Monthly Archives: December 2023

The Best Things in Life Are Free, You Can Keep ‘Em

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I uncovered even more jobs I did (mostly) for money, including, Big Face Records in 2012, a rap label that never took off.

Wish Slap from 2010, a truly terrible idea for a TV show where you paid money to have someone slap your favorite celebrity.

The cover (actually used) for the 2014 fantasy noir anthology, Fae Fatales, where I was first published.

And finally, Li’l Dicky from a Bush Administration parody comic I pitched to the Unemployed Philosopher’s in 2004, rejected because “There’s no way Bush will ever get a second term.” This is the worst reason I was rejected.

i did a lot more commissioned work than I realize. There’s more to come.

And IIIIIIIIIIIIIII Will Always Love Yule

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I stopped celebrating Christmas a long time ago, around the time my parents stopped paying my airplane ticket home. After I moved to New York-adjacent, I had a lot of family in New Jersey, but I am a terrible long-distance relative, and I didn’t know any of them well enough to spend the holiday with them, except once, and that was awkward.

The second year I was there, my uncle Larry invited me to Linden, New Jersey, in mid-December, along with the extended families of himself and my aunt Christine. Christine is my mother’s sister, but I adored everyone there, even the kids and grandkids of Larry’s brother, Phil. Even though I was out of touch, Uncle Larry welcomed me into his home on Ainsworth Street as if I had always been there, and I visited them frequently on weekends.

I only saw Larry’s family once a year, though, and I watched the children grow up as I kept them occupied while Mommy and Daddy got drunk. Whenever my smoker’s lungs couldn’t keep up with them, we played the heart-attack game, which was me falling to the ground and all of them tried to revive me using their rudimentary understanding of CPR. My other favorite game was the monster game, where I’d chase them to a hiding place, safe from me, and then I went and had a beer. Eventually, they’d find me, then I’d just roar, and they split.

But that left the actual day, when my extended family celebrated with just themselves, and my found families all went home. You’d think that would be depressing, but it really wasn’t. You see, on December 25, I had plans.

My day would start out late, and I’d head into the city for brunch with Joshua. As this was Christmas, our options were limited. One or two years, he had a girlfriend from China, and she took us to a real Chinese restaurant, which was a lot like that racist dining scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Chicken with broccoli was not on the menu, but something horrible being done to a crab was.

From there, we’d see a movie, which was reminiscent of what my family would do when I was a kid, and we ran out of things to unwrap. For the latter, the movie I remember most was Home Alone. As for the former, the one that became my Christmas movie is Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. (All you Die Hard people are so cute.) And from there we’d go to work.

Working at The New York Post on Christmas was absolutely wonderful. Everyone there was Jewish, or without family, or hiding from their family. None of the hardcore news editors were there, so everyone was relaxed. Year-round, the sport we played at The Post was to make each other laugh, and never was it more competitive than it was on Christmas. Even though I saw them every week, there was something especially heartwarming about seeing Mike and Rob and Dom and my auxiliary dad, Barry, as well as everyone else. The magic of Christmas in New York is such a cliché, but when you pass by the tree at the Rockefeller Center and glance into the ice-skating rink on your way to an office with a sodium-heavy buffet and affectionate shouting from some of your favorite people, you believe.

I have no memory of the thirteen Christmases I spent with Kate because we treated them like normal days. Usually we’d spend the weekend before with her (but never my) family, and her family didn’t get me, so they had no idea what to do with me. The actual day was just like any other, except everything was closed. It’s not as special when you’re not waking up and unwrapping presents.

With Nicole, she has a side-hustle sitting pets, and Christmas is a lucrative day, so we’ve spent it apart, except for once, during quarantine, when we watched that smoking turd, Wonder Woman 1984. This year, she woke up at home, and we unwrapped presents together and went our separate ways, her making a dessert and me taking the new sketchbooks and expensive paintbrushes Mom and Dad got me out for a spin. Zooming with them and my sisters and my niece and my nephew-in-law was pure chaos.

Christmas is just a day. Sure everything’s closed, and there’s nothing good on TV, but the sun rises and falls, just as it always does. You need to eat lunch, you need to take the dogs for a walk. It’s okay not to do anything just because someone else is. If you really need to find meaning on December 25, you can find it. I found mine on a loud news floor, trying to think of a clever headline. (The best one I ever came up with had to do with a computer screw-up that cost New York teachers their December 24 paycheck: “The glitch that stole X-mas.”) And it’s okay to feel lonely. Boxing Day is just around the corner.

