Archive for ‘blog’
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Alright people, sorry for the delay, but I’m taking this week off of posting on my website, and I’ll resume next Monday. I’m writing things, and also have been having problems with my internet, and a few different reasons, and there’s a part of the next comic I’m going to be posting that’s a bit more complicated than usual, and I want to get it right. Hopefully it’ll make sense when things start going up.
I’m writing several things at once, and sometimes the way I write these things is out of order, as has probably been apparent on this website in the past. So, the comic that I want to post next and what I’m actually writing at the moment are two separate things, and I think it will be better for both if I just regroup for a few days and get further ahead on the work. Basically, I’m being a moody artist about all of this and trying to follow my inspiration as best as I can. There’s a plan to these things, though, and a reason that I post them in the order I do and why sometimes it makes sense to me to wait in between posts, so stick with it, and there’s a whole ton of new stuff coming up soon that I hope you’ll enjoy :)
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When I’ve been talking about the recent delusional babbling on Frank Miller’s website, I’ve been struggling to not use the word, “retarded.” I don’t know another word that quite captures the tone of his blithering, though, that quite captures the way he goes past saying stupid things and ignorant things into actually coming off as somebody who’s brain damaged. The problem with using that word is that there are perfectly nice mentally handicapped people out there who would be degraded by the comparison.
On every internet messgeboard that’s talking about it, and even on my own Facebook where I posted about it, you’ll always find a couple morons who say that Frank Miller was right. The mind boggling thing about that is that he didn’t even make any points that you could agree with, even if you wanted to. His ramblings kind of start out by calling the Occupy people spoiled and rapists and a few other random things that popped into Frank’s addled brain and all of which can be demonstrably disproved, and then he quickly veers into senile free association racist anger about terrorists. Or something. He can’t manage to hold a thought from one sentence to the next, he’s just kind of spouting off about things that he doesn’t like.
The thing is, that’s the mindset of people who think like that. You can’t argue with them or reason with them because they don’t really have a point to begin with. It’s just kinda stuff that makes them angry, and somehow it’s all tied together and they think it has something to do with iPhones. This is the problem I have debating a lot of issues that should be fundamentally obvious to people. There are not two sides of equal weight to the arguments over gay marriage, for example. There’s really simple basic logic on one side, backed by every reputable piece of scientific information we have on human sexuality and which you can’t argue with if you have even a basic child’s knowledge of civil rights or the way our government works, and then on the other side you have blithering idiots babbling about things that they think are icky, and if you try to bring the conversation back to a rational place, their response to that is that whatever they’re saying they’re saying because God told them so.
The other thing I’ve seen a couple places now is people saying that whether you agree with him or not, Frank’s brave to speak his mind, and they admire people who say what they think and don’t mince words. The problem with this argument is that what he’s saying is idiotic. If people think idiotic things, why would you admire them for being an idiot, just because they talked about being an idiot? The reason for Frank to keep his idiot thoughts to himself isn’t because of fear or because of pressure from some Liberal media insitution, the reason is because he’s an idiot. I actually think the First Amendment is important, and unlike Frank Miller I’m actually familiar with what it means. Nobody’s saying, or at least I’m not saying, that he shouldn’t have said these things, because now it’s better to know that he is, in fact, an idiot, rather than to have him present himself as a person that could pass basic literacy tests and then not know that he’s actually hiding the fact that he’s a seething moronic racist. Is it somehow brave to be an idiot and a racist, just because you’re willing to project these things about yourself?
Then there’s the issue that people keep bringing up, that you should separate an artist from their work. The artist’s personal life shouldn’t have any bearing on whether or not you enjoy their work. I actually agree with this in some cases to an extent, but the problem with Frank Miller is that this idiot part of him does inform most of the work. The thing I’ve seen a lot of people say in the last couple of days is that they’re embarrassed, because they used to like Frank Miller’s work. That’s how I feel about it, too.
