250 Words on Heaven

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Putting my cards on the table, I don’t believe in Heaven. I’m pretty sure that “you” are the thoughts and memories contained in your brain and when your brain is gone, so are you. There’s beauty in that. 

Still . . .

There’s a “Twilight Zone” episode starring Sebastian Cabot as an angel named Pip, who welcomes a crook named Rocky into Heaven. 

Rocky can’t believe his luck! He gets to live in a penthouse suite, drive fancy cars, romance beautiful women, and win every bet he places in the casino. A month later, Rocky is bored out of his skull and going mad, and begs Pip to send him to Hell.

The twist you saw coming is that Rocky was already in Hell. More recently, the TV series “The Good Place” took a similar idea and ran with it.

My deepest theological insight is that an afterlife where souls get everything they want could be both Heaven AND Hell. They could be the exact same place. An evil soul would be tortured by it, while a good soul would find contentment and bliss. All the books you could read, all the entertainment you could enjoy, all the fascinating people you could talk to, all the urban excitement or wilderness solitude you could desire.

The beauty of my Heaven/Hell is that it would give evil souls a chance to redeem themselves. All you’d need to do to transform Hell into Heaven is decide to want different things.

Maybe like life?

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Comics & Care Collective Event Upcoming

Advance Notice: I'll be doing a Zoom book club event with librarian Jameson Rohrer of the Comics & Care Collective on Monday, June 9 at 7 p.m. Pacific Time! Jameson invited me to discuss A Fire Story in the context of graphic medicine, which intrigues me. For obvious reasons, I almost always give graphic medicine talks about Mom's Cancer, but a big part of A Fire Story is trauma and grief. I think it fits and am interested to see how it goes. 

UPDATE: Unfortunately, this event has been canceled. I hope we can make it up sometime later, I think it would be an interesting discussion!

250 Words on Cooking

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I enjoy cooking. It’s a creative activity that others can enjoy. The combinations of different ingredients are nearly infinite, and fresh is always best.

When I was a kid, cooking was for girls. Boys who did it got sideways glances from adults wondering if they couldn’t be just a bit more, you know, masculine? “Well, the best chefs in the world are men,” said Grandpa, praying that that was my destiny because somehow that would make it all right. 

Then came a day that changed everything. After school, my sister and I were cared for by a woman whose kids were in 4-H, the agricultural youth organization. One afternoon we went to a competition in an auditorium, and on the stage were rows of stoves and young 4-H boys and girls cooking and baking. This was electrifying validation. Cooking couldn’t be for sissies if those cattle-ranching corn-farming 4-H boys did it!

About the same time, I got a “Peanuts” cookbook. “Peanuts” the comic strip, not the legume. Many of its recipes were ridiculously simple—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?—but some were more challenging. The lemon bars turned out great!

Mom lovingly ate many failures. 

I still love to cook. I’ll try anything and have a good feel for how flavors will blend. No need to open a can of Cream O’ Blech soup when you can whip up a bechamel. 

I’m not one of the best chefs in the world, but I get by and nobody looks askance.

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250 Words on Poor Judgment

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I’m reluctant to give criticism or advice. I will when pressed, but I always stress that my opinion is just that; please feel free to take what sounds right and forget the rest.

I have good reason for self-doubt.

Shortly after Mom’s Cancer was published, I attended New York Comic Con. My editor, Charlie Kochman, ran up holding a thick manuscript in his hands. It was a pitch from a cartoonist who’d approached my publisher’s table cold, just because he’d seen my book on its banner.

Excited, Charlie asked what I thought. I skimmed it. “I don’t get it,” I sniffed.

Later, Charlie said he’d signed that young author and asked if I’d mind sharing my honest perspective on the publishing life with him. We met at Comic Con in San Diego, sitting on the floor of the mezzanine near the Klingon booth. 

“Look,” I told the kid, trying to be encouraging but realistic. “Getting a book published is cool. You’ll meet nice people. But it won’t change your life. Nobody is going to back a money truck up to your door.”

That kid was Jeff Kinney, whose Diary of a Wimpy Kid series has sold 300 million copies worldwide and inspired several movies. Whenever Jeff and I cross paths, we laugh and laugh about how wrong I was. 

