red death

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burning out my sky

finally finished this. it started as a warm-up exercise to get the hang of the new tablet, but became a monster. combined with my general exhaustion/hectic work schedule lately, it took way longer than it was supposed to. -_____-  i wonder if i will ever be able to get fast and more productive.

i'm wanting to knit and make plushies and shit again lately, but with how slow i'm getting at producing my comic i don't think i can afford having other hobbies. :\

listened to a lot of Kanye West while working on it, haha. i can't help it, i really like his music.

Kanye West - Love Lockdown - Youtube

Kanye West - Heartless - YouTube yesssssssss rotoscope! lol @ the Jetsons paintings XD

all dirty

 

i want those boots.

the Unicorns - Emasculate the Masculine -YouTube

This could be the sound of me tearing
into your flesh from a distance
opening fresh wounds
for a peek

And this could be the sound of me breaking
into your room late at night
slitting your throat
and cutting off your dick

'Cause everyone I know
is too comfortable with thier lives
to ever be a part of change

And everyone I know
is leaving for the weekend
with tickets to the game
everybody sounds the same

hunger pangs

amazing 15-year-old girl’s slam poetry to a Kimberly Henry ad for plastic surgery, on a menu, across from the salad options.  

Dear Kimberly Henry, I saw your ad last night.
The menu at the cheesecake factory-
your smile so bright on the page next to the page
with the weight management salads.
So people have to know the calories of every order,
or they might accidentally indulge themselves in flavour,
and that’s not right?
Because your ad says I should indulge myself under the knife. Because something about me is so broken and wrong? That I have to listen to every line of your song? And follow every rule of your game?
Go on a diet? Change my name? Or go insane at my own reflection, or the scale? Start calling myself an ugly pig, cow, whale?
Or remember I’m human, that’s all I can be. And my humanity is more beautiful than any sad plastic dream.
No, cause if I let myself get happy, I might get fat.
Which I guess is even worse than being empty and needing?
Or on a table cut open and bleeding?
Or obsessing over numbers, or hiding behind clothes?
Or really believing there’s no way I’ll glow~
unless I change this, lose this, cut this, change that? You know what?
I’d rather be fat.
I’d rather be really fat, not just a pinch of some skin.
I’d rather remember that food isn’t sin, because fat’s just a word like blonde-haired, or brown eyed. And when’s the last time somebody starved themselves until they died, because their eyes weren’t blue, even though they tried? And you know what?
The things you tell yourself are lies.
And they aren’t your lies.
You aren’t that creative.
You aren’t the first one infatuated with self hatred.
You’re just part of the chain on a dusty old bike,
and you’ve been pushed into the ground all of your life. Because it’s so accepted? So wide spread and celebrated, that skinny is happy and fat is wrong?
It’s written all over magazines and billboards and love songs and in me and in everybody, so I wonder, Kimberly.
What happened to you?
That you risked your own life attempting to be beautiful? And you tell other girls that’s what they should do?
And you reap love and peace like the grimmest reality,
and when I’m trying to eat you’re all over my menu?
How dare you tell girls that plastic surgery is fun?
That they have to char their skin under a fake sun, and put plastic in their chest to be any fun, to laugh and to tease and weigh and reweigh
and spend day after day
spreading more lies and causing more pain?
For the sake of their makeup, staying out of the rain?
More terrified to gain a pound than their health and dreams hitting the ground,
shattered by this cloud of despair
that’s infecting people everywhere,
so you can find little girls who only care
about skipping lunch, and they don’t even know, that in some reality, this isn’t acceptable.
To scream at women all day and all night, how is it any better than when women didn’t have any rights? Because yeah I can vote, and get a job, but I have to shave my legs, get a tan, go on a fast, get a man, lose the weight as fast as I can, boast, compare, cry, lie, and die?
So sure I can vote, but I can also fly away from this whole place of toxic air.
Because I don’t really care what you say, and if you think I should have a problem with that?
No thanks, I’d rather be fat.

i wish i could have been anywhere near this enlightened when i was 15.

i think anybody that really knows me knows i have body-related issues, and even though i've made huge strides this past year towards accepting myself and realizing i'm more than my body, that my body is just fine and is strong and capable of doing everything i need it to do so therefore i shouldn't be so hard on it, and even if i did have a "perfect" body it still wouldn't fix all of my problems, i still have my dark moments, and i probably always will.  but every little oasis in my desert helps. this one really helped me out today. as a person with anxiety issues in dealing with other people and feelings of constantly being judged, it's easy to get caught up in perceived expectations of me and let it distort what i know to be true, to let myself become complacent to my own oppression. it's not cool. i realize i need to work harder on not giving a fuck.

also i think the majority of it is rubbish, but i liked this one excerpt from The Witches of Eastwick:

She recognized as she labored in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce to be ladled upon the white spaghetti. The fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order...

