Morbid Obsession- Part 10

And we’re finally back to actual comics!

You can find the start of the current storyline that this follows up on here.

This picks up the story of my frustration with/obsession with time, and takes it to jobs I’ve had in adulthood to make ends meet while I’m trying to be an artist.  The time and money connection is going to be where Capitalist Pig comes back into the story, as the rabbit tries to think of new ways to monetize his creations.

Simultaneously, Rickets and Prester are going to run out of money, and Prester’s cocaine habit is going to lead them to some desperate measures.  For long time readers of my comics, you’ll remember that a while ago Rickets and Prester cracked open Capitalist Pig, who’s a piggy bank, with a baseball bat, and they’ve been living off the money that poured out of him since, but it’s gonna run out eventually.  Capitalist Pig, meanwhile, after being beaten with a baseball bat and robbed, has been plotting his way to get even.

As these comics often do, the storyline about the rabbit needing to learn to monetize his comics is turning out to be eerily reflective of my own life, because I really need to get money together for a new laptop.  To that end, I’m going to start organizing some of the art that I’ve created, and some time this weekend I’m going to start making a listing for comics of which I’ll be selling the original art, so if you’re interested in that check back.  I think I’m also going to put together some kind of offer to do original sketches of the characters for people who would like to donate to the Get Rick a New Computer fund and help these comics continue to come out in a timely fashion.  So, if you’re interested in original pieces, check back, and if there are particular comics that you’d like the original art for, ask me and I’ll see if I have the art still!

So, let’s see, the story behind this drawing is obviously a long and strange one.  For those that follow my comics, this is the same boy as in the Boy From Santa Cruz storyline that I did a while back, the beginning of which can be found here.

As much drama as there was in the Boy From Santa Cruz storyline, that was actually the streamlined version of it.  Between originally meeting him in a club and then actually drawing him, there was something like 10 months where we talked over text a bit but pretty much drifted off, and then I saw him at a club again, and asked him if he remembered me, and then the six months or so that we dated and I did the drawings in that original series happened.  That Fourth of July strip, about one of our good, early nights together, is about a Fourth of July that’s now two years ago.

After we kind of broke it off that time, almost two years passed in which we didn’t talk much, several other guys came and went, and then, for whatever confluence of reasons, after this last breakup we started talking again and decided to do another drawing.  He said that after he dates somebody, he needs some time before being friends with them again.  Two years, really?  I think a big part of why I still talk to him is that I can never figure out exactly what’s going through his head.  He’s either stimulating or just obstinante, or maybe I’m stimulated by obstinance, I’m not sure.  For all my talk of tying boys up, I think in a real way I’m the masochist.

That’s actually why I like to do these tied up boy drawings, because of the fact that I’m doing them of people I know or have dated, the drawings, while ostensibly about sexual sadism or power play, are meant as my expression of affection toward them.  They’re interesting relationship metaphors for me, because the thing is, I tied them up, but they can be untied any time they want to.  The person who’s tied up always has all the control, it’s about the illusion of power.

One of the 10 billion great lines that Bob Dylan has written is in the song Abandoned Love: “I march in the parade of liberty/ But as long as I love you I’m not free/ How long must I suffer such abuse/  Won’t you let me see you smile one time before I turn you loose?”  Devotion to somebody else is always about masochism, because if you admit that you like them and don’t want to leave them, they’re the one with the choice to leave or not, and you’re the one who’s tied yourself up.

When I was dating the BFSC, I bought an Ipod, and when I first loaded songs onto it and put it on shuffle, the first song it ever played was Abandoned Love.  In that song, he’s the one who’s suffering “abuse” but he’s also the one who wants to turn her loose.  The two are the same thing.  After that, for me that song kind of became the theme song of my relationship with the BFSC, I would listen to it at least once a day when I was dating him.  He wasn’t ever aware of that, though, I don’t think I ever played the song for him or mentioned it to him.  As much as I wring my hands about him being inscrutable, when I can wrest myself out of my own narrow vision for a moment and see it from his side, I realize that I must have been equally inscrutable to him, if not more so.  My interior life doesn’t seem mysterious to me because I’m living it, but other people aren’t.  Although they have more of it than you would have with most people, they have all these comics.

I used Independence Day day as the strip that represented the happy part of our relationship, because it seemed to me like a good symbol for freedom for obvious reasons.  That moment when you think you can be interdependent with somebody else, and still be free.  I’ve managed to have those moments, and in some cases even sustain them for quite a while.  I haven’t found out yet whether they can actually last indefinitely, but I like to think they can.  The fact that I’m posting this new strip on Fourth of July is a serendipitous coincidence that I should probably take credit for planning even though I didn’t.

