Just in case you guys think I have some kinda problem with paper comics: You'd be wrong.
I should have something in next month's Noxious Minutiae. It is indie cred times a BILLION, and I refuse to put what I've submitted to it on this site, because it would make everyone think I have a brain injury.
So I guess you'll just have to be undergorund as fuck and buy a copy.
Off to the Clutch show!
When I am old and wrinkled, and have grey dreadlocks down to my calves, I am going to find a lawn chair and a sun umbrella and a little fold-down table, and I'm going to sit down on a boardwalk with a sign. I'll bring my pet rats, and let them climb around on me while I sit, and nest in my hair.
The sign will be in front of me, at my feet. FORTUNES, the sign will read. FIFTEEN DOLLARS.
Gullible spazdicks will take one look at the TOTALLY MYSTICAL AND ECCENTRIC OLD BROWN LADY, and buy a fortune.
And all the fortunes will be bad.
Check the Misc. section for chapter six, "Lilith Moves In."
Just so you guys know: I'm writing a character, here. Nobody get offended. I generally think enough of you guys that you don't even need the warning, but you never know who's reading the site and aching to get all shirty about what strangers on the Internet have to say about anything. God only knows what kinda flotsam I'm still trailing from the National Geographic evolution entry.
Next "Playing With Dolls" update should come complete with neat-o downloads. Hopefully.
I have a ham to put in the oven, so I'll keep this short.
I've come across a couple of artists here and there that I think you guys should stalk like pretty young actresses who answer their fan mail a little too cozily. Here they are, in no real order.
Arie first emailed me ages and ages ago, and I've been watching her Deviant Art account since then. It's nice to see she finally has a site, now. She's got that "Holy shit, look at me, I'm gong places!" vibe to her, so hey, drop in.
There's also Ryan, who does autobio stuff and lives in Canuckistan. The fact that I like his work is kinda odd, since I'm practically developing antibodies to autobio comics. but hey, some stuff just speaks to you. Maybe you'll dig it, too.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Okay, I'm seriously a genius for real this time. And I can prove it.
So there are fish that glow in the dark and hypo-allergenic cats now, right? And science did that? With genetics? Y'with me so far?
They need to make some unicorns.
I'm serious. I am absolutely serious. The money would be be ALARMING.
I know you want a unicorn, too, so don't lie to me. We all want unicorns.
Would it really be all that hard to splice narwhal DNA into your average thoroughbred? Maybe, but we're not gonna think about that. That's not conducive. That's not the right attitude.
We'd figure something out, if we wanted it bad enough. How complicated could it be? It's a horse. It shits where it sleeps.
See, the thing to do would be to offer a whole line of unicorns, tailored to fit every delusion. There could be the opalescent white Arabians for all the chicks who never got over their Pretty Pretty Princess phase, and the midnight black Clydesdales for the dudes who want to be Larry Elmore paintings when they grow up, which will be never. And of course, the little unicorn ponies for the soul-devouring designer brats out in the suburbs. Cuz, you know, Daddy loves his little girl. STOP SCREAMING, HONEY.
The tough part would be making them small enough for apartments, but we'll fund that research with the first batch of unicorns, cuz you know Disney would whitewash Cinderella's Castle in orphan guts if it meant getting a five-year exclusivity deal. Can you imagine the extensively trademarked and copyrighted *~*~*Disney Princess Unicorn Parade?*~*~* They could sell tickets! Enter the Princess Lottery! Each hundred-dollar entry receipt, just one more chance to ride a REAL LIVE OMFG UNICORN down Main Street, USA! My God, the merchandising tie-ins and direct-to-video franchise ALONE.
Their firstborns' hearts poached in a mushroom cream sauce and served with a side of trophy wife would be a bargain.
I'm twenty-six years old.
That means The Jonestown Massacre is twenty-six years old. Neat how that works.
I think Jim knew I was coming.
Anyway... Thanks for all the nifty well-wishing, you guys. Yer awful sweet 'n' stuff. Here, have some audio clips.
Reverend Jim Jones of the People's Temple of Jonestown, Guyana publicly chastises a cult member for requesting a holiday visit home with his family. Can you catch the thinly-veiled death threat?
LOVE IS GOOD BUT GUNS ARE BETTER. Super rad freak-out at the thirty-second mark.
