Category Archives: Life

The Printed Menace Revisited

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I learned how to read from comic books. My dad had a huge stack of The Amazing and The Spectacular Spider-Man, The Avengers, and my personal favorite, the first fifty or so issues of The Defenders, all from the seventies and early eighties, and I read them obsessively. He had an original copy of Amazing Spiderman #129. In many ways, my dad was awesome.

I stuck with comics through the nineties, and I refused to take sides during great rivalry between adjectiveless Spider-Man and X-Men #1s. I remember my friend Tony telling me I was stupid for not picking up Superpro #1 because it was a NUMBER ONE, DUDE! I foresaw the collapse of the speculator boom when this guy I knew bragged about how he bought five copies of Spawn #1, and I thought, “If he has five copies, and his friends have five copies, who’s going to buy them? (And sure enough, twelve years later, when Chris Claremont did a surprising signing at Jim Hanley’s Comics in New York City, I bought a copy of the gatefold cover of X-Men #1 for a buck, or 20 percent of what I paid for it in 1990.)

When a guy named Robert opened a comic book store in my tiny hometown in 1993, I had found home, as well as Grendal, and I hung out there until 1994, when I went to college and became an intellectual, reading only Sandman. After that, I branched back out into the comics world and discovered lots of new stuff, a collection only confined by the size of the tiny apartments that my ex-wife (X-Wife?) and I lived in. When we moved to the DC metropolitan area, she surprised me with tickets to DC’s AwesomeCon, where I met my first muse, Peter David. But one day, I just stopped reading, even books by my favorite writers, such as Ed Brubaker.

However, my youngest sister, who prior to this point, read only Garth Ennis Punisher comics, suddenly became fascinated by Robin, and from there has become her own encyclopedia. When I told her who Snapper Carr was, she found out quickly that I had no idea what I was talking about. The student has surpassed the master.

Which brings me to the main event. Originally written to pit Brian Michael Bendis and Warren Ellis against each other. I love them both. They’re both very clever, very exciting, very cerebral writers, but they couldn’t be more different. To explain this to my friends (and later to my sister), I let them both write Star Wars. As I’ve revisited this, I’ve added more writers with distinctive voices.

Brian Michael Bendis:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: You got a bad feeling about this?
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: About this?
LUKE: Yes.
HAN: A bad feeling?
LUKE: Yes.
HAN: You got a bad feeling about this?
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
LEIA: This?
LUKE: This.
LEIA: This is what you got a bad feeling about?
LUKE: It is.
LEIA: You got a bad feeling about this?
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!
LUKE: Chewie’s got a bad feeling about it, too.
LEIA: About this?
LUKE: He does.

Warren Ellis:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Me, too. Let’s shoot it in the head.
LEIA: (Lights cigarette) Bloody right, then.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Frank Miller:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN (In captions): I had a bad feeling about this, too. A real bad feeling. A bad feeling burning ice cold in my gut. It tells me things are bad. Real bad. I watch the boy. Luke Skywalker. Age eighteen. He thinks he knows what he’s getting into, but he has no idea how bad it’s going to get. This feeling he’s got? It’s roses. Roses and picnics and apple pies to how it’s really going to get. Luke Skywalker. Age eighteen. He’s in for a world of hurt.
LEIA: Oh, Han! I can’t stand it anymore! I have to have you! You’re so manly! Take me, you wicked, manly space pirate! Smuggle yourself inside of me! Take me now!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!
HAN (In captions): The Wookie screams a dark, primal scream into the cold, dead interstellar void. A void colder and deader than that bad feeling in my gut. The Wookie screams. I know how it feels.

Joss Whedon:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Then maybe we should go all Buck Rogers on it and kick its evil ass! Set phasers to awesome!
LEIA: Totally!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Garth Ennis:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Fuck!
LEIA: Cocksucker!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Kevin Smith:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: That’s because my cock is in your mouth!
LEIA: You guys are so gay!
CHEWBACCA: Han, I think your bluster hides the fact that you do, in fact, have sexual feelings for Luke, but are conflicted because there is also something there for Leia, as well.
LUKE: Snoochie-boochies!

