The idea of Rickets is that he’s a robot that’s destroyed his memory chip, so he’s not quite right in the head.  He destroyed his memory chip after a traumatic breakout with a boyfriend robot he had, and then set off on the road to find a new life.  I wrote the story of his relationship with the boyfriend robot and him destroying his memory chip in a storyline called Marching to “The City,” which you can read here .  The story of what happened next, and how he ended up with the rabbit and ending up living with the rabbit and Prester the bear is something that I’ll tell later on.

Before  destroying his memory chip, Rickets was one of many robots that worked at a large factory where they created teddy bears.  Rickets created Prester the bear after his breakup with the boyfriend robot, and so Prester was a little bit off to begin with, because his creator was in an off mood.  That’s sort of my metaphor for how I created Rickets, because I made him after a traumatic breakup on which I based his storyline.  Originally the cast of my comic was mainly the rabbit, and his boyfriend, who I drew as a monkey because I called my boyfriend Monkey as a pet name (Aw) and Capitalist Pig, who I used as a way to complain about my job and a lot of other things.  After I broke up with the monkey, I wanted a new character for the strip, and I came up with the idea of a little robot who was broken and had been discarded.  It seemed like a fitting, if somewhat dramatic, representation of how I felt.

Sketchbook page, 2007

Rickets is now in a highly dysfunctional relationship with Prester, wherein they like each other a lot, but Prester can never admit it because he’s a born-again Christian and professes extreme homophobia.  Rickets doesn’t understand, because he doesn’t have his memories from those days, that he’s actually in love with the teddy bear he created himself.  This is supposed to be my metaphor for an artist being in love with his own art, and it’s the same reason I find it funny to draw my rabbit lusting after twinky guys wearing rabbit ears.  I think what I’m trying to say is something about a choice we have, which is to fall in love with a real person, and appreciate the people who are really in our lives, or to yearn for a kind of idealized romance that we’ve created in our heads and possibly doesn’t exist.  The Narcissism of affection, and also of art.  This is one of the reasons I like to joke about art and sex being the same thing, because they’re both forms of communication, or connection, but whether we’re truly forming a bond with somebody else or just talking to ourselves is the question about whether it’s healthy or not.  Where Rickets’ relationship with Prester will go, that remains to be seen.

Rickets’ personality has evolved a bit.  Originally in my sketchbooks as the discarded robot in the gutter, he was much more of a sad sack kind of character.

Another sketchbook page circa 2007

Sketchbook comic, 2007

Once he was in love with Prester, though, love had re-entered Rickets’ life, and he was no longer quite so confident and superior, because he was losing the fact that he didn’t have a memory of these things, so he started to be able to empathize a little more.

I think that’s about all I’ll give away about Rickets at the moment, although I do have big plans for his future, and also the future of the boyfriend robot character, and even a love interest that’s going to try to tempt him away from Prester.  So check back, a lot more coming up.

Next up, I’m doing a post about Prester.

Last night there was a report of Bent Con on the radio show IMRU that talked about me, Northwest Press and some other cartoonists quite a bit, you can hear the show archived here .  They also played part of an audio interview with me Linda Birch did at Bent Con, with me talking about my comics and sex fetishes, and it’s pretty entertaining to listen to if you’re curious.  You can hear the clip of just the audio interview with me here .  They were also giving away a signed copy of my book and I believe one of my Happiness is a Boy Who Swallows t-shirts, along with some other comics.  I’m not sure if they’ve given them all out yet, but the way to try to win one was to go and Like the Facebook page for their show and say you wanted one of the items, so if you want to try you can head over there and do that.

There was also a new review of my book by Greg McElhatton at Read About Comics , and a Bent Con roundup report with a brief profile of me on the JLHLS website , so check those out.

If all these reactions have you dying for a copy of my amazing book- And who wouldn’t be?- the digital version is on sale for a limited time in iTunes , and you can get it for only $5!  What? Amazing, I know!

Also, I’m gonna keep reminding periodically, if you’d like to stay up to date on things like this and updates involving my comics, plus also me going on about random stuff, you can find lots of that by following me at twitter.com/bloodoftheland , and you can also get updates about my comics by Liking the Facebook page for them !

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:

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.

Review at cxPulp by Andrea Speed — “I found this book riveting and hard to put down. It’s very relatable whether you’re gay, straight, or an anthropomorphized rabbit. It’s a little ironic that a comic with so many animal proxies is so very human.”

Review at GayLeague.com by Joe Palmer — “…while he cites the auto bio comics work of R. Crumb and Jeffrey Brown for thematic inspiration, Worley has his own voice. Oh dear, the die hard spandex crowd just had a collective wide-eyed stare at those names. Don’t you worry! You can enjoy this book without danger of your superhero-lover card being revoked.”

Review at Pink Kryptonite — “Take the authenticity of Pekar’s American Splendor, and blend it with classicist artcomix values, and you get an idea of the beauty behind Rick’s book. He even goes so far as to invite all his readers so moved by his work to contact him and be his groupies. Literally fucking with your audience. It’s genius.”

Review at Starving for Ink — “Ultimately, A Waste of Time is just the opposite. Worley has given us a refreshing dose of reality that I believe people will relate to, whether they’re gay, straight, or in between.”

I’ll keep linking to more reviews as they come in.  In addition to those reviews, I had two amazing cartoonists, Howard Cruse and Robert Kirby, who were kind enough to provide really great pull quotes for the cover, and StevieD and EvilJeff from the Comic Book Queers podcast provided a great forward where they said shockingly nice things about the book!

“There’s a brutal frankness and honesty coming from these foxes and teddy bears that you rarely see anywhere else. Comics are the one of the last havens to be truly offensive and beautifully unapologetic.” — from the Foreword by StevieD and EvilJeff from the Comic Book Queers podcast.

“Beautifully drawn, hilarious, wistful, profane and very human. Rick Worley’s A Waste of Time knocked me out.” — Robert Kirby, creator of Curbside, Boy Trouble and THREE.

“Rick Worley’s insightful A Waste of Time comic strips are simultaneously tender and perverse—like his bunny.” — Howard Cruse, author of Stuck Rubber Baby and Wendel.

I mean, Robert Kirby and Howard Cruse, how cool is that?

Convinced by the amazing reviews that you absolutely must own a copy of this groundbreaking book?  Well, you’re in luck, because now you can order it through Amazon and you can order a digital version through iTunes at the links below:

The Amazon.com page for A Waste of Time

The iTunes page for the digital version of the A Waste of Time book

In addition to that, you can have your local comic shop order you a copy through Diamond distributors, and if you’d like to get a copy through a local bookstore, or if you are a bookstore who would like to carry it and needs information about distributors, there are links to those things on the Northwest Press page for A Waste of Time .

Thanks to everybody that’s been following my comics on this website during the time that I’ve been posting them, and if you’ve read the book or are a fan of my comics, it would be greatly appreciated if you took a minute to review them at either the iTunes page or the Amazon page!  I’m going to be posting more information about the book soon, and I’m going to keep doing updates to the website on a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule for the foreseeable, future, so check back, a ton more stuff coming up!  If you want to get updates about these things as they happen, follow the Facebook page for my comics, or you can also follow me at twitter.com/bloodoftheland .  Thanks again to everybody, the book is beautiful and I’m extremely proud and excited about it, and so the reaction it’s received so far is incredibly gratifying.

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…