It's been a while since last I updated you all on what the Hell I've been doing, so let's get down to business.
Shuffle has been published on a small scale. I'm told more will be coming? We'll see. This is a little preview of my part of it (without the final shading, words... anything):
If you'd like to purchase a copy, right now copies ARE limited, so your best bet is to email me a request at deddrie@gmail.com
Oh Hell, Donna! is still updating every Wednesday.
...And I've got a couple character designs all ready to go for a storyline that won't show up for like another year or something:
AND Deddrie is actually ALSO still updating:
I just tend to promote that less because… Well… I mean, look at him. He's ridiculous. I know what this is.
Found some older drawings that need finishing though:
AND the Society6 page is still going strong.
Soon, there will also be a Storenvy.
EDIT: STORENVY link!
AAAND I entered a shirt contest thing with THIS at welovefine, though the rating period doesn't start for a few more days:
EDIT: Contest is over. Whoops.
*AHEM*
SO
As far as the other half of what I do, I DID manage to get an internship.
Fairly last minute and coated in chaos, this internship is actually much closer to something I would be happy (ish) doing, rather than all of the other internships that were available to me.
If I'm going to work for free, I'd like to not hate it.
Getting to the interview was an adventure, and made me feel a little like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
"No, seriously, I was told to wait here. I don't want to go through that door. Please don't buzz me in again-"
And suddenly I was on the other side of said door.
Just a thought here, but if you have to BUZZ people in before they can open the door, shouldn't you be checking to see who these people are first?
What if I was a crazy(er) person?
In any case, everyone was very nice.
Training starts tonight!
…And then maybe I'll have a real post.
Maybe.
In the meantime, have a look at some of the stupid things that have been coming out of my brain this past month:
Mermaid, kinda:
This one is pretty typical of me:
Yep.
My relationship with comic books has become a little like a weird dating scene.
DC and I used to be incredibly close.
Any new title, I was there, being supportive and loving.
No matter what the villains did, I had faith that the heroes would be… Well… Heroes.
But…
Then DC started getting weird on me.
Darker.
Too dark.
I don't mean that I was ever that into DC's BIF! POW! phase, but at least it was charming.
This was different.
Suddenly, everyone had to be alone.
NO one was allowed to have friends.
Not even Superman.
Characters like Bruce Wayne suddenly had no cares about family or legacy, which were pretty much key points to said characters.
Worst of all, I watched as DC started treating women very badly.
Women who had been there since the beginning were killed off.
Women who had been plot movers and game changers were erased entirely.
Women who were smart and caring and all manner of other things were reduced to objects for the men.
I was hurt.
…DC had broken my heart and I felt embarrassed to say I had ever been a fan.
DC threw away YEARS of our time together like I had meant nothing.
After all, I was just another woman.
Disheartened, I went to the comic book store.
It was time to move on and shop around for someone new, right?
…Was I ready to move on?
Dark Horse was there, of course.
Dark Horse and I always had a good time when we were together, but we hardly got to see each other anymore.
I found myself not having much to talk about beyond old titles from our history together.
It was difficult to find any new ground.
Still, Dark Horse was comforting in my hour of graphic novel need.
Madman never let me down...
But…
I wanted something more steady.
I wanted something that could give me movies so I could talk about characters with other fans who hadn't read the comics.
Or someone with cartoons-
…like DC.
Oh.
I missed DC.
Batman: The Animated Series…
You know, DC is still good for an animated movie once in a while, but no one else seems to pay any attention to it, so it feels like some kind of dirty secret.
I wind up saying, "NO! You don't understand! DC isn't like that! You just don't know DC like I do!" …And then I realize what that sounds like.
Then…
In the back of the room, looking all cool…
There was Marvel.
Now, I knew Marvel in passing.
I mean, my father hung out with Marvel just as much as he had DC, so I thought I had a good idea of what Marvel was all about.
Back in the day, I had pushed Marvel away when I saw what the Fantastic Four were like to each other.
They were mean in the comics, replacing key characters at the drop of a hat.
Plus, there was that time where EVERYONE was a mutant.
