Archive for December, 2010
23 items.
I’ve spent a lot of today wondering whether it’s actually easier to have a good date or a crappy one, having just had a good one but then, being me, spending a good portion of the day agonizing over what stupid things I might have said and done, how it’s possibly been fucked up, and whether we’ll see each other again. See, when you have a crappy date, you don’t worry so much about those things. Being me I’m also wondering if, should he see this post, he’ll find it strange or off-putting that I’m writing about it like this, but I’m figuring that’s just the way I worry about things. I mean, I’m not saying that I’m in love or considering a marriage proposal, I’m not picking out towels and curtains just now, I’m not, after all, a lesbian. But I did like the guy, and I’d like to see him again, and I don’t think people should have to be worried about saying that.
The picture above is one that I drew of the boy from Santa Cruz that I’ve been posting comics about, and it’s the one that I drew myself drawing in the comic that I posted here a couple of days ago. Part of the story that’s going on with all this is that our relationship, or whatever you’d call it, was based a lot of the time on me drawing him. As I do more comics about the whole thing I’ll explain in greater detail, but I can say that one of the first things I did when I met him was tell him that I’d like to draw him, and I meant it sincerely. I saw the times we spent with me drawing him as being very romantic and intimate. I’m pretty sure that sometimes he saw them that way, too, but looking back on it there was probably another level to why he enjoyed it all so much. Part of the theme of all the relationship-themed comics that I’m working on and hopefully compiling into a book is the difference between the views two people in a relationship together might have of that relationship, particularly, in my case, the way that sometimes I seem capable of ignoring reality a bit to focus on the parts of a relationship that allow me to hope that this might be the relationship that, ideally, I’d like it to be. The surprise, I suppose, for some people who might know me mainly through these comics, is that I’ve got all these funny old-fashioned notions about how relationships show involve two people who care about and value one another, are willing to be romantic, silly and vulnerable with one another, and other stuff like that. I mean, I know based on a lot of what I witness that it might just seem naive, but I like to imagine that there are relationships in this world that go on for a long time with two people remaining fond of each other.
While I spent a whole lot of time thinking that I was getting to know someone in a situation where we both liked each other and were gradually gonna become intimate and develop something like a mature relationship, I was taking a lack of intimacy developing as a stage on the way to something better, rather than a sign that things were just gonna get more distant. While I might have thought the time we spent with me drawing him was, at least partly, about us getting closer, I think a slightly awkward fact is that he just really, really liked somebody paying that much attention to him. As I do these comics, I’m also being very careful to try to show something in a way that has value beyond settling scores or venting anger, so I’ll try to say as carefully as possible that he either liked me doing the drawings because he had some really intense weird sorta need for validation that, at the time, I wasn’t completely grasping or was choosing to partially ignore, or because, inside of that skinny twink body that I was so fixated on fucking, and fucking, and fucking again (In a romantic way) there was a housed an ego so enormous that for it to be properly filmed would require the resurrection of Gloria Swanson and the budget to build an enormous old-school Hollywood palatial mansion. Honestly, I think a good chunk of this five month dating experience was based largely on the fact that he loved the attention of me staring at his body for hours as I drew it and worshiping all its details. I understood that it made him feel good to have somebody that interesting in his body and, hey, I totally was, and I liked making him feel good in that way, was more than glad to do it, I just didn’t really think of that as being such a large percentage of the reasons for which he actually spent time with me. Then again, maybe I appreciated having somebody who I found really attractive being that interested in me drawing, and in my art. I can be honest enough that I’m sure that stroked my ego, too, so yeah hey I suppose the weirdness can go in both directions.
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When it’s all in order, this one will come a bit later than the last one I posted. I felt like there was a need for this strip because I wanted to clarify a bit some of the tensions about why we were still hanging out. In between moments of genuine closeness and affection, there were times when I wondered whether he was using sex as a carrot so I’d do the drawings, and of course the other side of it would be whether I was using the drawings as an excuse to get him naked in my house, and then of course there’s also the fact that I actually loved doing the drawings, and he liked me doing them, so my obsession as to whether or not one of us was doing it for ulterior motives is probably a good indication about my whole victim complex, but I do think there were a little of all those things going on.
New comic tomorrow.
Now we’re continuing with the saga of the boy from Santa Cruz, which I started posting a while back and then didn’t update to this site for a while. Actually I continued writing comics about this particular boy, but my reasons for not posting much are complicated. Some of the reasons had nothing to do with the relationship, because my life was hectic for a whole lot of different reasons for a while there and hopefully it’s starting to reach a good equilibrium now. I’m gonna continue this storyline, and it’s gonna be an interesting mix of comics that I wrote at the time that the events depicted were actually happening, and comics I’ve written since then looking back. This one, for example, was actually written or partially written a few months back at around the time of the other two comics I posted mentioning the boy in question, and I probably would have posted it sooner except that I spent a lot of time agonizing over whether he’d find it funny or if he’d see it as confirmation that I actually am depressive and unhappy. I mean, of course the truth is more complicated and I don’t think anybody who has anything all that interesting going on in their mind never gets depressed, but the fact that I was agonizing over this at all should have told me that we weren’t on the same wavelength and it wasn’t gonna end well.