When I heard a while back that he was writing something called, Holy Terror, Batman! I thought, oh wow, this could be great. It was so ridiculous, I thought, to be taking a play on Robin’s phrase from the campy Batman TV series and using it to apply to a piece written in response to 9/11, that I assumed Frank was making an epic statement about our reaction to 9/11. What I took from it was him poking fun at the adolescent notion of how we think superheroics can solve our problem, how ridiculous it is that all the social issues that led to 9/11 could be resolved with a punch to the jaw. I thought he was saying that this ridiculous cowboy attitude of how to respond to it was fundamentally childish, and I thought him evoking the capes and spandex and bright primary colors of the campy TV show to make that point might possibly be brilliant.
Then the book actually came out. It wasn’t called Holy Terror, Batman, anymore, it was just called Holy Terror. The Batman joke wasn’t there anymore, but the reference to the bizarre goofy TV show was. The stupidness of the whole thing was there, only Frank wasn’t kidding.
I actually event defended Frank Miller’s All Star Batman and Robin when it came out, because I thought it was hilarious. I thought the whole thing was a send-up. I thought Sin City, too, was meant to take the broad archetypes of Noir and push them out to their logical extremes, and I thought by making something that highlighted and extreme and ridiculous you could get at the emotional truths that had spawned these sorts of revenge fantasies to begin with. I said I liked these comics. This is embarrassing now.
Marv and Dwight punching shit in Sin City is actually how Frank Miller views the world. The terrifying part is when people take this sort of sad broken little boy view of the world and then try to apply it to politics and economics, without knowing anything about either. In Frank Miller’s case, it’s a sad broken little boy view through the eyes of a crotchety old man, so he’s mad about hippies and other stuff too. Oh, and he thinks the Occupy people are rapists. For no clear reason other than the fact that Frank Miller isn’t capable of writing anything without talking about rape.
So this view of how Frank Miller thinks the world should be fixed brings me to what I think should be one of the most offensive things he says, but for some reason my favorite part of it hasn’t been mentioned quite as much as the rest:
“Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.
And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently – must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh – out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.”
“This enemy of mine.” And then he goes on to tell the pond scum that they should join the military. Frank’s never been in the military, as far as I know, but in his senile old man brain he thinks he’s fighting this war. He thinks he’s some sort of beleaguered hero. How is he fighting, exactly? Maybe he’s actually planning to go out and kick some butt himself, since obviously he thinks the world is looking to him for solutions.
So watch out, Islamcites! Frank Miller is coming for ya, and he’s gonna kick butt! He’s gonna fly through a window with lots of shattered glass and he’s gonna be throwing ninja weapons he saw in a book somewhere but doesn’t know how to use. And all enemies of Frank will be blinded and rendered helpless by large splashes of white gouache that Frank has figured out he can spackle over a black background to create blood or rain effects instead of, you know, actually drawing stuff! And this being Frank Miller, when he comes crashing through that window he’ll doubtlessly have a very angry hooker in a corset with him, and her stilettos will be coming for your head.
My new book published by Northwest Press is going to be released this weekend, and in the upcoming months there should be lots of events and related things going on, and I plan to do readings and several conventions and all sorts of stuff like that to promote the book as best I can. The fastest way to be notified about things like that would probably be to either Like the Facebook page for my comics, or to follow me at twitter.com/bloodoftheland .
Coming up this weekend will be Alternative Press Expo, during which I’ll be at the Northwest Press table if you’d like to come meet me or see the book. APE is one of my favorite shows, and it’s always a lot of fun and a great way to meet people involved in comics, so if you’re in the Bay Area this weekend, I’d highly suggest you come. Saturday night, from 7 to 10 pm at Mission Comics and Art there will be a release party for my book with drinks, snacks, and all sorts of cool people, so come out to that, too, if you’re in the area, and it should be a lot of fun. The Facebook event page for the release party is here so you can get all the information about it.
I’ll be posting information soon about different ways of ordering the book and different places where you can buy it, and you can also tell your local comic shop to order copies for you through Diamond. I’m planning to go to Bent Con in December, and hopefully go down to Anaheim for Wondercon next year, so I’ll keep you all posted through this website and through twitter and etc. In the meantime, there are lots of comics coming up, so keep checking back Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for updates to the website. Yesterday afternoon I was having some trouble with the website, so that day’s post wasn’t made until later at night, but so far over the last few weeks the Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule has been pretty reliable. Thanks to everybody who’s been enjoying the comics through the website, and to everybody who’s commented or said really kind things to me about them. There’s a whole lot more coming up, so I hope people are excited to read it, and I hope all of you enjoy the book!