Of course…
There was Iron Man.
Iron Man had been good to me.
Even as a playboy, Tony wasn't outright cruel to anyone.
Iron Man was allowed to have friends.
He had been with me even when I left for art school, and honestly, I realize that I just kind of…
Well, I ignored him.
I hadn't really given Iron Man a chance.
You know…
I hadn't given a lot of Marvel a chance.
I guess I judged all of the characters by their friends.
Still, Marvel had never peaked my interest before.
I mean, Marvel just wasn't DC.
…But maybe that was the whole point.
Maybe I needed Marvel for that very reason.
What was Marvel going to do with someone like me though?
Marvel spotted me as I stood there among all the options.
Marvel said, "I know it's been a while, but I'm different now. You've grown up, and I've grown up too."
That set up a red flag for me.
After all, DC was "different" now.
More "grown up" too.
DC had started wearing the name tag of "New 52" and started all that awful violence with no purpose, heroes with no friends…
Sexist, racist, AND it carried right over into the movies!
And I just-
"No, no" Marvel said, putting a cool hand up, "It isn't like that. What I've done? I call it Ultimate. You'll see. Just give me a chance. There's women. We even brought some back from the dead! There's people of color in real hero roles. No more sidelines bullshit. Trust me. Just give me one try."
Marvel handed me something Hawkeye related.
Hawkeye…
Clint Barton and… Kate Bishop?
And the movies!
MY GOD the movies.
Marvel put hands in coat pockets, shrugging while giving me a disclaimer, "Sure, people still get sexualized, but you never had a problem with that, right?" Marvel blushed.
We started laughing together.
I guess Marvel was paying attention.
After all, in Marvel films, it was an even playing field.
Marvel added, "I mean, Black Widow's zipper may go down a little at one point, but the camera stays on Captain America's butt for like 80% of the film."
Now, I knew DC had been trying.
Batwoman showed promise, some of the other female characters were being brought back in...
But I just didn't trust DC anymore.
...I wanted to.
I was still hurt. I needed time.
DC needed time.
It was the recent films that really turned me off to DC, though I did find the action packed whatever-the-Hell-they-were entertaining.
They were nice to look at, but the characters I knew and loved were nowhere to be found, replaced by soulless, angry, violent, frightening-
They weren't heroes anymore.
And where the Hell was Wonder Woman???
Comics be damned, it is a new world and I just can't be satisfied anymore without good, live-action films.
What about MY needs, DC?
So,
for now,
I have to move on.
Marvel stood, waiting patiently by the door with two tickets for yet another Marvel film.
I looked longingly over at DC…
"Well," I said, taking the Marvel comic to the register, "We'll always have Batman: The Animated Series."
My Knight and I were talking about what our anxiety looks like, assuming it has been personified into some kind of horrible creature.
We very quickly came up with this:
It was quick because, well, OF COURSE it looks like that.
Now, on good days, there are people who can ignore the anxiety monster.
I've never been so good at that, so while he isn't the most threatening thing in the world to me, (these days) he can still be super creepy.
Like...
Really.
Though, for the most part, he's just kind of annoying.
He is annoying in the way that he does shit like this:
He is the opposite of helpful.
He also enjoys SCREAMING in the middle of the night.
Normally I'd give some advice on how to deal with the anxiety monster.
I usually try to use these kinds of posts to offer some helpful hints on how to avoid the ball of stress I had become in my life.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out how to get rid of this guy.
Ugh.
The following blog entry is a collaboration between Bad Grey Matter and Tight Rope Noose. Together, we are Team Manticore!
We'll go back and forth a bit to tell bits of the story, and the illustrations from each of us will go...wherever they make sense to go. Not necessarily by the person who said it. Ready? Go!
What a weekend!
RP: We started by attending an event at Bard College. Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman had a conversation on stage in front of the audience, and if you don’t know why that was awesome then you don’t know the people I’m talking about. Neil Gaiman read from his version of Hansel and Gretel. They talked about the history of comics as it related to their lives. And MAD magazine. Very awesome.
