Comics from August 8th 2020

For 2017 to 2019, it’s 2023 and the feelings are almost washed out, but I can still get a sip out when I’m alone

Stand Alones Part 1

The way out

The way out isn’t an adventure, or a place full of obstacles and fights, it’s more than often a wasteland of nothing.
A whole lot of nothing to show for a mess of thought
A pile of useless shaving from an over carved sculpture
Endless glares of confusion
Rampant hallucinations

Punching Bags

Resilience is easier exercised with another
Choosing the rose of company over the comfort of loneliness
Someone needs to be the rock in a place where bridges would otherwise burn easily
Resilience is felt better than love in a place where love cannot be openly given.

With pride, gently gesturing “This is my family”

The evolution of the Corgi

I don’t understand the stylistic choices for most dog breeding, but then I realize what I see is only the beginning.

Bali Comics (The Meat)

Arriving to Bali

(It’s not hard to feel like you’re far from home when you start talking to people who want something from you other than money.)

Scuba Diving was a priority. Minerva asks for two tanks. Simba reluctantly pulls out his “gear”. Simba raided a medical device thrift store before going scuba diving in an attempt to streamline the experience. He had gathered together an iron lung in combination with various other blood filtration devices that would oxygenate his blood and extract the carbon dioxide via intravenous tubes.

Minerva – No

Simba – I’m a trail blazer

Minerva – I don’t think you see this as dangerous because you’ve nearly escaped death ten times the mean, but I like to follow the bulky-ass tedium that is breathing with my lungs and a 50 pound tank

SImba – I’ve mastered breathing with my lungs. Small attempts at the improvement of modern devices may seem ridiculous in present but my actions of insanity now will reverberate through the minds of many until some form of lightweight flexible gills are invented. 

Minerva – Simba and his moral superiority, sacrificing friends for progress or at least that’s what he tells himself to feel better about not facing his social anxiety issues. 


He hopes Minerva would find his antics amusing but she knows SImba too well at this point.. Minerva feels a slight resentment towards Simba for his impeccable ability to steal the show, to be a more durable punching bag than she can be, and in the end to rise from his ashes where she finds herself having to just move on.

That is how every time the coral was nudged by his massiveness Minerva couldn’t help feeling his neglect was an intentional affront to her careful nature.

The Scuba Diver

(I can’t help it. A little bit of blue in everything I do. I cherish the little parts you let me see, and those little parts I burn for light.)

Simba knocks into a scuba diver. Trapping the man between rocks and ASImba’s medical monstrosity for a long enough time to throw him into a rage fueled panic.

Seeing Simba’s oblivious nature as the cause of his distress, he pulls out a knife and begins chasing his offenders.

SImba’s intravenous tubes are yanked out seconds after the chase. Minerva instantly rushes in between to prevent bloodshed. She has no knife and decides to detach her tank, being the only metal object she has to defend herself with. She tries reaching for the oxygen valve on the scuba divers tank but gets her BCD cut open in the process. She tries to swim away.

SImba loses consciousness slowly and begins to sink. He gets glimpses of Minerva’s and the diver’s fight before blacking out.

The diver catches up to minerva. Minerva uses the coral and wildlife around her as a weapon, trying to kick him to induce vomiting while keeping her vital equipment away from the diver’s knife. Minerva loses her fins, the diver approaches her and she tries to ram the tank into his gut while creating distance between her center and the knife. He can’t get a good stab so he grabs on to her and the tank then empties his BCD. They begin descending quickly. Minerva loses grip of the tank. She struggles, but she knew letting go of the tank in this position meant a certain death.

Simba enters his dream state, still underwater in a trench miles below the surface of the ocean. There he is surrounded by fish-like demons of his mind’s creation. He’s been here before, each representative of some oppression, inadequacy, shame, and he’s beaten them all. Yet, here they are, staring at him, waiting. SImba knows the next demon he is about to face – a large eel. SImbas horrified by the realism in the overly detailed face of the eel, his mind incapable of putting shadows correctly, placing teeth where they are supposed to be, he looks all too 3 dimensional, shiny where there shouldn’t be enough light for shine, and he’s a little too bright for the darkness of the trench.

Simba is catatonic, the small demons start pulling him deeper into the abyss. The eel followed and the light escaped. Soon all simba could see was the eel. 

After years of demon confrontation, Simba had developed the quirk of saying “we” when he refers to himself. This realization made him smile.