OK, no new page today afterall, unless I post it later in the evening. I’m working simultaneously on a few things, and doing bits of multiple pages together, so I don’t want to rush it and it turned out the page I hoped to post today isn’t done yet. Actually, I’m planning to go back and change things on some of the pages that have already been posted, but I’d be curious as to whether or not anybody would really even notice the changes. Either way, sorry nothing new for today, check back tomorrow, and thanks again to everybody that’s been following and enjoying the current storyline.
As to what else I’m working on, I’ve mentioned vaguely that I’m doing a book. It’s gonna be a collection of stuff, some of which has been on this website but a lot of which hasn’t, and will mainly comprise comics I’ve done and am doing around dating and sex topics. So, lots of pornography for everybody who wants it, and hopefully some actual emotion as well. But plenty of pornography. I’ve been talking with Zan Christensen at Northwest Press for a while now about the book, and I think it’s gonna be fantastic. Northwest Press, for those of you that don’t know, is a new-ish comics publisher that so far has an awesome track record including the Lambda-winning graphic novel Teleny and Camille by the awesome Jon Macy and a Glamazonia book by the awesome Justin Hall. The book is planned to be released toward the end of this year.
Speaking of things I said I’d do and haven’t done yet, I need to be sending Zan some scans of my comics. Hm. Will do shortly. I’ve also been doing a lot of work on organizing some of my older strips and planning out and writing what will go with them to make a book of the size that we’re talking about, and hopefully one that will be a great reading experience. One of the centerpieces of the book with be the Boy From Santa Cruz storyline that I was posting on here recently, and another will be this current Marching to “The City” storyline. I view the two as kind of companion pieces, because they’re both relationship stories, but told in extremely different ways.
I’m also gonna do a new series of comics for the beginning of the book that will explain in broad strokes a bit of my dating history, and maybe give new readers a bit of an understanding about where the comics in the book are coming from and how the rabbit feels about these things. It’ll also explain a bit the monkey character, which people who have been reading my comics will remember from a while back as the way I drew one of my ex-boyfriends. He’s gonna be coming back in the comics, as kind of an archetypal ex-boyfriend avatar for the rabbit to talk to. He’ll be good when I need someone to yell at.
I’ve also been working on versions of the cover, and I’m trying to get a friend of mine to pose in underwear again for me to draw him. We’ll see how that goes, but he’s hot so hopefully it’ll happen. Zan’s read my comics, and I’m very happy with how much he embraces the sex parts of them without misunderstanding it. I like doing so much sex stuff because, obviously, it’s fun to draw those things, but also because it seems wrong to me to shy away from something that’s an integral part of the lives and interests of the characters that I’m writing.
I think, and so far have been validated to a degree in thinking, that people who don’t happen to share my particular sexual interests will see past it and understand what I’m writing about at the core. I read a lot of R. Crumb, and I’m definitely not into Amazonian women with giant legs, but the specifics of the sex are a vehicle for the broader things that he’s writing about. To come back to Bill Watterson, as I seem to a lot, I remember when I was younger and obsessing over the Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary book, there’s a part in there where Watterson explains that, instead of having Calvin’s dad have a generic job, he made Calvin’s dad a patent attorney, because Watterson feels things are funnier when they’re specific. That’s one piece of writing advice that always stuck with me and is really true. You don’t have to be a patent attorney to empathize with Calvin’s dad, and you don’t have to be into tying up twinks to get it when the rabbit’s feeling that he can’t connect with someone. As usually happens when I draw Calvin and Hobbes comparisons, I’m not sure Watterson would approve of the exact content of the strips of mine I’m mentioning, but it’s done with love.
Anyway, so I’m working on a bunch of things, and there are a bunch of things coming up, so if you’re enjoying the comics stick with them, and I think people might really love this book that’s coming out soon.
At first after I saw Thor today I thought I really didn’t have much to say about it, and I don’t, really. It’s a decent enough movie, very pretty sometimes, Loki is kinda hot, that’s about it. As far as a silly kinda fun thing with a good balance of self-respect when it should take itself seriously, and when it should relax and have fun with the basic nature of what it is, it did alright.
