I made these back in November 2022, there’s nothing close to a coherent story like I was originally shooting for so instead I made them kind-of stand-alones. I wanted to practice incorporating shading and colors instead of just line work like I normally do. I am working on a new set of comics and I want them to actually be funny (going back to my self-deprecating roots). I’m not sure about this new style yet, I think the colors distract from whatever I’m trying to emphasize, they look really pretty in my phones photo gallery though.
Diamonds: I know we’re not playing games, but…
Clubs: Are you going to tell me how we’re all at some long evolved Nash equilibrium, our position inescapable unless we refine our logical prowess and outwith our equivalents.
Diamonds: And you’re going to tell me about the role fortune plays in accumulating wealth? Few are fortunate. Logic gives itself to everyone.
Spades: I wish violence were not as condemned as it is
Clubs: Condemned in polite society, and the backbone of retaining our country’s membrane
Spades: Sighs – i’m so bored
Hearts: What’s the backbone of polite society?
Diamonds: It’s definitely not love and it’s not luck
Hearts: What is money anyways?
Diamonds: A replacement of soul. Simplification of something that was once diverse and ineffable.
Spades: Money won’t stop you from bleeding out. Money is an illusion until your health is at risk – in a moment all your pretty gems shattered.
Hearts: Rock, paper, heart. Love heals. It does. I’ve seen it. But as corny as it may sound it has to be real, life altering, plan breaking love.
Clubs: Love has a higher barrier to entry than wealth. So few of us find someone like that beyond our mothers and fathers. Ahem Diamonds, I think you’re to blame.
Diamonds: Love is fleeting, we need something to fight for otherwise we’d get bored pretty fast, and we all know what lovers do when they’re bored Spades.
Spades: Hey, you know how you can tell a dialogue is someone talking to the different parts of themselves? … I think I’m gonna leave the game.
Diamonds: Everyone leaves me, they use me to get where they want to go, then they leave me locked away in some toxic waste bin. I’m always left with the worst of them.
Clubs:
Diamonds: I know what you’re thinking. Always something along the lines of me needing to be less pessimistic. Just leave, I can see your every move and none of it works out. We have to end. We have to end in a way where I’m so broken and so humiliated I never want to see you again.
Clubs:
Note: These comics started from me anthropomorphizing my childhood pets. I guess they're a genetically engineered dog breed that turn in to humanoids and back. This picture depicts what selecting a Puppy from that mutant litter would look like.
Note: This had no intended meaning when I drew it
Minerva: It’s like I know it’s there but I don’t want to bring it out. It’s like a river I reach into, pull out a bunch of gunk and chisel it into something meaningful to the real world. Whatever I pull out – it somehow fits with what originally called it.
Simba: Why don’t you start?
Simba: It must be there for all of us – I mean the ability to create. I don’t have a river though, I have a vast desert to begin walking through. As soon as I reach something dangerous I know I’ll have to find a way to overcome it, fight it, and whatever that is is the creation. It’s scary, I don’t know what it’s going to be, and I never know if I’m going to survive it, but I guess I always do.
Minerva: I think the lump of river goo I pull out has the price of being a disgusting stenching mess I have to keep with me for sometime before it goes through a metamorphosis, I never know if it’s going to morph but it always does. It can be hard to face.
The Art of Explaining Yourself
Minerva gets the idea that the only way out of her inverter’s block is to go back to the first attack on her self esteem. She remembers the scene too clearly, her failed kopi luwak business in Bali. Mars and Helios, who she had been a long time admirer of, dismissively stomp on her hand-made offerings as they walk past her and Simba. She could feel the sting of her failed business, her ridiculous ideas, her pitiful offerings and an embarrassing attempt to cover up her failure in business capabilities with artistic ones. She had a scar on some technical part of her mind and the scar was made too grotesque for her to look at herself and so began every attempt to hide it. For years she stayed in the shadows. Just the mentioning of “coffee” or “profit” razzled her into a dumbfounded state. At last she hit a breaking point, it was time to face the part of her she had neglected for so long.
