Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
“There is a war on information in our country. On the media, on academics, on libraries, on archives, on the census – the list keeps going. We need to understand the ‘why’ of things, and cutting away our ability to make informed decisions will invariably derail our country.”
-Westheimer at the Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education.
I can’t say anything better than this quote, except maybe, that Canada is not the only country in this situation.
There is no comic posting on the drawing board today. In the meantime, I heartily suggest checking out the Ghosts of Tiny Animals. It is infrequently updated, but so beautiful.
I had this idea, and then I kinda started working on it, and then I put all my messy sketches together and spent a lot of time coloring it, and now I have this. Alice’s tea party, with Alice and Alice and Alice and Alice and Alice. She’s schizophrenic, you know.
Did you know that Libraries have collections of truly interesting and rare materials? That these libraries often digitize and create online collections accessible to anyone? That because of library websites/catalogs and their interaction with search engines most of this material is impossible to simply stumble upon? Allow me to help you trip, with a selection of awesome digitized archives.
Not everyone can be a library however, the Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc. has some fabulous antiquities and curious illustrations to peruse. Some of them may even be affordable to some people. And we can never forget the, ever more fabulous, Internet Archive.
Ever since I saw and put my name in for Beautiful Forever at the Light Grey Art Lab, I have been working on a set of tattoos. Now, I didn’t get chosen to participate in Beautiful Forever, but I couldn’t stop. Minus one (and + some details), these are all tattoos that occur on my comic characters. Do you know which one doesn’t belong?
I hate to get all serious and controversial, but I see a growing global trend of preposterous legalities. There has recently been a man in Australia jailed for buying/watching animated sex involving characters like children. It shouldn’t be surprising given Australia’s zero tolerance position (that and more found in this wikipedia article: legal status of cartoon pornography depicting minors). But a whole cacophony of details make this story icky all over.
Before we launch into the meat of them let’s consider how damning the man’s legal/behavior history is with previous convictions for assaulting teenagers. Now that we’ve considered that let’s stop thinking about it. It is not the point here.Continue reading Heavens help me, I’m reading the news
Aren’t they great?! I, maybe consciously, modeled Lola on a Dolly Parton/Christina Aguilera love child. Marx is totally Rosario Dawson. And I’m not sure I had an image in mind when I was drawing Vertigo. Her attitude is modeled on a dear friend of mine, but not her looks.
Was researching for The 25 Lives of Marcus Trapp and found this awesome and educational animation on TED-Ed | A glimpse of teenage life in ancient Rome – Ray Laurence.
Drawing a bunch of characters in indulgent Victorian inspired outfits.
When I was looking for my old cartoon portraits, I ran across these. Ah! Nostalgia.
I’ve talked about it, and I have constantly deflected questions and nagging from a friend who thinks it is good and I ‘need to get off my butt and edit it already.’ Penelope Sea and Ocean End is the first book I ever wrote. It’s not even 20,000 words – which is hilarious in light of my NaNoWriMo endeavors.
Well, I can finally say that I have edited it. Just finished. And I have tackled all the things about it that I didn’t like and that had kept me from editing for so long because I thought it was going to be difficult. Silly me.
I want to say ‘project done.’ It feels good. I get to cross something off a list now and go on to finish another unfinished manuscript.
I’ve also been given the order to shop it around to publishers, so I guess I’m going to try that. If I should fail, you can be assured that I’ll just end up posting the entirety right here, like I do with my comic submissions. Until that day, I’ll give you Chapter One.
PENELOPE SEA AND OCEAN END
Chapter 1
Penelope Sea sat alone at the end of a lunch table in the cafeteria of her new elementary school. She hadn’t made any friends yet. She didn’t want to make new friends She wanted to be with her old friends, in her old school, in her old town. All the children here looked at her funny, and the food that the pink-haired lunch lady served didn’t taste right. Although she had only been enrolled in Dolphin Elementary for one week, Penelope decided she definitely did not like it here.
The only thing Penelope did like about having moved towns, moved houses, and moved schools was her very own personal house key. She wore it on a shiny silver chain around her neck. Penelope was only eight. She thought she was special because after school she got to stay at home while her parents worked.
Long ago and far away when I used MySpace and not Facebook, I only ever had cartoon portraits of myself in my photo albums. I was recently told that these were missed, so I pulled them out of obscurity (they are up on the Art page too).