The chair I drew him in in this picture is actually the chair at my desk where I draw almost all of my comics.  That seemed fitting to me.  It’s a drawing of somebody tied up, and that somebody is in my chair, the chair from which I create art.  I like to push the question of who it is that’s actually tied up here.  I opened the whole Boy From Santa Cruz storyline with a drawing of him tied up, because it’s actually a story about him dumping me.  In that drawing, he’s tied up to a door, he can walk out it any time he likes.

Also from Abandoned Love:

“I can hear the turning of the key
I’ve been deceived by the clown inside of me
I thought that he was righteous but he’s vain
Oh, something’s a-telling me I wear the ball and chain”

So, I saw the boy from Santa Cruz again.  This is basically how our afternoon went.

A comic I wrote a long time ago, feels good to finally have finished it.

Yeah, I know you’ve heard that before.  But I’m hoping to have the next comic done and posted by Wednesday.

Sorry to everybody for the long delay before my next comic.  I’ve been been more scatterbrained than usual recently about trying to organize all the various things I’m trying to work on.  I’ve been starting on or working on so many things, but finishing very few.  The next new comic will be up within a few days, hopefully Wednesday, along with a blog talking about the long road I’ve been on to complete it.

“Good lord, this guys’s stuff is awful. Sixth form R. Crumb only it’s about furries or something”-My comics, according to a poster on the Chuck Dixon “Dixonverse” messageboards.

A couple weeks ago I got into an extended conversation on those Dixonverse messageboards with members of Chuck Dixon’s following stemming from the fact that I included him on the list of people of whom I plan to make Douchebags of Comics cards.  I’m not sure whether it was a mistake or not to even reply so much, but I figure that it’s good to engage people and answer questions and it usually defuses situations.  You can read the thread here .  On the other hand, though, I think it might be better to some extent to let the art speak for itself, and most people who have been amused by what I’ve done so far with the whole Douchebags of Comics thing have got what I mean when I use the word “douchebag,” and I wasn’t going to make any converts by going to a messageboard for one of the people I planned to make a card of and talking to its members.

They started the thread, though, and so I figured I should at least reply to show I was willing to be engaged.  Before I showed up, the tone of the thread was mostly like the comment I posted above.  I asked the guy who said that if I could use it as a pull quote on my next book, and he said sure.  When I showed up, though, the tone of the thread immediately turned from trashing me and my work to saying that, gee, I was a cool guy for coming, they hoped I would stay, and if I would just listen they could explain to me how wrong I was about Chuck.

“I’ve looked at your website, and it’s clear to me that you’re not without talent. You’re a good artist, and you have some wit. Would I be correct in assuming that you’d like to make your living at this? Because if so, I urge to drop this Douchebags of Comics thing, in it’s entirety,” -from the same guy who, on the first page, had made the comment I quoted above.

I guess he hadn’t actually read my comics when he made the earlier post.  Or maybe I became more talented in between the two posts.  Funny because they were also criticizing me for sounding off on something before informing myself while criticizing my comics without having read them.  Another of the posters also told me in a private message that they hadn’t actually read my comics before commenting on my lack of ability.

It was also a bit funny that, as they told me they thought the cards were a bad idea, they also rattled off the names of people they thought deserved cards more than Chuck.  Basically, “The cards are a bad idea, although we can name several people who deserve them…”

I said I was more than willing to listen about Chuck if they could tell me something I didn’t know.  They kept insisting for pages after I had already said that I’ve read a lot of Chuck Dixon’s work that, if I would just read Chuck Dixon’s work I would know that his politics hadn’t affected his work.  It’s strange, because I’ve had people make the exact *opposite* argument over including people like Grant Morrison in my series of cards.  They’ve said, Grant Morrison is a douchebag for such and such that he said, or did at a convention, or whatever, and I’ve said, maybe personally he can be a big douchebag, but when I think “douchebag” I don’t think Grant Morrison because I like his work.  And I’ve said again and again, the cards aren’t only down to whether I like them or whether I like their work.  It’s a mix.

Here’s the thing about this series of cards.  I love provoking conversation with it, and I’m eager to hear what people have to say, but if I make a card of somebody, I’m the one making it, so that’s *me* calling them a douchebag, so it’s gonna come down to how I feel about them.  There’s not a scientific set of criteria that constitutes a douchebag.