Simba swims up, grabs the monster by his eyes and mouth with his whole body. He swims through the entrails of the eel, the inside even more unnatural than the outside. 

Without the monster Simba is free in a lucid dream. Simba was never ever to hold them for very long. His spine shivers and the vibrations in his body become unbearable. He wakes up, invigorated and ready to fight.

He locates struggling Minerva and swims to her. He grabs the spare regulator and manages to get a grasp on the rope that attaches to one of the hot air balloon engines for his DIY buoyancy device. He fires at the diver, the pain from the heat sending him to the surface immediately. They exist together as a series of near death experiences.

Love this

Was
Never
Meant
To
Last

~
Coffee

(Tetris. I was the best in the world for a short time. Messing up on purpose, leaving a nasty set of cavities at the base so I could experience the challenge overcoming the extra challenge. I’m all too aware now of how that must have looked to people watching)

As a child she reveled in the beauty of bodily fluid. To most people the fluids are something unseen, kept behind the walls of many tiny and complex selective membranes, but Minerva loved to expose them.. The forces, the life, the variations in texture, viscosity, and color all dazzled her.

As children do, she played out stories of fantasy seeded by her love of biological fluids. She collected the slime from the blood of road killed fur piles, glitter glue, chicken skins, and rose petals to create a concoction that to a child was a potion that could make someone invisible hold visions in the water. She put the potion in little glass bottles hidden in the crevices of her house so that her parents would not protest. She made potions day after day like it was her duty to society, a secret salvation for people who didn’t know her work was affecting the outcome of their life.

In the tourist inhabited jungle cities in Bali, Minerva came across Kopi Luwak, a coffee made from cherries that had passed through the intestines of a civet. The partially digested coffee had become commercialized, a result of greed and tourists’ desire to leave a not so foreign country with interesting stories. Minerva knew her business would fail, it’d make people laugh or at least provoke people. To some she’d appear just as greedy and ten times more foolish than the locals stuffing caged civets. Secretly to her, so secretly she would not even allow the subtleties of her facial expression to expose to Simba that she liked the idea of partially digested coffee beans brewed her breakfast – that the idea of beans touching blood, veins, stomach acid, the organs, the mucus membranes of the body gave them an allure, an aura so uniquely sick and touching, she could feel it for days.

She went about gathering exotic animals to test her “product on”, compare changes in taste and potency. After a week she had set up her first shop. And after two weeks and enough exposure she decided to shut it down. With a great degree of laughter she and Simba broke the brilliant title of letters over her shop and put up a classic picket sign that read “out of business”.


SImba: If we’re gonna break the sign to make it look run down I say we just go over the top and break it into 25 pieces all loosely strung together so you can still read the sign, add some cobwebs and like ten more signs that show the progression of the business from beginning to end

MInerva: Well if I don’t do that then I failed at my failed business.

At that moment, Helios and Mars walked by. 

Helios was a mystery to Minerva, a combative overachiever, someone who could reject or accept her without tying emotion or past to his decision. Minerva respected him for that, she saw his fairness as so unique that she developed an admiration for Helios’s criticism. His words could sting her still, and few people still had that power over her.

Scuba diving Car Wrecks

She drives them to the bottom, exposing the entrails of the monsters to the more adventurous art seeking divers. 

The dive gear of the time was greatly modified after simba’s revelations with respect to the iron lung went viral in the media. Now divers wear a large variation of gill-like technology that directly oxygenates blood.

Everyone loves an underdog going against some evil and defying the odds.

With a carelessness that only comes from knowing Simba’s unfailing pattern of revival, Minerva left Simba in the trunk of one of the cars before driving it into the ocean to become part of her underwater car wreck exhibit. She knew he’d revive himself one way or another, and liven her work. She watched as he sunk to the bottom. She counted the minutes, guessing he was blacked out after 3. She tried to replicate the existential last thoughts he was having, childhood memories, vendettas, the most candid words he’s ever heard from someone,, and then the final relinquishing of will to live before surrendering to his godlike self. Two of the divers miraculously found and freed him. SImba rose like an angel to the now heavenly light at the ocean surface. His dead crinkled body unraveled and stretched. He breached the surface for his breath of life, every muscle flexed, sun glowing for him. Minerva smiled and then swam up to call it a day and get some coffee.

Yoga

Simba Goes on a yoga retreat in a desire for change and enlightenment.

