250 Words on Netiquette

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

An anonymous commenter on a recent post scolded me for not writing about a subject that’s very important to them. Anon seemed to consider my lack of interest an intellectual and moral failure, replying (with what I imagine to be a sneer), “OK, back to writing the Dave Barry stuff. Don't strain.”

For the record, I wish I could write the Dave Barry stuff. Unfortunately, Dave Barry has the market cornered. 

Occasionally, something I write gets a lot of attention. I’ve noticed that once a post catches on, unfamiliar commenters* swarm the discussion with so much nastiness that I have to restrict commenting because I can’t keep up with it. 

Different people have different reasons for being online. Mine is a mix of business and pleasure. It’s a way to keep in touch with friends and family, share my writing and cartooning, and otherwise promote my work. 

I regard my web homes—my Substack platform, Facebook page, and personal blog—as casual parties at which I hope to cultivate friendly and thoughtful interactions with interesting people. Commenters are welcome to critique or disagree with anything I post, but a crasher who poops on the rug, insults my guests, and demands that I cater to their whims will be escorted from the premises. 

I’m not infringing on your free speech. Say whatever you want on any of the hundreds of outlets available to you. Why pick a fight with me? I have no time for your nonsense. Host your own party. 

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* Yes, I know they’re probably bots, automated to attack anything vaguely political or socially relevant. Sometimes I look them up out of curiosity. It’s amazing how many pretty girls in bikinis or hulky special forces veterans have strong opinions on the issues of the day that they share with their five friends and followers. 

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Review: The Odyssey

No one has been eagerly awaiting my thoughts on The Odyssey, but I have some anyway. Reaction I've read has been polarized--some very positive, some very negative--so I kept an open mind as I went to see it with my daughters this afternoon. 

I liked it very much. It's an adult film with ideas that is about something. That in itself makes it interesting and worthwhile these days.

I am not a classics quibbler. One of the great strengths of old stories like The Odyssey, Beowulf, Shakespeare or religious myths is they carry universal themes that can be adapted for the times. If Romeo and Juliet can be molded into West Side Story, I have no problem with director Christopher Nolan playing a little fast and loose with Homer.

Odysseus has an interesting character arc. In this version, he is a soldier consumed with guilt for sins he and his army committed in their siege of Troy that broke the laws of god(s) and man. His 20-year voyage is penance for those crimes, and he only gets home when he surrenders his hubris and puts his fate in the hands of the gods. It's almost Zen. 

I loved the movie's treatment of the Greek gods. We don't see much of them except Athena, whose resemblance to Zendaya is explained late in the film. Otherwise, they're forces of nature too transcendent for humans to comprehend. A stormy sea is Poseidon's wrath; a clap of thunder punctuates Zeus's disapproval. Much better, I think, than Laurence Olivier pontificating in a toga.

I'm very glad I saw it. My classics-loving daughters liked it, too. It'll stay with me. Your mileage may vary.

250 Words on 26,000 Words

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

Today begins my third year of writing and posting one 250-word essay per week. Because each is exactly 250 words long, the math is easy: 2 years x 52 weeks/year x 250 words/week = 26,000 words.*

That adds up to a respectable novella’s-worth of whatever’s on my mind. As I wrote a year ago, when I only had half as many pieces under my belt, each may be a bite-sized appetizer but they add up to a surprisingly robust meal. 

As probably one of the few who read all three thick volumes of Mark Twain’s autobiography (honestly a bit of a slog), I appreciated that he structured it as a series of short essays he dictated to his secretary. Some were anecdotes from his life and times, others were reflections on random current affairs that caught his eye. His notion, as he explained in the introduction, was that a reader would get to know him much better that way than they would through a dry recitation of biographical dates and events.

I didn’t set out to do likewise, but it has occurred to me that my 250-word pieces cumulatively serve the same purpose. I try to space out the topics so I don’t post two pieces in a row on comics, or writing, or science, or pop culture, or memoir, or whatever. But sooner or later, everything I know and care about will make an appearance. 

It’s an exercise I’d recommend to any writer—or, really, anyone. Thanks for reading!

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* I also did one post promoting the release of my newest book, the Mom’s Cancer Anniversary Edition, but I don’t count those 164 words. Also, footnotes (like this one) don’t count. My house, my rules. 

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250 Words on Options

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

When a movie studio wants to adapt a writer’s work they “option” it, which means they pay you to NOT make a deal with another studio while the project is in development. 

Options aren’t terribly rare in the graphic novel world. Studios troll long-form comics for stories. Visuals already provided! Pre-packaged storyboards! I know cartoonists who’ve had their work optioned. Very few resulted in actual movies. 

Each of my books had a studio sniffing around it at some point, although only Mom’s Cancer was formally optioned. They flatter you with praise and bedazzle you with suggestions of which famous actors might play your characters, and promise to get back to you soon. Then they don’t. 

My favorite story: a producer with 20th Century Fox contacted me about my book Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? I, the world’s worst promoter, replied, “I don’t think it’d make a very good movie, it doesn’t really have much of a plot.” He reassured me they were enormously interested so we arranged to meet at Comic-Con International a few weeks later,  whereupon he said, “We’re going to pass. It doesn’t really have much of a plot.” 

If only someone had warned him.

While you can’t help drafting your Oscars speech when Hollywood calls, I’m jaded. Occasionally I’ll see a young cartoonist announce to the world that their story was optioned, gushing about scripts and casting, and think, “Oh, bless their heart.” Until the movie start shooting, it’s best to keep it to yourself.