RG: It was nice to see some similarities between my own background and theirs. Hearing talk of that grim relation that you don't have as many family members in your tree as you would have pre- WWII because your family is Jewish, the fact that the first thing I read in its entirety by myself was a Batman comic, and, like Rob said, MAD magazine, was all incredibly uplifting for me.
RP: Then we headed out to Pennsylvania from there. It was a dark and rainy night, so that was fun to drive in. The best part was an hour away from our destination, when a fog straight out of a horror movie surrounded everything in sight. It was like The Mist plus The Fog plus Silent Hill. This slowed us down considerably, and 20 minutes into it we saw our first “Warning: Heavy Fog” sign. That was super helpful because before that I had thought I had driven into the smoking section of America. No wait, I knew it was fog. The sign didn’t help at all.
RG: Rob started making siren noises like Silent Hill. It actually creeped me out, which is silly. We couldn't see ANYTHING on either side, so I kept wondering if we were going to fall off an edge and die in a ditch somewhere, but Rob was pretty skillful about not doing so.
RP: It was about 2:30 AM when I started having the sleep deprived hallucinations. The combination of being up since 7am Friday, plus the fog, plus the discomfort of lengthy stretches on the road started to take its toll. I was so glad when we got off of the highway and pulled into our hotel.
RG: See, I'm used to MY sleep deprived hallucinations. Faces in the trees? Wave at them like old friends. Little white creatures in the distance? Just don't look right at them. They hate that.
RP:….Until we go into the hotel. The man on duty was laying on the lobby couch with his shoes off. After opening the door he checked us in, asking if we were part of the dance crew (We were not) and started to show us to our room.
RG: Technically speaking, he looked at ME and said, "Oh, you're with the dancing group. One of the dancers." It felt like he was telling me I was a stripper. Turns out there WAS a dancing group at the con, but they were a small part of it. I guess they were the only other people who bothered to check into this Hell hole.
RP: Along the way we marveled at the general disrepair of the facilities. The yellow grime on the door hinges, the chipped paint at the corners, the dinginess of the rug, the dead plants in the hallway. But so far it was shared space, so if the room was nice we could deal with it.
RG: No, no. You don't understand. It's not like there was one dead hanging plant in a bucket or something. There was a giant row of dead plants along a wall on the floor. Someone had taken the time to set this whole thing up to look EXTRA fancy, so when no one took care of it, it was extra horrible.
RP: NOPE. We opened the door to the room to find out it wasn’t even put together. The bed was disassembled against the wall.
RG: He made me stand there with the door open. Just… stand there like a doorstop. Like, of course that was my purpose. I'm just a dancing girl. I hold doors.
RP: The man looked at us and said “You can’t sleep here, right?” This was said as an earnest question. As if we were OK with a room without a bed. We were not.
RG: On the way to figuring out if there was a room ready at all, he had asked us to follow him and leave our bags. We declined. While he was gone, we took the time to murmur to each other about possibly waking up in a bathtub of ice with no kidneys and how grimy that tub would probably be. We started planning our escape.
RP: He went and swapped the keys and then took us outside and around the building to a somehow even shadier motel-looking section of the supposed hotel.
RG: Oh... Oh so shady.
RP: We entered the room. Again, chaos. Exposed wires came out of the floor and wall, the gunk built up on the surfaces of the furniture. It looked like a drug motel, and probably was.
RG: Like Rob said, the journey when the man came back took us outside the building, up and down a bunch of steps. He kept asking where we were parked, as though our answer would magically change. I began to panic, then stifle the panic, back and forth. I assumed that this was actually fine, and that my crazy-ass was just blowing it out of proportion. My brain is so wrong that I honestly have trouble telling what is really bad versus just my head. This is why I have Rob.
RP: We closed the door and used the room phone to call the Hotel where the Convention was actually taking place. We had hoped to save a few dollars by getting a cheaper room, but not at this price! Luckily they still had rooms available and we quickly threw our bags back in the car, turned in the room key and left.