Detroit Lives

kind of as a follow-up to my Requiem for Detroit? post, here's a similar documentary but more on the positive outlook of things.

Detroit Lives - Palladium Boots

i'm really happy that they took a look at Detroit through an artistic lens, and delve into its potential and unique qualities instead of its problems. this is the kind of thing i think about when people seem so horrified by me living near Detroit.

also, i love Buster Keaton.

they'll rot your brain

i love cartoons, but particularly ones that push the envelope and go a little above and beyond typical wacky cartoon hi-jinks. i'm really not into those older merrie melody/warner bros. shorts where 99% of the comedy comes from parodying and spoofing famous people and movies of the day. i understand why it was popular and humorous at the time, but honestly i don't get a majority of the references, and secondly i prefer for any kind of media, really, to have a timeless appeal. for these reasons, i much prefer the later Looney Tunes, especially those directed by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Bob Clampett.

Bob Clampett might be my favorite animater/director ever. silliness and weirdness are cartoon staples, but he knew how to push it above and beyond, making a joke or gag that was merely funny and weird into something really laughably outrageous.

one of the things that first got me about his stuff is how far he was willing to stretch the very physical limitations of reality for the sake of ridiculousness. walls, doors, props, whatever, became the consistency of rubber. and his expressions and poses! look how great and elastic they are!

what an awesome wild take on Daffy! Clampett knew how to use Daffy to his full potential, and made probably my favorite Daffy cartoons, even better than the Chuck Jones duck season/rabbit season ones. though it doesn't ever fail to amuse me the endless and creative array of ways Daffy's face gets rearranged every time he gets blasted. but i digress.

in this cartoon, i love how giddy Daffy is as he bastes himself with gravy at the end. XD it's so funny, and dirty at the same time!

apparently it's impossible to find a video of, but this is one of my favorite Looney Tunes ever, "Old Grey Hare" from 1944. The dialogue is just so snappy and right, and Clampett milks every bit of comedy out of an aged Bugs and Elmer Fudd, taking the expressions and actions to a new extreme with their gummy mouths, furrowed brows and rubbery wrinkles. i also really love the facial hair choices of Elmer with a cookie-duster mustache and Bugs with a cottony Red Fox beard.

but my absolute favorite subject to explore in animation is malice, rage, mental breakdown, violence and craziness. while there were probably other animators technically better in other ways, to me, Clampett was one of the first animators to really master exploring the darker side of human emotions in cartoons, and exploiting them for comedic effect.

(i particularly love the cartoon with this dog. he's probably supposed to be a parody of someone with his weird, floppy hair and accent, but he stands alone as a funny character. i love that the majority of the cartoon takes place underwater and he and Bugs Bunny can inexplicably exist without breathing just fine.)

the only other animators i can think of that come close to Clampett's brilliance at capturing rage and insanity are Tex Avery and John Kricfalusi. it's hard to find Tex Avery's stuff online for some reason, and while he mainly stuck with more traditional cartoon idioms, he won my heart with how far he was willing to go to keep topping a gag. i have in mind one scene in particular that practically changed my life when i saw it, but again, i can't find it.

while Clampett and Avery were both extremely talented in their portrayals of  intense inner turmoil, it was almost always from a place of slap-stick and good-naturedness, whereas John K. took his influences in a directly darker place. the cartoonishness of his characters and ridiculousness of the situations softened the blows just enough to make them funny, but what i love about John K.'s animated sequences of Ren losing it is that often times you're unsure whether you should be laughing or not.

Ren: "i'm So Angry" - YouTube
this is probably the scariest and most threatening Ren's ever been, so much so that Nickelodeon forced edits to portions of his descriptions of what he plans to do to Stimpy and Sven. i love the juxtaposition of teetering between funny and flat-out disturbing.