So what’s the idea?
The idea is like this …
If you know me, you know that I developed a strange obsession with rising to power using free flying vehicles in order to cope with my fear of being abandoned from friends and family. And I imagine I have wings pulling me around when I dance.
I wish so badly that I was a book-worm. I love the way books look, and feel, the way libraries smell, the idea of a treasure trove of hidden knowledge, and their covers trigger my imagination to go wild. I like flipping to a random page and reading random passage and summating the book from just that, but I could never love reading.
Breaker of chains – physical freedom is an illusion, but the free exploring mind of an individual gets lost in shame, “shoulds”, neglect. I worry this part of a mind can’t just be free, well it can, but it feeds off emotions, the kind of emotions you get from a muse, losing yourself in another, breaking your plans, losing track of time – I think I’m living off scraps.
As mentioned earlier my need to invent something phenomenal; (in this case the new main stream vehicle of transportation, but over the course of my career I’ve met individuals who shamefully believed themselves destined to solve climate change, eliminate microplastics, and prevent the deterioration of our coral reefs) – I lost sight of what really fed my soul. So these wings, these angel metaphors, became a burden. I would try to hide them, they’d get stuck in ally-ways, and they wouldn’t let me fly – they were a cage, each feather spiked into the walls
into the floor.
I think everyone should try to create something dreamlike – just to get a taste, to be that more relatable when they’re laughing at all the motivational speeches that tell them not to give up. So that when they hear about the Greats, the Da Vinici s, and the Einstein’s of their generation they can be like “I don’t get the hype”.
I have this habit of devoting my energy toward the path of most resistance. I seek friction and that stems from my experience of being wholly misplaced with people who make me feel nothing only because they look like me.
And duh, duality of an individual, yin and yang. IDK why I even bothered drawing that overdone trope but I drew it later in this set also.
This stems from a dream I had back in 2020 – it said clear as day – be the wolf, don’t where his pelt. I was trying on tough personalities at the time. I have a tough personality already, but it gets me trouble more than I’d expect it to. I thought that was because of all the embarrassing shit mixed in, preventing a pure “classic tough”. I was tough mixed with tears, giggles, bad reading comprehension, severe social anxiety, and a terrible work ethic I didn’t want to face. Instead I tried out TV tough personalities in hopes that life would imitate art. It did. That match is burnt now. I think I can lie to myself once and then I have to go back to being me.
I got tired of hating consumerism. I just see humans as its own part of nature, the next step in evolution. The expulsion of plastic into the ocean is no different from a flower releasing pollen into the air. I switched to optimism at some point.
I lived on top of a really steep hill in Echo Park. Elysium park on one side and the bar scene on the other. I danced to avoid feeling nothing. The bar tender wasn’t wise. There were no passionate piano players.
I do really irrational things sometimes and then months later I’ll realize how irrational it was. One of these irrational behaviors was thinking I could ventilate my apartment with 3 different portable fans. I would run all my fans and leave the ceiling fan off. The guy I was dating was looking speculatively at my little fan push my ceiling fan slowly in the wrong direction as we watched a movie. I told him it was broken. He explained that its not, that its being pushed by the little fan. I joked that it was a statement about society. Months later I thought it very metaphorical. I was trying so hard to copy the people around me, to find the right formula of behavior so I never have to feel alone, and in the process I was pushing my own built-in fan backwards with crummier purchased fans. Is my subconscious mind this intentional that it knows how propeller blades work better than my conscious mind? Or am I really that irrational? I like to think the former, that I need to trust the non-verbal part of my-self.
OMG, I was trying to tie this up and it turned corny. One of the champion dogs (Helios) became Minerva’s rival and he was about to miss a jump so bad he injures himself, and she’s torn between feeling regret and sadistic joy.
If I have a Tag its going to be two stencil cut outs of people on opposite cliffs calling to each other, and I’ll place them really far apart but facing each other so when you find one you’ll know the other is near by and how to find it.
Anthropological Magical Realism 