RG: Even just waiting for Rob to get back to the room, I looked every lock and sat on the bed, half afraid to touch anything. Dear god. What if it was covered in jizz or something?? I was so thankful when he returned for me. We ran to the car and I debated if we had just escaped from another King novel.
RP: The man tried to ask what was wrong, why were we leaving and I simply stated I would send them a list. I am still considering writing the chain office, since previously I have had good luck with that company's line of hotels, but after this location, I will probably not frequent them again.
RG: I had furiously texted my mother, much to her chagrin. On some level, I just wanted her to know what had happened, just in case she never heard from me again.
RP: We get to the hotel (again) and luckily it is a very nice building, high windows with well cleaned treatments and a giant brass fireplace. A man who was dressed like the sun checked us in, and surprisingly (and despite what was told to us by the convention earlier in the planning stages) the cost for this nice hotel was the same price as the fleabag shit-hole we had just come from! Score.
RG: There were chandeliers and real wallpaper, and yes, the largest of men in the brightest of yellow shirts greeted us with open doors.
RP: We essentially collapse immediately after setting our alarms, we had to setup our booth to be ready by 10am, and at this point it is 4am. We will have to man that booth until 7pm on however much sleep we can get.
RG: *cry* After awkwardly fighting panic just to sleep, I slept rather well.
RP: Except for being moved over a space (and losing the critical corner-zone) everything went smoothly on day one.
RG: So many people had beards and baseball caps! Is that a PA thing or something?
RP: We were seated next to Red Adept Publishing, cool authors all competing to see who could get the most votes for their genre. They also ran a great panel about it.
RG: The writers were a lot of fun. We're all internet friends now. :)
RP: People. Love. Cats. Rowyn’s stuffed cats are a huge hit and we pretty much immediately sell out of the large ones.
RG: My guess is that because I had a niche there, that was why they sold so quickly? I don't even know. Earrings and pins weren't bad either, but we went to sell prints. Rob's free comic went like hot cakes though, I will say.
And here are some shots of what our table actually looked like:
All in all, we had a great time!
We've been making our rounds this year for conventions, and in a couple of weeks, Team Manticore (Bad Grey Matter and Tight Rope Noose) will be at THIS one!
Table V12!
Come see me!
I'll have prints, cats, NEW prints of Donna stuff, some pins, earrings... STUFF.
Show me some love!
Today, I'm going to tell you the tale of one of the very few typical-of-pretty-much-everyone's-childhood stories I have.
Bee stings.
My first (and so far only) was completely avoidable and I can absolutely blame it on my older sister.
No, but like... Seriously.
Okay, not really, but I'll tell you how it all went down.
First off, my sister is almost eight years older than I am, so when I was a kid, I automatically looked up to her and wanted to do as she said, regardless of whether or not that was a good decision.
I have since learned.
Many years ago, my family was stopping by a little shop that opens in the Summer for hotdogs, ice cream, and the like.
I was looking forward to these things.
Instead, I got this.
We were standing at the top of a hill:
Now, most children do want to roll down hills.
I understand this.
I was not most children.
So, to begin with, I really just did not want to do the normal-child thing of rolling down the hill.
Grass is dirty, worms freaked me out, sometimes grass made me itchy (which got worse with age), I feared rolling right into traffic... and so on.
With some coaxing, I (for whatever reason) was convinced that doing this thing was actually a proper plan.
Much like her frustration when I was not a fluent English speaker at two years old, all she wanted was to have me experience an authentic childhood thing.
All I wanted was ice cream.
So, I roll, like any other child would have done.
And, of course, I roll over a bee.
You know, despite the literal pain in my ass, I remember being very concerned about the bee.
I pictured a bee-crime scene and I wondered if his bee family would miss him.
Perhaps they'd send the bee-bulance, but it would "bee" of no use.
I had killed him.
With my butt.
We rushed home for an embarrassing round of "Here, hold that chair while Mommy takes a tweezer to your ass,"
And I resigned myself to a life inside, forever, because screw the outside world and its hills.
In case you are on the edge of your seat wondering, yes.
Yes, I totally did get some ice cream.