Chris Claremont:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Of course you got a bad feelin’ about this, old friend, because the evil we face is the Empire, which has caused us no end of difficulties. If you’ll recall, Darth Vader has revealed himself to be your father as part of his master plan to overthrow his lord and master, Emperor Palpatine [See The Empire Strikes Back—Ed.]. We’ll need to face this together …
LUKE (In a thought bubble): Han’s talking tough, but it was only recently that I was able to rescue him from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, and he may still be suffering from the side-effects of carbonite hibernation [See The Return of the Jedi—Ed.]. He can’t keep pushing himself like this. Hey, is that an Imperial Storm Trooper about to shoot at us? It is! I’d better warn the others. (Out loud) Look out!
LEIA: (Thought bubble as she jumps over the blaster fire): Incredible! It was only months ago that I was a helpless princess in the clutches of Grand Moff Tarkin [See A New Hope—Ed.], but now that it has been revealed to me that I am the daughter of the once-noble-Jedi-turned-evil, Anakin Skywalker [See The Return of the Jedi—Ed.], and with the training I’ve received with the rebels, I can easily evade this blast! (Out loud, still mid-jump) Luke! Use your lightsaber and Jedi training to deflect the blast! Chewbacca! Use your crossbow gun to stop the Storm Trooper before he can get another shot off!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH! [See The Revenge of the Sith—Ed.]

Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
LEIA: What are you gonna do about it?
LUKE: Are you going to wear the metal bikini all the time now?
HAN: I have no objection to this.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Ed Brubaker:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: It’s about to get a lot worse. (Shoots Luke in the back) Now we can be together, Your Highness, without him standing in our way.
LEIA: (Points her gun at Han) Oh, Han, don’t you see? It was never about you and me. You were the one standing in my way.
HAN: No!
LEIA: (Shoots him.) Now, Chewie, we can take the money and get away from it all! Just you and me.
CHEWBACCA: (Strangles Leia) WRAURGH! (Wipes a single tear from his cheek.)

Neil Gaiman:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
NARRATOR: The bad feeling drifts through the hearts and minds of the galaxy, like the smell of something foul, yet bittersweet, like kimchi. The words cross their lips as the feeling overcomes them. The Correllians know it …
HAN: I got a bad feeling about this.
NARRATOR: The Mon Calamari know it …
ACKBAR: I got a bad feeling about this.
NARRATOR: The Gungan know it …
JAR-JAR: Meesa got a bad feelin’!
NARRATOR: The Hutts know it …
JABBA: Botaka! Hoo hoo hoo …
NARRATOR: The Ewoks know it …
WICKET: Yub yub!
NARRATOR: The Wookies know it …
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!
NARRATOR: But never is it more real than in the dreams of the exiled royalty of a world that is no longer there …
LEIA: I got a bad feeling about this.

Peter David:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Are you sure it’s not “More Than a Feelin’”?
LEIA: (punches Han in the shoulder) Han, this is serious.
HAN: Oh, dry up, Princess.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Grant Morrison:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: The only way we can get through this is if break the parsec barrier and cause a chain reaction. This will require everything we got, all of us. And if we fail, we run the risk of turning every living creature in the galaxy into yarn.
LEIA: (turns to camera) That is if it’s okay with the writers.

Ben Edlund:
LUKE: As he stares out across The Galaxy, the galaxy far away, our intrepid hero stands there, asking himself the same tough questions. What is it far away from? If Darth Vader is indeed his father, why don’t they have the same last name? Do they have Chinese food in space? It’s these questions and more that make him think. They make him cry out to the stars! The warring stars! I! GOT! A! BAD! FEELING! ABOUT! THIS! AND I’M OKAY WITH THAT!
HAN: Who are you talking to?
LUKE: Hello there, old chum. I’m just setting the mood.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

My favorite writer is Matt Wagner, but he doesn’t have any consistent tropes to hang one of these on. I was also going to do Mark Millar, but thinking about it made me want to throw up a little.