I realized that the reason it’s kinda bothering me is the way it, and the recent and future stable of Marvel and DC movies, have been discussed that bothers me. It bothers me that when people see these things, they think that these are what comic books are. I mean, of course they’re from comic books, but how did we get to a situation where this is the representation of an entire medium? A lot of people watch these movies and then never go to comic books, because these movies don’t show them anything about what comics can be. Superheroes are fun, I like ‘em, and they could have a place in the comic book world if they were handled differently. But these are movies from comics books, I don’t like calling them “Comic Book Movies.”
I realized that the problem isn’t just the superhero genre, it’s the way that that genre has been handled and manhandled since, seemingly, time immemorial by the various publishers through the last several decades that have now, more or less, boiled down to the “Big Two.” I think the distinction that it’s important for us to make now is that Marvel and DC just really aren’t comic book publishers at all now, haven’t been for a long time. What they are is a couple of large corporations with baroque, tied up business obligations that compel them to maximize the profits that they can turn from a small stable of licensed “properties” which are sometimes actually used as, and at other times erroneously referred to as, “characters”.
Some of there characters are cool. I’m being honest here, I read Batman a lot, and I’ve always had a soft spot for Fantastic Four and Spider-man since I found them in liquor stores at around the age of 10. But think about it, man, is there any other medium in the world where the same “character” has been in continual– monthly, not occasional, and often between four and eight times a month– publication for 70 years? I mean, what the fuck is that? Genuine personal and artistic expression can and have been found with these licensed characters, but I’d say it happens a handful of times a decade, which would put the number of stories using these characters with a non-financial impetus at about, I dunno, some small part of a percent of the vast sea of junk that’s shoved out with ‘em. And in many of these cases, the comics they make with these characters aren’t even the real impetus so much as lunchboxes, T-shirts, whatever, action figures and, yeah, feature films.
And that still wouldn’t be such a big deal, if these two tiny, claustrophobic companies hadn’t managed to almost completely take over an entire medium. You go into most comic book stores, and they mostly, if not exclusively, carry books by these two publishers. This has happened for a variety of reasons, distribution considerations, and is sometimes the fault of the consumers, too, but can you imagine going into someplace called a “Movie Theater,” only all they played, 24/7 was Star Wars, and maybe Clone Wars episodes. Imagine, nobody calls this a Star Wars store, they just call it a Movie Theater. I have to think that anybody who really loved movies, or especially anybody who was interested in making them and saw film as an inspirational outlet for his creative expression, would be kind of fucking irritated at these novelty shops taking over.
And again, the thing isn’t just superheroes in general, or even the particular superheroes that are most popular, it’s the shortsightedness and, historically, frequent cowardice of these companies that’s the problem. I keep seeing the movie Thor being cited as risky of them, because he’s a “lesser known,” hero, or that the success of Thor is an exciting affirmation that they can dig deeper into their stable of established characters and still sell movie tickets. Wow, that’s exciting. Call me an elitist (And that’s been done) but I really don’t consider making a mega budget superhero movie that ties into a dozen other Avenger tie-in movies and is based on a character that’s been continually used to pump out popular merchandise and magazines for about 50 years like some great red-caped sausage factory, that just doesn’t exactly reek to me of cutting edge risk or avant-garde filmmaking. It is what it was, which was a fun summer movie, but, because character B has slightly less underroo exposure than character A, that the people on the business ends of these things look to this as their version of a risky or innovative endeavor? Jesus. And the fact that this signals to them that they can dig deeper into their stable of characters, by the way, does not signal that they have any interest in producing new or interesting characters or comic books, it signals the opposite: that they’re excited that they can get even more mileage of strip-mining the bitches they’ve already been riding for decades. That is not exciting to me.
