True Story #244.
oh my GOD
frustration-man asked:
How do you keep yourself motivated to always improve and do better?
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It comes from a place of love… and shame!! I love to draw and figure comics out like a puzzle. I find my drawings from even a few months ago pretty embarrassing, and always have.
I love comics but am embarrassed by most of what I see out there. When I need nourishment, I pop my head into the comics world and fill my belly with unsorted frustration. Then I compose my lovesick, hateful self and make something closer to what I wanna see.
tyrejones-deactivated20161210 asked:
Did you ever want to get into animation (storyboard artist, etc) or are you content with making comics?
Animation was my job before I did comics. I still take on a bit of animation freelance work every year because it pays the billz
talein asked:
did it ever made you cry? I mean, did any of your comics ever made you cry? I mean, your comics made me cry. Thank you.
They haven’t made me cry! I get a little drop in my chest when I come up with something very personal or emotionally charged. It pulses in this pleasant way and sometimes travels up into my head. It feels like a caffeine euphoria! But then there’s a desperation to transfer that feeling to paper. It can sometimes take days or weeks, it might require a lot of buildup. Hopefully it survives every step of the way, and has that effect on someone else when they see it. At that point I’ve gotten it out of me and I feel better. I guess drawing a comic is a little like crying in slow motion.
planet-crunch-deactivated201509 asked:
heya! Long time fan, I'd like to ask: What comics do you like to read when you're not working on your own?
My awful secret as a cartoonist is I don’t get around to reading many comics, aside from my post-convention haul. Most of my inspiration comes from music and TV. Lately I’ve really enjoyed HBO’s John Adams series, Girls, Adventure Time, and Out of the Vinyl Deeps, a book of essays on 60s/70s rock by Ellen Willis.
As far as comics go I’m starting to read Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys, which is brilliant so far. It drives me crazy how good the layouts are.
Anonymous asked:
This is something that's been weighing on me and I don't have an acceptable answer so I'm hoping that someone with a producer's point of view can provide a bit of insight. How can or how should comic book consumers consume comics with the knowledge that companies are hiding people who are known "bad actors" being if not actively hidden then passively ignored. I stopped buying comics from one, then another, now Dark Horse has issues. What, if anything, can or should be done?
iamdavidbrothers answered:
Hmm…the short version is “there is no such thing as an unproblematic fave and never has been” (even Jesus had a temper) I guess but the long version will let me organize some thoughts I’ve had percolating about Life in 2015 from the top down:
I’m a free black man living in the United States of America in 2015. My tax money is used to support for-profit wars and drone strikes at funerals when it isn’t actively funneled away from the communities I grew up in and the schools that I and people like myself went to. I have a medical marijuana card that lets me do a thing that other people I know or resemble have done an unforgivable and unreasonable amount of time in prison for. And I mean, Ronald Reagan was certainly a dude who screwed up black people, and a lot of other people, through both negligence and malice, and we’re still feeling those effects today.
I work in an industry rife with issues, many of which have very, very easy solutions that are consistently utterly defeated by the systemic, structural, and personal forces at work. (Couldn’t fit “craven” in that sentence but I should’ve tried harder.) There are people in comics I know for a fact have been telling other people in the industry racist stuff about me, but I can’t address it because I know how popularity contests work and I’m not trying to end up in some gossip rag. I’d rather scrap in the streets than that.
Right now, I’m typing a response to you on a Mac, watching Top Gun on an iPad, and texting a couple friends on an iPhone. When I get home this evening, I’m going to play either MGS V or NBA 2k16 on my PlayStation 4. One thing all of those devices have in common is that it often takes inhumane levels of crunch time to create software for them, and coltan, which must be mined. It’s generally mined in places like certain areas of Africa, China, and South America. It batters the environment, and the production/mining process is often closely tied to militia groups and criminals.
My favorite genre of music, the only one I connect to on a “this makes me wanna weep” level, is rap, which is often hateful toward women and occasionally toward gay folks.
I like lemonade a lot, and a friend pointed out that 69% of the lemonade produced worldwide is courtesy of child labor.
Nah, but for real: I don’t have an answer for you. I can’t. Assuming you live in America in 2015 and you have any type of internet, you’re already drowning in compromise. Drowning is probably too small a word for it, honestly. Life under capitalism means that somebody’s getting the shaft, or falling down a mine shaft, or whatever, pretty much every single time, to varying degrees. Sometimes it’s just getting paid a little bit less than you are worth. Sometimes it’s going to work and knowing good and well that you might lose a limb because your boss doesn’t think you’re a human being like they are. We’re complicit by default, and maybe actively, too.