It’s a funny story with a lesson in humility I take seriously. Whatever the source of criticism or advice, take what sounds right and forget the rest. Especially if it's me. 

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Terri Libenson

I reconnected with former syndicated cartoonist and bestselling middle-grade author Terri Libenson when she did a meet-and-greet at Copperfield's Books in Petaluma, Calif. yesterday. We've known each other online for a while and met in person once at the Denver Pop Culture Con in 2019. We had time for a very nice conversation between young fans being delighted by her. Because she is delightful.

The artwork is from Terri's "Pajama Diaries" comic strip that she donated to the Cartoon Art Museum in 2020 to be auctioned off as a fundraiser. I bought it. So yesterday I took the opportunity to have her inscribe and sign it to me! A nice closed circle. 

Terri is currently on a book tour that had her doing three school visits yesterday, doing two more school visits today, and catching a flight to Australia tonight. I asked her how the life of a successful bestselling author suited her and she said she liked it fine, but I don't think I'd have the stamina for it. 

It was great to see her, and I'm very glad we had time to talk. I wish her the best of luck on her tour!

P.S.--I look unusually red and blotchy in this photo because I got a sunburn over the weekend. As a descendant of the pale pasty peoples of the icy north, I always look a little red and blotchy, but not this red and blotchy. My olive-skinned wife and daughters regard me with pity and horror.

P.P.S.--The Copperfield's bookstore in Petaluma has a big stack of "Fire Story" paperbacks that I signed while I was there, so if you want one that's a good place to find it. Please support your heroic local independent bookseller whenever you can.

250 Words on Writer's Block

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

“Only amateurs get writer's block,” said cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. “Professionals can't afford it.”

That was surprisingly uncharitable of Schulz. Still, he hit seven deadlines a week for nearly 50 years. Respect. I’ve had jobs in which I had to write so many column-inches per day to stay employed, and always managed to do it. It wasn’t necessarily creative writing, but regardless: there’s no waiting for the muse when a paycheck is on the line. 

Still, writer’s block is real, and many authors more celebrated and successful than I am have suffered from it. I haven’t. Yet. Oh, I’ve gotten stuck and stalled, but I don’t consider that a block. It’s just a problem I haven’t solved yet, and I’ve written professionally long enough to be confident I will. Somehow. Usually within a few days, when the solution seems so obvious and easy I feel stupid for having missed it. Meanwhile, I have plenty else to do.

I think most writer’s block is actually fear of imperfection. Once you set an idea down, it’s no longer the flawless notion that was in your head. My suggestion: give yourself permission to fail.

Just start, knowing it’s going to be terrible. Simply going through the motions lubricates the creative process, and it’s always easier to revise something that exists, even if it’s bad, than create something from scratch. 

If, at the end of the day, your work still stinks, throw it away and begin again tomorrow. Nothing is ever wasted, especially failure.

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250 Words on Solar Power

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Twenty years ago, I was a science writer working for some of the top people in renewable power, energy storage, and distributed generation. I glibly described my science writing job as “taking 500 pages nobody can understand and turning them into five pages anybody can understand.” I ghostwrote articles and books on cutting-edge topics for very smart people, and considered myself an expert by proxy. 

I once asked a client what the tipping point would be for solar power’s mainstream acceptance. He replied, “You’ll know solar has made it when the environmentalists turn against it.” 

That time has passed, as some large-scale solar projects sited in deserts have been decommissioned or canceled due to their ecological impacts. However, solar photovoltaic panels are everywhere, and installed capacity has surpassed the most optimistic projections. 

When we rebuilt our house in 2018, we put solar panels on the roof. Why not? Their cost was trivial compared to that of construction. Our local power provider offered incentives to install an electric vehicle charger even though we didn’t have an EV, and again: why not? Of course, we eventually figured we should buy an EV to make use of the charger, so now we power our home and fuel a car with free photons from the sky.

I’ve noticed that whenever I drive our gas-powered car, and particularly when I refuel it, I feel a twinge of shame. This is how broad social conventions change: gradually, one early adopter at a time, and then suddenly. 

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The Madness of King Don

 

(Photo of Fort Sumter (center) is from the National Park Service; photos of Alcatraz (left) and Columbia are by me.)

