Archive for ‘comics’
So I think I strained my Tibialis posterior where it inserts onto metatarsal IV. How did that happen, you ask, and also what does that even mean?
Well, I kicked a wrought iron chair. Why they even ever invented wrought iron chairs I do not know — it must have been for a more shoe-wearing age. I intend to make that chair’s legs cardboard-shod before the moon sets this eve.
And what does that mean? That means I kicked a big bar of iron at full speed with my fourth toe, which it bent up very precisely and injured precisely one ligament, in the deepest part of my foot. Basically it’s the part that holds up the top of the arch of my foot. So if I place my foot firmly or try to push up off the front of my foot I am in a lot of trouble. Since it felt like a tear, a lot of trouble.
I got on it right away with lots of ice and arnica, and it wasn’t the worst tear, but man, it felt like a tear. A shocking new experience. A very precisely disabling injury, too. Don’t know what I’m going to do for work for a few days.
If you ever wanted a commission, now would be an excellent time. As it is I think I’ll just work on painting and Cloudhopper and War on Christmas.
Austin Daze ( http://www.austindaze.com/ ) asked me to write a couple hundred words on Occupy Austin, so I wrote them here; take a look and feel free to help me edit this before I turn it in.
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After only two weeks, Occupy Austin has turned into Barton Springs. It’s all drum circles and hula hoops and beautiful, earnest young folk standing around doing not-much.
What did you expect? This is Austin.
People want a lot from the Occupy movement. First they wanted to not have to pay attention, and now they want a list of demands, as if Occupy were holding them hostage. And Occupy Austin, people really don’t know what they want. Are they even protesting?
Not exactly, no, we’re not. Not like they are other places. We’re in solidarity here, because…
It’s amazing what Occupy does to a guilty conscience. If the bankers and the cops know they’ve got it coming, then they go right out there in crack skulls. Here in Austin, things are honestly pretty nice. There’s inequality and oppression, but it ain’t exactly Chicago.
Out here we’re meeting to talk about this, to show support, to trade ideas, to change minds, to have fun waving signs. All signs welcome — I saw Lyndon LaRouche types one day, communists the next, Infowars the third.
We’re reclaiming our public spaces.
You always said you wanted us to turn off the TV and go outside. This is what it looks like.
If you’re in your thirties and forties, I’m talking to you. If you remember wanting an Atari, I’m talking to you.
I know how it is. We’re getting old. And everything we hoped for never really happened. The future got here only in the stupidest and worst ways. There’s no flying cars or end to war, just unemployment and killer robots and dead oceans, and this magic internet that we never dreamed of that lets us talk about it all.
Instead of the new tomorrow we were promised, we got a bad rerun of our parents’ yesterday. America’s been stuck in neutral for our entire lives, while the engine just runs and runs and runs.
There’s been a pall of doom over our entire lives. First it was the good old global thermonuclear war of our childhood days, then that went away and now…we don’t even know what it is, but we know we’re in terrible, terrible trouble. We can’t even tell where the trouble is coming from. It seems like it’s coming from everywhere.
It’s been hard to not give up.
But…
What if this is it?
What if you waited your entire life for this, and when it finally came you were just…too…old. Too old and tired and worn down and passed by. What if it finally happens, and we’re just too old to recognize it?
If you wait your whole life for something, and when it finally gets here you’re just too old to do anything about it, didn’t you wait your life for nothing?
But if you grasp that moment, then it can still all turn to gold. Those years do not have to be wasted — the world waited, and you waited, and the world was ready, and you were there.
Oh Class of ’93, you weren’t meant to spend your life in grey fluorescent hell. You weren’t meant for it all to be for nothing. We were raised by good people who wanted to give us a world full of light and joy and friendship, energy and possibility and freedom, respect and truth and dignity. An end to war, and an end to hate, to hunger, to sickness. They did not prepare us for this mean little world.
This is what they trained us for. This is what they made us for. This is why we have dragged ourselves through an endless grey night, and the dawn is finally here. The world is finally ready. The time is finally come — we can take our future back.
But we’re so old!
It doesn’t matter. Life isn’t fair. Some people wait their whole lifetime and it never happens, For us, it’s finally here. It was almost too late — it definitely wasn’t too early. But you know what they say about something that wasn’t too late and wasn’t too early; it’s right on time.
It’s time for us to help our parents keep the promise they made to us, the promise their parents couldn’t keep to them.
You are not going to get another chance.
Wake up!
I don’t give a damn at what point babies are babies, I say if you got something in you, you got the right to take it out. If it lives, put it in an orphanage. If it dies, well then. The corollary to this — and the point where abortion anti-advocates prove themselves assholes — is that if it cannot survive outside the body, it still looks like a baby, and it’s a pure kindness to end its suffering without making the mother suffer even more. I have a chart that demonstrates this if you’re confused.
The salient point is that nobody can make you an incubator if you don’t want to be. Laws stop at the skin (or at least they should).
What I reeeeealy want to do is give the technology another couple years to get here, until we get to the point where a baby can be implanted and survive in the GI tract for at least a little while, regardless of whether the GI tract is male or female. Apparently it’s quite possible and they just haven’t made it practical yet. And then I want to find a fat asshole senator from a state where they made abortion illegal in cases of rape, and give him a roofie and inject that shit in his fat gut, and tell him, it doesn’t matter that somebody implanted this thing in you in the most horrific and disrespectful manner possible, it’s a baby and you have to carry it.
The law will be clear.
I will be charged with rape or something, and since this is a southern state that’s only a year or two with time off for good behavior. I’ll probably get out before that shitbird brings the baby to term. And I’ll spend that whole time laughing.
It’s pretty weird when I think about how many times I’ve seen this one drawing. Must be way up in the thousands. I like the hard-edged cartoonyness of it, I like the way that Dan (who you will find is the main character) drops from cartoon into real life (and proper rendering) as the story goes on.
It’s not just because I took so many figure drawing classes since I started this book, that’s just a coincidence, I did it on purpose I swear….
although the first version of this panel was drawn three years ago, I keep working on it. I especially like his face. One theme I keep seeing crop up in my work over and over again is employees who hate their bosses.
Turns out that autoposting pictures doesn’t work unless you put a text post with it. Noted!
Anyway, Cloudhopper, from the beginning, one frame at a time. Once a week (Monday) I’ll be running Cloudhopper from where it is right now, and as an occasional series I’m going to post it one panel at a time.
so now that I have slain the mighty dragon that is WP installation, I plan to move this blog to updating daily, for quite a while.
Every Monday I will be serializing Cloudhopper 3 until it’s done, and then it’ll be time for War on Christmas.
The other days of the week will be filled with
that French Revolution trading card game that I’ve been working on
various art
various information
other various things that I have not written yet but will
reposting of:
*”I am the President Of Ice Cream,” colored.
*Cloudhopper Day One in giant storybook form.
*The Liberal Apologia for G. I. Joe and other comics criticism from Scans_daily.
*all the disparate things that I have written around the internet will find a collective home at last.
I’ve never tried to put everything onto one web page before but it’s finally time.
I’ll also be posting the newest stuff on LJ and DW and DA and Facebook and Tumblr and all the other different channels I use, like I do, but you can count on coming here and reading something new every single day from now on.
I’ve never tried daily updates of anything before and I’m a little worried that I may miss, but because I finally figured out web design and I have pages and pages and pages of art that you’ve never seen, I’m going to give it one excellent shot.