What is exciting to me is the internet. As these people bitch and moan about the loss of print sales– while simultaneously of course refusing to do anything to make their printed comics any more accessible or interesting to a fanbase outside of the aging group of people they have who have already been reading these comics since they were in their teens or younger– they have of course ignored that the technological advances that might be making people loose interest in print are opening up an exponential number of new opportunities. They’re doing exactly what the music industry did, which is to bitch about what it’s loosing rather than making any real effort to see what they might gain. And if it fucks ‘em out of business, well I can say that might just be the best thing for comics ever, really. The internet is a great way to distribute and consume comics in traditional formats, and it’s also a great way to innovate and play with the artistry in ways that paper might never have allowed. Things like Body World, Chester 5000, and, hopefully at times, my own comics, are all things that previously never would have seen the light of day in the formats they seem to thrive best in. And while a lot of those have initially been available online for free, their later publication in print, and in some cases their ancillary merchandising sales, have proved that people are still perfectly willing to spend money on art and entertainment that they like, even as their preferred methods of consuming it may change. Things like Achewood and Penny Arcade have shown you can do pretty alright money-wise from webcomics. Bands like Pomplamoose, simultaneously, have shown that with, youtube and other digital distribution, you can make a living from music now without ever pressing CD’s.
And if the main distributors of these things are as timid and retrograde as they keep proving themselves to be, well, I like Batman, but I’m not gonna cry about DC fucking itself over. I think that with the internet, actually, comics are going to prove to be one of the real populist mediums. With media as prevalent as it has been in the last several decades, a large portion of the way that people think about the world and express themselves now contains a non-verbal visual element. To use that visual vocabulary for self-expression, film and video games and things like that are of course awesome, but the problem with those for me is that there’s so much money and so many people involved. With comics, if all you want is a pen and some paper, you can make some comics. Before what was standing in the way of those comics being shown to the world was the business interests of the companies that published them, and now that’s not the case. Comics seem to me like they’re rapidly becoming seen as an egalitarian way to tell stories you want without a budget, and to tell them how you want, and their limits as a vehicle of personal expression seem to me, well they actually almost don’t seem to have any. And that’s a really fucking good thing.
Oh, and speaking of comics, for anybody who’s been wondering where I’ve gone since I posted the most recent one of mine, I’ve been planning a lot of things for the upcoming comics, and I’m gonna post a new one on Monday, so check back then :)
Alright, sorry everybody, the post I was planning for today simply isn’t gonna be ready in time. Drawing-wise it’s much more detailed than some of the other strips and it’s just taking longer than I was hoping. I’ll post it tomorrow, and hopefully do another post on Friday so that there are still three this week, if not Friday, then Monday, but there will definitely be another post tomorrow, so check back. Thanks!
Gonna be trying to draw a lot later today and have a comic posted tomorrow. For right now, I’m trying to be on a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday posting schedule again, so I might post another Friday so that there are still three this week. I have so many comics partially written or outlined, I really want to be drawing as much as possible so that people can see them. It takes a lot longer to draw a comic than to write it sometimes, but I don’t script out too heavily because I feel that part of the writing should be in the drawing, especially when you’re writing and drawing the comics yourself, as opposed to writing for another illustrator or something like that. So it’s an interesting process that I’m going through right now, thinking about different aspects of a lot of different comics all at once. Anyway, if you want to be notified of new updates to the website and stuff like that, feel free to follow me on twitter.com/bloodoftheland .
I spent some of the afternoon today adding to the archives with some older comics and drawings that I’ve done that weren’t on the website before. The stuff that was posted today starts at this one here http://www.rickworley.com/2009/01/09/old-joke/ . With a lot of the older comics I’ve put on here, I feel kinda ambivalent toward them, but actually I suppose they aren’t that bad for what they are. The comics have evolved, and they’re pretty different from what I’m doing now, but actually I can see that it’s all sort of part of the same concept, which is to make all these comics together form some sort of massive autobiography, but also to have them form a whole where you’re able to follow along with the characters and get interested in their world. So, seeing the rabbit in a different mood from what he’s in now might make for something that’s worth reading, and some of the older comics can be pretty funny. I’m posting them roughly chronologically, both to keep the stuff on this website going roughly from older to newer, but also to form some sort of interesting reading order for people who browse it. With the older archive stuff that I added, I put most of the sketchbook comics and the illustrations toward the end, so you can flip through the comics without it all being mixed together. Eventually I might rearrange the order of a lot of the posts on this website, but for now they kinda seem to make sense. Enjoy :)
Planning to post a new strip tomorrow, I’m trying to finish up several tonight, so we’ll see how it goes. I already have some material started or done besides what I’m working on today, but thing thing is, like I’ve mentioned a bit on here before, that I’ve been writing and drawing out of the order in which some of these should probably be read, so the order in which they’re posted is something I’m still working on. If anybody’s curious about finding out what’s going on with these comics and being updated regularly, there’s a Facebook fan page for them that you can find, by clicking here , and you can also follow me on twitter, where I usually mention it when I’ve posted a new comic.