Cult members detail their desires to murder their relatives. RAWR RAWR CHRISTEN THE UNBELIEVERS LIKE A BOAT. Bonus insane Jim Jones giggle-fits!
Hm. Whaddya think? Five years old? Six? THENK YEW DAD.
And of course, the finale. Cyanide and valium laced Flavor-Aid: Goes down smooooov. Kids first, seniors second! QUIT'CHER BITCHIN', WE'RE GETTIN RE-IN-CAR-MER-RATED! It's fifteen minutes, might wanna put a kettle on.
That should do it. Off to open presents. I'll try to whip out a new Blikada soon. But not tonight.
Another Clutch show. Logan Square, November 30th. And a good thing, too. I was running dangerously low on ROCKING THE FUCK OUT.
A buncha other bands will be opening for them. Fu Manchu and... eh. I dunno, someone else. Whatever. Don't care. Not there for them. They'll be decent enough, hopefully. But really, I would sit through an hour of jackhammers and slaughterhouse piggy panic-squeals to see C!. I just hope I don't have to.
I'll have to draw a new picture to fling at them onstage, too, because I'm sure they don't think I'm creepy enough, yet. Probably Draco, King of Dragon Men, from "Oregon." The song, not the state. Maybe in pencil. We'll see if I have time.
Oh, there's a new "Playing with Dolls" up, too. Part five! Coda's diary continues! Hurry hurry hurry on over to the Misc. section.
Bullseye.
From the cover of the Fantagraphics holiday catalog.
Perfect. On multiple levels. I wish I were half as clever as Steve Brodner. Maybe I should find him and eat his heart.
Oh my stars and garters. This is my last week of being twenty-five. I enter my late twenties on the 18th. Pity my decrepitude.
Who wants to translate their love for me into something a little more tangible than pure and immortal emotion? OMG wishlist.
Not that I'm actually expecting anything from anybody, but I'm weirdly proud of this list. Half of it, especially the pricier stuff, are more reminders to myself than loot I actually expect people to get me. I always get a little thrill when I cross something like that off after buying it for myself.
Yes, I buy myself gifts. So lonely.
Anyway, check it out, and feel free to let me know if you add anything on this stupid list to your own. It's unsettling how satisfying that would be.
I guess he Googles his screen name.
apachearrow, AKA Arden Lawrence, found my old blog entry concerning Nintendo's, er, theft of his "Mushroom Kingdom" idea and subsequent plagiarism of his sketchbook doodles into the Super Mario Brothers video game franchise. He posted a spirited defense of his claim, along with a link to proof of its veracity.
And this would be the proof. This right here. Arden says drew it in 1977.
Hm. Spotted mushroom.
Well shit, I'm convinced.
He probably invented The Smurfs, too. They lived in spotted mushrooms. And Timothy Leary was pretty much 80% spotted mushrooms by the time he croaked, right?
OMG art theft. sum1 raeped his seoul. :(
Anyway, with any luck, Arden will be available to answer questions and elaborate on the precident-shattering lawsuit he must have planned against Miyamoto Shigeru down in the comments section.
We're all with him on this one, RITE GUYZ?
In a nutshell: 49% of America apologizes to the rest of the planet for allowing 51% of America to re-elect a chimpanzee as president. Because we probably owe it to 'em.. if we don't already, we inevitably will.
It doesn't take long for the emo-kid drama and weepy goth photo-collages to dissolve into a game of Dueling Attention Whores, kittens, Germans, and cartoonists advertising their websites. Which I guess was sort of inevitable. THE INTERNET RUINS EVERYTHING.
Yup. Check the Misc. section for "Chapter Four: The Diary of Coda Experiment, Last Week."
"Braindead teenage girl" is one of the few dialects I excel in. I was part of an informal, full-immersion program during high school, you see. But then again, weren't we all.
For anyone who might be interested, I've posted my vaguely amusing screenshots and accounts of what my families in The Sims 2 are enduring in the Misc. section, under the header "Playing with Dolls." Good stuff, if you're bored. Or like underage lesbians.
I'll add to it from time to time, and start new families, too. Hopefully, I'll even manage to get a few downloads in there, but since I'm so completely wrapped up in myself, I'll probably make you click on the individual story chapters to try and find them. Because I'm egotistical like that.
The first three pages of the Experiment family's ordeal are up right now. Have fun.