Some of these comics are pretty autobiographical, some of them are autobiographical but in a more abstract kinda way. This one happens to be exactly what goes through my head when I like a guy. I wrote this when I was still seeing the guy in question, and now looking at it it has an interesting perspective for me. The list of his attributes in the second panel brings up for me what’s recently been a recurring theme in my thoughts, which is how maybe the way I see a relationship when I’m actually in the midst of it is part reality, yeah, but also part wishful thinking. Having now seen other sides of him, I’m not sure if that second panel list is exactly what I’d call accurate. In my slightly more bitter moments, I’d look at that list of adjectives and say that I got about one out of six right.
Next in the series about that boy down in Santa Cruz. These are gonna veer in and out of strict reality, but there is something genuinely sweet and charming about him that keeps me coming back, so I mean the compliment here sincerely. As far as the last panel goes, don’t go out with me if you mind me writing something like that about you. As if there weren’t enough reasons for people not to go out with me. Heh. But I also meant that last panel as a very sincere compliment.
So, here we start the other storyline that’s supposed to intercut with the storyline about Prester and Rickets. Without over-explaining (Which means I’m about to over-explain), the concept here is to cross over a fictional storyline that’s based on some personal experiences, which is the story of Prester & Rickets, with a true story that’s being somewhat fictionalized. With the Prester and Rickets storyline, there are certain things that I’m trying to explore and I have an eventual goal in mind for it, I’ve know for a couple years, actually, the vague basics of how some of it’s gonna resolve. In the case of this other storyline, I’m writing about something that’s actually going on, and I don’t know what the outcome of the storyline will be because it hasn’t happened to me yet. The questions the story means to ask are something like, Will this relationship work? Is this what I want? What does he want? and all those other things you’re wondering when you embark upon something. Because Prester and Rickets are, in some ways, fictional, I can decide on the answers to the questions that are being asked in their story, and those questions are essentially similar to the questions being asked in the other story, where they’re out of my hands.
Although, of course, I maybe can’t control everything that happens to me, but I am the one writing it down, so I do have control over it in that way, and the story is never gonna be 100% factual. I’ve kinda got into the premise of having the rabbit’s “boy down in Santa Cruz” be his version of Charlie Brown’s little red-haired girl and a device in that way. The theme that, for me, ties these stories together, as well as the story about the rabbit becoming addicted to porn, because that story’s really more about why we desire what we desire, and why we want to create things and why we want to have sex and whether there’s a point to either, the stories are just all about searching for something without quite knowing what it is that you’re searching for. Trying to make that thin, wild mercury sound that we hopefully all have inside us somewhere.
This is another one that I redrew. I don’t actually hate the drawing on the original, I just don’t think it fits in with the look that the storyline eventually took on. And actually, I feel like the perspective in the first panel in the original is messed up, and the body language of the characters is kinda wrong for the jokes, and I ended up changing mostly all the details of the original. But, here it is. You can see the original here if you’d like.
This is also where things get dicey in therms of reading order. This strip, and the next two that I’m gonna post, come toward the middle of the storyline, but between this strip and the strip I posted yesterday, there are other strips that have already been posted, were you to read this in my ideal order, and there are other strips already posted between this one and the one I’m posting tomorrow. These strips are story beats that I want to have in there and they clarify a few things, and after it’s all completed I’m gonna go back through the archives and rearrange everything so it’s the way I’d like it to be, but one of the main reasons I like doing these things as strips like this is that most of the strips stand on their own in a way, and you can read them in several different orders, so they’re readable without worrying about my big master plan, although I do feel that the context will add to them.
Next new comic tomorrow.
Things take a subtle turn for the less than idyllic in this moment. To explain a little bit what’s going on with the stories I’m writing about this relationship, now that the relationship in question has ended and my writing about it changed perspective, I started to have a lot to say about certain things related to it, and I kind of started writing things that chronologically precede the stuff I had already posted that was in relation to this story, so I’ve kinda been drawing and writing out of order and things, and it all kinda makes sense in my head, but some of these things right now might seem a tiny bit abrupt and then at some point I’m gonna start telling about the portions of the relationship that came before these moments, and so the way they’re posted might initially be out of order, but I plan to go back and rearrange the way these posts are ordered on this website so that it’ll all eventually make a coherent story. As it is at the moment, I don’t really feel that you need to know more than I’ve posted to get something out of the strips that I’m posting, so my explanation is in case anybody’s curious, but if you’re casually reading this website it might not be too important at the moment. Likewise, the stories with my characters that aren’t explicitly based on me all have backstory matter that exists in my notebooks or in my head, and eventually some of that’ll get posted, and so on, but I also don’t think you really need to know all about their pasts to flip through what’s going on now and hopefully get some enjoyment out of it. One of the reasons I like telling stuff that, to me, is fairly epic and personal in the amount of scope it has in the things it relates to in my brain is that I can do one little bit here, another little bit there, to work on what’s meaningful to me at the time that I’m doing it and, eventually, a larger form will hopefully become apparent, but at the same time each little piece is its own little deal with its own value, and all the pieces can possibly add up together in more than one way.