I kinda like the way that 2010 kicked my ass.
The year was lead off by a pair of relationships with guys that were just either big mistakes or manifestations of some sort of masochistic pathology of which I’m not aware. Somehow with the first one I was able to convince myself that there was some sort of connection that would enable us to have a mature friendship even after his decisions regarding taking himself off his meds to see what his personality “really was like” derailed things enough that I knew we couldn’t really have any sort of lasting relationship. I decided to move in with him for a while, ostensibly to save money so that I could find a better apartment to live in, and somehow disregarded the fact that he was in some elaborate way hoping that us living together would rekindle the demolished scrapheap that was left of the brief few months when we got along in a boyfriends sorta way. Simultaneous to him somehow hoping that the magic would start by us being up in one another’s faces all the time when we were already having a difficult time getting along was the fact that he couldn’t really handle anybody in his life, much less his living space, for any kind of extended period of time before little alarm bells would start to sound, echoing down the corridors of the weird little alternate reality that existed in his head and guided to shrill crescendos and panic attacks by whatever sort of undiagnosed borderline personality disorder that he held onto as an excuse and nursed like a sparrow whose wing had been broken so that his sense of altruistic martyrdom could be boosted as he fed it from a bottle. Needless to say, he didn’t react well when I was living with him and going out to see the second one of these boyfriend mishaps.
So, I had to find someplace in which to live on very short notice, which led to a tumultuous middle of the year, which was the backdrop for the fits and starts of the sad little attempt at connection that ended up being my relationship with the boy from Santa Cruz, which is getting chronicled in these comics. Then my Grandma died.
I had a grandparent die before, but it was a grandfather to whom I wasn’t attached. The grandma that died last year was, consistently throughout my childhood, probably my favorite relative. I was probably her favorite grandchild, too, and the oldest, and she showed it pretty shamelessly sometimes, but she was also obsessively devoted to all of her grandchildren. I was living with her and my dad a few years ago when she had a series of strokes at the way-too-young age of 60, and ended up in a nursing home. She was partially immobile on one side, couldn’t walk, had trouble eating, and the health problems piled up on one another just in a fucked up cruel way until there wasn’t much to do about getting better. I saw her a decent amount when she was in a nursing home down in Southern California and I hadn’t yet moved to where I am now, but then she was moved to Colorado, because a lot of her side of the family is out there, a year or two before I moved up here.
I didn’t see her for a few years when she was up there and carried a lot of guilt about it, but it never was very feasible and those are the types of things that get delayed. And anyway, what else is there to do in Colorado, anyway? When I went there last year, I moved the location on my OKCupid profile to see if I could meet anybody with whom I could kill some time, and man, checking out gay dudes on a Pueblo Colorado-based OKCupid account is, well, probably something that could fill a blog of its own. But I did go out there last year, because my Dad was able to buy me a plane ticket. When I showed up, my Grandma was in one of her many downward spirals, and it was of course pretty depressing to be in a nursing home at all. There was a woman who spent most of the time in a wheelchair near the outside of my Grandma’s room asking most people who passed whether they had come for her. Whether she was wondering if you were family on a visit, a nurse with medication, or who knows what else was unclear, she just wanted to know if anybody was there for her.
Which wasn’t anything too strange to see in a nursing home, of course, and I’ve seen enough nursing homes to realize that. When I was little, my Grandma actually worked as a nurse in one, and I still have a vivid memory of her coming home from work worn out one day and telling me that when she was old, whatever happened, she didn’t ever want to be in one of those places. The place where she was staying in Colorado actually wasn’t a bad nursing home, there was lots of staff and they seemed attentive and respectful, the rooms and halls were clean and didn’t smell too much like putrefaction (More like putrefaction masked with Lysol), and there were some things for the residents to do, paint, whatever. Lots of TVs. So it was a nursing home that was actually doing about as well as such a place can do, and yet you still have the old woman sitting in the hallways asking if you’re there for her, and dozens of others who are actually much worse off. There’s something about the collision between pragmatism and insanity that’s more disturbing than failure and resignation, in the case of which there’s a clear problem presented with possible solutions.
