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2012-12-11-bm

One Pencil

2012-12-11-bm

I remember I was really tired while drawing this, which explains why it’s like not even a joke at all. It is sanctimoniousness in star-patterned boxer shorts.

So hey, yet another review of The Dream of Doctor Bantam! This time from Sara Rauch of LAMBDA LITERARY:

. . . Don’t expect anything pat or generic at all out of this book. It’s full of strange plot twists and struggles, it teeters on the edge between dream and reality, it’s gut-wrenching and will make you wince and roll your eyes and wonder if your own coming-of-age was quite so fraught (and you’ll realize it was). It’s funny and sad without trying too hard, and more than anything else, it’s honest.

. . . Julie and Patrice, despite their constant bickering, forge a crazy, intense bond. It is in these moments of desire that Thornton is at her finest, capturing the wondrous, torturous moments of first love: “And the lock in her heart felt like it was coming open again, the gears and tumblers falling piece by piece until there was nothing but a pile of metal, glittering, on the grass.”

Set in Austin, The Dream of Doctor Bantam does a fine job of evoking the underside of a city—the parts only a local might see. . . . There is an unending amount of life in this book, the pages fairly surge with it. Julie is fumbling, weird, snarky, and also wise in her ironic, insecure yet self-assured way. Julie’s urges and interactions with her world are palpable—Thornton’s prose skillfully matches and magnifies Julie’s take on things, making the entire book an immersive, in-your-face experience.

There is a zine-like aesthetic to The Dream of Doctor Bantam, and while it works overall, there are a few parts of the books that feel messier than others—it has its share of inconsistencies and imperfections. None of these things are large enough to ruin the overall enjoyment of the book, but if you’re the type of reader who likes tidy prose and scenes, this isn’t the book for you. If you are, however, the type of reader who likes to dive into the weird world of the protagonist and hang on for dear life as she navigates it, then The Dream of Doctor Bantam is a just the ticket.

This was like over the top great.

Also, it looks like I am answering questions for an “I Am A” on Reddit on December 17 at 4 p.m.! If you wish to ask fun Reddit questions along with THE REST OF THE LAND, please, do so then! Or like write comments now. I’ll probably answer anything

There was other stuff I was going to write in preparing this post, but I’m exhausted for some reason. New comic Thursday, featuring Cathy, see you then

2012-12-06-bm

I’m Terrible

2012-12-06-bm

This one pretty much speaks for itself.

So hey: I am in the FALL READING ROUNDUP at BooksMatter! Here’s what they say:

The world of The Dream of Doctor Bantam, Jeanne Thornton’s debut novel, mostly resembles our own except no one seems to want to be in it (you may think that, too, is a similarity, but I prefer not to). Julie’s sister, Tabitha, has died, and Julie’s flashbacks reveal Tabitha’s unhappiness and longing for release. “It’d just be nice to be outside of time for a little while,” Tabitha says. “Just to stop and look around and notice things. Just to figure out where to go. Just not to exist for a little while.” Soon enough, she doesn’t. Soon enough, her little sister—anguished and pawing through her sister’s old belongings, from her sex toys to her diary—discovers a girl, much like Tabitha, who has found a way to escape time: a cult named THE INSTITUTE OF TEMPORAL ILLUSIONS: A COMMUNAL PLACE OF IDENTITY AND FOCUS OUTSIDE OF TIME. Rather than fall for the cult’s gimmicks—their eerily convincing rejection of being “timebound”—Julie falls for the girl, Patrice. What follows is a haunting story of Julie’s attempts to save Patrice, to save herself, to see if anyone at all can be satisfied living inside of time. Thornton doesn’t give us the formula, but her story, channeled through Julie’s desperation, has a heavy beauty.

My favorite thing is that this reviewer, this Tiffany Gilbert, finds my fictional cult’s horrifying metaphysics “eerily convincing.” YESSSS. EVERYONE SHOULD JOIN MY CULT, IMMEDIATELY.

New comic Tuesday!

2012-12-04-bm

You Must Submit Draft Plans

2012-12-04-bm

First just to clarify: yeah, that’s Cathy, in AVATAR FORM

So shameful confessions dept: I have, in the past, spent a reasonable share of time on SECOND LIFE. In part this was due to sick fascination at its creepy Ayn Rand meets Uncanny Valley aesthetic — the Orwellian NO NUDITY propaganda posters when you leave the training area, the endless shopping malls full of different articulated wings, gigantic stomper boots of the kind I will never find a reasonable pair of ever unless I commission some kind of artisan to make them, and creepy “sex skins.” I spent an hour once in the entrance to a Star Trek sim that I crashed just to steal a cool Starfleet outfit trying to explain to a really officious sixteen year old station commodore why I didn’t want to actually join Fake Starfleet and spend sixteen hours a day following the orders of other teens whilst slowly working my way up from fake ensign to fake admiral. I have practiced dance moves with a Halo character who had a skull for a head and fended off ten thousand improperly spelled advances from horrible European men, and one time guardedly cultivated the advances of a girl in a nightclub dressed as a really accurate Power Girl. I took a class on how to make 3-d models of Halloween ghosts. The whole thing is so visually offensive, over the top, and UTTERLY COMPELLING.

