Tag Archives: pop culture

Artists’ Block, but Not Really

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The weekend Newcastle died, I redid the page of MortalMan that I’d destroyed with paint. I don’t have time on the morning of Tuesday through Thursday to work on my comic (the set-up of my work area is a real pain in the ass, and I can’t concentrate when I’m watching the clock for when I have to leave.) However, I have plenty of time to do the Three Stories in One drawings I posted this week.

Yesterday, I designed a logo for a fictional newspaper, and I roughly sketched out a panel. Today, I was able to finish the panel and do the roughs on another panel, and that’s all I have. I spent the rest of the morning drawing this.

I am afraid if I put MortalMan down, I will forget about it because that’s my M.O. But I’m really straining myself to do the little work I’ve done so far. There’s no deadline, and no one is clamoring for more pages. So I’m coming to you to ask permission: may I extend the break I started when Newcastle got sick, even though he’s not here anymore? I’ll still be drawing, just not the comic. Can I be trusted to get back to the comic on my own time?

Some feedback would be appreciated.

Walking on Down the Hall

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There’s something about Three Stories in One. Of all of my intellectual properties, of all my ideas, it has to be the dumbest. It wasn’t just my idea, though. Severian (nee Boone) was there with me in drama class, and when Ms. Lindberg told us to take out seats, we discussed how hard that would be for me, who came to school on my bike, or Boone, who took the bus, and it took off from there. Suddenly, Severian is (kind of) hooking up with Amber, the most popular girl in school, and I was racing cars in the Indy 500.

When I sat at my desk after school that day and wrote it all down, along with some of my own embellishments (there was lots of flying), I inserted Severian’s friend (who I barely liked), Luke, inspired by a Doors song I had just learned, and later in the tale, Wendy, who I’d had a crush on at the time. The storytelling was unique, in that, instead of chapter or scene breaks, each main character’s adventures were presented as a separate story, woven together with titles and “To be continueds.” Severian wrote a sequel to the collection, and we took turns writing them.

Three Stories in One became a mini-phenomenon. This was in the early nineties, so there was no internet to share it on, but it spread anyway. Severian typed it up, printed out a few copies, and they circulated, even coming into the hands of Amber herself (who I’m pretty sure was horrified, though the only hooking up Boone and Amber did was to play games like Ping-Pong). Severian and I were celebrities. In 1995, I condensed my contributions to Three Stories in One into a single collection (which can be read here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OciHzg8YdB8wyjGZNZx509v1nCvXPMIO/view) When each story fragment is put on a separate page, it came out to seventy-eight pages. In 1998, I started to teach myself how to draw, and by 2005, with four comics under my belt, I decided to illustrate Three Stories in One. I wasn’t great with faces at the time, all five of us had a distinctive look that was easy to cartoon. I made it fifty-six pages before I started making friends in the town I had just moved to and abandoned the project. However, those illustrations stuck with me, and every once in a while, I like to come back to them.

When we were kids, we talked about Three Stories in One like a pop-culture mega-hit, and I still do, even though I’m only Facebook friends with Wendy and Amber, and we don’t ever interact. The less said about Luke, the better. As for Severian, the last time I saw her was January 1, 2000, and she was presenting as Boone. She and I had a difficult relationship, as we were both mentally ill and not receiving necessary care, and she had a number of issues on top of that. After Newcastle passed away, I sat down and worked on a watercolor to take my mind off of everything. As is the case with most of my sketchbooks, I let the picture tell me what it wanted to be, and it became a dramatic drawing of Wendy. Next thing you know, I made movie posters of all the main characters.

LUKE: A total sleazebag

JEREMIAH: A miserable nerd who rides his bike everywhere

BOONE: A surprisingly cheerful and innocent goth

AMBER: The most popular and perky girl at school

WENDY: The Worst Driver in the World

I’ve made attempts to reach out to Severian, but no luck. I don’t want to do all seventy-eight pages again, but I’d love to do something smaller with these characters, and I’d love for her to writer. Though, if she chose not to, I’d completely understand. It was a difficult time in her life, and one of the main characters uses her dead name. For me, though, it was an innocent time (even though I was unhappy for at least half of it), and I’ve never written anything as bananas since.

Saving Faces

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This is a hell of a big find for me. Sixteen years ago, I wanted to do a three-to-four-panel comic strip about my sleazy reporter character, Max Fuentes. I filled out this really great chart I found on DeviantArt, mostly as an effort to draw the same face over and over again, something I’ve never been able to do. I wish I could find this challenge again.

Eventually, all of these storylines came together in the novel I entitled The Grind, as I’m a better writer than I am an artist.