Ace up my Sleeve

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I wrote this angry. I put it down, worked for six hours, and came back to it. I was still angry (though I managed to add some clarity to some confusing bits). I feel like I was remarkably patient, even though this has happened one time too many.

There appears to be a misunderstanding. Maybe people forgot this about me. Maybe people don’t even believe this about me. Either way, I want to take the time to clear this up. Last month, I wrote a post about wanting to say hello to a woman I see every week at the café. I was anxious about it, to the point of paralysis. Enough of my friends are under the assumption I wanted to ask her out on a date.

No, goddammit. Over the past fifteen years, I have developed crippling social anxiety. I can carry on a conversation with a stranger if they start it. Ask me to start a conversation, and I get the yips really badly. All I wanted to do with this woman was say hello, tell her I’d seen her here every week, and share my name, which I didn’t think was possible without looking like a creep. I didn’t inherit the anxiety from my dad, who would pursue a person through a parking lot if they had Jersey plates.

That brings me to the larger issue. The abbreviation LGBTQ is actually an abbreviation of LGBTQIA. The I stands for (I think) intersex, and the A stands for asexual (ace to its friends). Being left out of the term that describes alternative sexuality is only one example of asexuality erasure. Mostly it’s the flat-out denial, including—from a whole lot of people in the LGBTQ community—that it exists at all. Maybe an ace hasn’t met the right person. Maybe they’re just not trying hard enough. Maybe they can’t possibly know if they like sex or not if they’ve never tried it. Maybe they’ve had sex before, so they can’t be ace.

I identify as asexual. I’m not sure anyone I know believes me because I hear a lot of doubt about it. I’ve been hearing some lately, and it’s been really getting under my skin. It’s part of my identity, and I shouldn’t have to justify it. I shouldn’t have to explain it. I should just be allowed to be. Just this once, I’m going to go over the common things that make people doubt me.

I’ve had sex before. In some cases, I’ve had sex a lot of times before. I once bought a family-sized box of condoms on a Friday with the intention of not having to buy them again for a while, only to discover that I needed a new box come Monday. A lot of people don’t fully understand their sexuality until later in life. I had an inkling that I was asexual in my early thirties, but I became sexually active briefly, so I figured that invalidated that. It turns out I’m bipolar, and I’ve only ever been horny when I’m manic, when I’m a different person altogether. In the past, mania turned me into the Incredible Hulk. Now, with the right treatment, mania turns me into the Credible Hulk.

I have crushes. Yes, I get butterflies for both men and women, but men don’t impress me as often as women. The most important thing is that I don’t want to have sex with them. Sex never even crosses my mind. I just want to follow them around like a little puppy.

I write a lot of sex in my novels, and I used to write erotica. Like Stephen King is a non-threatening dork who can write an entire novel from the perspective of a homicidal dog, I write fiction. The definition of “fiction,” from Merriam-Webster, is “fic-SHUN. n. made-up shit.” Emphasis on the made up. I don’t write a lot of sex anymore, but I write a lot of kissing, and words cannot describe how revolting I find pieholes grinding up against pieholes. Sex is even grosser because there’s a wider variety of fluids involved.

I draw a lot of sexy women. Here’s where I think most people get tripped up, but the answer is, I am attracted to sexiness. From the presence of a woman in a power suit to the muscle of a 1970 Pontiac GTO to the swagger of David Tennant in Good Omens, confidence (even feigned confidence) grabs my full attention and holds on. The word sexy trips people up because sex is in it, but I have never associated the two.

Asexuality is a spectrum, like all sexualities. There are aromantics, who want nothing to do with dating and holding hands. (I’m borderline aro. I’m extremely touch averse, but there is one person who is allowed skin-on-skin contact with me.) There are people who are revolted by sex. There are people who have sex, usually for a partner, and don’t hate it, but don’t get off on it. There are demisexuals, who are only attracted to someone once they get to know them. Most importantly for the point I’m trying to make, there are aces who tend to lean into one sexuality or another. I, for example, lean heterosexual. It doesn’t mean I want to have sex with anyone of the opposite gender, just that I find them more interesting than my own.