The new page of Blikada is up. Comics section. Shake a leg, you're missing some character development!
I'm tweaking the comic in ways that are probably thoroughly imperceptible to anyone but me. The dimensions of the original art has changed slightly, and I'm using smooth bristol instead of watercolor paper, now. I think I've got the illegibility problem in the dialogue balloons licked, too. So yeah, this is all coming together pretty good.
I'm also experimenting with manga-style (OH YEAH, I SAID THE M-WORD) "mood tones" in one of the backgrounds, because I can only draw so much dusty savanna. I guess I've been reading too much of Dirk's manga collection. But hey, it works, who cares.
Okay, so there's this thing deaf people can get now. It's called a cochlear implant.
Cochlear implants are made of miniprocessors and microphones and magnets, and they look sorta wacky, but that's not important. The important thing is that they make you hear. Not perfectly, but much better than you probably could before. As in, "Look at me, I can speak in a voice that doesn't remind people of humpback whale song" better. And wow, is it pissing some people off. I already knew deaf people were touchy, but Jesus.
And now, a weak justification of my grotesque generalization.
During my summers interning for the AARP in Washington, DC during college, I occasionally babysat the phones to the outside. Once in a great while, a deaf person would call, with the aid of an interpreter.
I tend to remember them as the most obnoxious calls I ever fielded. Take that however you want, I genuinely don't care. Maybe it was just one miserable shit calling over and over, I wouldn't know. What I do know is that his interpreters were always really, really good at communicating his disgust at my inability to use the mutant-calculator deaf phone.
What the fuck. First of all, it's not my fault it's not hooked up. Secondly, people called up en Español sometimes too, but none of them ever got rocks in their ass when I said no habla. I don't speak MOST languages, Gramps. Yours is just one of them.
Anyway, back to the movie.
The primary focus of Sound and Fury is a little deaf girl of about five, born of deaf parents, with two deaf siblings. She wants a cochlear implant, and her parents both have magnificent meltdowns, complete with hypocritical pronouncements and defenses of a handicap as the backbone of a "beautiful culture."
Gets better.
The secondary focus is two hearing parents, who have a deaf son and decide to implant him at 11 months so he'll develop normal speech. The baby's deaf grandmother calls her daughter a louse, accuses her of not loving her son the way he is, and interprets the move as her being ashamed of her own deaf parents.
Some highlights:
-- The deaf father of the little girl giving an spirited argument that deafness doesn't detract from a person's ability to succeed and learn, about three minutes before he discusses his own glass ceiling problems in the hearing world and his wife's absurdly poor reading skills. (She can't even read a recipe.)
-- The deaf baby's grandmother basically admitting that her primary concern would be that, if her grandson could hear, he would make fun of her when he got older.
-- The deaf parents coaching their deaf daughter in front of the cameras to say she was mistaken, she never wanted a cochlear implant at all.
-- The same deaf parents conferencing with the mother of a little girl WITH a cochlear implant, and becoming offended when the woman mentioned she wasn't teaching her daughter sign language. Later, when their own kid attempts to read a storybook out loud, her father becomes enraged and demands she sign it instead.
-- And, finally, that same father's fear that implants and constantly improving medical technology will one day render deaf people... GASP!... extinct.
All in all, a lot of crazy to pack into an hour and fifteen minutes.
And yes, I'm going to qualify it as crazy. Deafness is a disability. A disability that limits a person in obvious, tangible ways. It makes life hard, which is crummy. You can adjust, accept, and overcome, and a lot of people have done that beautifully. They can have pride in that, since having pride in your accomplishments is only natural. But pride in the disability itself is.. well, a little crazy. A lot crazy.
And guaranteeing that your own child is subject to the same disability you readily admit limits you? That's cruel. And selfish. And cowardly. And a whole lot of other words.
Of course, that's just an opinion. Feel free to ignore it.
Anyway, Sound and Fury is worth a look. I know it'll probably have me punching various hideous afflictions and deformities ammended with the words "culture" or "pride" into Google for at least a week.
...but Chris Rock and Malcolm-Jamal Warner both called and urged me not to forget.
Thank goodness. I really have no idea what I'd do with myself without famous people carefully selected to fit my demographic sending me pre-recorded phone spam telling me how to live.
I have to get a grocery list together later tonight. I hope they call back with the name of which breakfast cereal My CommunityTM is relying on me to buy.