Until this weekend, the stupidest thing I'd seen a president do was when Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release millions of gallons of water from two California reservoirs to fight fires in Los Angeles--after the fires were mostly out and the water in those rivers had no way to get to L.A. so it just flowed into the ocean instead.

Now I think Trump has topped himself by ordering that Alcatraz be reopened as a federal prison. Keep in mind, it got out of the prison business in 1963 because it was many times more expensive than any other prison to run and maintain. The economic argument has not improved since. 

I live in the Bay Area and have visited Alcatraz many times. It's been a national park for more than 50 years. Its infrastructure--electrical, gas, water, sewage, foundations, buildings--would all need to be redone. The only way to open a prison on Alcatraz Island would be to scrape off all the existing structures and build a new one from scratch. 

Trump ordering Alcatraz to become a prison again is exactly as stupid as ordering Fort Sumter to be recommissioned as a modern military base. It's exactly as stupid as pulling Apollo 11's command module Columbia out of the Smithsonian so NASA could send astronauts back to the Moon in it (note that Alcatraz has been out of operation longer than Columbia has!). 

This is Mad King George territory. If any Republicans ever had the guts to open Amendment 25 proceedings, this could be Exhibit A in just how detached from reality our current president is. 

250 Words on Time Slipping

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

“Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future.” –Steve Miller Band.

When I was young, every middle-aged person had lived through World War 2, and many had served in it. Today, anyone old enough to remember the war, born before say 1940, is at least 85. The Greatest Generation that endured the Depression and beat the Nazis will soon be gone.

While we are evidently cursed with short memories and need to relearn the lessons of defending freedom and fighting fascism they taught us. 

All of us are navigating our own raging rivers through time, though sometimes it feels as if we’re standing still and time is flowing through us. We peer through tiny dirty windows at eternity parading by. 

I have mixed feelings about my memories becoming history. I feel lucky to have seen Apollo astronauts walk on the Moon, as momentous a step as Lewis and Clark wading into the Pacific or Caesar crossing the Rubicon. I laughed when my daughters studied South African apartheid and I was able to show them clips of newspaper articles I’d written about divestment demonstrations at the local university. Watching documentaries on the Civil Rights or Women’s Liberation movements, it’s hard to believe they happened in my lifetime. 

When I was young, it seemed like the USA had been around forever. When I got older, I realized I’d been alive for something like one-fourth of its existence. That’s an interesting change of perspective. My country feels very young and fragile now. 

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Feeling Like an Antique

Hilarious and depressing at the same time: we were cruising a big antiques fair that took up a few blocks of downtown Petaluma, Calif., this morning, when on a table full of old magazines, newspapers, comics and prints I saw a familiar image: an 11 x 17 miniposter I made of my original "Fire Story" webcomic. I sold (or often gave) them to folks before the book came out and I had nothing else to offer. This one was inscribed to "Troy."

The story gets a little better: when I asked the proprietor what he was asking for it (it's always interesting to see what I'm worth on the open market), he broke into a smile and I realized he's a long-time fan/acquaintance and, in fact, the "Troy" to whom I signed the print. Which was not for sale. He just keeps it in that portfolio.

While I'm sure there's SOME price that would induce Troy to sell it, I didn't try to tempt him. I still have a stack of them in my studio, and can sign as many as I want.

Happy Holidays!

My day's clothing choice that started all the trouble.

My wife Karen, who keeps track of such things, tells me today is both National South Dakota Day and National Dueling Dinosaurs Day! I can connect them.

Not everyone knows that I spent my childhood in Rapid City, South Dakota. We moved to California when I was 11. I've always been proud and happy I was raised in the Midwest--I think it gave me a solid core that made me better--but also glad we left when we did. The West has a lot more opportunities for a teen and young adult.  

South Dakota is also where paleontologists have found a lot of dinosaurs, dueling and otherwise, which is a real point of local pride. In fact, high on a ridgetop above Rapid City is Dinosaur Park, topped by concrete dinos built by the WPA in the 1930s, which I remember from my childhood and revisited with my family in 2008. 

At Dinosaur Park, Rapid City, S.D. in 2008. Somewhere there exist photos of me in that same spot at the age of 4. If you're ever in the area, pay a visit. Can't miss it; just look for the apatosaurus looming over the city.

