Archives

2013-09-19-bm

Book Chat: The House of Mirth

2013-09-19-bm

So my girlfriend is going to graduate school, which means there is a whole fun curriculum of books she is reading that I can read and pretend that I am going to graduate school too! Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is the first of these books, and it is kind of great.

Essentially The House of Mirth is a book about a dystopia such as one might read about in We, 1984, or Brave New World, a hellish world in which women have no power or agency, in which merely to be accused is to be tried, judged, and convicted in a swift, crippling blow, in which vast amounts of ingenuity must be expended in order to attach oneself to an available bachelor without one having one’s own ability to earn money directly in the profane world of business, in which the simple attempt to like invest money in the stock market in order to earn enough to pay off gambling debts one is kind of forced to accrue must be done through the auspices of men who expect sex as their reward. Basically it is a horrible story about a grim alternate reality in which women have no power, except that it’s just New York in the early 1900s.

Despite being kind of wicked smart, effective, and judicious within her circumstances, Lily Bart does not have either the courage to leave behind her society and class altogether or to like dutifully marry horrible men for the sake of their money, thus she dies in poverty. What bothers me a lot is how Wharton seems to join in condemning Lily, mostly through the alternately adoring and contemptuous eyes of Selden, the cool independent New York dude who does not mind living in a boarding house and having only moderate means, because it is more important to him to be True To Himself than it is to join all those rich jerks in their corrupt, evil social world. And Selden just can’t understand why Lily is such a jerk, why she wants to hang out with those rich jerks so much, when she could be her REAL ACTUAL SELF . . . with him! He is one of the good ones! She could be SO HAPPY!

Yet Lily can’t go off and be happy with Selden because she has to survive in a world where she’s just like definitively not free. Why should she want to be happy with Selden, even? At the end of Part I, Selden is all “I <3 you Lily wait for me to call on you,” but Lily is in the process of getting KINDA ALMOST RAPED by a friend of the family. He sees her coming out of this guy’s house in the dead of night, after being ACTUALLY SEXUALLY ASSAULTED, and is like “How terrible, LILY IS A REAL WHORE,” and storms away. And Edith Wharton kinda sides with him, one gets the impression. Appearances are everything!

I think The House of Mirth is pretty worth reading for a lot of reasons–the “tableaux vivants” scene is great and I want to have a tableaux vivants party at earliest opportunity, for example–but the author’s relationship with her main character is, um, problematic. But the character is great, and the depiction of her Totally Awful World is frankly scary. (The class stuff in the book is kind of odious–everyone is Really Really rich–but it’s interesting to see how much the author takes it as a given that no one actually deserves this wealth, or believes they deserve it. The American Dream is like in no way a part of this plot.) Fortunately I guess my characters are here to provide you all with the only truly correct, definitive interpretation of Lily Bart, through which you can better enjoy not only The House of Mirth, but perhaps all American literature ever.

Next update: MORE LILY BART RELATED FUN, OF COURSE

2013-09-17-bm

Maybe

2013-09-17-bm

Ugh, sorry this is up so late in the day! I finished it last night just as a terrible outage took the internet from us all.

So this one entertains the idea of homeschooling, which Lilana and Anna both brought up in response to the last comic. Honestly I initially thought that Mona would probably try to homeschool Betty but that there’d be some kind of barrier to it that’d require her to send Betty for public education. The reason for this has less to do with what the characters would do and more to do with the fact that I have twelve years worth of memories of public education to draw on and like zero years of memories of homeschooling, and I don’t know that I could do it any kind of justice. But I mean, I’m already writing a comic about having a child when I don’t have one, so I’ll see how it might fit into the story better? It’s definitely something I should know about more generally.

While working on this, I was playing all of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the background, essentially audio-only, as if Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Wil Wheaton, and a bevy of halting guest stars were performing a special podcast just for me. I really enjoy first season Next Generation, despite the kind of not-great quality of the productions, the kind of social unpleasantness of a lot of it (rape gangs! The episode “Code of Honor!” the sex planet with the evil god space station!), and the lame, lacking drama. The reason: it has this weird high-minded quality to it, probably owing more to Gene Roddenberry’s kind of enlightened hedonism New Age beliefs than anything. From what I understand, basically the writers throughout the first season were furious with Roddenberry for just rewriting the hell out of them, banning things like interpersonal conflict between the characters and adding lame whimsical devices (Picard’s French chauvinism, Picard hating children, etc.), and adding long, high-minded speeches about how much cooler 24th-century people are than we are (Riker’s speech in “Lonely Among Us” about how Starfleet serves steaks that are “just as tasty and nutritious as meat, but without the need to enslave animals for food.” Which is cool but it has nothing to do with the scene at hand?) Every episode is also about facing some kind of god-being at the edge of human experience–like, every episode is about this! All of them! The result is something that feels a lot more like a kind of Transcendental Meditation-style cult parable than, say, Star Trek, and I kind of love it. It is such a weird television artifact. Later, of course, it turns into a much more lovable yet less singularly weird, great thing.

