Archive for July, 2011
25 items.
I like this comic because I feel like it manages to do several things pretty efficiently. In the book, it’s a moment after a lot of comics with the rabbit and Rickets talking to Truckstop about their relationship problems, and here we see that it’s got Truckstop thinking about his own relationships. It’s supposed to set up a bit of a mystery about Truckstop’s past, because it doesn’t show who he’s talking to on the other end of the line, and at this point this is all we know about this ex boyfriend. The first three panels are basically written as something I wanted to say to a particular ex of mine, and the fourth panel is something that an ex actually did say to me. The guy that said that to me, he was always into fairly kinky stuff and he couldn’t really get all that excited unless he was tied up or abused in some way, but he did have an emotional side, and a long time after our relationship I saw him again and he was getting maudlin and talking about how sometimes he missed me. I asked him what it was about me that he missed, and that’s what he said. Apparently, everybody’s he’s dated after me felt uncomfortable spanking him.
By hitting, of course, I mean in a kinky consensual way, so I never felt bad about it because really I was only doing to him what he explicitly asked me to do. It’s always about the sub in those situations, because it’s their fantasy about giving up power. They want to feel like they’re giving up control, but obviously they’re not giving up anything because you wouldn’t do it to them unless it’s what they wanted. But I’m not gonna lie, it was kinda hot sometimes.
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In the book, this comic is meant to be a bookend to the comic I did a while ago where I show my life in a pie chart and Rickets says I should go ahead and kill myself. Obviously this one is meant to be a little tongue in cheek because the things on that list aren’t the only reasons I don’t kill myself, but when I was brainstorming things about life that I really like, or things that I look forward too, that’s a pretty good sampling of things that came to mind. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a problem that sometimes it seems like the most important things in life are art and sex, but I don’t really think that that’s a cynical way too look at it at all, because sex is about relationships, and about connecting with other people, and art is about expression, and hopefully about communication, so they’re both really about the ways that we connect with other people, and I think that’s why I like using them as the two main themes of my work. Art is the way you take the things that are in your head and try to put them out into the world, and relationships are the way we try to let other people in. Maybe the fact that I’ve had more success with art than with relationships means that I’m better at expressing than receiving, or maybe it just means I’ve dated a bunch of dickheads.
Either way, I always like to remind myself that I can do better at art, and I think that no matter how good you get at something you should always strive to be better, and I think that, in the marginal success I’ve had with relationships, I just need to keep reminding myself that I can be better about letting people in. In these comics, trying to strike the balance between those things is the journey that most of my characters are hopefully on.
I’ll put up with a lot for a cute butt. If it comes to a choice between a cute butt or self respect and intelligent dating-decisions, I can’t say I’ll always choose the one I should.
Seeing Annie Hall was probably the first time I had seen a Woody Allen film, and for whatever reason I loved it, even though at the time I’d never had a serious relationship and I was too young to get a lot of the jokes. The mix of how real the characters emotions are, combined with the self-aware way he’s always poking fun at their neurosis and self-pity without invalidating those traits probably had a big influence on what I thought was funny, and obviously it’s had an influence on any number of writers besides me. Of course, Woody Allen didn’t totally invent that kind of self-deprecating humor, and the joke I mention in this comic is one that Allen tells in the movie and says is usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but he also points out it actually probably appeared in Freud before Groucho Marx used it, so I thought it would be a funny thing for me to quote, since it describes how I worry I can be about relationships sometimes but, like that sort of sense of humor, it’s obviously not something only I have felt since the joke goes back for over 100 years and people for all that time have found it meaningful.
I guess self-pity and self-loathing are in competition with one another for the most dominant motivating factor for a lot of autobiographical comics, but obviously it’s a little more complicated than that, because you have to find yourself pretty interesting to write comics about yourself. The redeeming quality, for me, anyway, is that I think the point of writing about yourself is to communicate with other people, and that hopefully they’ll see parts of your life experience that they can identify with. Really, that’s what most authors do, whether their work is explicitly autobiographical or not, you’re trying to find things in your life experience that are worth sharing with people. I think the reason that it’s fun to poke fun at the whole kind of self-pity thing is that, obviously, you’re gonna write about the parts of your life that aren’t perfect, because that’s where drama and stories come from. If you just wrote about how great your life was all the time, I think that would get insufferable much more quickly than writing a little bit about how, yeah, things can suck sometimes, because writing about certain things sucking sometimes is a long way from saying that everything sucks all the time, which I don’t believe that it does.
If anybody doesn’t know who Arctic Monkeys are, they’re a sort of pop rock band, not the greatest band in the whole world but I like listening to them. They’re extremely British, and you can hear the lead signer’s accent as he sings, and he’s also really cute, which is another reason I like listening to them of course. The joke here is just that the rabbit is having a bit of an obsession with British boys, so he’s moved from Patrick Wolf to Arctic Monkeys, and they’re good for the joke because they have lyrics, like the one I quoted in the comic, where they’ll use about a billion British-isms like, “daft,” and, “slag,” all in the space of a few lines, so I figured that people could get the rabbit’s British music obsession without having to necessarily know who the Arctic Monkeys are.
It’s supposed to be a bit of a mystery as to what exactly Prester’s painting there. The first thing we saw him painting was a while back, and in the book collection you finally get to see what it was. There’s a little bit of a payoff to his paintings in the book, but there’s actually even more of a story reason for them going forward, and they’ll come up again. I point this out now so that one day I can link to the older posts and say, “See, I totally had this epic stuff planned out all along!” and everybody’ll be suitably amazed :)
This is a portrait I did of the boy who was in the last few strips, but this portrait actually won’t be in the upcoming book because I did it after. I started talking to him about the comics I had done about us dating, and it came up that I hadn’t done a portrait of him like I had with a lot of the other guys I talked about dating in the book, so we decided to do one. I think I might actually use this in the next book, because I think comics about the day I drew it might be interesting. Part of the next book is probably going to be the experiences I’ve had reevaluating these past relationships from a greater distance, because they look a lot different to me than they did when I was actually still going out with the person.
I think in real life most of this conversation happened over Facebook chat, but I figured it would be better to draw it this way. We’d only gone out about three times, but I left it more ambiguous in the comics as part of this string of boys I had dated. In the collection being published it’s kind of the culmination of that part of the book.
As the comics go on, obviously the comics that are already out there are going to affect the comics I’m doing, especially since now when I sate somebody, they can see comics that I’ve done about dating. I think “It’s kinda amazing,” is broad enough that I wasn’t trying to reference the Boy From Santa Cruz when I said it, but I guess it’s flattering that this guy had read my comics closely enough that he remembered exactly what I had said in one of them.
I had a fun time at APE this weekend and at the premier party for my new book, so thanks to everybody that came out, bought a copy or talked to me about it. I had one guy go on an explanation about how he didn’t like the comics because he thought they were, in his words, “Too meta.” He read one of the strips and he didn’t like that the character in the comics was talking about the comics. The problem with that is that a lot of the comics are autobiographical, and I write comics, so it’s going to come into play. I don’t think he realized I was the person who had actually written the comics, though, and he read a total of one strip before coming to that conclusion, but that’s alright, actually, I’m aware that these comics aren’t going to appeal to everybody. They’re designed to appeal only to super awesome people, and not everybody is super awesome. Seriously, though, I always enjoy hearing what people think about the comics, because when I make them it’s so personal, and it’s just me and the comic, and so it’s still always a bit of a trip for me to hear about how they seem through somebody else’s eyes.
There will be more information soon about how to order the comic online, and you can request that your local comic shop orders it for you through Diamond. There will also be a new comic on Wednesday, so check back!
