Archive for August, 2011
6 items.
The follow-up to the strip I posted on Monday. Can’t be a rockstar without the groupies.
8Comment
There are going to be comics coming up about how recently there have been some awkward moments on dates for me, because if somebody wants to read my comics they can already know a whole lot about me before I know anything about them. On the other hand, it’s a big time saver, and there are some things I won’t have to explain, because they’ve already read my explanation in comics form. I had a boy recently discover me through my comics and send me naked pictures of himself, and he already knew that I was into glasses, what sort of underwear I like guys in, what sort of poses I think are hot to draw guys in, and etc., so there you go. If that’s what having fans is like, I can totally live with having fans.
When I started doing these comics a few years ago, a lot of times I’d draw the rabbit on a standup stage in front of a microphone making jokes. I think it was my way of kind of poking fun at the strip format, because with short comic strips, there’s this rhythm built in where you only have your few panels, and at the end people are expecting a joke or a payoff. What I usually did in those old standup strips was use them to have the rabbit say something really depressing, or something that wasn’t a joke, but deliver it like he was doing standup.
People seemed to like those standup strips when I did them, so I figured since I hadn’t done one for a while I should do a new one for my book. To stay true to the format, I figured I’d have him saying some of the most depressing things possible, and then end with something that, depending on your opinion, could be even more depressing, and use the standup format to let people question just how much I’m joking or not.
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything with being cheered up by pornography. I don’t really trust people who don’t watch pornography. I think people who say they don’t watch pornography are either lying, or there’s something wrong with their brains.
This is another comic that sort of exists in two versions, although the first version I did I never finished. I started writing this the first time a while before I moved to San Francisco, and part of the idea of it was whether or not I should keep the roses or mementos of ex boyfriends like that with me, or whether it was better to get rid of them. Obviously since now years later I still had the roses to draw the comic from, I decided to keep them. The line in the comic that mostly stayed the same was “Even dead roses have their own beauty,” because I think that was me trying to get at whether it’s counterproductive to dwell or your past, or whether there’s actually a good aspect to trying to fit together all your experiences into something cohesive, which is something I spend a lot of time doing with these comics. I thought I should finish this comic now because it fit nicely with the themes of the comics I’m including in my book collection, especially the whole thing in the robot story about the robots giving flowers to each other.
I already did a version of this joke back a while ago, and I wanted to include it in my book because it seemed like a good little introductory note in case people didn’t know yet what it was that the rabbit likes. It’s good to be upfront and clear about those sorts of things. The older version of the joke, though, was from 2009 or thereabouts and it just didn’t fit with the newer drawings in the book, so I redrew it.
Sorry to disappear for a while again there, but readers of these comics have probably known I’m prone to do that. It’s actually a deliberate strategy to keep up my crazy artist mystique. That, or laziness.
The reason for this latest absence, though, is that I’ve been drawing almost nonstop to complete new strips for my upcoming print collection published by Northwest Press . I’ve done a huge number of strips and drawings that currently aren’t on the website yet, and so I’m gonna start posting a bunch of those in something resembling a regular Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule, so since I already have all these comics and things ready to go, expect a whole lot of upcoming updates in the next few months. Some of these comics are really beautiful and I’m really proud of them, and I’ve probably been drawing more over the last few months than ever before in my life.
Of course, the comics took longer than I hoped, but actually I think I was still working pretty damn fast. It’s just that there were a lot of things I wanted to do. The book is going to include the Boy From Santa Cruz storyline, Marching to “The City,” a handful of other previously posted strips from the last year or so, and then a good chunk of the rest of it is all things that I’ve drawn over the last few months. So, a ton of good stuff. This strip I’m posting right now is the last for the moment in the storyline about my rabbit being in love with Patrick Wolf, and then on Monday I’ll start posting more new things, and see how long I can stick to that Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule.