Happy Happy Joy Joy - Dailymotion
probably everyone is acquainted with this episode or at least this song, but it amazes me that some 10-15 years later, it's still hysterical to me, particularly the seemingly crazy, non sequitur ramblings of Stinky Wizzleteats in the middle of his song (which apparently are all quotes from children's songs and a Western movie by Burl Ives, who Wizzleteats is a parody of). the whole episode is really good, particularly the parts where Ren fights the power of the happy helmet and loses, and the preceding scenes in which he is constantly insane with happiness.

Ren: "THESE HANDS" - Youtube
this is probably my favorite insanity sequence from Ren and Stimpy. to me, the threats of Ren's violence and his maniacal ramblings were much more disturbing than any of the actual cartoon violence he inflicted on Stimpy. i love how it actually goes there, with Ren contemplating breaking Stimpy's neck in his sleep. XD

edit: oh yeah, how could i forget Space Madness?? i think Ren's first great insanity sequence. it contains two of my favorite quotes: "it is not i who am crazy. it is i who am MAD!" and "we're not hitch-hiking anymore! we're RIDING!" XD

besides the dialogue and exaggerated body language and expressions of the characters, John K. is a genius when it comes to creating a mood through background and music. i love when the backgrounds go from being normal settings to surreal, splotchy spaces, indicating a character has snapped or is about to become unhinged. sometimes the music choices are ham-fisted and obvious, further adding to the comedy, but oftentimes they're beautifully in contrast to everything that is happening, such as his liberal use of relaxing classical music to scenes of disgusting things, or just plain absurdity.

i feel like he really dropped the ball with Adult Party Cartoon, but the classic Ren and Stimpy will never cease to amaze me. they just don't make cartoons like that anymore.

chemicals between us

omg i got my new tablet FINALLY and it rocksss YESSSSSSSSS so excited!!! it's the best tablet ever (or the best one i've ever had, anyway!)! super excited to draw shit and work on my comic again!! though i do want to keep drawing in my sketchbook; it's fun.

 

i hate thinking someone is genuinely interested in me and my hobbies and interests, but really they're only interested in my orifices. i'm so bad at figuring it out sometimes. 

i'm thinking about getting a vaginal piercing, heheh.

shit a brick

not sure about all her other features, but this is the first time i'm happy with this character's mouth scar.

i have looked into the maw of the abyss

back from FanExpo! it was quite an experience. the first day was an absolute nightmare; i had gotten next to no sleep on my bus, and my one friend who was driving us to Toronto had gotten like no sleep, and our other two friends who drove in from Pittsburgh had to leave at like 5 am so of course everybody was super tired. then we got held up at the border getting in and that freaked me out. then we got lost forever in Toronto trying to find our hotel and a place to park the car, and when we finally did make it to the convention center it was really late, and i got like the worst migraine i ever had.  so painful. i ended up getting sick right in the doorway as we were rushing to make it into the room, which was really embarrassing at the time, but now that i look back on it it was pretty funny. it's really humbling to have your mentor/one of your favorite people that you just met for the first time helping you clean up your vomit, heh.

but the rest of the night went good. after i threw up and took some headache medicine, i felt sooo much better, and everyone else ordered room service, and we watched mixed martial arts fighting on tv, then sat up watching Fear as late as i could with Ross, and it was such a funny movie, wow. gotta rent it. anyway, the rest of the trip was pretty good too. i think we all felt like champs for having made it through that first day. XD

i had a really good time hanging out with Nick and Justique at the Audioshocker table, i'm glad they let me invade their space like that. i finally started trying to come out of my shell a bit and mix it up and talk with people at the con and  stuff, and i met so many incredibly talented and nice people! it really touched me. it might sound sappy or whatever, but as much crap as it is to struggle and get to cons and you may have to put up with some bad stuff, it was totally worth it to me to just be around these kinds of people, to feel their energy and know that they get it. that we all have similar goals in creativity and self expression and being passionate about something other people might not understand. again, i probably sound totally gooey, but for maybe the first time in my life i was sure i was on the right track and doing the right thing by me. i was sure this is where i belong. it was definitely a significant experience for me, and i'm really grateful to my friends who made it possible, and whose friendship has inspired me to put my all into my projects the way that they do.

also my mom called me today and i told her all about the con and how it went and how it made me feel, and i was surprised because she was actually really pleased and happy for me and supportive. i kinda wasn't expecting that reaction at all, so it was nice.

but yeah. back to drawing!