To be clear, despite that my eye is drawn to physical attributes, they have nothing to do with my opinion of someone. For example, the woman in the coffee shop I wanted to approach is not the kind of woman who catches my eye. Neither is my ex-wife. I hooked up with the latter because we spent an hour in a car together getting to know one another. I said hi to the former because we share a space for an hour a week, and it seemed like the polite thing to do. While I have dated women who were my physical type, I can say of the three most beautiful, two did not go well.

It’s been four years since I’ve had sex, and I don’t miss it. †here are behaviors and preferences I have that seem to indicate sexual inclinations, but I’m asexual. Please do not challenge this. Please do not call bullshit on me. This is a truth about me that you need to accept if you want to be a part of my life.

I’m ace, I’ve accepted it, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

And Another Thing

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One more point on the reason I hate AI so much and why it’s not art: What’s the point? If you can produce a professional-looking image or a coherent novel or even a movie just by filling in some Mad-Libs, why would you even bother?

It’s frustrating that my art doesn’t look like it does in my head or that I’ll never illustrate those action comics I used to fantasize about walking home from the PATH train. It’s disappointing that I’m not going to finish the last comic I started working on. But look at what I’ve done in the past 25 years. I can crank out a full-color drawing in about a day, and it’s hard. And yet I take pride in my poses. I savor filling in the details. I can’t do that by typing in a box.

I’ve written over 30 novels, plus several unfinished, and with each one I fell in love with the characters, and I learned who they were with every page. Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, piecing together a story is a rewarding challenge, and one I hope to get back to someday.

I’ve even made 2 movies in my life, one in French, and I don’t even remember the finished project. I don’t even remember the titles–wait. They were The Rat and Rambo et Juliet. What I do remember clearly is hanging out with my friends and traveling all over town and being goofballs and how Max simulated the sound of someone falling off of a balcony (he stomped on a small branch behind the camera).

I’m never going to be a famous artist or writer or a filmmaker. My stuff will never be as polished as what some of these AI engines have produced, and I don’t care. It’s not sampled from other art (I use a lot of references, though, and some swiping) and writing and movies, it’s mine.

One day soon, all of our popular movies, books, and graphic images may be produced by AIs, but it won’t be art. And I, for one, and really smug about that.

Or, to put it another way, I bought this from an MOC site.

After spending an hour with it, I had this.

Another hour later, this:

I could have scoured the internet and found a Short Circuit action figure and put it on a shelf and forgot about it immediately, or I could have spent my drawing time this morning enjoying it, feeling it in my hand, guessing which iconic part of the robot I was constructing next, and building a scale replica of a memory from my childhood from a couple bags of plastic. I feel accomplished, and on a day I had Artist’s Block, I passed the time (somewhat) productively.

Some things shouldn’t be easy—not because it’s hard for me, but because it’s good for the soul.

Girl of my Dreams

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I could say I don’t dream, but humans will die if they don’t dream, so I’ll say I don’t remember them. Every once in a while, I’ll get one that sticks with me and inspires me. In 2005 or 2006, I dreamt that a middle-aged mentor type was tempting me to smoke marijuana (which I hadn’t done by that point for over a year) in the library by saying, “Let’s take a walk on the green,” a phrase that I don’t think was used by a marijuana smoker at any other point in history. I was also a student in high school, and I was my age at the time (let’s see, 2005 was eighteen years ago, so that would have been twelve), and I had a thing going on with a fellow student. I took the imagery, reduced the creep factor, and penned my first novel, posting it on LiveJournal while I was writing it.

A side effect of marijuana withdrawal is vivid dreams, which would explain why I’ve woken up over the past few weeks, swearing I would write this down as soon as I finished brushing my teeth, then forgetting everything. The other night, though, grabbed me. It wasn’t the part where Kim Basinger came onto me and eventually kissed me. Of course not—I think kissing is gross. It wasn’t that I tracked down Clark so I could brag. Clark was a childhood acquaintance of my ex-wife who moved to Bloomington while we were there who turned out to have a lot in common with me, and we became good friends. Ultimately, he was Team Kate, and like everyone else I met through her*, he ghosted me following the divorce.

