Also, I tidied up some pages here. The galleries for illustration, caricatures and individual pieces have all been filled out. I have more stuff to add to those pages, but I’m glad to remove the “under construction” tag from them.

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So here it is!

Meanwhile I am preparing the next ten pages of Wanderlost, so look for a new update next week. Things in my personal life have settled down enough for me to get on a regular cartoon schedule. Hoorah!

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This chalk talk by Kurt Vonnegut on story arcs is making the rounds on the Internet for the main reason all great comedy works: because it’s true.

Of course, it’s not a “recent” post — a) Kurt’s dead, Jim; and b) he gave this lecture back when computer hard drives had less than half a gig of storage. But it’s great. Here he’s taking the piss out of our literary pretensions, a shtick he replayed his whole career with fairly consistent success, even as he indulged in pretensions of his own. No sin in that, however. As I like to say whenever I get the chance, you can’t create unless you can “pretend.” (Ha, see what I did there? It’s a pun.)

The brings us to the imagination itself. Missing from Vonnegut’s discussion — because otherwise the gag doesn’t work, hence it’s beauty — is the real work, the busywork, the sweat and toil of filling in the details, of building a world and putting believable characters in it and giving them something to do that is worth paying attention to and then arriving at a satisfactory conclusion, with a little Meaning thrown in for good measure. It’s actually more fun than it sounds, but it ain’t easy, there is a lot of intellectual work involved, plus a lot of worry about Is It Worthy and Am I Good Enough (tho maybe that’s just me projecting a little). It’s tempting to take short cuts, to lighten the load a little, to make the story telling easier by using narrative conventions, character types, familiar situations, and genre expectations.

That’s where you can get into trouble.

Both wings of the broad church of fiction depend on a storehouse of manufactured, processed, elements of imagination. A young girl-child is in danger. What color is her hair? (Blonde.) A man, pursued by police, runs down an alleyway and encounters…(a dead end, perhaps a fence.) A woman answers the phone. Her face turns serious. She tells the caller “Thank you,” softly. Then she gently places the receiver back on the hook. What’s her problem? (Cancer.) A middle-class black man enters a restaurant in a small town in a southern state. The first racist he encounters is…(an angry proletarian white man, perhaps already drunk.) The child who discovers the magical fantasy world is (bookish, easily upset, physically weak). No surprise that many of these top-of-mind tropes depend upon and reinforce a variety of culture stereotypes and behavioral expectations. Whiter is better, the law is not easily evaded, emotional outbursts are to be eschewed, racism is a social phenomenon perpetuated by poor whites, only the pathetic have an interest in escaping reality.

Shit! You just got bogged down in the quagmire of modern culture and all its terrible politics. You just regurgitated all the poison you have been fed since infancy. You were just trying to write a story, man! Now look what you did. Clean that up!

I like this Mamatas post (thanks, Kip!), not because he rubs our noses in our mess, but because he’s reminding us that the act of questioning our own assumptions about people, society, history, etc. cannot be done without imagining how these things could be (and often are) otherwise. As a political cartoonist, I ran into these problems a lot: to express an opinion coherently through the visual shorthands of cartoonish icons without reenforcing the terrible stereotypes handed down from rotten history is a real challenge. I don’t think I was always successful; fortunately there was always someone ready to point out when I fell short of my ideals — even more fortunately when they did it before I published anything (remember, kids, get an adult to proofread your work before handing it in.) The key is listening. That’s true of most things in life, anyway, but it gets hard when it’s coming from someone criticizing you. The reward for suppressing your instinct to tell them to fuck off is becoming a better artist — and to arrive at a higher level of politics. Mamatas, again, and his conclusion (uh, spoiler alert?):

Our first step is to see this stuff when we do it, to realize that we didn’t make this up. It was made up for us. The second step is to clear away as much of the mediagination as we can. And the third this step is to write, to really write from one’s own brain. Resist the “real”, as the real that can be articulated in a five-act dramatic structure with a likeable protagonist and a satisfying dénouement is not the real. Find your own imagination, and use it.

