Jeanne's Comix | Bad Mother | Chapters

Happy American Horror

So I’ve been sick for two and a half of the past four days — interestingly, not consecutive days — and my plans to do three comic updates this week fell prey to needing to take it easy. This means your Halloween strip is ready NOW, giving you a full shopping day to prepare your costume if you, like Mona Spector and myself, are too terminally Bad at Halloween to have gotten one ready before now!

The joke in this one is pretty by the numbers, but what I like is Cathy’s costume, which is one of those high concept but totally ineffective costumes that I like to come up with! WHY DON’T YOU ALL GUESS WHAT SHE’S SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE COMMENTS. Other costumes I considered for her before deciding on this one: the “world-snake” Jörmungandr, the lead figure from Pornocrates by current fave painter Felicien Rops. Fun sketches:

Other news: I did this playlist for my book! I was at Austin Comic-Con and met a bunch of people and gave them bookmarks with Bad Mother comics. Hopefully SOME OF YOU are those people! Welcome!

For you and for everyone else: new comic on Thursday, same day as my reading at DOMY Books. If you’re in Austin, please come and hang out! This is probably the only event I’ll be doing for the rest of 2012, so if you want to hear me read from my book, you’d best turn up!

Puppet Play

BEHIND THE SCENES SECRETS: this strip largely exists to establish that Mona Spector is the events director at her humble coffee shop. HOWEVER, I do think this would be a great event to see at a place where food and coffee are served! HERE ARE TWO MORE GREAT EVENTS YOU MAY ENJOY: A Reading with Jeanne Thornton at DOMY Books (link is to Facebook): Austin people ought to know about this DOMY Books! All manner of indepdent books, comics, zines, and other reading matter, plus constant excellent events, book clubs, and much more. Any city is only as good as its bookstores, and DOMY is one of the stores making Austin a legitimately good city in which to live. AND NOW CLEARLY IT IS ALL THE GREATER, as I will be reading there on November 1! Come celebrate DAY OF THE DEAD with me! Bring any questions you want to ask, whether they have to do with the book or not! November 1, 7 pm, 913 E Cesar Chavez St in Austin! Austin Comic-Con: Come pick up a copy of Rocksalt! A bunch of Man Who Hates Fun books! Copies of my novel! And an infinity of other delightful surprises! I’ll be with Geoff Sebesta and Uncle STAPLE! at booth 930 on Saturday and Sunday, and mmmmaybe part of Friday, if I can get necessary freelance work done early. Come hang out! So more news you may like: I’m going to shoot for three updates next week, Tues/Weds/Thurs. This is largely to get a true Halloween update in there, since there is in fact a Halloween strip this year, in CLASSIC NEWSPAPER COMIC TRADITION. So here is the signal I will give you: if you see this Halloween strip on Tuesday, expect the regular Tues/Thurs schedule. If, however, Tuesday is a normal, non-ghostly strip, PREPARE YOURSELF FOR HALLOWEEN EXCITEMENT A DAY LATER, plus another strip on November 1! I do want to get to three strips a week at some point, and we’ll see how it goes in terms of actually getting the time to get the work done. All right: so I’ll see you this weekend at Austin Comic-Con, and then on Tuesday! Is it a deal? It is a deal!

Have you not Forgot to Wind up the Clock?

The title of this is from Tristam Shandy.

So the new issue of ROCKSALT is here upon us! This one features sixteen pages of LAUGHS. Go check it out, and if you enjoy it, please like us on Facebook to get more news and updates! I would type the contributor list here, but I’ve been typing it so much lately and it’s suddenly REALLY LONG. But here’s a non-hyperlinked version, with the URLs in web-unfriendly text:

