Archive for October, 2011
14 items.
I’m debating with myself how much exactly I should talk about my intentions with some of these comics, and how much I should leave it open to interpretation. I think the best thing to do might be to point out some of the connections and things I was trying to do, but maybe not spell out an exact interpretation of them, since there is meant to be more than one way to take them.
The use of a song here is meant to be an echo to the comic where the rabbit is listening to Arctic Monkeys, among other things, and actually is setup for a much bigger story I’m planning to do in the future. I used Andrew Bird because that actually is the album that I was talking about with this particular ex in the conversation that this comic is about. The idea is that you can take it a number of different ways, because this conversation is pretty verbatim to an actual conversation I had, but its placement in the story in the book is meant to give it different resonances and compare it to other situations. More of this will become apparent as things go on, but the characters can all represent several things. In their own universe, the characters have their stories and you don’t need to know exactly what is autobiographical for you to put it together. On the other hand, there are games going on that I think lend a lot to what I’m trying to say with the comics once you read enough for the games to become a little more obvious.
The ex-boyfriend that the monkey character is based on is also the same ex that the robot with glasses in the Rickets story Marching to “The City” is based on. The idea being that one of the main intentions of Rickets is that he represents a different side of my own personality, which is kind of a little joke because obviously in one sense the comics where the rabbit is talking to him are really just me talking to myself, since he doesn’t exist. So, Rickets and the rabbit have a lot of the same story, and I’m sure some people have noticed that the robot’s name is only a few letters off from mine. Rickets handles things a little bit differently, he’s supposed to be the more cold and logical side of me, which is one reason I made him a robot, but he’s also a broken robot, he’s destroyed his memory chip, and part of the rational for that is that I don’t think it’s in our makeup to react calmly and rationally to everything, that’s not how people are, it’s not a perfect reaction, it’s a broken reaction.
The ex that features into these stories, the thing with him is that what role he represents in the story of my life is based largely on how I choose to view him. At the time, I was crushed over the breakup, but looking back, I can’t be entirely sure why. What I thought I was loosing might have actually been my idealized version of him that existed in my head, rather than what I was actually losing which, really, was in some instances kind of a douchebag. Rickets destroyed his memory chip, so in the kind of fantasy flashback version of the relationship that I told with him, it was all very beautiful and romantic with the reasons for the conflict never really explained. I didn’t destroy my memory chip, though, so things got more complicated for me. I did actually see the guy again several times, this comic being an example of one of those times, and he was always eager to be affectionate and communicative when it served the purpose of stoking his ego or assuaging his loneliness.
He was usually seeing a new guy or two, but when he needed attention he’d look me up and I, being an idiot, was there. He knew how torn up I was about the breakup, and he’d say things like what he says in the comic above and then breeze back out of my life without any apparent awareness that his actions might have consequences. He’d come over, and he’d say he missed me, and we’d have sex, and then his phone would vibrate and he’d get guilty and suddenly less interested in sex and when I pressed him he’d eventually explain that he was getting texted by some guy he was seeing. He broke up with me a few weeks before my birthday, and I didn’t have any birthday plans other than spending the evening with him, because I had planned to see my other friends on days before or after my birthday since he had issues with almost all of my friends and he didn’t like seeing any of them, and most of them didn’t really like him. Maybe this should have told me something. If I had a male friend, he’d be obsessed about me cheating on him with the guy, and in the case of my female friends, he just couldn’t really seem to get along with them. So, when we broke up this ex made a big display about how we were still supposed to be friends, I was still so important to him, and all that, and so I asked about my birthday and he said, no, no, of course he’d still spend it with me, so I didn’t make plans with anybody else. On my birthday he showed up pretty early in the evening, we had dinner, and then suddenly he said he really had to be going. Turns out, he had made a date. I was back at my apartment by around 7 in the evening with nothing else to do. I ate cake my sister had brought me.
So, douchebag. Yet, for whatever reason there was this emotional connection, and it wasn’t completely one-sided, because however fucked up it was what passed for showing affection for him, he still did manage to continually show up back in my life. But in writing about this, I can capture bits and pieces of it, or certain events from certain perspectives, but I can’t do every subtlety and everything that passed between us, so I do bits of it from one point of view, bits of it from another, and you can add up the bits, but I think one of the great benefits of doing these short stories or strips is that you can also take them on their own without the context of every other strip, and the individual pieces can be observations about relationships that can be applied to relationships that weren’t exactly like that one. I like this strip, because at the end the question posed is kind of how do you respond to the things the monkey character said? There’s a bit more to it in the follow-up strip I’ll post next, but I think it’s a good question to ask without necessarily spelling out an answer, because I didn’t know exactly how to respond to it then, and I don’t know exactly how I would respond to it now. You can take the cute robot story part of the story, or you can take it with the other parts. the relationship had some things in common with a cute kind of fairy tale relationship, and it had some things in common with a situation that could constitute something I would consider at the very least codependent and dysfunctional.
Anyway, that’s probably enough explanation for this particular strip, I’m gonna continue these thoughts with the strip posted on Wednesday.
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I actually drew this one a pretty long time ago, over a year ago, actually, but I realized that it could be part of something bigger with the rabbit character dealing with the monkey character again, so I didn’t post it. In the book, I decided to use it as part of a little series of comics with the rabbit talking to the monkey after I’ve had all these comics with him mulling over his relationships after the dating strips in the book. There’s gonna be more stuff with the monkey going forward, and more stuff I’ve done dealing with that same relationship from different perspectives. I think something the comics in the book do a good job of, collectively, is sort of establishing the main characters so far, and how they currently relate to one another, and now that I’ve done this setup, I plan to take them on much more epic adventures, and also to reveal a lot more about their pasts.
I think this strip is a pretty good analogy for being restless in a relationship. There are a few other things going on, like the sun which is meant to tie into the Marching to “The City” storyline and things like that. If you’ve read the older comics, you’ll know that the rabbit used to date the monkey character, and that’s a relationship in my life that’s been referenced in a lot of different ways, so the ways that these storylines tell stories from my life from different viewpoints and in different styles will hopefully be something that’s more apparent as it goes on and makes more sense as more of the characters’ histories are shown.
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.
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.
