A Waste of Time

To celebrate one year of Trump making America great again, I wanted to do an homage to the work of the great conservative painter Jon McNaughton who, his website will inform you, is “America’s Painter.” I’m calling this painting “Very Fine People.” I suppose some things such as Trump wearing the Constitution as a diaper might strike some as a bit heavy handed, but I was hoping to emulate Mr. McNaughton’s bold vision of symbolism that will make those with an elementary school level of literacy feel included in the political process.

I will say that it’s fun to draw in this style. The anatomy of my human characters got pulled in a more realistic direction over time, partly because I wanted to draw sex stuff, and also because part of the original high concept of A Waste of Time was that the environments and human characters would look fairly realistic, and the cartoon characters would stand out from that world.

But it’s kind of a relief to draw more cartoony people. For one thing, it’s nice that they’re roughly two heads tall… Trying to draw people with realistic proportions in a horizontal comic strip format creates all kinds of problems and due to their height it’s hard to avoid ending up with rows of talking heads. This is of course one of the reasons a lot of classic comics characters have these sorts of dimensions. Obviously, I was looking at some Peanuts strips to get ideas about how to draw child versions of Steven Bannon and Donald Trump. In some panels, Milo Yiannopoulos’ dog body is sort of inspired by early drawings of Snoopy, before he developed the more famous look he has now. I didn’t just want to do the strip in “Peanuts style” because I usually find it annoying when people try to do that or draw something in “Calvin and Hobbes style” or whatever… Homage is one thing, a quotation or a parody is one thing, but I don’t like Schulz’s or Watterson’s style used as a brand. It’s their voice, their handwriting. But I didn’t want to hide that I was obviously using some Peanuts inspiration, so there are lots of details that are nods to different poses and things Schulz did.

When you do things like that, it makes you appreciate how great what he did is. In some ways, it can be a very freeing and quick way to draw… I love doing the fingers that are just like little marshmallows and so you can do the poses without drawing every detail of the hand. But it’s not simpler, there’s so much thought that goes into the minimalism that he developed. To have it very simple and drawn quickly with a fast, free line, but to also capture everything that you need to sell the joke and the emotion of the scene is amazing, so when I’m doing little things that I saw in one of his drawings, I like to acknowledge where that came from.

The faces of the characters are a little bit more in my own style and a little bit more realistic than a Peanuts character, so it looks kind of grotesque to have this somewhat realistic head grafted onto a tiny cartoon body, which I thought was entertaining and fun to look at.

I’ve changed my mind about what i’m going to post Monday… It’s been too long since I’ve updated my story “Monday,” and so I think I’m going to start posting the next chapter of that. Maybe with a blog explaining why it ended up going on hiatus for a while… Either way, I’m excited to finally start posting chapter four! And then I’ll probably post “My Troubles With Twinks” afterward, before I start posting chapter five. Or maybe I’ll just keep going through chapters five and six (Six is the final chapter of “Monday”). I finished a detailed script for the rest of “Monday” last year, and once I get to a certain point with something where I basically know the form and what’s going to happen, the rest is a lot of labor and the initial creative spark has passed, my mind immediately moves on to the next thing, rather than finishing the thing I’ve started. So, rather than finishing “Monday” after I had it all worked out and scripted, I of course started about ten other projects and short stories and have been putting them up here and there. “My Troubles With Twinks” is another one of these, but it’s turning out to be fairly long, and I started thinking that I didn’t want to delay getting back to “Monday” for another few months… I just need to finish the fucking thing. Or at least another chapter, so we can have a new one to put out. So, I think that’s the plan… “Monday” on Monday. See you then!

Alright, a little more porn before I get into posting my next story, “My Troubles With Twinks,” which I think will begin next Monday.

The gentleman in today’s illustration is Kyle Ross, another favorite of mine. I was hung up on drawing Joey Mills for a while, and I thought I should expand it to include some of my other favorite porn actors.

This drawing is actually one that I started years ago, back before I met that boyfriend I wasted two years of my life on. I penciled this drawing way back when, and I never got around to finishing it for the same reason I did very little sexual art when I was with him, which is that he would throw ridiculous little tantrums and say I was hurting his feelings if I drew a guy other than him. He never tried to forbid me from doing it, he just made it clear from repeated example that, if I did a drawing like this, I would spend the next day dealing with him pouting until he finally told me what he was upset about, and then another day after that massaging his ego until he started to act like an adult again.

I have no idea why I put up with that, except that it began gradually. After our first date and before our second, he read my first book, so he knew perfectly well what my art was like, and he told me he loved it. Then he started gradually to reveal the crazy part of himself, by which time we were too entwined for me to run for the hills, which is what I should have done after the first date.

Never again! So, there’s something liberating about doing this drawing and having people tell me they like it, rather than having to deal with all that ridiculous nonsense instead. I didn’t finish it from the original pencils, because they’re old and I think my drawing has come a long way since then. Actually, I didn’t even find them, I just started over from scratch, so maybe I’ll look for them and compare the two, that might be interesting.

And we’ve reached the end of my short story “Joey Mills Gets Fucked”. Check back Monday for a new strip!