I used to be a humbug, including during my time at the paper before I realized what a holiday it was. Nowadays, I am by no means a Tiny Tim or post-ghost Scrooge. I still have a problem with how shallow this holiday is (i.e. the Black Fridays that last well into December) and how I lost the goddamned Wham! game on Christmas Freaking Eve! But even at my loneliest, I looked forward to this day, even if it is just a day.

(This essay has no thesis, it’s just a bunch of random and contradictory thoughts pouring out.)

I Got YouTube under my Skin

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Well, I’ve found myself deep in the YouTube hole. I’m not exactly sure how I got here. While I work on my art, I have TV on, but nothing scripted was holding my interest. I tried a few documentaries, especially anything about the Fyre Festival because that was such a delightful mess. Even though I shouldn’t, I can’t help but find joy in people wealthy enough to afford tickets costing thousands of dollars, finding themselves treated like refugees.

From there, I turned into a woman and started listening to True Crime podcasts. Actually, it’s just been one, and she had a YouTube channel. Even more so than her podcast, her videos were perfect to listen to while I was doing something else. When you log into YouTube, it gives you videos that you know you want to see, and many of them are the opposite of the kinds of views you have. For me, it’s a lot of videos about how Disney/Marvel is really doomed this time. These videos are curated to make me angry because anger keeps people glued to the screen—it’s Facebook’s entire business model. I don’t click on anyone I don’t know.

I knew Todd in the Shadows from his music criticism, and he’s generally on my side, so when he posted a video “fact-checking the WORST YouTuber,” I had to look. This referred to James Somerton, a smug essayist who champions the LGBT crowd, all while alienating both straight and gay women, as well as asexuals. Todd proves that Somerton doesn’t know what he’s talking about, using (as they say on YouTube) receipts. But it was so much worse than that.

A gaming YouTuber named hbomberguy released a four-hour video the day before about plagiarism, and two of those hours were dedicated to Somerton. He doesn’t just steal ideas, he literally reads pages from books like the legendary Celluloid Closet, as well as works from LGBT authors and documentarians who don’t have half the exposure he has. He has made a lot of money off of these people. On the rare occasion he uses his own material, it is misogynist, ace-denying, and misleading.

This isn’t the first time he’s been accused of plagiarism. He actually stole from one of his donors, and when she called him out on it, he claimed he was scared for his life and turned his rabid fans against her. He got away from that one scott free. After hbomberguy, though, he closed all of his accounts and went into hiding, only emerging weeks later with an insincere, crocodile-tear apology.

The rush of justice intoxicated me, and I checked out more hbomberguy stuff. The algorithm pointed me to reaction videos by a variety of skeptics, as well as a YouTube-hosted podcast by an asexual couple who claim Jessica Rabbit as an ace icon.

My desire to see more petards hoisting some assholes led me to Creepshow Art. The star of the channel draws pictures while she serves up (as they say on YouTube) tea about her fellow YouTubers. I didn’t watch any of her videos, but through the takedowns, I heard enough of her petty, self-righteous trash-talking that I never will. She was a popular subject for reasons I won’t go into here because they’re convoluted, like a vast spider web of brazen internet fuckery.

I know nothing about YouTube celebrities, but they exist, earning millions of views and dollars for whatever they broadcast. Some people do the art and gossip of Creepshow Art; some people tell stories; some people share essays; some people create documentaries; and some people just trash talk. It’s a community, there are conventions, and there are beefs. Most of them know each other. All of them make a really good living being personalities, and most, from what I can tell, are terrible people.

This leads me to Gabbie Hanna. She started out on Vine (Does anyone remember Vine?) doing short-form sketches. When Vine collapsed, she moved to YouTube and later to TikTok, as a storyteller who occasionally starred in sketches with other YouTubers. She started a music and acting career and published some bestselling books. She is YouTube royalty, and she is truly awful.

She and Donald J. Trump tie for the thinnest skin. When someone “passed” on her during a game of “Smash or Pass” (please don’t make me say what this game is about), she hunted him down at a convention and harassed him until he broke her phone. (This guy is really awful too.) She is a master projectionist, and if you took a shot whenever she used words like “manipulative,” “gaslighting,” “abusive,” and “narcissistic” in a video, you’d be dead. She did things like tell a guy who was about to hook up with her friend that she heard a rumor said friend had an STI, and then Gabbie demanded apology from her. Gabbie’s behavior on the set of a TV show another friend cast her in got her character, and that relationship, killed off. None of it is her fault. If she admits to anything, it’s fragile mental health.