Contributors
Jeanne Thornton (fictioncircus.com/Jeanne)
Sam Hurt (eyebeam.com)
Aaron Whitaker (www.aaronwhitaker.com)
Mack White (mackwhite.com)
M. Austin Bedell (skweegieisland.com/)
Gilbert Smith (crithit.org/spooky)
K. F. Harlock (crithit.org)
Nouri Zarrugh (www.nourizarrughart.com)
Geoff Sebesta (unnecessaryg.com)
Brian Horst (http://www.flickr.com/photos/eelskin/)
Antonius Wolfsblut (muskville.com)
Jason Poland (robbieandbobby.com)
John David Brown (flickr.com/photos/jdbrownpopart)
Miracle Jones (miraclejones.blogspot.com/)
Simon Jacobs (simonajacobs.blogspot.com)
Monte Hayward (www.webcomicsnation.com/monte/)
Mast (absolutemaster.blogspot.com)
Dylan Edwards (studiondr.com)
Dieter Geisler (dietergeisler.com)
Kathleen Jacques (bvbcomix.com)

Marginalia
Jason Poland
John David Brown
Jimbo
Rodney Barry (rodneybarry.deviantart.com/)
Gewel Kafka

Cover
Zach Taylor (gnourg.org)

If anyone would like more info, the Facebook page HAS IT

Also: it looks like co-editor Geoff Sebesta and I are going to be at Austin Comic Con this weekend, along with Chris “Uncle STAPLE” Nicholas and a bunch of Next Generation cast members, including Wil Wheaton. Please come join us! As soon as I know the booth number, I will bestow it unto you! That will certainly be THURSDAY, when we witness an elaborate Rider-Waite card house in the process of construction, and more.

Suicide Redeye

This is the thing I miss most about the brief period where I worked as a “barista”: full access to the Torani syrup bar and no restrictions on one’s disgusting personal taste. Also: other people did this, right? Where you go to the soda machine and mix equal amounts of every soda to create a “suicide” drink?

New comic on Tuesday next!

Another Day

This one is dedicated to many of my friends!

News: I got interviewed in Interview magazine, kind of about the book, but more about my feelings about different matters. My book is also said to be a “punky, poetic rush of a book” as well as “sexy, lucid, and quirky,” and it’s asserted that “Thornton nails loss, loneliness, and creepy cult mentalities. ” It is a weird feeling to have an interview about you out there. When I was I think seventeen, I got a perfect score on the ACT assessment test, one of like nine kids in the nation (or in Texas; I don’t remember) to do so, and a reporter came to our house and did an interview that appeared in the local paper. It was a similarly weird experience where you read a story about someone you don’t altogether recognize to be yourself–like I’m sure I said the puppets thing but it sounds so Byronic and harsh and evil and I don’t really feel that judgmental about my like CHILDHOOD FRIENDS. I remember at the time I felt like this was a process that was happening, that people were falling away from some kind of “great purity” which was the same thing depicted in this comic: wasting a lot of time making stuff that is cool but not useful. Now I can recognize this less as “becoming puppets” and more as like, having different interests. But we all become MORE PURE, MORE ELEMENTAL in the media!

(Memorably re: the earlier story, a friend of mine said that the newspaper photographer made my room look “a lot cooler” than it really was)

There should be a new comic on Thursday for everyone

Salad of Discontent

The writing in this one is maybe indistinguishable from a newspaper comic, for which I apologize, but I do like that it has a kind of spiritual sickness to it. I swear that this comic feature is meaner than you think it is.

I don’t have a huge amount of news? We should, as of today, finally be actually really done with the next issue of Rocksalt as of today. This is a big ol’ issue, 16 pages of QUALITY COMICS ENTERTAINMENT, and it’ll be up at the website as soon as we’ve got it back from the printer.

Should be a new comic Tuesday.

Gardnerian Wicca Club

I was in fact at a wicca-themed party briefly on Saturday, but this was drawn far before that! It is, however, based on an actual Gardnerian Wicca Club that has met a nonzero number of times while I was at Epoch Coffee working on Bad Mother scripts, and this is what my hasty ballpoint margin-of-notebook sketches tell me its participants look like. I know enough about this stuff that it is really is critical to distinguish between Gardnerian Wicca and other rival witchcrafts, but I really liked that they had a sign up saying “Gardnerian Wicca Club Meets Here!”, like if they didn’t have the sign you might stumble onto one of those other wicca clubs by mistake, and you wouldn’t connect with the right kind of spiritual power.

