I was bored.
(via fuckyeahkingofthehill)
“The Value Of Feeling Tiny”
I’m not that smart of a person, and I will readily admit that. I am often told otherwise, but in my own head, I’m still the same 13-year-old struggling to sound smart that I was when I was actually 13 years old. What I know now that I didn’t know back then is that there is value in being small and suffering under the weight of hopeless repose. There is beautiful sadness built into the realization that you don’t know crap and everybody else around you is kicking your ass at everything you think you’re great at.
When you’re constantly knocked down from your pedestal of knowingness, you grow thick skin and leathery elbows. Being smart and confident breeds precarious minds, where being humble and inferior builds stronger minds. What good is being a smart guy when, at the first sign of resistance, you throw your arms up in protest and shout at the darkness?
So, I encourage everyone to put yourselves in a position to get slapped down. You would be surprised at how good it feels when you’re not expected to be the smartest one in the room!
This is a comic I made about thinking too much and how sad it can make you. I hope someday to learn how to think less.
“The Green in Me”
I spent the evening watching the new Muppet Movie with my best friends, and I was completely transfixed from the beginning until the end. The moment I saw a muppet on the big screen, a big tear darted from my eye and onto my hand. I had never been really that attached to this ragtag group of puppets, but in the theater, I felt a rush of cleanliness in me. I wasn’t an adult with problems, tribulations and roads-so-rocky - I was a kid. Everything I cared about was right there in the ultra-stylized, white-picket love life presented to me, and I didn’t care about anything else.
It was so beautiful to see Kermit living again, but it arrested me and brought me to think about the personal happiness figures like Kermit the Frog and Charlie Brown bring us, transcending generations! As I walked into the theater, a bald guy asked me why I was seeing the Muppets. I responded that I was a lifelong fan, and he said that I wasn’t even born when they came onto the scene. Dang, man! That’s what’s so important about them! I was born in the late 80s and adore them as ferociously as anybody who grew up with them in the 70s.
But, for as monumentally famous as both Charlie Brown and Kermit are, they are true folk heroes. Perhaps everybody may love them the same, but we all love them individually. The love we feel is individualized, unique and entirely personal; Kermit is your best friend and my best friend. I see Charlie Brown in me. I have changed so much, but at my very core, hearing Chuck deliver a heavy sigh can still reduce me to tears.
As such, seeing Kermit hold the weight of the world on his shoulders with a crooked sigh and his trademark gulp overfilled my cup of emotions, spilling malted sympathy all over the table. Damnit Kermit. There are so many things we have different, but he is still the one I am on the inside, or at the very least, the one I have always wanted to be.
And for that reason, every time I hear that frog say that it’s not easy being green, I feel that extraordinarily popular song like it was spoken only to me.
You’re right, it’s not easy. But it’s all that we can be.
Not much to say about it, but, I finally got around to making some rough scans from my 24 Hour Comic Day comic, Secret Technology. It’s the tale of a robotics student at CMU unwittingly developing a powerful robotics technology, and how the world around him reacts to it.
It’s rough, sketchy and the inks get almost insubstantial by the end, but in my defense, I could barely grip my pencil by the end!
I fulfilled a life-long dream of participating in 24 Hour Comic Day by making this, and I couldn’t be prouder of my achievement. The product of it isn’t great, but, man, I am amazed that I managed to finish at all. I hope you enjoy it.
The first and last panel from my comic from 24 Hour Comic Day, ‘Secret Technology.’ It’s the first comic I’ve drawn in almost a year or two, and the longest comic I’ve done yet to date. It’s a bit amateurish in its paneling, but, I’m pretty proud of myself that I managed to do it.
These two panels side by side illustrate how absolutely grueling and painful 24 hours of straight drawing can be, and what kind of effect it has on one’s work. My pens ran out of ink, my knuckles were swollen and discolored, I was growing dizzy and anxious and crushed by the silence of everybody in the room ducking nose-deep in their work.
But, I am going to keep it that way, because, I think it’s better to loop people into what I was feeling when I was drawing it. That’s kind of the point of 24 Hour Comic Day.
Though, I do want to go back and re-ink the whole comic. I love the story and the pencils, but, the ink isn’t really up to par with what I would have liked. But, perhaps for the book.
Aston, PA – A Pattern Among Static
If static is noise, adolescence is dominated by noise so profoundly loud that it drowns out your vision, your voice and your sense of personhood. Being young and confused is akin to being wrung out and hosed with calls for decision that hit like icicles on chilly, numbed skin. When you’re a teenager, you can either ignore the static or get swallowed by the warbling void of expectation – nothing seems to correlate, but young brains struggle to see patterns amongst it.
My time in high school was covered in that confusion. I couldn’t figure out who I was, what I was doing in Aston and why I couldn’t have been born in a much different time. My hobbies, passions and interests didn’t align with those of the world around me, and I felt more akin to just one of the thousands of specs that dance on tired televisions. In my time there, I was isolated and lonely, cordoned off by others to be irreverent, desperate and nerdy.
The tragedy of adolescence is that, for all intents and purposes, every teen is convinced that they’re unique in their confusion – but it takes until well into adulthood to realize that the people we hated were perhaps the only people we could find solace in.
Between having the majority of my friends thousands of miles away and having spent most of my childhood staring into the unforgiving fluorescent glow of a computer monitor, I didn’t have a lot to share with other people. I felt like a fountain of enthusiasm, dampened by oppressive disinterest; the last man standing in a room that nobody entered.
It was that pots-and-pans thumping of listlessness that kept me pushed down, and I owe being hoisted out of it to three teachers: Mr. Mal, my 6th grade math teacher; Mr. P, an eager, nerdy teacher whom I discussed video games with; and Mr. Morris, a soft-spoken nerd with whom I had an uncanny ability to relate to.
It was remarkably easy to talk to Morris. It was the first adult I had spoken to since middle school who didn’t scoff when I spoke about Star Wars and whom felt remarkably connected to the twin-language-level humor shared between myself and my best friend. As awkward as I was, Morris was a clean-cut, broad-standing, confident mirage of what I could look like – and it was empowering.
Then, I was keen on playing under-the-radar, subversive practical jokes on my teachers. For instance, when I would print papers out, I would add the text ‘Communism is the answer! Hail the USSR!’ in the lightest grey that would print in the footers of each page, then re-feed it into the printer and print my actual paper on it. I did this to Morris, and he returned my paper with the phrase “You’re such a commie” written on the bottom. I was pretty impressed.
Mr. Morris, in his unwavering art-house stoic tone of voice, inspired me to write, to draw, to laugh and to live for the first time in my high school career. I had felt appreciated on a human level, rather than that of a subordinate. The fact that I liked comics, retro games, barely combed my hair and had a penchant for ironic t-shirts didn’t matter – they were points of jolly discussion.
I can’t help but thank Mr. Morris for extending his hand to me and for seeing me not as a student, but as the lonely kid that was just looking for another nerd to relate to. Who I am now is, at best, part-way an emulation of the kindness and poise that this teacher extended onto me.
So, thank you.
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