One by one, her friends abandoned her, and in 2022, she dropped out of the spotlight for a while. When she came back in the beginning of 2023, she posted 170 TikTok videos in twenty-four hours which were, for lack of a better word, unhinged. I don’t mean trash-talking her friends or getting really drunk or high at a party. I mean calling herself the Second Coming, obsessively discussing simulation theory, inviting strangers into her home, and screaming. She was having a full-blown manic episode, and her fans were calling in welfare checks. I had been reveling in this toxic human being’s downfall, but now I was genuinely concerned about her health.

After that, she disappeared until a few months ago, when she gave interviews. No one asked her about what happened, only what she was up to. She talked about how she was at peace, and she found God. (He has his own channel, but not as many followers as her.) This is the reason for this blog post: she said she was deciding who she was. Was she a musician, an author, or a painter?

Even the most critical of “tea” dispensers said that some of her songs were bangers, and she sold out large venues, but she can’t sing. She’s as bad as the untrained actors in the ubiquitous musical episodes of our beloved TV shows. Her poetry books are New York Times bestsellers, but they read like Shel Silverstein as a fifteen-year-old goth girl in the early 2000s. I haven’t seen her paintings, but most celebrity paintings are really bad.

This woman rose to fame first by being goofy, then being a goddamned nightmare. And she’s got more than one bestselling book, huge concerts, and a cultish fan base. What has she done to earn this? For starters, she’s good at being goofy. She works hard—you have to to be a YouTube celebrity, and that means being on. You develop a character, and even when you grow out of it, you’re expected to behave the same. People say that she hasn’t evolved her content to fit in with the times, but every single temper tantrum got views, and you have to wonder how much of that is calculated and how much is mental health. Her dream has always been singing, and she leveraged her clout to do just that. Same with her “poetry.” She went into seclusion because she wanted to. She’s even used the word “retirement.” She’s thirty.

Was her meltdown an act? I doubt it. I’ve seen that kind of thing before.

Why do I care? I’m asking myself this as I watch any Gabbie-Hanna-related video that the algorithm throws at me. Is it because I want to see her punished? I do. I want to see her brought down low because she became successful by being the most hated person on the Internet. I don’t personally hate her, I just want to see her get justice. But justice is an imaginary thing, and her large fan base is real.

I don’t have the right to tell people what they can and can’t spend their money on, and I don’t read minds. Maybe they feel like her poetry speaks to them. Maybe she sings their anthem. Or they could be like me, obsessively clicking on every Gabbie Hanna link to watch this horrifying train wreck.

I’m currently writing the script for MortalMan and running some of these ideas past some friends. I came up with a brilliant gag based on Adam West/Burt Ward Batman fights. I’ve got Christmas presents to unwrap on Monday. I’m going to start illustrating soon, and I cannot wait to get to page 7. She may or may not have earned that massive Los Angeles house, but that self-absorbed loudmouth has nothing to do with me and my definition of success.

To Draw or Not to Draw

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Back when I wanted to make action comics, I had a little vigilante with no name. His original story was five issues, based on Hamlet. I wrote the first five scripts, but they are lost to history (Newcastle destroyed my laptop), and my attempt to make a novel of it failed when I couldn’t make five issues drag on for more than 20,000 words. The book would have been called Tantalus. I modeled the character after Bruce Lee, and I gave him a cane he never needed when he was fighting or doing parkour (symbolism) as well as a scarf that would have been a good visual. The book was always intended to be in black and white. I decided, after fifteen years, to draw the character again, and I went a little more stark than he had been in the past. It would have been called Tantalus.

Here is the one I just did.

Here is one of my earlier sketches from 2002.

A more dynamic one from 2003 I would like to have used as a cover:

As well as a couple of dynamic pictures from 2008.

I think I’m done with this character, but I loved his look, and he’s fun to draw. The one I just did didn’t turn out great, but I should give it another shot.

He Works Hard for His Money

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It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes people hear I’m an artist, and they think they could get a custom logo for their businesses. They rarely ever used my art because my style doesn’t necessarily have that clip-art, professional je ne sais quoi that makes it look corporate. What they needed was a graphic designer, but they still paid me, and it is some of my best work. Here’s eight examples.

