A handful of recent life changes have had the side effect of a great diminishment in the amount of house parties I now go to. So here is a drawing of a house party.
I am doing everything I possibly can to not have to work on my new book. One of my strategies is to believe that I am not ready to make the final artwork. that I need to practice like an athlete; that I need to be drawing nonsense on paper enough to be able to see the space and the gravity in my head intuitively enough to draw every scene correctly the first time. Once I can see what is behind the thing i’m drawing, then I am ready to draw the thing. So I sketch and sketch and still don’t think I am ready to draw the first scenes. To enter the book I have been writing for so long. and so here is a cartoonist trying to conjure the first drawings in her living room while some spooks look on. Not writing a book is - as it turns out - an important part of writing a book.
this is a bad scan but I wanted to imagine movie night at a local bar. I don’t spend very much time in bars anymore but I still think they’re neat. I don’t work in service anymore but I think the relationships people build in service are… well I think about them. Last time I was in a bar was in Brooklynn while I was waiting for my friend to come home from work. I sat drinking club soda with bitters and reading. Part of me was just having a nice time sitting and reading and the other part of me was thinking wow, how enigmatic and beautiful I must appear here. Out of towner at a locals bar drinking NA drinks and reading. Someone must think I am mysterious and beautiful and want to talk to me. haha. Nobody did. I read until my friend texted me and I walked to her house. I am in my mid 30s which means I am capable of having a genuinely pleasurable experience while also indulging in the narcissistic fantasy of how I must look to all the people so eager to pay me attention.
The monster I am talking about is an animation in a commercial for a pharmaceutical. The monster is silly and bounces around and is forgettable because he’s in a commercial no one wants to watch. But some one learned their best how to use blender and maybe even has student loans from art school and has so much potential and imagination and worked hard to make this monster; to bring it to life. and I think that person probably loves this forgettable creature. Somebody has to love these things.
Zac found this photograph some place we went near the lake. Same place maybe where they have those paper weights. These paper weights - there’s two of them - are small clear acrylic cubes with drops of oil incased in suspended bubbles in the middle of them. they are the first drops of oil collected from Congolese oil wells sometime in the 20th century. They are very frightening keepsakes.
For the record, I don’t necessarily think that this is the most interesting job, but the character on this page seemed to realize in that moment that being a lawyer for a YouTuber is a job, and is probably either very stressful or very exciting for the right person.
There are many many very sexy words that emerged in the 20th century, and I think one of them is the word ‘counter’ used as a prefix.
“Breaking Bad, but instead of Mr. White being a drug genius and creator of crime spectacles, he’s just really adept at conning his wife into believing he’s behind every catastrophic news event.”
I keep drawing these scenes, for the new book, that are supposed to emotional for sure but in the script it’s just text and direction. And then I draw them and I just watch the characters on the page and they make ME cry. They end up much more emotional in the drawings than I expected they’d be from the script. Like, oh I just realized that this Bear isn’t just making an insensitive joke because he’s kind of a jerk but he’s actually yelling at his sister. He misses his sister. It’s fun to watch characters be themselves; move on without me.
Night time on earth, daytime in the sky