Art Dump

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Since spilling paint all over page 5 of MortalMan and on the same day, getting a bad feeling about Newcastle’s health that was (mostly) true, I haven’t been working on my comic. Instead, I’ve been drawing and playing with pastels and even writing. A sketchbook or laptop is easier to put down than my comic-making rig when Newcastle wants attention, and you better believe I am going to give that cat everything.

First, I bought flesh-colored paints, and there was such a variety of colors there (I still haven’t figured out the yellow) that I made a whole picture with just those colors.

Next, I scanned in a painting I did before applying inks to see what it would look like. Then I applied inks.

The next two are just characters from my fan-fictions, one with the arms too short, and one with an interesting style I’m going to keep in mind for the future.

Strippin’ for Politics

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I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I approached the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild in 2004 with the idea for a newspaper-style strip about the Bush Administration. They turned me down because there was “No way he’s winning reelection.” This was a big part of the reason I moved to Indiana that summer.

While excavating some old sketchbooks, I found my character drawings for it. See if you can remember twenty years ago and all the wacky characters.

First is Li’l Georgie, the rootin’ tootin’est president ever. His alien friend Li’l CheyNee is always by his side. Li’l Rummie never lets him down, and neither does Li’l Collie. Girls are gross, but Li’l Condi is the exception. And finally, their nemesis is Li’l Frankenheinz. (This one is a little obscure, to be honest—can you guess who he is?)

I’ll be honest, I had zero ideas for actual strips starring them. I was hoping to get other people to write it for me.

You got the brawn, I got the brains, let’s make lots of money

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Here’s a few more work-for-hires I did over the years. The first one is the most recent, from 2022, when my former roommate, Will, asked me to design a pair of avatars for his baffling username “Rocks in my Socks.”

Next, in 2014, my sister, Rachel, hired me (don’t worry, she got the family discount) to design a logo for the annual charity scavenger hunt she participates in, GISHWHES. I don’t recall the theme, and I’m not sure I want to.

In 2012, Michele paid me to make her look awesome in the desert, which I did.

And finally, in 2012, Whitney asked me to help her design a logo for something SCA/pirate-related. I feel like I did a great job with this one (I also designed a business card and a flag), but I’m not sure they used it.

Unfair Use

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I was told under no uncertain terms will I be allowed to include the first 3 lines of  “I’m Too Sexy” in my upcoming novel. The reason I given is that the music industry is insanely litigious. They gave me several examples of the charges they’ve levied for the use of even “one lyric” (I assume they mean line because a lyric is a word). Note that I didn’t say “musicians” are so litigious. It’s the people who own the songs, which is not them.

I wrote Right Said Fred personally and asked them for permission to use the lines, and their assistant told me that to talk to the licenser. Now, “I’m Too Sexy” is not a work of art. The lyrics are uninspired, and the beat is childishly simple. It’s catchy, though, and most importantly, the brothers who make up the band wrote, performed, and recorded it. It’s their song. They don’t own it.

National Comics, which would one day become DC Comics, bought the rights to Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars is worth a lot more than in the forties, but even then it was incredibly cheap. Superman launched an entire genre. Even before comic book movies became mainstream, the work of superhero creators inspired the movies. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando leads Han, Chewy, and Leia into banquet hall with Darth Vader? That scene happened over a decade earlier in The Fantastic Four:

Jack Kirby, the artist of that scene (and cowriter; without going into detail, the Marvel method of storytelling leaned a lot more on the artist than the writer, contrary to what Stan Lee’s hype machine will tell you), did not get to keep his own art. Timely, which became Marvel, got to sell it at auction, and Kirby didn’t get a dime. This went on until the seventies, when Kirby and Neal Adams and other artists fought tooth and nail for the right to own what they created. Likewise, in the nineties, Todd McFarlane was the superstar artist whose work was selling literally millions of copies of Spider-Man comics. Marvel went nuts selling merchandizing with his art. McFarlane got nothing. (He rounded up other superstar artists to form Image Comics, in which creators were allowed to keep their creations until they didn’t want to do that anymore and did the same thing.)

Sorry I’m hitting you with the comic book history, but it’s all I really know. I know that Disney and the Creator’s Syndicate (which owns Peanuts, among its extensive catalog) are so litigious, they will send cease-and-desist and even subpoenas to daycare centers that paint Charlie Brown or Mickey Mouse on their walls. Every time I see a place with a Garfield hanging around, I wonder who’s going to squeal on them and bring in the lawyers.