What I said about Chuck Dixon was that my main bone of contention came down to some things he’s said that I think are homophobic.  Some people on the messageboard, before I said anything about political affiliation, turned that into an issue of “Liberals” attacking conservatism.  Interesting how, without mentioning politics, if you mention bigotry people assume you’re attacking the right wing, isn’t it?  Conservative people, are you comfortable that that’s what your party is synonymous with?  I mean, I guess you must be if you vote that way, but that seems kind of depressing.

There are multiple things about Chuck Dixon that I’ve found douchebaggy from what I’ve read, but the main thing came down to quotes he’s made about gay people.  The people on the messageboard, though, kept telling me that those quotes were taken out of context, and used as fodder by the “Liberal” people who are so close-minded and attack anybody who disagrees with them.  OK, I said, explain to me how what I thought about Chuck Dixon was wrong.  The main thing that ended up being discussed was this quote from Chuck:

“My suggestion was that superhero comics are, whether die-hard fans like it or not, ostensibly children’s comics and perhaps not the forum to be informing children of homosexuality, heterosexuality, or sexually transmitted diseases. I think I incensed some people by saying that I didn’t want my kids receiving their sex ed from Judd Winick in the pages of a superhero comic book. I still don’t.

“I’ve never backed away from my disdain for agenda-driven comics in what should be the medium’s primary escapist, mass appeal genre. Stand on your soap box all day long. But don’t stand on the shoulders of household-name icons. Write the characters in character and don’t write your world-view through them.”

Now, saying that you don’t want authors on liscened characters to use those characters as a platform for their personal views is one thing, although I see it as pretty stupid.  I don’t understand the impetus to want artists to remove themselves from the art they create.  I can’t think of anything more boring than art where the artist exists to do purely what the fans and the company he’s working for tell him to.  But then again, that’s how most superhero comics are these days, and that’s probably a big part of why they’re so vapid and worthless.

But that’s a whole different discussion.

The problem I have is that I see that quote as him saying that gay people shouldn’t be included in entertainment that could be seen by children.  Chuck Dixon himself showed up in the thread, and I asked him to tell me that *wasn’t* what he meant, but he didn’t.  After pages discussing this, it seems to me that Chuck Dixon said exactly what I thought he said, it’s just that some people don’t consider that sentiment to be homophobic.

This is what I’d like somebody to explain to me:

How is it possibly *not* bigoted to say that an entire segment of the population should be hidden from the view of children?

What the argument comes back to is that, well gee, it’s a complicated issue, and parents shouldn’t be forced to explain it to their children until they’re ready to.  The problem is that that’s an utterly fucking stupid thing to say.  That’s what those few thousand moms who call themselves the Million Moms were saying about not having Keven Keller Archie comics being available in Toys R Us.  It’s a complicated issue, we don’t want to be forced to discuss it with our children.

The problem is that there’s nothing complicated about it.  Kid: “Mom, what’s ‘gay’?” Or, kid: “Mom, why are those two men living together?” Mom: “Sometimes two men love each other just like a man and a woman do.” Kid: “Oh.  Alright.”

That’s how complicated it is.  It’s *complicated* when the parents insist on bringing their bigotry to it.  Instead of saying the simple sentence like above, the bigoted parent would like to say, “Well, sometimes two men love each other, but god hates them for it, even though god made gay people, and Mommy knows this because she personally knows the will of god even though I know you’re a child and you’re still old enough to smell bullshit when I say that, but obviously Mommy knows the will of god because she can quote some verse from Leviticus to justify herself, even though if she read the rest of Leviticus she’d realize it involves everything from slavery to animal sacrifice and Levitical law isn’t actually a part of Mommy’s religion except when Mommy feels like it, and really the religion itself doesn’t make any sense, either, but Mommy believes it whenever it suits her because it’s easier than her becoming educated and learning something about reality…”

Yeah, that *is* complicated, but if that’s the stupid-ass conversation you chose to have with your child, every gay person in the world should not have to hide themselves from view at all times so it’s as easy as possible for you to keep your children ignorant and worthless like you.

The other thing there is the idea that, having gay characters in something that children might read forces you to talk to your children about sex.  That’s obviously not true.  Having a straight couple hold hands or kiss in a story does not teach kids about sex.  It teaches them about affection, which is a good thing.  Saying that having gay characters in fiction forces you to talk with your child about sex is deliberately disingenuous and an attempt to divert the conversation away from what you actually don’t want to talk to your child about.

The bigger thing here is that, not only is having gay characters in stories children will see *not* harmful, having them in there can be so immensely beneficial.  Ignorance about the simple facts of gay people existing is what leads to bullying and hatred related to it.  Maybe even more importantly than that, having no characters like themselves to look to in stories leaves gay kids with the conclusion that they’re freaks, and that’s what leads to depression, suicide and all sorts of other horrible things.

