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Hey, everybody! A lot’s been going on, so I figured I’d do a brief blog to encapsulate some of it.
My book’s been out for a bit over a month now, and I want to thank everybody who’s read it and say I’ve been amazed by some of the comments it’s received. Some people have had a really personal reaction to it, or just been incredibly kind about how much they liked it, and that’s been really gratifying to hear. I really love hearing people’s reactions and feedback on it. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had been getting harsh reactions, but everybody who’s talked to me about it has been so nice, so it’s great ;)
There have also been some new reviews of the book, again all really kind, and here are links to a couple:
A review of my book in the Bay Area Reporter
A capsule review of my book in this magazine
There are, of course, links to several ways to buy the book on the store page of this website .
For anybody that’s enjoyed the book, stick with this website, because since I finished the content that appears in the book I’ve been writing a shit ton of new stuff, and I’m really excited about it. There are a lot of things that have been in my head for a really long time that are going to start getting posted soon, and a lot of new things, too. Some of them I wish I could start talking about, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
I also had a great time this last weekend at Bent-Con , despite the fact that I started feeling sick and losing my voice right before I was supposed to speak on two panels. So, people got to hear my hoarsely rasping about my comics, which I’m sure must have been enjoyable. If you tried to talk to me and I wasn’t saying much, that was probably part of the reason, so don’t take it personally. We also premiered the first A Waste of Time t-shirt, with the phrase, “Happiness is a Boy Who Swallows,” on it, and people seemed to really like it. I mean, that’s pretty much a universal truth, so who wouldn’t like a t-shirt saying it? And I met some really awesome people, including the great Marc Andreyko, who was just really nice and a lot of fun to talk to. I also met, again- We met before, but this was the first time we talked much- Alex Woolfson, who writes, among other things, the comic Artifice , which is really prettily illustrated by Winona Nelson and tells a smart, tasteful sci-fi boy-on-humanoid robot porn story. If there’s something to not like about smart, tasteful sci-fi boy-on-humanoid robot porn stories, I haven’t figured out what it is. Well, maybe I’d prefer it to be a little bit less tasteful and more hardcore, but as it is it’s got a cute, cheerful vibe that makes you smile.
Also coming up this weekend is the opening for a show at the Cartoon Art Museum in which I have a piece. The show’s got a great lineup of amazing cartoonists, and I’m proud to be in it, so you should all come if you can and check it out. Here’s the Facebook page for the event , and here’s the press release:
Small Press Spotlight on LGBTQ Cartoonists
Cartoon Art Museum Exhibition: December 10, 2011 – March 4, 2012
Opening Reception Saturday, December 17, 2011, 5:30-7:30pm
SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Beginning on December 10, 2011, the Cartoon Art Museum’s ongoing Small Press Spotlight will feature the art of ten Bay Area LGBTQ cartoonists.
This installment of the Cartoon Art Museum’s Small Press Spotlight has been curated by the students of the Engage: Queer Comics Project class at the California College of the Arts. The exhibit will feature original and printed art from ten Bay Area artists, showcasing the remarkable world of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) comics from the last four decades.
A film composed of interviews of major figures in queer cartooning conducted by the students over the course of two semesters will also be on display, as well as copies of Quilt Bag, a zine of original material created by the students themselves.
Featured creators in this exhibit include Burton Clarke (Gay Comix), Jaime Cortez (Sexile), Ed Luce (Wuvable Oaf), Jon Macy (Teleny and Camille), MariNaomi (Kiss and Tell), Trina Robbins (Wimmen’s Comix), Joey Alison Sayers (Just So You Know), Christine Smith (The Princess), Mary Wings (Come Out Comix), and Rick Worley (A Waste of Time).
An opening reception will be held is on Saturday, December 17th from 5:30-7:30pm at the Cartoon Art Museum, hosted by the class’ teacherJustin Hall with comics-inspired drag performances by the uncanny Sue Casa, Trangela Lansbury, Karma Zabetch, and other special guests. This reception will be free and open to the public.
About the Small Press Spotlight:
San Francisco has been a hotbed of innovative, groundbreaking comic art since the late 1800s with the advent of the modern comic strip. In the1960s, the Bay Area gained further notoriety when the underground comix movement launched from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Today, some of the biggest names in alternative and small-press comics hail from the Bay Area, and the Cartoon Art Museum’s Small Press Spotlight focuses on the works of these talented individuals.
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Cartoon Art Museum • 655 Mission Street • San Francisco, CA 94105 • 415-CAR-TOON • www.cartoonart.org
Hours: Tues. – Sun. 11:00 – 5:00, Closed Monday
General Admission: $7.00 • Student/Senior: $5.00 • Children 6-12: $3.00 • Members & Children under 6: Free
Cartoon Art Museum • 655 Mission Street • San Francisco, CA 94105 • 415-CAR-TOON • www.cartoonart.org
Hours: Tues. – Sun. 11:00 – 5:00, Closed Monday
General Admission: $7.00 • Student/Senior: $5.00 • Children 6-12: $3.00 • Members & Children under 6: Free
The Cartoon Art Museum is a tax-exempt, non-profit, educational organization dedicated to the collection,
preservation, study and exhibition of original cartoon art in all forms.
Sounds awesome, right?
People around the Bay Area should also check out this really good rundown of the San Francisco comics scene written by Gabby Gamboa and posted on The Comics Journal website ! It hits on a lot of the cool things that have been going on up here and mentions some of my favorite comics shops in the area. It also mentions me (If only to say that I was at an event that the author didn’t attend) so there’s that :P
One last reminder: I’m going to be sticking to the Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule for posts to this website for a while, but as I work on various different things there have also been drawings and bits of different things that I’ve been posting to my tumblr , so if you’re curious, check that out. You can also follow me at twitter.com/bloodoftheland , and on the Facebook page for A Waste of Time for more updates and stuff.
New comic to be posted tomorrow, Wednesday, and next week I’m gonna post a few Christmas-themed comics, so check back!
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.
I think I need to draw my rabbit in his hoodie more, since it’s awfully adorable.
If you’re near the Bay Area, don’t forget that this weekend is Alternative Press Expo, at which I’ll be selling my newly released book, and tomorrow night from 7 to 10 pm is the release party for my book at Mission Comics and Art, and I’d love people to stop by! The Facebook page for the release party is here so check it out!
I still believe there’s such a thing as a guy that can do all the hot things like that, and then is also able to date and communicate like he’s an adult. Somewhere…