There will be some old comics this week, and at least one new one! Hopefully two–it depends on time. The next one is gonna be about Edith Wharton.

2013-09-10-bm

You Can’t Keep A Good Dog Down

2013-09-10-bm

I am getting the hang of this having more than one color thing very, very slowly. A secret is that it makes no visual sense!

So uh I don’t know if anyone uses Tapastic (besides DYLAN), but I started running old Bad Mother comics there? Supposedly it is better for viewing on your phone so that you can read in the car and get into TERRIBLE TROUBLE THAT WAY. I guess it is also better at handling those web technologies like cross-browser optimization and subscriptions and magic and stuff that I with my terrible 2001-era web skills am not able to do. So if you like those things, I guess FEEL FREE TO SUBSCRIBE THERE.

There should be a new comic up Thursday, and I’m still adding secret backdated strips so as not to violate the central TIME RULES of the comic. A fun little ongoing storyline starts here if you have not seen it!

2013-09-05-bm

Reading Time is No Good

2013-09-05-bm

The big question people may have re: this one is how Betty knows about Jonestown. My idea is that Mona like one day, when she was five, sat her down and gave her a really sanitized version of the skinny on various cults, basically to warn her about those who would seek to do her harm via MIND CONTROL. It’s the kind of lesson that I guess she thought was important to administer before starting public education lol

So ROCKSALT MAGAZINE was reviewed in the Austin Chronicle! Here is what was said:

Single strips, full-pagers, even a few static poster-pages, are contained within the newsprint volume. (Note: Cover by Gil Smith. Note: Centerspread by Gewel Kafka.) Here are people with something to say. Here are works by ragers-against-the-machine, historically fluent philosophes, arch observers of humanity, and silly-ass cartoonists. . . . [we] highly recommend grabbing an issue in your favorite java joint and locking yourself to some easy chair with caffeine handcuffs … and using the paper hacksaw of Rocksalt #9 to cut (if only for a few golden minutes) your cortex free from the constraints of immediate reality.

Wow cool you should CHECK IT OUT!

I am trying to get used to the balance with the new color. Like I mistrust a lot of my basic Color Ideas, so I hope this is agreeable enough for y’all.

New BACKDATED STRIPS to come, of course! See ya later

 

2013-09-03-bm

Advertisements for Myself

2013-09-03-bm

WELCOME TO BAD MOTHER YEAR TWO. It is now after Labor Day! Betty, six, is now in school (and slightly redesigned because I was drawing her way too tall, oh no.) Let us follow her progress!

Complicated note: because I am advancing the strip in real time (and collecting it year by year as it’s done), the fact that I was traveling all summer really messed with my plans a lot, but I don’t want to violate the roughly real-time progression and delay Betty’s entry into school another year. So hopefully just this once I’m going to slowly backfill the archives, FALSIFYING DATES WITH IMPUNITY, in order to get to a few things that need to be done for Year One. (It’s nothing that’s like a PLOT SPOILER for year two or anything; just stuff that needs to happen now before Betty’s in school for the sake of the Whole Thing when it’s done.) So please take a look back in the archives to see if any new cool things have been added SINCE LAST YOU VISITED.

How do the kids even read webcomics these days? Like do you use computers or like phones or like just psychic interfacing with machines directly? I do not know any of these things. I still think the fact that this site is run on a WordPress install as being somehow really “cutting edge.” gughghh

What has happened since June! Not that much? I didn’t win a Lambda award. I was in New Orleans for most of August. A new issue of Rocksalt Magazine that I’m super happy with came out. I got a new secret freelance assignment that is really impressive but that I can’t tell anyone about for a few more days, I guess.

(Oh also: my other comic, The Man Who Hates Fun, actually updated in honor of its NINE YEAR ANNIVERSARY. ughghh again. It’s not going to update again for a while, until I’ve got a big chunk of pages ready, but I think the new page is a more fun front page placeholder than the big TO BE CONTINUED page that’s been there.)

New comics, as ever, when they come. Thank you all for being patient with these like ENDLESS VICISSITUDES

 

2013-08-20-bm

Crack

2013-08-20-bm

This (and the pages immediately before and after it) are some of the first comic pages I’ve ever done 100% on the computer. This one I think turned out actually kinda well and I think I’d have really messed it up had I tried to do it “by hand” entirely–all the repeated poses and action stuff–no good, no good