Archives

2012-10-09-bm

Gardnerian Wicca Club

2012-10-09-bm

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!

2012-09-28-bm

The Book without Qualities

2012-09-28-bm

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!

2012-09-25-bm

Park Place with Six Hotels

2012-09-25-bm

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.

2012-09-20-bm

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

2012-09-20-bm

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.”

2012-09-18-bm

We Can Do Anything, Betty

2012-09-18-bm

This was written at two in the morning when I couldn’t sleep.

Soooo here is news! My novel, The Dream of Doctor Bantam, just got a pretty good review in Publishers Weekly, preparatory to the official release date of October 1! (Though you can order it now.) Here is what they say:

In this offbeat, emotionally raw debut, FictionCircus.com co-founder Thornton explores the tribulations of romance and rebellion, and the coming-of-age of 17-year-old Julie Thatch. Still reeling from her older sister’s suicide, Julie meets and falls for Patrice, a mercurial, fragile, oddly-innocent young woman striving to move up in the ranks of the Institute of Temporal Illusions, a cult led by the titular Dr. Bantam. Their relationship is a volatile, co-dependent, unstable thing, made worse by Patrice’s damaged psyche and Julie’s cynicism regarding the cult and life in general. The latter’s half-hearted quest for personal growth clashes with Patrice’s increasing instability and obsession with becoming “Unbound,” or free from the concept of time, and both careen toward a moment of crisis. The lack of quotation marks gives the text a muted, distant feel, an effect abetted by Julie and Patrice’s underlying feelings of alienation and disaffection. But Thornton’s hypnotically intense writing style makes the story simultaneously attractive and repulsive, though consistently powerful.

They are notoriously sharp-tongued at PW, it is said, so this is a pretty good sign I think!

Comickaze was okay also. I realized within the first hour or so that it was really, um, not the crowd of people who are going to be into what I do, generally speaking (lots of anime/Adventure Time costumes; lots of scantily clad Poison Ivies and Dark Phoenixes.) I didn’t bring too much beyond the book and some MWHF collections, and it was pretty fun regardless of the lack of sales (beyond a few people, to whom I am grateful!) I tabled with Dylan Edwards of Studio NDR, who is delightful company, and got to meet & dine with people from Prism Comics and Northwest Press, both groups highly worthy of your attention!

Okay this is it — new comic Thursday!

2012-09-14-bm

Printing an E-Map

2012-09-14-bm

HUMOROUSLY, I’m very hastily putting this up before getting ready to catch a plane that I should have gotten ready to catch some time ago! This plane is bound for Los Angeles, where I will be at the COMICKAZE EXPO on Saturday and Sunday. I will be sharing booth #1638 with Dylan Edwards of Studio NDR, who has a new book out with a foreword by, gasp, Alison Bechdel! I will have a bunch of Man Who Hates Fun books, plus my novel, plus I guess paper that I can draw something on for you if you are into that.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, will also be at this convention. All right, I must go! There will most likely be a new strip TUESDAY. We are getting back on track, we hope.

2012-09-11-bm

Opposable Thumb

2012-09-11-bm

I like the attitude that Mona is inculcating in Betty here. Imagine feeling superior to the dinosaurs themselves when you were a kid!

So who else is a Tyler Page fan? He’s released a big old 10th Anniversary edition of his ILL-FATED college days comic, Stylish Vittles! You get all 600+ pages of Stylish Vittles, a “director’s cut” edition comprising maybe half of those pages, lots of notes and page layouts, and long-buried RELEVANT COLLEGE WORK that reminds me of Jessica Abel/Artbabe stuff that I, uh, don’t like that much. But if you like painstakingly dissecting people’s DOOMED PROJECTS, this will be a kind of mother lode for you! And the many-years-later quick Part Four ending to Stylish Vittles is probably worth downloading this all on its own.

(I don’t mean to sound down on Tyler page with all of this DOOM talk! I like doomed things! But his project Nothing Better is pretty far from doomed, and Raised on Ritalin is going to be the smash graphic novel sensation of 2013-2014, whenever an enterprising publisher takes a shot on it.)

That’s it! The hope is to have a new strip up Thursday, and to get back to the Tues/Thurs thing as soon as possible. So check back when you can!

Sincerely,
Princess Hemlock

2012-09-07-bm

Serif Vomit Font

2012-09-07-bm

It has been a long, long time. But consider it a DOUBLE UPDATE. Above, this work, featuring guest appearance (kinda) by a “creative license” likeness of Austin Sketch Group’s own AUSTIN SWINBURN. I drew this sometime back in June, and now here it is. More Bad Mother/Boat Girl material soon. Man Who Hates Fun material less soon.

Below, a Jack Chick-style adventure, in support of my book. You ought to get yourself a copy of my book!

Love Is a Battlefield! A Publication of the Institute of Temporal Illusions

2012-06-19-bm

Snow Cone

2012-06-19-bm

The point Cathy is making is that it is not actually respectful to be misgendered, and that the implication that a person is being respectful by assuming that you’re a member of what they take to be the ruling gender is not really that cool. NOT AS COOL AS THE DELICIOUS SNOW CONE SHE’S PURCHASED, ANYWAY

RANT: I mean really, is this hard? If you don’t want to ask what pronouns someone prefers because it would be an impossibly brief customer service style interaction and therefore awkward, which I get, then here’s a tip: if you can tell that someone is trying to project signals of being one gender or another, go with that! If someone is obviously dressed in a female manner, use female pronouns. Your RATE OF GIVING OFFENSE will probably not be zero, but it will be substantially lower than it will if you decide to go the SLY DETECTIVE route and say what’s “really” going on. (If you don’t want to ask what pronouns someone prefers when you see them regularly, or if you know what pronouns they prefer and just decide that it’s too hard for you to use the right ones, then MAY SEVEN BLIGHTS DESCEND ON YOU)

I understand that it is human to want to Solve Mysteries, but it’s maybe irritating also. I promise that I will try to be funnier on this subject in the future. IN THAT VEIN, please tune in THURSDAY, when Mona and Inez try to put together a flyer for a local event.

2012-06-14-bm

Who’s Afraid of Vegan Escargot

2012-06-14-bm

We are back! Sorry for the delay! Let us explore the relationship between Mona and Inez for a spell.

What would vegan escargot even be made of? It seems like the hardest possible food to emulate in vegan form. I am open to suggestions as to recipes for this, and if there is a good one I will even make it and post pictures. THIS IS SERIOUS.

Whether or not you are also SERIOUS, I will see you Tuesday, when Cathy buys a snow cone and is shown Respect!