So, that’s why, after everybody on the Dixonverse messageboards tried to explain to me that the comment isn’t a big deal, I still think it’s a pretty big deal.

Chuck Dixon himself, in the thread, said once we started talking about Orson Scott Card and I explained that I considered Orson Scott Card to be a completely different case than Chuck Dixon:

“I don’t know if Card is a homophobe because I’m not really sure what that term means and I don’t think anyone else does either. It’s like calling someone a heffalump. But Card has made homosexuality an issue for himself and, it seems, he continues to do so. For some reason none of this blownback on his career in any way I can see. I mean, there’s a major H’wwod movie based on one of his novels in pre-production. And he still gets published, right?

“All I did was comment on gay issues when they crossed over into the realm of superhero comics. I didn’t talk about “dark secrets” or spout smack about gay society or whatever. I simply questioned that some of these issues were not appropriate in mainstream superhero books. Especially the way they were being presented. In Green Lantern, gay-bashing was being exploited as a topic much like a Lifetime movie and just as predictable and by-the-numbers and written by a writer whose ONLY issue is homosexuality and AIDS. I also didn’t think that retroing the Rawhide Kid with a “ain’t sissies funny?” approach to be anything but insulting to everyone as well as the misuse of a once-popular character.”

The point being that, no, he hasn’t done anything horribly homophobic in his work, or even showed that he hates gay people.

I’d agree with him that the way a lot of gay stuff was being presented at the time he made his comments about it wasn’t great, and obviously nobody likes that Rawhide Kid story.  But the confusion is over the idea that including gay characters somehow automatically involves politics or sex.  There’s no reason it should have to.  But no, I don’t think Chuck Dixon hates gay people, although I do think he’s perfectly capable of understanding what people say when they use the word “homophobe.” To dismiss it that way is an etymological debate, not a philosophical one, because you can argue about exactly what the word should mean, but when somebody calls somebody a homophobe you know what they’re saying.

So no, Chuck Dixon hasn’t given evidence that he hates gay people.  He just thinks that kids shouldn’t see them.  See the problem I’m having here?

There are different levels and different kinds of homophobia.  There were a lot of people in this country’s very recent history who wouldn’t have considered themselves racists at all because they weren’t full-on violent bigots or Klan members or something, but they would have opposed interracial marriage.  When interracial marriage was made legal, a larger percentage of citizens actually didn’t approve of it than don’t approve of gay marriage now.  But not everybody who would have said they didn’t like interracial marriage would have considered themselves a racist.  I’m sure most of them would have insisted they weren’t.  They would have just seen themselves as supporting traditional values.

I see casual, low-key bigotry as being dangerous, too, because people can pass it off as being no big deal.  It’s much more insidious.

I’m not even saying Chuck Dixon is a bigot.  Right now, I’m also not going to go into other things he’s said that bother me or other reasons that I’ve considered him for a Douchebags of Comics card.

Right now I’d just like to address that one comment.  Can anybody explain to me any possible way in which saying that gay people shouldn’t be in stories children see is *not* bigoted?  I really don’t think there is one.

Out of all my characters, Truckstop is probably the one who really knows what he wants and is totally comfortable with it.

Truckstop’s biggest frustration in life is that other people aren’t as comfortable with themselves as he is, although he’s extremely patient and supportive with my other characters.

Truckstop came by to crash at the house with my other characters around two years ago, and it seems like he’s still there.  I don’t really plan on him going anywhere.

One aspect of Truckstop’s character that’s only been hinted at so far is his past, and he does have a bit of a mysterious past that, like Prester’s, will get explored as things go on.  I wanted to set up the idea of an ex boyfriend of his that we haven’t seen yet, and that will be explored later on.

Truckstop, specifically, was made to tell stories that people have told me that I thought would make good comics, but where I didn’t think it was the best idea to draw the actual person who told me the story.  He seemed like a good way to use some of the more outrageous things that I’ve heard without divulging confidences.  Mostly everything that Truckstop says is something that’s actually happened, but not to me.  The story of his name, specifically, is a sex fantasy of somebody’s, but that one isn’t a story of something somebody actually did.  At least, not somebody I know personally.  I’m sure somebody’s done it as some point.

For those of you who want to follow Truckstop’s amazing escapades, check out the Facebook page I just recently made for him!  There’s not much on it yet, but it’s gonna be added to soon.  Tomorrow’s gonna be another Truckstop drawing from my book that came out last year that I don’t think has been on this website yet.