Like, LOOK AT THIS. LOOK HOW GROSS THIS IS. It is the beginning of the new world.

LOOK AT THIS INSANITY.

So why, why would someone expose herself to this totally nuts world that people create when there are no physical restrictions on their behavior whatsoever? Answer: it’s a really good place to hang out for trans people who aren’t particularly out yet. Because on the Internet, all gender representation is I think generally assumed to be false, no one actually looks for the physical “reality” behind whatever you present yourself as. This is pretty much what I did, gawking at the bizarre hideous products of people’s worst impulses while enjoying a for-once totally unambigious social response to my gender presentation. I could talk to people and think about whether I was “coming off as female”–which I don’t think is actually a useful thing to do, in the end–it’s terrible to try to think about HOW TO PRESENT YOURSELF SOCIALLY, and the chips ought to fall where they may–but I wouldn’t have developed the confidence to figure out that it’s not a useful thing to do, in the end, without at least putting in some serious effort at practicing that useless thing.

There is also value beyond Sociopathic Laboratory. I spent hours hanging out at the maybe-still-around Transgender Resource Center (which is where I first read a portion of She’s Not There that someone had helpfully scrimshawed onto some kind of in-game PDF object), sitting on couches and talking about social anxieties, asking medical questions, and generally just Being Honest For Once with people dressed as pharaoh wizards and/or sex bats. It was great, provided some sense that there was a real community of People Like Me in existence before I ever had the guts to seek out such communities IRL, and you could even fly. There were closeted kids in weird fundamentalist religions, sex workers, busy corporate types, generally fun socialites and literary nerds, all of us meeting behind weird polygon masks. I can’t describe it if you haven’t tried it: it’s another order of remove from the basic internet. It’s kind of terrifying and useful and I think probably more trans people than one would expect have had this experience.

So clearly now that I’m writing a trans character, which I’ve been afraid to do for years, she has to own a messed up nightclub hollowed out of a whale. I went back and forth about how insane to make this look–like including a bunch of weird JPEG artifact clip art and little tags in bad Verdana font above every object–but I figure that for various Complicated POV Reasons it was probably best to just present the Second Life weird stuff in this comic at face value. So I’m sorry this whale nightclub is maybe more tame than it ought to be.

I don’t go on Second Life at all anymore because it’s KIND OF DEPRESSING TO ME NOW. (It’s interesting that Cathy is like, a lot braver than me about gender stuff, yet she still spends an unwholesome amount of time online. I guess theoretically she treats this as some kind of actual business? I don’t know!) But I would like to take this opportunity to RAISE A GLASS to what’s inadvertently maybe a pretty useful thing for the trans community, as well as the ideal haven for the worst products of human imagination that reality can offer.

(Further reading as to my reactionary and curmudgeonly opinions regarding this simple software program that probably brings lots of people basic happiness, that has even done the same for me: here)

2012-11-22-bm

Hiiiiiii Inez I Look Pretty Vulnerable

2012-11-22-bm

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone reading and to your families!!!

There should be two components of Thanksgiving, I feel: the “meal day” component and the “commemorate the invasion and conquest of a people, a commemoration duly masked by the myth of a shared meal symbolizing eternal friendship between two peoples” component. Let’s separate those two, where we commemorate the evil on the first day by buying a live turkey, “befriending” it (like giving it some kind of name) and integrating it into our lives in some basic way. Then we kill it and process it, and a week later we have “meal day.” We are somber because of the necessary sacrifice of the bird, symbolizing the land that we have inherited and that we’re using with no serious intention of giving it up and like returning to our continent of ancestral origin. But the quality of the meal and the togetherness of family will remind us that despite the dark, bloodstained quality of our shared history, we can’t think about this, and we must gather together around wonderful scalloped potatoes and pumpkin pie and yams with marshmallows stuck in them, because the present and whatever luxuries we can afford are all we have.

This is my Thanksgiving wish for all of us: that we will befriend turkeys that we have to kill, and that this will bring us all together.

Again: HAPPY THANKSGIVING

2012-11-20-bm

Library Policy Killed Me

2012-11-20-bm

So I’LL JUST LEAVE THIS HERE: http://therumpus.net/2012/11/horn-reviews-the-dream-of-doctor-bantam

I love everything about this. Mr. Kevin Thomas picked the best possible images anyone could pick pretty much. His version of the Institute logo is so excellent. A SALUTE TO MR. KEVIN THOMAS OF THE RUMPUS.