But what got me so much I didn’t forget, even after brushing my teeth, was what happened when I was lying in the hammock in my backyard. The hammock exists in real life, though I haven’t touched it in over a year, during which it rained an average of every third day. Approaching me from the alley on a dirt bike was a slight figure wearing a hoodie, hood up. The figure hopped off the bike, let it fall, and rushed over to me. It was dusk, so it took me a while to figure out it was a girl in her mid-teens, her face obscured by the shadows. We fell into an easy conversation. I don’t know what we were talking about, but it had to do with my book. Eventually, she pushed her bike home, and I walked with her.

We did this every day—she’d meet me on the hammock, always at dusk, and we’d walk together through the dirt road that cut through my neighborhood. The hood stayed up until the last trip together when she pulled it down. I don’t know what color her hair was because of the grayish blue of the sky and the amber of the street lamps, but she was pretty, with delicate features. She also had the scars of a Glasgow smile, which is one name for the Joker’s disfigurement in The Dark Knight. It didn’t upset me, and it never occurred to me to even wonder where it came from. All I saw was the girl’s unique face.

That wasn’t the reason it was our last walk together. She invited me over to dinner to meet her family, but when I tried to drive over to her house, I couldn’t find it. And in the way that dreams will change the subject, it wasn’t about the nameless girl anymore.

The scars aren’t the reason I haven’t stopped thinking about her for the past couple of days either. It was her positivity. She had a warm, friendly, energetic personality that made me feel at ease, the way no stranger, or most people I know can. Our conversations, even though I don’t remember what they were about, were intimate. She didn’t think of herself as ugly, and the scars didn’t get in the way of her finding someone to talk to. I feel like I could learn from that.

In the way I took the classroom and the relaxed mentor of that dream eighteen years ago and spun it into a long tale, I’d like to write about this girl, but I don’t have any ideas for a story. And on top of that, I don’t want people shipping the me character and the girl. I’m thirty years older than she is, and even the idea of being her friend is already kind of weird.

In the way that I dreamed about falling in love when I was young, I dreamed about making a close friend, something I have a dearth of. The day after I watched a goofy Marvel franchise descend into DC darkness, I could use a little positivity. I have a new character now. She just needs a name and she needs a story.

* With a pair of exceptions—though she actively reached out and tried to recruit them to her side.

** Which was the dirt road in front of the house I lived in in high school.

Simply the Best Man

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I met Shane in 1992, and he was a year and a half older than me. I quickly looked up to him as a mentor. My senior year of high school was full of a lot of new and old friends and adventures, but sitting in his studio apartment while he painted, and chatting and bullshitting was probably the highlight.

When I moved New York adjacent, he was there for the first several months. He showed me around, including a method of buying weed that landed us in the middle of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Youth March. While I taught myself how to draw, he was my biggest cheerleader, and the first person to call me an artist.

He and his family moved upstate, which is where I spent my three-day weekends, working on two screenplays, one of which was lost to poor archiving and a then-sixteen-pound Newcastle sitting on my laptop. The other was completed, and because it was absurdly long, he and I spent a week last summer lengthening it into a five-episode series.

Our relationship had its ups and downs, and he’s not the best at long-distance communication, but we have stayed tight. An eternity ago, he was my Best Man. My ex-wife hated him and schemed to keep us apart, and it worked. However, we’ve reconnected since then, and I’m constantly sharing with him some of the many little drawings I’ve been doing.

I’ve prematurely written my memoirs, with each chapter representing an important character in my life, and you can bet Shane got one. With his help, I was able to correct a lot of the misinformation drilled into my head by someone I was married to, and now I have an accurate chronicle of our relationship until June 2022. I should probably update that.