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Click to find out more and purchase!

“Up in the Air” is the second story I did featuring the Wanderlost characters (back when it was called simply “Sheldon”); I have been wanting to get it into print for far too long. Well – tada! Here it is. Comixpress did another excellent job printing it up. But I am only selling through the Wanderlost website and at my Stumptown table. To get it, either visit me there or follow the link embedded in the image above.

I skipped last year’s Stumptown Comicsfest out of money worries and lack of product. But this year is different. (Or so I keep telling myself.) Once again I team up with Chris Baldwin of Spacetrawler fame to share a table and various personal insults as a way to pass the time — insults of LOVE!!! — and I hope to attend a couple panels run by fellow Cartoonists With Attitude.

For those wondering when I will start updating Wanderlost again, the answer is next Wednesday. I am finally emerging from the woods of a nasty sinus infection that has waylayed me for much of the year so far. Just took my last antibiotic pill this morning. I feel clearer and breathe better. I look forward to returning to normal energy levels.

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I Like Money

Just got paid for a freelance job. Always nice, but more so in the post-holiday we-so-broke season.

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Pardon the extended absence from blogging these days. I’ve been knocked down by recurrent back pain, which has affected my cartooning abilities — as well as my dishes and laundry abilities, so ya can imagine what my house looks like. Also, the pain drugs are keeping me kinda dopey. I am on them right now. It’s like typing in a fog.

Hey, I hear there is an election going on. Fascinating. Did you know that the electorate is fed up with the incumbent party? They now seem poised to put in the opposition party. Rinse, lather, repeat. (Jenn Sorensen has this cycle of idiocy nailed.) I hate the two party system. I really, really do. Every year, the GOP puts forward an even crazier batch of right wing assholes, and the Dems get away with being douchebags Because Hey Not Crazy. And liberal bloggers scoff and berate other liberal bloggers for pointing out the douchebaggery, then go Full Throttle Ballistic if you suggest Going Third Party. Insert Nader flame war here.

So sick of it.

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So my plan is to wrap this series up by the end of the year and start a whole new project. Probably not be a webcomic. As should be obvious, I don’t have that kind of time these days. It will be a graphic novel I want to develop and get published in print by a real publisher with the goal of making professional money. I know, crazy, right? But I prefer to do that stuff off-line without the artificial deadlines of a weekly update.

That said, my online presence will not disappear. I’m too pissed off at politics to do that, anyway. And I have other ideas that are suitable for random web postings. I’ll just do them all here at Mooretoons, the logical place for one-offs.

At next year’s Stumptown I will have all six Wanderlost stories in print form, individual issues that I will sell at the table and online. I’m thinking about figurines, too, or tea cozies. Merch of some sort.

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Tomorrow the kids go back their state-sponsored babysitting holding pen that has some educational merit with a vague purpose of making them globally competitive, whatever that means. Meanwhile, I’ll get to finish a page of Wanderlost I started last May that I’ll post it on Wednesday.

The next question is: what else? I mean, aside from digging the house out from the summer wreckage (so much useless crap to get rid of, so many books to give away or sell, so much yardwork left undone) and picking up more shifts at the library. I’m talking post-Wanderlost cartooning. And I’m not inviting ideas from the Mind Hive, just keyboarding aloud that there are projects on a back-burner that require attention.

Graphic novel(s), possible collaboration with a good friend, some rudimentary animation…. These are things I want to get started on. Oh, and I want to play guitar like Richard Thompson.

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Thanks to my old friend Michael for the tip.

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Click to read the whole thing.

Glad to update Wanderlost on time for once. I disrupt Sheldon’s escapism with some hard truths coming from home. I hope it isn’t too maudlin. Thank goodness for Tuvia to provide a punchline of sorts.

Speaking of neurotic comics, CNN has a profile of Jules Feiffer to publicize his memoir. It’s a decent read. The article links to a strip critical of Lyndon Johnson that, sad to say, echoes like crazy today. Surely more predator drone strikes will bring the Taliban to the table, n’est–ce pas?

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