Archives

2013-05-23-bm

Not Even the Sun

2013-05-23-bm

BUT THE PRAYER WAS SWALLOWED BY THE DARKNESS

So Rocksalt Magazine’s person-who-understands-marketing-because-I-don’t MATT HIRST interviewed me for the STAPLE! blog! I talk a lot about Bad Mother, my previous comix stuff, and despair:

The best thing I think I’ve done with Bad Mother are the strips with Mona driving Betty to the gas station at night or Mona slumped on the kitchen floor, one hand on the handle of a pot, talking to the cat about how she feels incapable sometimes of being a decent parent/human being. It works because it uses the same graphic vocabulary of the strips where like Mona’s being a jerk to her girlfriend or Betty’s saying something cute about dinosaurs: this safe family comic world is also the world where there’s real despair breaking through. This is a theme that I want to work with a lot more as the strip going forward, which I’m sure fellow despair fans will appreciate.

I hope today’s strip MEETS EXPECTATIONS in this regard! (None of my plants are dead, incidentally) (yet) (except the one that died of “old age” basically)

Hey, this weekend I am doing a reading at Bookwoman in Austin! You ought to attend!

New comix Tuesday, as per usual. (Because I’m going to NYC on tour, expect some delays in strips going up first week in June, though I’ve got enough of a mostly-finished backlog at this point that hopefully we’ll be fine. I WILL ADVISE.)

2013-05-21-bm

Tell Me What You’re Thinkin’ Right Now

2013-05-21-bm

More people should do this! All the time! Everywhere! BREAK THE CHAINS OF PROPRIETY! You, all of you, comment with what you are thinking RIGHT NOW so we can relate better

Soooo I’m not sure how many of these I’ve listed, but here it is again: my WORLD TOUR 2013, summer leg:

More dates on the WORLD TOUR TBA! I guess if you pay for me to go to your town and arrange a place to stay and a bookstore and everything, I can probably swing this.

I keep feeling like there’s something else I meant to post about here, and I have no idea what it is. I hate this

New comic coming Thursday!

2013-05-16-bm

All Lesbians Ever

2013-05-16-bm

WHO HERE AGREES WITH INEZ. I kinda don’t, except about the magic urn thing

Also, clarification: Mona’s not like referring to a “trigger warning” or anything; she’s referencing Roy Rogers’s horse. I don’t know why this is a reference that occurs to her (or by extension, to me, since I’m like the same age.) I could guess that Mona was the kind of kid who would get like really really obsessed with a single piece of archaic culture and be really demonstrative about it. Like frex she’d probably go around the house singing this song:

Probably she sang this for COUNTLESS HOURS, like literally chasing her parents from one end of the house to the next, belting out this song neither she nor they would have any direct reason to care about! Forever! She still sings it today!

That’s it — see you all Tuesday

2013-05-13-bm

I Must Remember

2013-05-13-bm

(This comic based on personal experience)

So I guess I’ve been doing this comic for a year now! I’m glad it’s still going, even if it’s going a lot more slowly than I figured it would. There are like just shy of sixty strips, I think, which is not a fantastic amount in a year since it’s like three panels per strip usually. But this is fine (uh, for me, anyway.) Things grow at the rate they grow.

Vision statement: I did a comix panel with Griffin Mauser, Ghastly Gilbert Smith, and the friendly musical folks of Urban Specific this weekend, and the question of what all of us even liked about comics came up (i.e. influences etc.) This comic comes out of me really, really loving newspaper comics, like to horrible distraction, like checking out every comics anthology or collection from the 741.5 section of the library over and over forever, and wanting to intentionally set out to write one that’s supposed to be a long, evolving story told through a lot of short newspapery installments, taking this weird format that’s a result of a bunch of accidents of commerce and publishing/distribution technology, and trying to do something neat with it that would be hard to actually publish in any mainstream newspaper consistently. I think the fact that this is supposed to end up being a long story isn’t yet apparent, and will be soon, but I want it to be at least sort of good as a regular daily-style strip, and I guess I hope people like what I’m doing! BECAUSE I’M GOING TO KEEP DOING IT

Thanks everyone who’s been reading! I wish I could make a green-iced anniversary cake that everyone could eat, but the internet does not yet have this technology. HERE’S THIS INSTEAD

DELICIOUS CAKE<3, new comix Thursday

2013-05-09-bm

Married to My Ideas

2013-05-09-bm

I like the switch between panel 1 and 2 in this one and I like the little drawings. One of them says THE GHOST THAT KILLS.