It took a long time to figure out how ghoulish Betty should be in this, also. I’m not sure I struck the right note. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

So here is some news: my book is one of the October Book Recommendations by the mysterious “Grantland“! The review talks a lot about The Master (which I saw just before reading this review, so it seemed extra delightful to make such a comparison), thus:

There’s a discomforting tension that runs throughout The Master. Its saturated palette and Jonny Greenwood–composed score give the film a consistent tone that’s hushed and at the same time distressing. Doctor Bantam feels the same way. It’s a slow, dissonant burn of a novel, a haunting meditation of young, wayward love.

TL;DR: A coming-of-age tale about Scientology and lesbians.

I love that TL;DR! I also love that, uh, this book that I worked for a pretty long time on seems to be enjoyable to different folks.

I should have a new comic on Thursday, and maybe more book news! Or maybe not! I can tell you that if you’re an Austin local, there will be an Event on November 1, so save the date, I guess?

See you all later!

The Book without Qualities

I like this joke! I was also proud of not having to actually refer to the text of Ulysses, which is why I didn’t even know how to mispronounce “introibo” and why some sentences are missing. Presumably Mona owns the expurgated version or something, or maybe she blacked out sentences herself when she was in her rebellious early twenties! (Also, I haven’t read Robert Musil, so I’m dissing his work in a really frivolous and uninformed way, and if you have strong opinions about why I should read The Man without Qualities, PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR REASONING IN THE COMMENTS, or I’ll assume that you, too, haven’t read this book)

The thing I like least about the art in this comic is trying to draw Betty well! The Man Who Hates Fun has kids in it, and has had for a while, but it’s really distinctly hard to draw kids for some reason, especially when they’re supposed to be very young. Betty is supposed to be five going on six–how many people get that? Probably none, unless it’s by context! That said, I think the second panel here is one of the better efforts, and I’ll figure out how to do it better in time — already we’re better than something like this, where she looks like twelve.

News: I judged a short story contest on Tuesday! Here are the finalists, plus my comments on their work. My favorite wasn’t the one that won the finalist voting, but that is the nature of democracy in fiction!

Should be a new comic on Tuesday!

Park Place with Six Hotels

It seems plain that they’re playing some kind of home-brewed version of Monopoly here, one where you either get a lot more money or where property is a lot more cheap. MUCH LIKE LIFE, IN THE MIND OF YOUNG BETTY SPECTOR

I drew this strip back in June, and it has since become strikingly topical maybe! I don’t know where Betty picked up her ideas about, uh, “entitlements,” but I guess Mona has some kind of monstrous quasi libertarian views about some topics? Or at least wants her daughter to hold such views in order to develop some kind of fearsome, diabolical confidence? I don’t know yet.

There should be a new strip on Thursday. It is almost a certainty that Cathy will be in it, if you like Cathy.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I imagine Mona is a terrible person with whom to play whatever board game this is. She is always willing to play, though!

Okay, so here’s some news: Johan Harstad’s spectacular Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? is at last available in paperback! This was one of the first books I ever edited while working at my previous job and Johan is a fantastic individual that all America is destined to be talking about, as he is talked about in his native land of grimmest Norway! To show you how good this book is, here’s a paragraph selected and retyped pretty much at random from my old HC copy:

It was quiet for a moment and we sat and turned the thought over, and neither of us knew if it was true, or if it was just something one said: that it helps to be loved. NN was breathing evenly and the clock hands moved on undisturbed, second by second, I thought about outer space, that if I were to go now, for example, to the middle of the Milky Way, at the speed of light, it would take twenty years for me to arrive, while for NN, lying in her bed, 30,000 years would pass before I returned. But nobody can travel that fast.

That’s the way I’d think when I was sad.

It was Einstein who made sure we’d never travel too far from each other.

It is the story of a depressive gardener who, having lost his job, girlfriend, and most of the good things in his life in one fell series of events, agrees to be the sound man for a struggling band from Stavanger on a tour date in the Faroe Islands. After setting sail, he wakes up in the middle of a road with a pocket full of money, no recollection of how he got there, and a truck bearing down on him. Inside the truck is a man named Havstein with an offer that will change young Mattias’s life. SPOILER: It ends with a lot of people with no experience building a boat! Read Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?.

That’s it! Should be a new comic Tuesday. I am returning to “the swing of things.”

despair and laughter and the process of learning to draw good

Archives