The reason I’m calling you all here is because Shane is an accomplished painter, with shows across the US and a distinctive style I’m proud to say I’ve watched evolve, from awkward (but still beautiful) nudes of Sherilyn Fenn to the Cubist/Outsider style that is his brand, which seem to feature the same woman. I can’t judge because I frequently draw the same woman. Long story short, nobody paints like him.

As artists, we couldn’t be anymore different. His medium is oils and large canvases. Mine is pencil, ink, and watercolors. His subjects are deserts and cityscapes and surreal costumes. My subjects are characters from my writing oeuvre. He’s a painter, I’m more of a cartoonist.

Even though we see each other as equals and have been mistaken as brothers, I still look up to him, and I thought it would be really cool if I drew one of his paintings in my style. The result isn’t nearly as good as the original, but the process was fun and engaging and exactly the reason I’m an artist. (Mine’s on the right, in case you couldn’t tell.)

A Puzzling Experience

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I’m going through a manic period right now, which means I have a lot of energy, I’m in a great mood for the most part, I’m focused, my creative output is on the edge of being ridiculous, I’m chatty, even with strangers, I’m not paying attention to my budget as much, and the slightest inconvenience makes me want to flip a desk. I’m glad I have the tools to recognize when it’s happening, but with the drug cocktail I’m on, they’re usually a lot more subtle. I’ll probably have to get my medication adjusted, which is the 2-1/2th circle of hell.

Meanwhile, for months, there has been a puzzle. I like the puzzle. I don’t ever use it, but I like it. I’m aware of the therapeutic power of a puzzle because my mother is a professional when it comes to them. It’s great to be able to take a break and refocus your mind elsewhere (which is why, for example, I’m blogging at work for a few minutes). The puzzles are fun, from the Vegas-style mid-century Palm Springs poster to the various farms to the ‘Murca one (a bald eagle flying over purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain, with wavy red-and-white stripes in the sky). There’s just one problem: the puzzle space is on the other side of my low cubicle wall.

There’s no chair there, so you have to stand up to work on it. This isn’t a problem with my work friend, who chats with me when I’m not in the zone, but for everyone else, who don’t quite know what to make of me, who don’t even say hi, that means, in my periphery, several times a day, there is someone looming there for up to twenty minutes. It’s distracting, and it’s unnerving, and it makes me tense even when I’m on an even keel.

I am not on an even keel.

After a long puzzle session from someone who doesn’t acknowledge my existence, I restrained myself from snapping and went to Work Dad’s office and explained my situation, starting with the sentence, “I don’t want to be the guy who kills fun, and it’s been great for morale, but that puzzle has to go somewhere else.” Before I could even list my reasons for this, he started brainstorming new locations for it (a chore because where it is now is literally the best place for it), and he gave me a compromise: let them finish Palm Springs, and he will give it a new home. Work Dad has an absurd amount of empathy.

This is the second great victory I have scored this week. The first one was procedural, and I can’t explain it without about four or five paragraphs, just that it was mighty. I have no one to brag about it to, though, especially not my work friend because the puzzle’s current location is right outside her office, and she’s such a crucial part of the staff that she can’t stray too far from her desk.

So I’m bragging to the readers of my blog, both of you. Here’s hoping they finish Palm Springs quickly before I go on a rampage.

Coffee Shopaholic

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Twenty years, when I lived New York adjacent, there was a spot on Eighth Street near Astor Place where you could look at a Starbuck’s, turn to your left and see another Starbuck’s, and turn to your right to see another Starbuck’s. It was like you entered some kind of vortex. There was a Starbuck’s in the Container Store when I worked there. When I visited Shane in Binghamton, the only place we could go was Starbuck’s. In the early nineties, it was a magical, distant place I’d only hear about in whispers, but by the late nineties, it was like mold.

It’s been years since I’ve been to a Starbuck’s. (Except for in airports because they give you no other options.) I prefer the smaller places that don’t bust unions, and they don’t serve you coffee that tastes like it’s been on the burner for a month. I found one a short distance from my place, and I’ve started going there regularly.

I bring one of my three sketchbooks and something to draw and color with because I work best in noise and the occasional distraction. I don’t see a lot of repeat customers, except for one.