Simba – All I can conjure are pessimistic rants at the moment, make silent eye contact with me before you walk away, bring me back from the dead, or I will hunt you down.

He finds Yoga in everything.

(To be the wolf, not only wear his pelt.)

A Visit To Simba’s Childhood Paradise.

He enters a land in the clouds.

From the clouds, he quickly grew to admire earth dwellers. He watched them struggle cry, fail and feel alone. He watched them feel hopeless and stuck with envy. He wanted to offer them guidance, he wanted to tell them that they were not alone, that millions of perfect bored angels watched them for hours on end with the greatest interest a being can have for any one person, but they can never know, the devil is the audience. 

Simba began watching Minerva, she was far from hopeless but just as unsuccessful as somebody who was. She imposed her ideas on everyone around her at the expense of family, at the expense of fitting in. Simba wished he could impose himself on the angels even if only to provoke them. They were content, unchangeable, and any conflict was made artificially for recreation. Why make conflict within? But there was a conflict, and with that simba new he was divided, maybe he made enemies with himself so he’d have some equal to spar with.

Simba didn’t want to return to the world, to rise after rise, that exhausting pattern he’d mastered and stagnated in. Simba had settled into a comfortable pattern of near death and revival, to everyone it was awe inspiring, to him it was a trap, to Minerva..  she was just bored with it. Minerva expected it, used it like a tool, rolled her eyes at each precipice he dangled from – and for that Simba loved Minerva. She was a portal out, a person who saw the stepping away from near deaths as a casual change in artistic style. 

Simba – I found myself trying to be good enough for you, over being there for you…

SImba- Whatever that meant, whether its being full of joy so I’d never take out aggression on you, loving myself enough so you didn’t have to reassure me I’m worth loving, being confident enough for you so I may channel my ambition efficiently, laughing at my failures so I never take anything you say personally… I was just gone.

Minerva felt the need to be free. She thought that rules were instilled to prevent bad actions or poorly thought out actions. She however was meticulous and had a strong desire to improve the world. She thought it’s important to feel like one is free to act upon his thoughts without fear or apprehension in order to be happy. If more people could hijack an airplane, fill it with hammocks and gas the inhabitants to sleep to prove an obvious alternative’s superiority, wouldn’t we have less people breaking the rules to do bad things? It seems we fall upon preestablished rules and guidelines to decide upon what is good or bad too much. What if vigilantism and Santa Claus felt they were free to go into houses and make beautiful moments, personally care and give resources to people they love. The rules lead to obvious guidelines as to what is trustworthy. However, societies guidelines for the paths that are allowed are too few and too narrow for people’s potential. The present will not change to be a truly free place, but Minerva felt it necessary to prove this point in her next art piece.

Minerva gets up in the middle of a plane flight and pulls out sleeping gas and unveils ows of hammocks she had so cleverly installed and hid before the flight. She offers the passengers the option of sleeping their flight away in a horizontal position. The passengers were frightened and shocked that she could be allowed to get away with something so absurd. This was indicative of a huge security breach, and they could all be dead right now.

Passenger 1 – I don’t want this. I like sitting and watching movies on planes!

Minerva – But it could be better, it could be more comfortable for everyone if this flawed system wasn’t so well established.

My hero: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLbPrQ3K/

Passenger 3 – GET OUT!

After gassing the plane she jumped out to protect herself from a law that felt more like a power tripping miserable old pessimist than a benevolent god. Avoiding the law was made to feel worse than breaking it in her experience. 

Minerva – Just stop, it’s Adrenaline’s turn to speak.

Falling

She falls, falls, falls. The wind roar is everything she hears. Nothing peaceful about it. Minerva grows more clairvoyant as she reaches the earth. At this point, with her unsteady sight she could detect Simba falling towards her from the corner of her eye. She undid the straps from her parachute and covered her ears.

Minerva lifted her head. Simba was shooting toward her. She opened her body to slow down. They locked hands and began to spiral together. They found each other in the sky.

Stand Alones Part 2

Grocery Flow

Grocery cart, metal on metal, metal on pavements, vibrating screws, no suspension, no rounded corners or soft edges, a walking pile of spears, they try to escape using their obstinate rigidity as a their weapon, and Simba the vigilante cowboy who rounds the cacophonous mavericks and makes them move.

Beautiful Gut
The worlds we find with in