Inspired by Kate Beaton’s iconic Hark! A Vagrant comics – Part 1 of more to come
Drawing of a cat with a caption that says “You didn’t waste this year, you didn’t waste your potential, and you aren’t a waste of anything.”
Drawing of a cat with a caption that says “You haven’t failed. You haven’t lost. You haven’t ruined everything. You’re just not done trying, and that’s okay.”
I’m moving toward my goals on patreon. When I reach 300$ a month, I’ll start posting longer comics on Saturdays. If I reach 700$ a month, I can keep posting daily for the foreseeable future *and* expand the project. I could add tie-in projects like positive astrology, positive photography, and longer series that focus on specific topics like studying, writing, healing, etc. If these are things that interest you, you can pledge for just 1$here.
Drawing of a cat w/ a caption that says “Forgive yourself for being human. Fake your death. Haunt popular tourist destinations. Become the magic you always had in you.”
Drawing of a cat with a caption that says “Allow yourself to take up space. Actually go to space. Eat the stars. Become a star. You are already a star. All you need is to be yourself.”
Only 5 more days left to get one of my digital collections of positive doodles with surreal messages and/or my collection of flower-themed positive doodles before I retire them forever! You can get one (or more) here.
On World AIDS Day, reflect on this Hanukkah lamp titled In Search of Miracles, on view now. In his use of test tubes for oil containers, the artist Salo Rawet associates the ancient miracle of Hanukkah with the search for a cure for AIDS, cancer, and other plagues of our time. The artist proposes here an alternative version of lighting the Hanukkah lamp, extending beyond the traditional eight days of the holiday to symbolize continuous cycles of the sun and moon. In this new interpretation, the lamp becomes and embodiment of hope and an expression of “human attempts to intervene and support the divine process of exuding miracles in our daily life.”
Can someone put together a universal theory for why Tumblr loves Halloween to a fault but hates Christmas
Tumblr skews young, Halloween spent with friends, Christmas with family.
Tumblr skews young, more users want to fuck monsters than want to fuck Santa.
I have an actual theory behind this, but I won’t be able to articulate it well until I read Bakhtin and maybe some of the medieval peasant-culture anthro stuff, so I’ve been putting it off. The short of it though is: Halloween is Mardi Gras, while the “holiday season” is Lent. Christmas however is not Easter; the closest equivalent to Easter is the day after Christmas, when you are no longer exposed to Christmas shit and you can maybe get a day off if you work retail.
Over the course of my lifetime Halloween has transmuted very noticeably into a kind of peasant carnival. I think this is because its colonization by commercial forces focused entirely on trick-or-treating, and its religious associations are nonexistent here, so above trick-or-treating age it was left completely to “the folk” to do what they wanted with.
Basically there’s two distinct elements to modern Halloween: the first is that it acts out, and thereby creates, a sense of mastery over and comfort amidst the anxieties of life – death, and monsters, and horror, and so forth. These are several steps removed from the actual sources of people’s fears, but they represent them. The posture of being at home, amongst family, in the company of death and horror is a way of grappling with the senseless horror of life.
The second aspect is that Halloween flouts the pieties of conventional society, whereas Christmas embodies them. Therefore, Christmas is the anti-Halloween. Since it’s America, bland corporate pleasantries and hyperconsumerism are themselves pieties, and as more and more of the population shifts into the service sector, the number of people who experience those things like an imposition from on high increases. The reason everyone starts celebrating Halloween as early as possible, yet dreads when the same thing happens at Christmas, is because Christmas is a “high” holiday that embodies the norms and culture of the upper-middle-class. Halloween is a vulgar party whereas Christmas is a
genteel
sermon; the commercialization of Christmas only changes the church and God.
My theory: it’s the creator vs curator debate.
Halloween involves making things and performing weirdness publicly, Christmas involves paying money to hope you guessed correctly about someone else’s preferences.
also we’re all broke and at least in my clusterfuck of a family there’s a competitive aspect to gift giving that provokes low-grade anxiety until it’s over.
Halloween is an inversion festival. Its celebration involves the suspension of the standard rules and replaces them with otherwise-rare freedoms: you can be someone else, fear is turned to entertainment, the dead get up and walk around like the living (not literally, but it does remove some of the agony of separation; one’s lost loved ones can feel closer, be interacted with in a way), there is an increased sense of magic and related possibility as a tangible thing.
There is also creativity—in choosing what to be, in creating one’s costume, in choosing what one will do when the rules have flown away and how to interact with dark and scary things for fun. It is freeing and satisfying in ways that Christmas, being primarily about traditions and secondarily about shopping and I’m not entirely sure I got the order right, is not.
Happy Hanukkah, everyone, from these two jerks! I’m posting this a little early this year. Line art by the amazing Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, and colour art by @deecunniffe.
I want to point out what a technical achievement this story is on the art side. There’s a real joy to creating a whole story in eight panels, but this? This is some magic. We introduce four new characters. In panel 5, SIX PEOPLE are talking. SIX. In the world of comics, that’s almost un-doable.
Yet Ro and Ted arranged everything so the conversations flow and are sensibly grouped, all the “acting” is fantastic, and then Dee laid on top these beautiful, almost fairytale colours – look at the subtle work, the blush in Henry’s cheeks, Frank’s five o-clock shadow, the shine of the wine bottle’s glass surface, the light texturing in the backgrounds… and of course the snow! This is some first-class illustration work on an incredibly hard script. (I fear Ro and Ted always get me at my worst – my very formalist script for them in the 24 Panels anthology was no cakewalk either. (The problem is, they’re just so damn good at it… check out their work on the Image comic Crowded!)
Decepticonsensual's Armada 