The cafe consists of some booths and two couches with tables in front of them. I always sit in one corner of the couch. On the other corner is always a customer, about my age and not dressed in athleisurewear like every other woman who patronizes the place, and she is there every Saturday morning. She tends to sit on the other side of my looong sofa, and she spends all of her time drinking her iced beverage and reading her phone.

When I saw her this past Saturday, I thought about saying hi (not ask her out), but I got the yips. I’m naturally shy, I’ve got a mean resting bitch face, you can’t tell I’m not dating just by looking at me, and the most important part: I am pathologically afraid of being a creep.

I’m large, with hair that doesn’t stay nice and a beard that grows back as soon as it’s trimmed, my inability to start a conversation, and the aforementioned mean resting bitch face. I assume the sour looks on faces I see on the sidewalk is because they’re disgusted with me, as opposed to the fact that nobody ever looks happy on the sidewalk. This is called confirmation bias.

So my therapist and I talked about it, and she pointed out that if she were creeped out by me, she wouldn’t sit on the same sofa, over and over. She may not want to be a friend, but she’s definitely not disgusted with me.

My homework is to say hi, and if she is friendly, tell her my name. Maybe even get hers. I see my therapist once a month, giving me four Saturdays to get past the yips.

Wish me luck!

Kitten Season in Albania

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In my old writing group, we had a contest too see which of us could write the most words. The winner got a sticker. If you looked at Kat’s laptop, she was covered in stickers. It’s a free-write—you can talk about how much you hate writing for ten minutes, and you’re still qualified to win. This is surprisingly coherent for a free-write, but that’s the way I roll. The prompt was the phrase, “It was kitten season in Albania.”

It was kitten season in Albania, and no matter how much you sprayed, they were everywhere. And you know what they say about kittens: if you see one, there are dozens around that you can’t actually see. I had a particular problem with the kittens during my stay in Albania as part of my top-secret diplomatic mission with the State Department, and that was this: I had a lot of knickknacks. A LOT of knickknacks. And if there’s one thing that a kitten loves, it’s destroying the knickknacks. There was an owl that my grandmother had given me—she was Albanian, which is how I scored the sweet undercover gig—and a kitten came out of nowhere, bit its head off, knocked the remains to the floor, and disappeared into a portal. Fucking kittens. I don’t know where these portals go, but I vow one day to find out.

I called the kitten exterminators the other day—don’t worry, they don’t actually kill the kittens—they just round them up and put them into a vacuum cleaner to be sent to the kitten retail outlet in Bangor, Maine. They have a portal expert whose job is specifically to figure out where the kittens go after they create their swathes of destruction and adorable, adorable mayhem. We have theories—some of us think that it is a beautiful, sunny world of fluffiness and cotton candy. Others believe—as do I—that it is a dark, hell dimension full of evil and stuff. This makes as much sense to me as anything, being that I really, really loved my Albanian grandmother’s owl statue. I wanted to kill that kitten, but it looked at me with those big kitten eyes and mewed a tiny kitten mew, and it was all over. I’d adopt the little fucker, but I have other owl statues that my Albanian grandmother gave to me. Many owl statues. There was an army of them. I think she used them to unleash dark, Albanian magic upon the world. So who knows, maybe the kittens are a force for good, destroying those talismen of evil. Or maybe they’re just tchotchkes. What kind of magic is dark, Albanian magic? I’ve heard of Dark Macedonian magic, and dark Lithunanean magic, but never dark Albanian magic. I don’t know who spread that rumor, really. I think it was my mother, who never did like her mother-in-law. But still, labeling someone as an evil Albanian magic-user seems a little harsh, don’t you think? Maybe there was a grain of truth about it? I mean, there was all the chanting and the weird lights that eminated from Grandma’s room late at night when she thought everyone was asleep. I wasn’t asleep because the prescriptions I was on for my insomnia never actually worked. The ones for psychosis, however, were magic. Just like my grandmother. And that kitten. Fucking kitten.

