(image found on the World Wide Web, but not sure of the original creator)

True to my deepest and most enduring instincts, I chose avoidance and began beating out my first draft of my long-form comic, Niteswimming. I was starting from scratch. I very much did not know what I was doing. But using some of my newly obtained APA skills, my words formed intelligible sentences that soon became paragraphs, then pages and chapters, until I had a full script around 90 pages.

I withdrew from my statistics class.

The first draft is a huge leap, one that I had planned to make, you know, one day. For me, that “one day” had become a week, the week a season, then the years had piled up, and there I was staring down an exponential curve.

That first draft was peppered with punctuation and spelling errors^[1], meandering, and lacked three-act story structure, but it got the ball rolling. And though it took me nearly 20 years of pondering, and a deep aversion to math, to push me to take the first serious step, once I did, it was as if comics had just been patiently sitting in the other room.

Hi, friend.

I never got to this part in statistics, but there is this term, Appeal to Ignorance. It is a theory that what you do not know to be true or false (you have no evidence) is believed (fervently) to be true or false. For example, “I have never tried to make comics (art, poetry, a film, a script) and I am certain I never could make anything good.”

Well, if I’m the professor, I’d say the practical application of this theory definitively leads to failure. Instead, let’s acknowledge the causal relationship. By doing the thing, the thing will exist. And by stirring those ideas, each day, they come closer and closer to the ideal we hold in our imagination.

I’m roughly seven years into my comic journey. I know I remain green in a ton of ways. I’ve come to understand that the cost of engaging in an everyday art practice requires I wake up at 4:44 am each weekday to snatch a few moments of drawing and thinking time before my so-called real day begins. There is a deep satisfaction in telling the obligations of the day that they will need to wait a moment. Wait so I can feel excited, passionate, and be a creator of my own little world for a little while.

Here’s to making things. Each day. Any way, we can!

^[1] My lifelong calling card. Try and ahkuse me of AI ;)

Put down your cellphone, because you can’t afford the several dozen in circulation, and slap on your Discman.

Switch out Like a Prayer for Bikini Kill and reflect.

Maybe you remember a few months back a fiery politician named Pat Buchanan said there is a “war for the soul of America” because of all the feminists and homosexuals. Meanwhile, this upstart Bill Clinton announced his presidential bid, saying, “we will rise or fail together.”

No.

As Communism falls all over the world, mega churches multiply and dot the American landscape. In the middle of all of this, a music revolution is concentrating in a rainy maritime city called Seattle, flipping the record from material girls to girls with guitars.

This is the world of Anne and Lo in the comic, “Niteswimming”. High school seniors dodging bullies, religious cults, and deadbeat boyfriends to form a fierce friendship with romance on the horizon.

See you this September 11 &12 at SPX where I will be selling the prequel, “Clowning for Jesus,” and the preview of Act 1, “I Have Friends,” at table N13!

Don’t I feel awkward. Slippery with no grooves to catch. Rolling and bumping into each corner, then rolling out.

What does it mean to be round? Smooth. Continuous. Oriented to what spins and makes its mark. The wind whirls your hair around. A sandpiper sinks its bill into the sand. Round.

What does it mean to be a square? Does nature make squares? There are lines. Ridgepole pines. Where the sky meets the ocean. There are angles and points. The frozen lake melts and breaks apart. A ladybug’s spots.

We make squares. A photo is a square. And a painting. A window in your home. The home itself. To be square is to slice up the roundness of nature so the human can enter.

Can’t I better understand the raging storm through my bedroom window, and surely I am lost watching my home blow away.

Yes, nature is round, and humans are square. So, then, the original idiom is correct: square peg, round hole.[1] The world is round (ha ha), and humans are squares trying all their lives to fit.

_{[1] Where the idiom was first published, Kenelm Chillingly, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2552791.Kenelm_Chillingly}

I was not a “comics person”, so I read the comics that bubbled up in the ether. What I gleaned from most syndicated newspaper comics, or the comics shoved sideways in the impulse rack at the grocery store, was comics were silly, lowbrow, disposable, and, as I got older, so highly predictable it wasn’t worth the time to read. So, I tuned out.

(I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I mean, Betty & Veronica are the same person with two wigs, ok? You heard it here first!)

But then one day, in the middle of an art school identity crisis, I came across Diane DiMassa’s collected self-published comic, Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist!

Clouds part! Eyes unbelieving! Foreign language skills lacking, and thus, reading “Paisan” as pay-saan. grunt. But the words “Lesbian” and “Terrorist” definitely caught my attention, as I was sporting a sloppy little buzzcut at the time and the United States and its allies were gearing up for Bush Jr’s “War On Terror.”

(Me in my South Pasadena studio apartment. Not pictured, a HUGE sumi ink stain on the shag carpet.)

I loved DiMassa’s blunt and outrageous comics featuring the weapon-wielding “Hothead” and her devoted cat “Chicken”. I felt freed by her I do what I want drawing style and her stories, often climaxing in a hail of beatdowns, knives, and/or bombs, where the bad guys got theirs.