All of this goes back to my book. It’s set in 1995, and while “I’m Too Sexy” was released in 1991, it was still fresh on our minds at that time. My twenty-seven-year-old work friend told me the song was a banger when I mentioned it to her, but in the nineties, it was kind of annoying. Really, really catchy, but annoying. The people I hung out with hated the song, myself included, and hearing the acapella “I’m too sexy for my love; Too sexy for my love; Love’s going to leave me” meant we were in for a very difficult three-to-four minutes. One of my friends thought it made him cool to play that song in the Kristy’s every time he came in. (For reference: if most of the people in Gallup, New Mexico were Power Rangers, Krristy’s would be the juice bar where everyone hangs out.) It was not cool. In fact, we all kind of hated him.

Kristy’s is a major setting for my novel, and a character does the “I’m Too Sexy” thing. I happens repeatedly, but I can easily edit the subsequent uses out. That first use, though, is supposed to capture the despair those first three lines brought in me every time I heard them. Why the fuck can’t I use those twenty-one words without paying out a fortune?

Greed. That’s all.

Music is ingrained in us, from catchy ad jingles to that guy whistling on the elevator. We sing the lyrics to ourselves or other people all the time. It’s a part of our lives, and denying writers the right to use these words is denying us the right to properly chronicle how we live, how we talk to each other. My novel is about teenagers, and what do teenagers care about if not music? That used to be the first question I’d ask of anyone I met when I was that young, even before learning their name: “What kind of music do you listen to?” How does that count as “Fair Use?”

When I wrote this novel a year and a half ago, I had come to terms with Right Said Fred. Their one-hit wonder was a classic by that point, and I had begrudgingly accepted that. Even though I haven’t exchanged a word with the asshole who heralded himself with that song like it was fucking “Hail to the Chief,” I kind of love his chutzpah in retrospect. But after talking to three lawyers and Neil Gaiman (relax, it was on Tumblr), and now the legal department of my publisher, I kind of hate it again.

If he’d had the right, would Fred have approved of my use of the lyrics? I don’t know. The characters’ reaction to them isn’t positive. But I can use the title, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I have to rewrite the paragraph or the entire passage so I don’t just say, “She heard the first words of ‘I’m Too Sexy’ and slammed her head down on her book.” I’m too good a writer for that, all so some rich douchebags can charge me a thousand dollars or more for their use, douchebags who have never a created a thing in their lives except enough money to buy a yacht. I am so mad right now.

I’m too sexy for this bullshit.

Schoolyard Haunts

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Something I’ve always wondered about was where the supplemental lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came from. I never hear them on TV (that doesn’t mean they’ve never been on TV), but I’ve been hearing them since I was too little to remember. Nowadays, you can’t sing “You would even say it glows” without someone appearing out of nowhere and adding, “Like a light bulb!” Where did it come from? How do I hear it from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Northern Virginia with few differences? And even if there are slight differences, the tune and rhythm is the same. I think this would be a better documentary than another one about Ted Bundy, so Netflix, call me.

However, that’s not why I gathered you all here. You are here because a chat conversation today revealed to me just how weird this schoolyard song was, and that it, from what I can tell, did not leave Woodall Elementary in rural Oklahoma. I’m calling upon you because, if you can identify the song, you would put to rest a mystery I’ve been living with for over thirty-five years.

The song, and I am not making any of this up, goes like this:

Yo momma, yo daddy, yo greaaaaaaaasy granny!

You got a hole in your pants, you got a big behind, like Frankenstein

You’re gonna beat beat beat down Sesame Street.

It was sung to me as kind of an acapella funk rap. The part where you’re introducing your relatives goes pretty slowly, like a train warming up. The rest of it chugs along at top speed.

I have no idea what this is. When the class clown who taught it to me was confronted by a teacher who said, “Where did you get that song, mister?” his answer was “Sesame Street.” Which is funny, but it is probably not accurate.

I don’t even know why I remember it, but I do. Is it from a song? That’s a possibility because I was not up on music in the eighties, unless it was by “Weird Al” Yankovic. And yet, I’ve never heard this song. Is it just a weird schoolyard thing? I have not heard it in any schoolyard I’ve been to, and anyone I’ve asked about it has usually given me a concerned look.

If I had the finances, I’d do a documentary about this, as well, but it would probably be lots of shots of people being puzzled by me singing to them. I’d be asking questions that would baffle them, such as, “How do you respond to the allegations that your granny is greaaaaaaasy?” Or, “Do you believe that this alleged hole in your pants might be related to your behind matching Frankenstein’s in size?”

Anyway, that’s why you’re here: does this ring any bells? Is this a song I’m not familiar with? I recently found out that accusing someone of having a “big ol’ butt” came from a song. I hope you have some answers.

There’s one possibility I hadn’t considered, and that’s that the class clown made it up whole cloth. Somehow, that would be the best origin for this strange little rhyme.

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.

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.