FURTHER, I’ll leave THIS here: http://www.autostraddle.com/read-a-fcking-book-jeanne-thorntons-the-dream-of-doctor-bantam-149623/

. . . That tenderness of first love, of first girl-on-girl love, of finally knowing how you want to be forever and finding someone you can easily take with you. The love story makes this a book for us. A book in our own strange, emotional, gravelly language. A precious sign of what goes on in our hearts and our heads and how it is to fall in love with someone unusual. Someone nobody would have picked for you. Someone you thought you’d never be able to pick.

Eileen Myles called it “messy.” I was ready for romance, for hot summer nights, for a heart beating merely to continue looking for truth. And if I haven’t given you enough reason to read it by now, just know it was all of that and more.

These are the kind of things that make the huge amounts of time spent doing this stuff worthwhile: having someone you have no direct knowledge of suddenly care about the same things you care about, for a while. SO HAPPY ABOUT THESE.

ON A DARKER NOTE.

I didn’t remember that this was the Transgender Day of Remembrance before planning this comic for the day. I feel completely fortunate that other than a handful of scumbags in my old Brooklyn neighborhood, I’ve never been actually threatened or attacked. But I remember having to make an active decision: “Now there are people who are going to potentially kill you without knowing you, based on how you’re going to present yourself.” And I don’t think anyone should have to make that decision. And I feel grateful to everyone who’s helped in any way to change the balance of the statistics on this site from stuff like “shot by the LAPD, shot by the NYPD.” But trans advocate Brandy Martell was shot in her car just this year by guys who tried to pick her up only a couple of blocks from a restaurant Anna Anthropy and I ate at while talking about the really early stages of her book sometime in like 2011. It’s still really, really bad. We could’ve both been gone just as easily as Brandy Martell was, for just as little reason. And it’s worth taking some time to remember this and the people who weren’t as lucky.

*

Okay, so this comic. To anyone who thinks this comic about a mother helping her daughter steal books from the public library is too saccharine: I will see you Thursday for our THANKSGIVING SPECIAL! BRING YOUR APPETITE.

2012-11-15-bm

Five Noble Factors

2012-11-15-bm

A comic commemorating Sun Tzu, author of that classic of military strategy and tactics, War is a Racket. Remember these five noble factors! They can be useful in your own life! A usual interpretation of these factors: Issues involving the weather. Issues involving the terrain of the enemy. The personal character of the enemy commander. The internal logistics of the army. AND: general submission to the individual tendencies of objects under THE TAO. If you correctly calculate these factors in your own force and that of your opponent, you can know the outcome of the battle before it even happens.

So hey: some artwork I did was included in a show called PRESIDENTIAL LOSERS at Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin. The idea was that a combination of local artists like myself and Big Deal artists like Anders Nilsen, John Porcellino, and Lauren Weinstein would come together to do pictures of people who’d run for president and lost. (I did Geo. McClellan.) The show is becoming a book, with luck, and you can help this process out by contributing to the Kickstarter campaign! They just need $5,000. This seems eminently achievable. DOESN’T IT?

There will for sure be a comic next Thursday, or THANKSGIVING. There will probably also be one Tuesday. See y’alls then

2012-11-13-bm

Goblins!

2012-11-13-bm

This is for The Party, who had to contend with a gelatinous cube and a quasit last week, and who are going to have to navigate a hellish maze Tuesday night. Stay strong in your hearts!

I’m making progress on the new longer project I’ve been pokily working on for a couple years now. Here is a PREVIEW IMAGE:

The pages are all penciled and it’s a little shy of half done on the inks. Once I finish it, the next non-regularly-updated comics project is the MWHF conclusion. SOON, FRIENDS

Also: dear New Yorkers! The excellent team behind Word Up Community Bookstore requires YOUR HELP to find a new permanent location! This is a new independent bookstore, shocking in this day and age to begin with, and located in the Washington Heights neighborhood. If I’m not mistaken, it’s pretty much the only bookstore in that neighborhood, and in the wake of terrible hurricanes, it’s more necessary than ever before. I saw Junot Diaz read there and he rocked the place. HELP THEM OUT! The worst that can happen is that you will get a book for your troubles.

New comic Thursday if all things go well!

2012-11-09-bm

Zen Espresso

2012-11-09-bm

THERE IS LITTLE MORE TO BE SAID.

Here, also, is an excellent illustrated interview the fantastic CASSIE J. SNEIDER has done with me at TheRumpus.net! Topics of discussion: Scientology, a history of juvenalia I have been responsible for, and the answer to the question of which Beach Boy I would prefer to be melted onto in an industrial accident. It is one of the few interviews I’ve done that also alludes to the fact that I do comics as well as write books, which is really nice. Please enjoy it! Please, also, buy the book if you haven’t!

I should have more Bad Mother material for you on Tuesday, all things permitting. One day there will be Boat Girl again. I am trying to get things done!