DiMassa © 1995

Reading this book cut through all the postmodern jargon, stylistic subtleties, and soft rage politics of art school. In DiMassa’s work, hypocrisy is called out, rage embraced, conversations direct, and retribution inevitable. Here were some serious, unfiltered, take-it-or-fucking-leave-it comics that needed no derivations cited and circumvented labored critical discourse.

DiMassa © 1993

If Hothead had been sitting in on an art school critique, and someone asked, “So, why did you choose to juxtapose a gun-toting, lesbian, cat-owning, spiritually-seeking female hero in the historically male-dominated medium of comics?” I imagined Hothead would say, You can take your juxtaposition and shove it up your ass!

In comics, just like lit and art, the end goal is getting your work sold. That was implicit when a person decides to spend four years of their life in art school hate-reading Jacques Derrida and responding to snotty questions like, “why should anyone care about this?”

It seemed to me DiMassa’s work was not trying to ingratiate mass market audiences or woo publishers. Her work was a bold embrace of her community, and a source of catharsis for all her community had to fight against, all the while stirring up a few laughs to help people get through their day.

DiMassa © 1992

All I can say is this collection of self-published masterpieces found me just in time. Shining a light back onto DIY, readily accessible tools of pen, paper, and a copy machines, and reminding me there are many ways to creatively skin a cat.

Just not Chicken!

DiMassa © 1995

In my young life, for several weeks over two summers, I traveled with thirty teens, our youth pastor, a choir director, a clowning expert, and a dentist to Cofradía de Cuyutlán in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico.

That’s me, the tall one who doesn’t know what to do with her hands. That other white girl in a men’s undershirt and knee-concealing sundress is a fellow missionary, and everyone else, the unfortunate targets of our mission.

During our week in Cofradía, the boy missionaries dug trenches for toilets, and the girls clowned. As in, “He is digging a hole under the hot, unrelenting sun, whereas I will perform the act of being a clown for you.”

The purpose of painting our faces and dressing in a mix of thrift store finds and homemade costumes is not dissimilar to the brightly colored lure a fisherman ties to their line.

Instead of fish, we targeted children, restless and released from their academic year, and now confronted with sweaty sunburnt girls who spoke Spanish in wildly varying degrees of comprehensibility.

I’ll just say it right now, even by year two, I had not firmly gripped this romance language. Some of my fellow missionaries were quoting the Bible in Spanish with passion, eloquence, and passable pronunciation. I was the one with the well-worn Spanish-English dictionary who continued to panic when asked what my name was.

So, being a clown, caking on the makeup, stepping into synthetic non-breathable fabrics in 100-plus temperatures, had an upside. I could communicate through theatre instead of words. Sweating bullets as a clown was transportive, maybe its own kind of religious experience, and during those trips, second only to the blessed embrace of sleep.

Out there in the plaza, amongst my fellow teen missionaries, clowning for Jesus, kids and parents would tentatively approach. The second eye contact was made, we shoved a balloon animal in one hand and a religious tract in the other, smiled, and said:

“Here ya go! Cristo te ama! Stop being Catholic and start being a fundamentalist Christian, you adorable child!”

TRIGGER WARNING for anyone who cannot deal with clown pictures (hey, at least it’s not a picture of you).

GAH! Chilling! That kid over on the right has a good idea. Run, kid!

and I make comics.

I’ve made art all my life, but sometime before the pandemic and between graduate degrees, I thought, I want to make comics! And so the first tentative steps were made.

Like a lot of people, I love to draw. People will be quick to call a kid an artist, even if their best work can be found in the margins of their homework or on their jeans. What always thrilled me most was drawing nouns (people, places, and things).

Leading up to art school, I tried abstract art, assemblage, gesture, and cooking wine-induced painting experiments, but there was no heart in it.

At art school, I carved a giant plaster fist, made palm-sized bees out of electrical tape, poured brown tile grout through an industrial tube to make a perfect replica of dog poo, and affixed a chicken wire lady sculpture with a strap-on so she could screw the art school wall.

Not the catalog of transcendence I’d once imagined. All of it was just stuff combined to make another pile of stuff, and even the best writer in the world couldn’t produce a clever enough art statement to elevate those messes.

Hidden between all the direct-to-landfill art experiments, straightforward drawing and writing would sneak in. What quickly followed was the desire to order those drawings and words into proper stories, then paginate, replicate, and disseminate. This simple process of assembling a story with pictures produced a quiet thrill that continues to this day.

(a giant plaster fist and my first attempt at a zine, “Spit!” in my first art school show, circa 2000)

So here I am, sixish years into making comics on a regular basis with the intent to make them better and better and get them into hands. And though I have SO MUCH to learn, I want to share where I have gotten to so far.

Maybe you came across this and you make comics too. Good to meet you! I hope you’ll forgive my punctuation and spelling missteps on this writer-focused platform. I hope we can share ideas, projects, goals, failures, and successes.

Because, F*** it! We only live once, so let’s draw!