Lost Tuesday to a hospital visit (kidney stone).

I’ll be fine, but it’s an ongoing thing and I’d like to make up the lost time, so I’ll be giving the blog a rest until Monday in order to get back to the drawing board as much as possible.

Still voted though! Ivy raced over and got me from the hospital to the polls here in So. Cal with only four minutes to spare. I love my wife.

See you Monday!

Today is the mid-term election here in the U.S.

I love this crazy country of ours. Let’s not make it *too* much crazier this time around, okay?

Okay, so Tuesday of last week, Kate Beaton put up a comment via her Twitter handle in 4 parts:

dear internet, you are well meaning, but I’d like to make a point.

when you tell a female creator you like her work so much you want to marry her and have her babies, you’re not doing anyone any favors

first of all, as cute as it sounds in your head, it’s a shitty, disrespectful ‘compliment.’ No one makes comics looking for sexual attention

secondly, by doing so you invite others to critique that person’s works based on their looks, which is uncomfortable, sexist and unfair.

There was a blizzard of responses (including a bunch of negative comments by males, apparently) that sparked a wider discussion about sexism in comics, and on Friday, Gabby Schulz put up a very funny comic about the whole thing.

It has 666 comments as of this writing (no joke!) and they make for some bracing/revealing/funny/depressing reading; sometimes devolving into YouTube-level depravity.

It’s important, before you open Pandora’s Box and go to the comic that you understand a few things that seem to confuse people:

1. Gabby is a guy (who sometimes goes by “Ken Dahl,” though that’s actually a pen name).

2. The comic is fiction. Also funny. It’s not meant to be picked apart like a court transcript.

3. Beaton is right.

It may be true that men and women have traditionally adopted different styles of communication and there are some men who might have reacted differently if roles had been reversed, but now that you know it’s offensive to say such things, it’s kind of ridiculous to argue the point.

It offends. Now you know. Act accordingly.

It’s not rocket science.

[Edit to Add: As some of our comments have pointed out, the ‘babies’ line was just an example, and a mild one at that. There have been far worse, and it’s a pattern reported by several other female cartoonists.]

UC-inspired costume courtesy of Aliki Chapple. Love that tilted angle.

Site might be down a bit in the next few days while we fix some things, but hope to be back to regular blogging on Monday.

As always, you can also find me on both my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Information is Beautiful has been around for a while, but it’s such a great site, I just wanted to give it a shout-out here.

In the last 100 years or so, many technology watchers (including Einstein, IIRC) have lamented how the human brain has barely changed while its many inventions continue to reshape our environment at a constantly accelerating pace.

Short of Eugenics 2.0 (probably NOT a good idea), we need to get smarter FAST, and recent advances in Visualizing Information are one of the fronts that look especially promising. To a cartoonist anyway.

Not all of the charts David McCandless offers up on his site are in the spirit of rigorous scholarship. Some are just rhetorical jabs. But see if you don’t feel your own brain crammed with ideas after a stroll through its pages.

THIS is so close, in almost every respect, to what we were asking for over a decade ago, it’s almost eerie. They’re even using the same language to describe it.

I’ve got a graphic novel to draw, so I’ll stay on the sidelines for a while, but you can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this one, and I hope you do too.

And yes, if it flies, I’ll be gloating for a reeeally long time.

Shaenon Garrity has a great post at Comixology this week. A little manifesto called Ten Things to Know About the Future of Comics.

Garrity has this unnerving habit of being right about everything, so I suggest you pay attention (though, if you disagree with any of her conclusions, I’d be curious to hear your views too, of course).

Please note that although I’m briefly name-checked in the article, I didn’t find out about this one through ego-surfing. It was actually via Barry Deutsch this time.

Cartoonists: Do you know that what you put in your panels is potentially far more interesting than how well you draw it?

Some Friday Odds and Ends…

Came across this oilspot by the mailboxes Wednesday. Thanks, humanity, nature, and entropy. Good job there.

Here’s a great cause: Tom Hart (one of my all-time favorite people in the comics universe) is creating a new comics workshop in Gainesville, FL. Here’s your chance to help get it off to a great start!

Here’s a cool sidescroller with some nice art. (link via John Patten)

And finally: Heads up, Stanford University! Looks like I’ll be heading your way on Thursday November 18. More details shortly.

Have a great weekend.

New art from an artists’ artist.

NSFW. via.