So I have two news items! One is a New York City event on June 5 at Bluestockings Bookstore with the excellent Chavisa Woods, author of The Albino Album! It is all part of a FANTASTICAL TOUR this summer that will take me from Austin to New York! And back again! And that’s all! But this event is going to be really, really good, and everyone within a two state/province radius should hell of come out to see us read!

The other is that ROCKSALT ISSUE 8 is now upon us! Fantastical work from a variety of artists both old and new! You are commanded to read it, and please take note of the various SPECIAL OFFERS available to the savvy consumer within.

A new strip will appear on MONDAY. Yes, MONDAY

2013-05-07-bm

Bloodcats

2013-05-07-bm

Who is this new mysterious kid? When am I going to like make a cast page to detail facts about my six or so characters?

Hey so check this out! My pal Bill Cheng is FAMOUS NOW, and appears in this interview on NPR’s All Things Considered talking about the Delta Blues and his new book, Southern Cross the Dog, which is AVAILABLE EVEN NOW YES NOW from all stores everywhere! I’m extra excited about this book because while I was writing my book, The Dream of Doctor Bantam, we were both reading our work to our group of pals in a cafe every two weeks, so it’s like this book is some kind of GHOST TWIN to mine book, sharing amniotic fluids and stuff! You ought to read this book. It features a really scary sequence in a swamp, various awesome characters, authentic hoodoo magics, and all kinds of good writing. GO READ THIS BOOK NOW.

In other MY FRIENDS ARE GREAT DEPARTMENT NEWS: Miracle Jones was just exhaustively interviewed by The Rumpus! One of my fave quotes in an interview full of fave quotes:

I think the future of publishing is a mere change in metaphor from books as “commodity” to books as “location.” Having “electronic rights” will not mean being able to put out a single, boring text file for “download.” Electronic rights will mean property rights: you will host the one copy of the text that everyone visits and with which everyone interacts. Pirating books will become as silly as pirating houses or food. That’s why celebrity chefs are being pushed so hard as the new “rock stars”: elaborately-prepared meals are the very last art that can’t be copied.

Please widely share this interview! Use like Twitter and Tumblr and stuff! The world’s gotta know!

I guess there will be a new strip Thursday? Maybe we will learn more about this kid and his deal then.

2013-05-02-bm

Walking in a Circle

2013-05-02-bm

I like a lot of things about Mona’s house! Notably I like that her tomatoes are doing better than mine are, at present.

The book Mona is reading is AT LADY MOLLY’S, the fourth book in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series. So far it’s probably the best of the series, if only because it’s More About Widmerpool than the others. Basically this series is like Proust except (1) funnier, (2) featuring occult topics, and (3) containing a far greater percentage of rank coincidences. I like ridiculously sustained writing/narrative projects A LOT, so if you like these as well (plus you have an affection for early twentieth-century British society and some level of tolerance for long passages about how the “character of women can never truly be known to men,” which are annoying but which aren’t the WHOLE point, at least), give it a shot!

New comix Tuesday, I think.

2013-04-30-bm

If You Enjoy People

2013-04-30-bm

Mona and Cathy are out on the town!

It looks like I’m gonna be reading in NYC in June with one of my favorite writers and people! Details to come once they’re more final. Putative title of the event: DOUBLE FIST

New comic Thursday! This one featuring Inez, and a magic garden!

2013-04-25-bm

A Killer Whale, a Tiger Shark (1 of 2)

2013-04-25-bm

The first in a two-part series involving SONGCRAFT. The next part will be tomorrow! TUNE IN

In a special BONUS FEATURE, I also did a comic about the characters from the Dungeons and Dragons game friends and I have been involved in for like half a year now! It’s here on my Tumblr, and also here, in miniature:

In YET ANOTHER SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE, I also have this awesome Bad Mother fan art that Kathleen Jacques of Band Vs. Band did for me for my birthday (which was, uh, a while ago) that I don’t think I’ve yet posted here! It features Mona, Betty, and Inez enjoying WHOLESOME PURSUITS:

You should be reading Band vs. Band, guys! Something really cool happened!

All right, SEE YOU TOMORROW