One of the wellsprings of dinosaur fossils is the Badlands National Park east of Rapid City, a geological wonderland I visited many times as a kid (don't miss the famous Wall Drug Store!). I happened to get up and put on a Badlands shirt this morning, which is why Karen told me about National South Dakota and Dueling Dinosaurs Day, which is why I wrote this post and that's the Circle of Internet Life. 

Celebrate as you see fit.

Dueling Dinosaurs at Disneyland. My understanding is that these two species were actually separated by tens of millions of years and never would have faced off in real life. Real life can be a real buzzkill sometimes.

250 Words on Stingers

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

For most of my early life, I had a phobia of bees and wasps. It started with a wasp sting when I was very young. After that, if a stinging bug got into the house or car, I full-on panicked.

I later learned that bees are sociable and industrious, and have no beef with me as long as I let them be. I can peacefully coexist with bees, and happily watch them buzz about our lavender.

Conversely, wasps are evil assholes.

The summer after I graduated high school, my dad and I did an Outward Bound rafting trip on the Green River. Outward Bound expeditions were reputed to be a true test of wilderness fortitude. Ours was easy. We ate and slept well, and floating down the river covered most of our ground for us.

Everyone took turns cooking and cleaning. One dinner, my job was stripping chicken meat from its bones. A whirling cloud of wasps descended on the chicken and my goo-slathered hands, but I couldn’t disappoint the team. Fighting through blind terror, I finished the job, unstung. 

At the end of the journey, we sat around the campfire sharing what we’d discovered about ourselves. Campers spoke movingly about experiencing nature and transcending handicaps.

I talked about deboning chicken. People laughed, but I meant it. Preparing that meal was the bravest thing I’d ever done. Wasps largely lost their power to panic me, although I still feel a spike of adrenaline when one sneaks up on me. Assholes.

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Cartoon-a-Thonning

I was improbably set up at the first table visitors encountered entering the museum's Great Hall. I'm holding a portfolio of some of my art because I enjoy explaining to folks, especially young artists, how my drawings become books. I like to demystify the process. Write and draw your story; the rest is details. Immediately behind me was illustrator Eric Martin; to his left was comic book artist Brent Anderson; and to his left was cartoonist Tom Beland.

I spent the afternoon at the Schulz Museum with a flock of other cartoonists to celebrate Paige Braddock's 25-year career as the head of the Schulz Studio (hired by Mr. Schulz himself the year before he died). The museum has one of these "cartoon-a-thons" every few years to mark special occasions, and they're always fun. Cartooning is a solitary profession so I appreciate a chance to catch up and talk shop. Plus I talked about comics with some nice people and sold a few books. That's a real good day.

Heroic local independent bookseller Copperfield's stocked many participants' books, including "A Fire Story," so I sent people to buy it there.

An angle on the Great Hall over my left shoulder. The hat in the foreground graces the head of Brent Anderson.

My friends Amber Padilla and Mary Shyne, with Brett Grunig and Emily Martin at the next table over. Amber did a story for the same "Marvel Super Stories" anthology that I did, so I sent three people who bought the book from me down to have Amber sign it as well (she was not offering it, so I wasn't stealing any sales from her.) Mary has a new graphic novel coming out soon that looks terrific and I expect will do very well.

My wife, Karen, took this photo of me talking with Brent Anderson and Tom Beland, two of my favorite (and very different) comics stylists.

I was especially looking forward to meeting cartoonist Julia Wertz, whose work I've been a fan of for years. I knew she had moved to the area a while back but we didn't cross paths until today. Turns out she'd read my stuff as well, and we're scheduled to do a panel together at a small con next month, so good thing I met her! Made my day.

Cartoon Art Museum (CAM) board chair Ron Evans chats with Justin Thompson while Lex Fajardo leans into his hard sell. Ron was there to present CAM's prestigious Sparky Award to Paige Braddock, but she didn't know that yet.

Lex interviewed Paige in the museum's theater about her life, career, and time with Peanuts. It was a really nice retrospective, including a look at her long journalism career, during which she drew the illustration of Martin Luther King on the screen. I especially appreciated her insights into character-based cartooning. Paige was genuinely surprised and touched when Ron Evans gave her the Sparky Award at the end, and immediately credited her team for their hard work. Also, her blue blazer matched the color of her eyes, which I thought was a real heads-up play on her part.