Jeanne's Comix | Tag | bad mother

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!

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.”

Serif Vomit Font

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

Snow Cone

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.

Who’s Afraid of Vegan Escargot

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!

The Horror Pool

I have no idea if this comic has external relevance, but it has some personal experiential validity at least. I remember spending literally hours as a kid swimming underwater and thinking about haunting things: What it would Look Like in Atlantis, How Similar is this to Flying, etc etc. There was this terrifying altered state associated with the pool: your basic systems of movement are overloaded; your whole way of interacting with the world changes utterly, into something more eerily natural. I guess that’s what I’m trying to capture, that way swimming TAKES OVER THE BRAINS OF CHILDREN, and I think it kind of does a good job of it, but I just seriously have no idea if other people have this creepy hypnotic relationship to swimming, of if it is just me and Betty Spector, a character I have created. Please weigh in on the subject with your own terrifying water stories!

Also, question: how old does Betty look/seem? I have like zero experience with drawing kids, other than the somewhat older kids in The Man Who Hates Fun, and I may need to figure out some alternate way to do this.

Okay, sad news: there will be NO COMIC THURSDAY OR SATURDAY. It can not happen! I am sorry! If you wish to send me something to put up in lieu of a comic on those days, totally feel free to do so and everyone can party in my house while I’m not here, all right? But OTHERWISE, please join us next TUESDAY for a Quiet Dinner Conversation with Mona and Inez, followed WEDNESDAY by some Existential Girls Action.

Who is the Worst Girlfriend

It’s seriously bad at the copy store when an old dude needs a million weird receipts copied. It is such a painstaking process!

As far as what song from “The Wall” is playing at maximum volume throughout the strip: which song would be the funniest? PLEASE CAST YR VOTE IN THE COMMENTS DEAR READERS.

I will see you all Tuesday, when we take a mysterious journey into the underwater deeps with our intrepid heroines.

(Note: this strip also appears in the new issue of ROCKSALT, which has JUST DROPPED. Find a copy around Austin, or read it online here! (Here’s the rudimentary official website for back issues: http://fictioncircus.com/rocksalt.) I also did the dialogue for John David Brown‘s excellent comic strip Stillbourne in this one.)

Doctor Christ-X and the Corrections

I want to go on record that this is the first appearance of William Gaddis’s US National Book Award winning novel, JR, to appear in any comic strip ever. I feel confident in making this assertion.

It’s possible that this is also the first time the works of Jonathan Franzen have been discussed with any degree of seriousness (um, in this case an extremely low degree of seriousness) in any comic strip ever. Perhaps this is funnier if you’ve read the Corrections? Okay, how many people have read The Corrections, or any book by Jonathan Franzen? WHAT DID YOU THINK?

I’ll start: The Corrections seems, despite its flaws, to be actually impelled by some kind of serious individual pain, and by the kind of moral questioning where you don’t know the answer in advance. Sure, evil drug companies have stolen the patent of a noble working man to disseminate a kind of evil brain drug to the masses, and sure, video games corrupt EVEN NARNIA, but there’s a sense that these are perhaps the best possible roads, and that the characters the book kind of forces us to identify with are really just Luddite scum for resisting the technological corruption of man in the name of happiness. You could make a pretty good case for both sides and the book is ambivalent in the best sense. Contrast with Freedom, which I hell of don’t like: Freedom’s moral dilemmas just sort of exist in a void. The answer to the question of whether mountaintop removal mining to save a single bird species is justified doesn’t seem that interesting to Franzen anymore: the large moral questions loom in the background, but essentially as flavor for the domestic drama, horrible wunderkammer set dressing: kid gets in big trouble selling bad Russian tank parts to US Blackwater-style contractors (that may be wrong; I don’t have the book on me, but something like that); husband faces pressure at work because mountain families refuse to move so that their land can be destructively mined; gentrification divides two families, etc. Think of it in TV Guide synopsis format: “An Occupy Wall Street protest forces Rick and Cindy to reassess their marriage,” “A bad investment in a Far Eastern iPhone sweatshop causes Michael to lose millions, creating tensions with his wife.” Whereas w/ The Corrections: “Incredibly unethical ecstasy-like drug allows Midwestern mom to cope with horribly dissolving marriage” — the social horror is more directly, satisfyingly tied to the situation.

(I also sort of remember writing this a few years ago: http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=46&mode=one. It’s a review of Franzen’s STRONG MOTION, whose plot I almost don’t even remember anymore. I think an evil corporation is generating earthquakes? I remember a really good scene with a raccoon living in horrible urban blight. But I stand by pretty much all of that review except the quality of the writing.)

Further: there’s a dejected quality to Freedom, whereas The Corrections had some kind of terrible sense of hope and possibility, like Kobo Abe-level terrible. I just don’t like Freedom. Who likes Freedom, or has any kind of thought about Franzen whatsoever, I guess?

Okay, so on Saturday we get to see where Inez works, plus also a desperate confrontation between Old and Young. Enjoy it!

Seitan’s Hoof

I don’t know what to say about this one? It was tricky to write it so that Mona doesn’t come off as completely awful, just entertainingly awful. I have no idea what any of the food in that buffet is supposed to be, also. Surely it can’t all be differently molded/constituted varieties of seitan.

No Existential Girls strip this week — INSTEAD PLEASE SEE MY NEAT GUEST STRIP AT BLASTER NATION. Blaster Nation is one of these newfangled comics that grew on me really, really fast — the writing is kind of great, at once funny and sounding weird despairing depths, nerdy without being entirely dependent on references. It charms me and you ought to sample the work of Brad and Leslie!

Okay okay, so please join us on Thursday, when you shall be commanded to enjoy a quiet discussion on contemporary fiction between Mona and Inez. It’ll be great!