It sucks and I don’t know what to do about it. What you’re asking is intensely personal. I can’t tell you boycott this or that, even if I’m personally doing it, because I came to that decision based on my conscience and personal morality. I think the only way to be “right” in this world is to retreat from it, to exist apart from it, and that’s true of comics, too, I feel.
But here’s what I do: when my conscience flares up, I think about it. I figure out where I stand and why. I think about what I can do to help the harm, and whether or not my help actually helps or just makes me feel better. There’s rappers I grew up loving I don’t give a second thought to now, except to mourn the wasted potential. I try to figure out whether the harm it does is worth the benefits it brings me. (That sounds cruel, but every single person alive does that math every day. See also: cigarettes) And then I feel bad a lot, because I have never found a good answer to anything and have to go with my gut, which means compromising what I believe on some level.
Ted Cruz got a lot of flack for liking Watchmen’s Rorschach from the peanut gallery but…you know that part where he’s like, “Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise”? He’s a lunatic and a dirtbag, but that stuck with me, because I’m not there yet and dunno how to get there, short of moving to the mountains with my old lady and our dogs, but even then I’d have to pay somebody who paid somebody who paid somebody who paid somebody to steal that land from somebody else.
Here’s what should be done: people should stop doing stupid, hurtful, or hateful things. (We should probably also reconfigure capitalism and the way we live our lives, but that’s kinda the same thing, I reckon.) Easy! Here’s what can actually be done: living with the mess we’ve made as best we can and hoping that our actions can cause change.
So I dunno yo. I don’t think there are acceptable answers. If you feel led to abstain, abstain. If you feel led to partake, partake, but do it with real eyes. Don’t justify it. Admit it. If you feel led to partake, critique, and abstain with no readily apparent rhyme or reason, do that, too. But that’s something you’ve gotta figure out, because I can’t tell you what’s right for you. Use your weight for good if you can, but don’t pretend like you are when you’re not.
“I download music to stick it to the record companies.” Nah son, you’re out here downloading music because it’s free.
Once you start looking, you’ll think about this stuff a lot, though. The rabbit hole is deep, dark, and depressing. Find a balance that fits whoever you are, something you can live (or be relatively okay) with.
Lemonade was a popular drink and still is, though.
Click click for comics!
Wow happy August! The summer is just breezing by. As usual I’ve been busy drawing Marceline comics, and I’m now about halfway through the project! I’m also going to be teaching soon, so things are busy. But OP updates will chug along whenever I have some time! Thanks for readin’.
wittgensteinsmister asked:
Now that you're starting to get into print comics, do you think that you're going to start phasing out doing web comics?
No, I will definitely still be doing webcomics.
johnnyvureblog-blog asked:
Have you ever considered doing a graphic novel? Do you have any standalone stories/characters? How would you approach it differently compared to doing serial comics?
I don’t think it’s the format for me. Drawing 15 pages at a time is a big push! I think I thrive on digest size or less when it comes to comics. But I guess it all comes down to having the right idea for it.
Anonymous asked:
Dr. Graham, I think I need some help. Lately I've been feeling this overwhelming sense of discouragement about wanting to make comics. It seems like everything is awful. Institutionalized racism and sexism in editorial. New voices that consider writing about other cultures as appropriation, and a vitriolic old guard terrified of change and full of spite. It feels like if I make a creative endeavor it will either go unnoticed, or attacked for some sleight I did not perceive committing. What to do
royalboiler answered:
Dear Generalissimo Anonymous,
I would say that Institutionalized racism and sexism are far from unique to comics,and impossible to completely escape anywhere .It’s good that we’re at least talking about them more, now, in relation to comics.
I see a lot of guys in comics voicing this fear of change, or worrying they’ll be attacked for some sleight— I don’t see that as a real concern. things are hopefully shifting so that people from other backgrounds are getting their voices heard, but that doesn’t take from you being able to have a voice. It’s still easier to be a dude (and straight & white helps) in any industry. Soooo maybe don’t worry about that.
I think the main thing to keep in mind is that it is ok to make mistakes “a man becomes a man from all the shit that he goes through” it’s about how you deal with the mistake.after, Listen to other people and be respectful of other’s experiences that you haven’t lived. This doesn’t have to be incompatible with taking personal risks and doing stories about whatever excites you.
I’d say just do the work you wanna do and if things come up try and learn from them.
And I think going unnoticed is ok. I’m kind of glad that I got to make comics in print that went mostly unnoticed before anyone paid me any attention. It was a good chance to learn about some things before I had to deal with the stuff that isn’t about making the work.
mm hmm