despair

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.)

2012-03-16-boatgirl

Curse of the Sea Serpents

2012-03-16-boatgirl

This was the first Boat Girl comic, done sometime late 2010 early 2011 — I have literally no idea exactly when. It came out of a conversation with Anton Solomonik that generated most of the character’s horrible body language: the stare, the enigmatic hand motions. Anton was totally disgusted with my live rendition of the character so I KNEW I HAD A WINNER!!!

She is kind of off model here since this was done in like ten minutes in a sketchbook with a roller ball pen. Admittedly all the early proto-MWHF strips before the ones in the archive featured the same character with black hair and no cowlick, which seems impossible to me now. The CLOUD STRIFE RULE OF CHARACTER DESIGN is that you should give your main characters some kind of non-black hair so that you can put them in front of pretty much any background and not get into too much trouble.