First was for a post-apocalyptic novel series that I think the author did actually use. It’s a pretty good logo, in my opinion.

Second and third are for a Southern barbecue restaurant that never took off. This guy was never satisfied with anything I turned in, but some of the sketches turned out well regardless.

A friend wanted to write a kids book about a misbehaving kitten, and I mocked up a couple of character sheets, fourth and fifth, and some pages, but the book was never written.

I can’t remember what the sixth one was called, but it was for an indy publisher. This was the one ultimately used on the only book he published, but it took a couple of tries to get it right.

The seventh one came about when a roller derby team asked me to make a figure for their flyers. My style would have been a great match, but they didn’t like my first draft because apparently this is something you’re never supposed to do in the ‘derb.

And finally, the owner of the salon I used to frequent asked me to help with a warning label. The figure chosen from the sixth picture would have the circle/slash signifying “no.” They liked the idea, but it wasn’t slick enough.

Of course, I used to do work for PPC Hero, but my art was never clip-arty enough, and they eventually let me go. The blog no longer exists. That’ll teach them.

I’m happy to be doing my thing these days, with no hope of making money. I may turn in some fantastic work, but it’s usually not good enough for what the client has in mind. As I said, I’m not a graphic designer. Even the ones that used my ideas tended to replace them as soon as something better came along, which is what happened with the comic I wasted 2004 working on, The Book of Jesse. The one I am good enough for is myself. There was a long period of about four to five years ago when I wasn’t, and my art was bad (even my birthday self-portraits), when I was doing it at all (my birthday self-portraits). My renaissance began with a pushy coworker demanding a portrait, but once I shook the rust off, I’ve been amusing myself, and if I can’t do that, then what’s the point?

The Sass and the Furious

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I had a brief dream where, in the next Fast and the Furious movie, Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto gets swept up in the evil shenanigans of his old college roommate, played by some famous slab of beef wearing a fabric baseball cap and a pair of cargo shorts. This is, of course presupposing Dom Toretto, or even Vin Diesel, went to college, much less finished high school. (Considering that it’s in Diesel’s contract that Toretto can never lose a fight onscreen, I’m inclined to think he didn’t.)

Anyway, it got me thinking about my roommates in college, and whether they’d come into my life as bad guys to be forgiven and welcomed back into my family to enjoy a chilled Corona. There’s Will, who’s certainly sharp enough to be a mastermind, but he’s a big softie, and I don’t think he’d take too well to being bad.

Then there’s Jeff. Anyone who knows Jeff knows that he’s got it in him to be a madman. I haven’t seen him in over twenty-five years, but I know he shaved his head, which is a prerequisite to evil. When I knew him, he was perfecting the wicked rubbing together of palms and giggling maniacally while tossing out wicked bon mots like, “When life hands you dilemmas, make dilemonade.”

He could also get inside the hero’s mind. For example, he never swore. He took to words more colorful than “damn” or “hell” like I take to the N-word, i.e. never, ever, not even alone in a dark room with all the listening devices turned off. That’s why it came as enough of a surprise that I fell off my chair when he caught me by myself and leaned in really close, whispering, “Don’t fuck with me.” He denies it to this day, and to this day, nobody believes me but Tim Lentz, who always knew there was something shady about that guy.  

Jeff kept his cool under pressure, a necessary qualification for an overlord, but he also had little patience for malarkey. Even though we were a matched set through much of our freshmen and sophomore years, he didn’t tolerate my bullshit, and understand there was a lot of bullshit back then. Would he kill a minion for making a mistake? Maybe not at twenty, but certainly as he got older, his patience would dwindle.

The reason I know for sure that Jeff’s got amoral plans for the world is that he never left our room without a slip of paper he tucked into his breast pocket. He showed it to no one, but he’d occasionally take it out, read it, and chuckle darkly. One evening, when I was again protecting the purity of Altman Hall from behind the desk, he chatted with me for a few minutes, pulled out this paper, and opened it up, revealing the title: “Taking over the world checklist.” He crossed out a numbered item, “Befriend Jeremiah Murphy,” and folded it back up before I could read what else was on it.

To this day, I have no idea what my role in a global takeover might be. I’m all but hermit who writes novels and illustrates comics no one reads. I have a feeling we’re going to find out soon because we’re both turning fifty, and fifty’s a good age for world-domination. And if he tried to stop him, Vin Diesel find out that this is a fight even Dominic Toretto can’t win.