston's work has been, and her less good work still kicks ass over most of the other stuff in syndication.
In winter of 2003, my dad insisted I get a flu shot. It was the first time I'd ever had one, and it was pretty exciting. I had dreams that were kind of like my fever dreams, only less pleasant, as well as my first episode of sleep paralysis since my 2002 trial.
I'm oddly happy with the way the watercolor came out on this.
I said for a long time before deciding to go to law school that if I could get a job telling people off, I'd take it. This was more what I'd originally envisioned.
I try to examine my dating background to see where I've gone wrong, and to figure out if there are patterns.
Frank Black and the Catholics 4/1/03
I wrote this after coming home from the show, cause I'm a fan girl.
I don't know if there are snakes in Alaska.
I get a lot of crap about my sexuality, and I'm tired of it.
Some of my experimental stuff turns out better than others. I think this was originally going to be longer, but then I didn't like the other stuff I'd done for it.
This was a project I started to get back in the habit of doing a lot of comics, because for a while I wasn't doing much. I realized that part of the reason for this was that I was getting too hung up on everything being really perfect, so I thought it would help to do something where I wasn't putting any pressure on myself. I started thinking about doing a comic where I didn't plot ahead at all, just went with whatever I felt like, and then I felt too lazy to draw anything, so I just went for the collage approach. It's worked, and I'm doing more comics now, although it seems to have taken on a life of its own.
I was digging through my magazines for collage inspiration and found myself making up conversations for the bland-looking people in ads.
I spent several hours one day trying to remember the word hydrangea. This is one of my first real attempts at mixing collage with other media. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
I was walking home from Pizza Luce with Leslie and we passed a wig store.
My apartment is really hot in the summer.
My former roommate, Jeremy, says he has a t-shirt that says "It's my goddamn birthday, you worthless bastards!" I didn't do much for my birthday this year for various reasons, but I thought doing an obnoxious comic would be cool.
I think tension is interesting, and I have an unfortunate tendency to allude to larger plots that I'm probably never going to flesh out at all.
La storia is italian for history, is up. There's no real significance to the title being in italian; my naming convention is based on what I can remember that isn't terribly long. I was lousy at titles before I started putting stuff on the web.
The idea for this one is something I got from a book Nichole gave me.
The Lisa Saga
Lisa was someone I knew in Texas and had it pretty bad for. The whole thing was kind of crazy.
I can't fight anyone else's demons, but it doesn't make me stop wanting to try.
I did the first three frames upside down. My lack of a camera is occasionally irritating, but this was pretty easy.
The bullet was in my right leg, as was the one that I found a couple months later. I don't remember which hand I found it with. It took both hands to get it out, but there's no way I can draw that - I don't remember enough, and I would have needed someone to photograph it while it was happening.
The bruises are watercolor, blood is acrylic, and the background is ink. My black acrylic paint dried up a while ago, but I have a lot of black ink so I've just been using that. It dries to a slightly different color, but I'm okay with that. The sketches went better than I thought they would, and doing the wet media was actually the trickiest because I couldn't do it all at once, I had to do the ink and the acrylic separately from the watercolor, and I ended up doing them separately from each other, too.
My previous bed was a mattress I got from Barb when I moved to Ohio. After a while it developed a pretty significant sag in the middle and it took me a while to notice, since I sleep in the middle of the bed most of the time. I think this is why I can almost never sleep on my stomach anymore, which is too bad.
I had a lot of strange dreams around the time my mother died. This wasn't even the strangest, just the easiest to convert to comics form.
I try to post something every week, and this was something I put up when I was running late. It's something random from my journal, where I was trying to draw ghosts and then started thinking about what they'd be thinking about.
I wanted to do more of this, but couldn't once I got it up.
I think the reason to eat at restaurants (other than having spent ten hours helping people move) is to eat things I can't cook myself. The Seward Cafe has these fantastic vegan pancakes.
Micron pen, crayon, and grey ink. I was trying to get the feel of what it's like to not really have access to your own emotions.
I have a hard time understanding the motivations of social conservatives.
My not so exciting adventures buying shower gel at Montclair Plaza.
I have these great animal stamps from when I was a little kid, and I spend a lot of time thinking about image and how it's perceived differently depending on group membership.
I've been taking the marriage equality battle a little personally. I admittedly haven't read as much about various civil rights pushes, but nothing I've read has talked about how difficult it is to have your humanity debated in public. In particular, I find it appalling that religious conservatives seem to think that homosexuality and things with the trappings of homosexuality, like cross-dressing (which is actually mostly a heterosexual practice) are more despised by their god than murder.
This came out of a game one of my friends made the mistake of teaching me in college, and I think it came from Sandman originally. You make up flavors of ice cream that couldn't exist. Concept nouns work really well, like paradox and depression and stress.
This is a side view of my apartment building, not a top view.
Because I have an internal soundtrack and I'm not afraid to admit that it plays crap.
A dream of a man with two heads
One of my first experiments with multimedia.
I like making fun of advertising. Unfortunately, I think it's funnier than everyone else does.
What does it mean to be normal?
Jodi gave me a bunch of old textbooks. One of them had a section on social deviance. This is more a propaganda piece than a comic, but whatever.
This one's pretty self-explanatory. I was sure I couldn't be from this planet when I was about 7, which is how old I'm supposed to be there, incidentally. Sometimes I'm still pretty sure I'm not the same species as everyone else, and if I had to pick one piece to be my basic autobiography, this would probably be it.