A Waste of Time

The title of this comic comes from a comment a friend of mine made to me a while ago. I woke up one Saturday remembering vaguely that I’d spent the previous evening in some clubs and had more than a bit to drink. That Sunday, I got a text from the friend in question that read, “Sober yet?” Apparently, I’d been pretty wasted.

“Was I that fucked up?” I asked.

“Lol. You were a hot mess.”

“What’s that mean? ‘Hot mess?’ ” Being gay I know that it shocks people, but I don’t read a lot of Perez Hilton or devote too much attention to the lesbian exploits of Lindsay Lohan, so I’d never come across the phrase.

“It means that you would’ve been hot, but you were a really fucking mess,” I was informed.

I felt like the description summed up a lot about the last couple of years of my life.

I’ve been trying to get this story together because I decided at some point that I wanted to call the first eventual trade paperback collection of my comics Hot Mess for that reason, and I’ve been trying to get together material to submit for a grant that has an October submission deadline. Trying to figure out how to explain my comics and what some of my goals for them include has forced me to organize them in my thoughts a bit more than I had. I’ve already mentioned on here bits and pieces of information about it, as in, “Oh, this drawing is for,” whatever issue, and so on, but now, if anybody’s curious, I feel ready to lay out a bit of the master plan, and maybe some of my past posts will have a little bit more context.

This title piece, Hot Mess, is intended for inclusion in an issue that I want to call Tales of… SELF INDULGENCE! and that will hopefully indulge a little bit of my interest in old EC and other horror comics. I have a couple of other pieces already started at different stages for this. My first two single issues, give or take, will probably fill out the back matter of Hot Mess, and I’m starting to refer to them, collectively, as Odds and Beginnings. The story Roll With It that I posted on here a while ago, along with some other bits and pieces that I’ve posted at different times, are meant to be included in, “It’s Like Heaven” , which is named with a quote from an Allen Ginsberg poem and meant to comprise some of my musings about my recent romantic misadventures. Then there’s, “Thought Dreams”, which some of you might recognize as being named with a Bob Dylan lyric. I’ll say more about what this one will include later on. There’s also, “Marchin’ To the City”, which is named with another Dylan lyric. That one is meant to include a partial origin of Rickets the Robot, and is something that I’ve given a lot of thought to. All together, these issues with some additions and rearrangement will hopefully comprise a sort of autobiography of part of my life, and will be Hot Mess.