Ginger Rap: A Eulogy

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It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I’m putting my current comic, Ginger Rap, on hiatus. It’s not that I don’t have time, it’s not because I lost an interest in drawing, it’s not because it sucks. (Pages 1, 2, and 5 are really good, but it’s not working.) And it’s not because someone read my first color comic, “Haute,” and realized what a genius I was. It’s because it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to.

I decided to illustrate this comic for two reasons. First, I wanted to make a comic. This was not my first comic, and I really enjoyed it. In fact, about a year ago, before my renaissance, I remember thinking that it would be fun to do another comic. Too bad I didn’t draw anymore. Here I am, with fifty sheets of Bristol board, ready to have some fun. The second was that if I drew a lot and a lot of the same characters, over and over, I’d be a better artist.

So here I am, treating the comic as a duty, and wanting to draw bigger pictures, while not enjoying the quality of art I was putting out. I like simple comic art. It’s the reason The Kindly Ones has always been my favorite Sandman story, and why I will buy anything Matt Wagner illustrates. However, my art has been oversimple, unlike the art in my sketchbooks. I had forgotten everything I had just learned about anatomy when I penciled and inked the pages, and I did it because I was rushing. My comic book art has been getting worse.

It’s time to step away and do a post-mortem. Even though each page had been penciled, painted, and inked, they look like sketches. Meanwhile, my sketchbooks have hardly any sketches, rather complete pieces of art. I’ve been treating the whole page like the medium, when I should be making each panel art.

In addition, I’ve been learning a few things, I bought a hand model (first thing I did was flip the cats off because I am a child) and a book on anatomy and a book on perspective. I’m experimenting on some tricks to give my characters more depth.  

So I’m not quitting. But if I spent some time away just practicing and learning, it would be really jarring for the art quality to leap like that between pages 8 and 9. Is it time to put Ginger Rap to rest and move on? I’m really looking forward to the last page, though. That’s why I said hiatus and not canceled.

But you see what I’ve been doing, right? Totally worth it.

Tales from the Cubicle

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*thunder and organ music*

Gather round, boys and GHOULS, for I bring you DOUBLE the frights in tonight’s chilling tale: “Terror in Team Room 5.”

*lightning*

It seemed like such a normal day. The sky was overcast, and the air was warm, but not too warm. It was more of a cuddle than a scalding. I had done a great deal of work that day, I made a drawing I can’t wait to share, and I gathered in Team Room 5 with the managers and the giant TV to talk to the editors and those who couldn’t make it that day.

Then there’s Brandy (not her real name). Brandy’s desk is fifty yards from Team Room 5, but she Zooms into the weekly meeting. I’m sure there’s a good reason. She’s our staff influencer, and there might be some reason she can’t leave her desk. Whatever.

The meeting was pretty typical, until three-quarters through, when a figure stepped into Brandy’s blurred background. I was watching the editor-in-chief at that moment, so it took Clara (not her real name) whispering at me around the Vice President of Publishing for me to notice. When I looked over Brandy’s shoulder, I saw me.

My height, my build, my bad posture, my complexion, my burgundy T-shirt, my jeans, and platinum blond or white hair were all there. There was no way to communicate to Brandy while he just stood there, shuffling around, giving me the heebie-jeebies.

The Vice President of Publishing, visibly bored, got the editors to stop talking and set us free. After confirming on Brandy’s screen that I was still there, Clara and I raced to her desk. We were between my doppelganger and the elevator, so there was no way he was getting out. And yet, he was nowhere to be seen.

We asked Brandy who he was, and she told us she never got a look at his face. Who was he? Where did he go? We will never know. Watch the background. Always watch the background.

Well, that tale was TWICE the scares! Hahahahaha! It was TWO frightening! Hahahahaha! That’s a tale you enjoy with a hot cup of COPY! Hahahahaha! It gives a whole new meaning to “talking to yourself”! Hahahahaha! I hope you enjoyed this DOS of horror and tune in next time to Tales from the Cubicle. Hahahahaha!

*thunder and organ music*