I spent a lot of time sitting with my Grandma. I was, afterall, in Pueblo Colorado, so I’m not gonna pass myself off as heroic for doing that since the other alternatives to spend time on were Walmart, Target, and some Starbucks. Then my Grandma was hospitalized for the god-knows-how-many-th time, and I spent a lot of time sitting near her bed in the hospital. Her health continued to worsen, and she had difficulty feeding herself and her awareness of what was happening to her seemed to get continually more limited. She could barely pick things up, definitely couldn’t turn herself over, but when I first arrived she had hugged me so hard that I was surprised, and when it was my last night in Colorado before I had to catch a morning plane back to San Francisco and I said goodbye to her, she hugged me so hard that I could barely get out of her arms. I felt in my stomach that I knew what she was saying.
When I got back to San Francisco, a few days afterward my Dad called to say she had died. Her misery in the place where she had been staying was so obvious to me that the guilt I felt was that maybe she had been hanging on for the last several years so that she could say goodbye to me before it happened. Which is profoundly egocentric, of course, but still. Somehow all of that gave me an odd mood, made me preoccupied with memories of my childhood, and combined with the fact that, on returning, I was staying with friends until I finally found another apartment and I now had to do it even more quickly than in my other bizarre living situation changes, I didn’t quite know what to make of the state my life was in. I found an apartment I liked, though, and managed to move in, and, for a brief moment, things were looking really good.
Then I got hit by a car. I was walking across a crosswalk in broad daylight at around 9 in the morning, a few blocks from the apartment to which I had just moved, and I woke up in an ambulance and also in all sorts of restraints and braces. I guess it was apparently a hit and run, nobody came forward to say that they had seen the accident, and I was seen having a seizure in the middle of the street by a bus driver. I was in and out of consciousness for most of the day, leaving me with dramatic flashes of memory of things like them cutting my clothing off of me, or being moved from one gurney to another and seeing how my previous pillow had practically been soaked through with blood from my head, or waking up in a hallway somewhere and immediately having to grab the first nurse that passed and asking her for something in which to vomit, which she got me just barely fast enough so that everything I had eaten that morning didn’t get all over the floor. Looking back, to be honest, that all seems kinda cool and fascinating. I had an adorably cute doctor who didn’t look over 27 and seemed extremely kind. I went back and forth on hoping that he had been there when they cut off my clothes, or hoping that he hadn’t because I’m sure I probably wasn’t looking my best. Then again, maybe he’s into neck braces and blood-covered foreheads. Maybe that’s why he became a doctor, right? I can hope, anyway. He was awfully cute.
So, it turned out that I had some pretty severe head trauma and a couple hemorrhages going on in places around my brain that usually aren’t supposed to be saturated with blood, or so medical science tells us. What overcame me, though, was astonished relief that no other damage had been done. I was having a really hard time focusing, and for the first couple of days it was hard to stand up without the whole room spinning and me reaching for something to hold onto. None of it was very dignified, but with it came a clarity as I realized that what I was really afraid of was that something would be wrong with my hands or arms. I realized, in the hospital, that my greatest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to draw. I guess maybe sometimes it takes you being run over by a car to realize that some of the things you get so worked up over in life aren’t really worth the amount of anxiety that you spend on them, and to somehow focus you. Or maybe I’m one of the few that needs to be hit by a car to slow down their whining, but I’m hoping that that’s endearing or something. I went to a post-trauma therapist who was very curious to know if I was having any nightmares about the accident, or if I was having anxiety, depression, or thoughts of revenge. He seemed slightly confused when I told him the whole thing had put me in a better mood, but he also seemed to understand what I was getting at.
A year or two ago I called my Grandma in Colorado and talked to her for a little while about how things were going. I didn’t call her all that often, because to be honest it was really difficult to speak to her on the phone. She had trouble speaking due to all the billions of medical complications, and it just wasn’t very easy to communicate over the phone. I think the conversation I’m remembering might be the first one I had had with her after moving to San Francisco, and she asked what I was doing up here. I told her I was trying to be an artist, and that I was doing comics. When I said that, on the other end of the line she started to cry, and said, “That’s what you always wanted to do.”
I guess it might be. I wasn’t sure of it until later, and I guess somehow she seemed to know that about me before I did. I went on a detour toward the end of High School and into my early twenties where I decided that I wanted to write more than draw, and I worked on a novel and some stuff like that. I still like writing prose, but for some reason I struggled with that fucking novel. Around five years ago, for some reason, I started drawing this little rabbit, and I originally drew him crouched down on his haunches. I knew that there was some part of me that still wanted to draw, and I thought that this little bunny, crouched down, could be a kind of logo or symbol for my work, like early Keith Haring graffiti babies. Quickly, though, for reasons all his own, the rabbit started to stand up, and I started putting word balloons next to his head, and as he started to develop an attitude and sass and often say the things that I wanted to say, I realized that the rabbit was just me.
When I was young, I always had a bit of an obsession with comics that I think probably started with newspaper strips and then, around the age of ten or so, migrated to Superheroes. I liked Superheroes, I think, because I originally wasn’t allowed to read them. My Mom used to be really protective about the things that I did and didn’t see, and she originally decided that Superheroes were too violent. When we were house hunting one day, I think it was 1991, trying to move from Garden Grove to Riverside, we stopped at a drug store and my Mom told me I could pick out a magazine for being well behaved. I wanted a comic, and I got Archie. Somehow, though, Archie wasn’t scratching whatever itch it was that I had. I nagged her until a couple of days later, also in a drug store, she relented and let me get a comic that wasn’t Archie. I settled on Fantastic Four, because that month they were having a 30th anniversary issue, and that comic was the biggest. It was number 358, with the die-cut cover, all 90′s comics style, and it still makes me smile to look at it.
That led to a total obsession, first with Fantastic Four, and then with Spider-man, and so on, and really I was just excited to get my hands on anything that was a comic. Couldn’t really explain why, but there’s something about you at that age that’s just malleable, and the right little bit of the world sears itself in your brain. My Grandma used to take me to the comic book store on a lot of Wednesdays, because it seemed really important to me what was going to happen next with the various Spider-man clones that were running around, or to sometimes get an issue of X-Men and try to work out just what the hell was going on with the huge Soap Opera cast of characters. The difficulty of actually finding a cohesive narrative in any of these things that accomplished any purpose other than appealing to the continuity fetish of men who were now in their 30′s or 40′s but still reading things that were, at that time, very comfortably written on a level easily readable by my 10 year old brain, that should have alerted me that there was something not quite fresh about all this Superhero business. Looking back, what really excited me was the form of comics itself. I just didn’t have access to too many other types of comic book stories. Just pictures and words, adventures, you could do almost anything on that page.
When it was announced that Superman was gonna die, I knew this was the big time. I was so excited to read the story, even though I didn’t really read Superman, that I was furious that Mom wouldn’t let me skip school that Wednesday to go nab all that polybagged glory. To anybody who was reading that last paragraph and protesting to themselves about how much Superhero comics have changed, I clear my throat subtly because it hasn’t escaped me and it shouldn’t escape you that today is in fact the day on which there’s a polybagged issue of the Fantastic Three being released. Will it have a die-cut cover with a hologram? Well, gee whiz, better run out and spend the $5.99 or whatever the hell they’re charging for a single spandex fetish magazine these days and find out. When Superman died, though, I was about 11, so this was a big deal. Since I wasn’t able to skip school to get it and was absolutely panic stricken that it would be all sold out forever by the time that I got out of school- I was an 11 year old, not an economist- my Grandma actually went and waited in line at the comic shop I liked to get me one. Now, that’s a cool Grandma.
When I finally realized that Superman actually was gonna come back from the dead, something in my young mind was shaken. I’m not sure I had any revelations as such about the permanence of death, but something about the cheapness of killing a character for publicity and then just bringing him back when sales petered out again made me have some vague pre-adolescent concept of the cheapness of certain things. It made me realize, I think, that not everything that went around telling you it was great was. I think, in some roundabout way, that has something to do with what 2010 did to me. Sometimes, we attach a lot of importance to things because of their immediate effect on us, but really, based now on personal experience, maybe getting a convenient, non-fatal hit by a car situation might be one solution for that.