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Nearly Home

I shot this from the window of my plane yesterday. In the morning I left the Atlantic and by mid-afternoon was looking at the Pacific. What a world!

For those unfamiliar with the area, that's San Francisco Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge spanning its opening to the ocean. Extending from the left (south) tip of the bridge you can see the green swath of the Presidio and, further to its left, the long green rectangle of Golden Gate Park. Alcatraz Island is at lower left, circled by boat wakes.

You can visit great places and people but there's always something special about going home, isn't there?

Graphic Medicine 2026: Baltimore!

While many of my cartooning colleagues gathered this weekend in San Diego for Comic-Con International, I was across the country in Baltimore for the 2026 Graphic Medicine Conference. Although I love Comic-Con, I think I got the better end of the deal. 

Graphic medicine is a field of medical humanities where comics intersect healthcare. It’s a big field, from public health to journalism to narratives like my book, Mom's Cancer. It brought close to 200 doctors, nurses, academics, librarians, cartoonists and others to Baltimore to share projects, research, results, stories and ideas.

I signed up for the conference too late to join any panels or workshops, and wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the time and money to fly across the country without a real reason to. Karen convinced me I didn’t need any more reason than wanting to hang out with my friends. “Life's too short. Just go.” 

It was the right call. I did hang out with my friends and also made some new ones. I saw interesting new creative work and am taking home a load of inspiration (and books). I managed to participate in many other ways than sitting on a panel, both within sessions and the perhaps-more-important time outside of them. 

I was also gratified to see that Mom's Cancer is still very relevant and useful to people working in the field, which is nice to know as we release its 20th anniversary edition. Graphic medicine people are the best. 

Photo dump ahoy. Apologies for the high percentage of selfies.

Most of the conference happened on the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood Campus, though we also ventured across town to the famous hospital. I don't know how many campuses Johns Hopkins has in Baltimore--seems like a dozen. This town is peppered with Johns Hopkinses.

A beautiful campus of Federalist-style brick buildings and grassy quads. Because it's summer the campus was pretty dead, except for knots of touring high school students. As I remark every time I travel east, brick architecture enchants me because we have very little of it in northern California. Ours all fell down in 1906.

At the Thursday night reception/social hour with keynote speaker Dr. Nathan Gray and graphic medicine champion Dr. Brian Callendar. Can't swing a dead cat without hitting a doctor.

Also at the reception, I connected with my friend Maia Kobabe, author of the most-banned book in America GenderQueer, and Maia’s collaborator on their new book Breathe, Sarah Peitzmeier. Sarah is the Ph.D. kind of doctor. There were a lot of them, too.

Dr. Nathan Gray gave the opening keynote talk on Friday. He wrote and drew a graphic novel titled The Human Remains (it's a tricky title with multiple meanings) that will be released in November but I have had the pleasure of reading (and blurbing) it already. I think it's a terrific book and Nathan was an excellent speaker about his own experience as a comics-creating physician.

Harvard medical librarian Matthew Noe, cartoonist Ellen Forney (Marbles), and Dr. Michael Green, who's been at the heart of graphic medicine since its beginning. I'd asked them if I could take their picture and they were winding up to pose when I snapped this one, which I thought had a lot more life and personality than the stiffer portrait that followed. Hope they forgive me.

A large atrium space was dedicated to vendors, including my friend, RN, and graphic medicine co-originator MK Czerwiec. Her excellent book Taking Turns is an oral history in comics form of her tenure on an AIDS ward in the 1990s, while her new book, LB & Me, is about her creative connection to cartoonist Lynda Barry. MK also won an Eisner Award for her editorship of the book "Menopause," and did me the favor of writing a new Introduction for the 20th anniversary edition of Mom's Cancer.

Friday night ended with an opera recital inspired by Dana Walrath's graphic novel about her mother's experience with Alzheimer's Disease, Aliceheimers. Dana wrote the libretto; that's her at the music stand, narrating. Music was performed by a pianist, who's obscured by the piano, and a very talented soprano. If I had their names handy I'd give 'em. The performance was held in an auditorium in the hospital that was originally an anatomy theater, with medical students in steeply banked pews looking down at human autopsies. I think the setting enhanced the haunting themes of Dana's opera.

A selfie at one of the sessions on Saturday: Dr. (MD) Alex Thomas, Dr. (Ph.D.) Meredith Li-Vollmer, cartoonist Ellen Forney, and me. You may not know their names but trust me: this is a murderer's row of prodigious graphic medicine work and talent that, in their own ways, have made big differences in a lot of lives. Meredith, who works for Seattle and King County Public Health, gave an excellent day-two keynote. 

Saturday included this panel about the new book Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine, to which I and 40-some other people contributed essays. Left to right are editors Briana Martino and Lisa Diedrich, then contributors Anna Mukamal, Paul Flippen, A. David Lewis, Maia Kobabe, MK Czerwiec, and Ebru Ustundag. They actually invited me to join the panel before it began but I declined, both because I was unprepared and knew from experience that eight people on one panel was WAY more than enough. It went very well, and I had a chance to say a bit at the end. It's a neat academic book on how graphic medicine works formally, along the lines of Scott McCloud's analysis of comics.

Fulbright scholar Maria Jose Mompeán Mejías came from Spain to study graphic medicine in the U.S. for a year, and is heading back home right about now. Photo by Brian Callendar; Dr. (Ph.D.) A. David Lewis provided the photobomb. Maria Jose said very nice things about Mom's Cancer, which was great but didn't quite register until I sat in on her talk....

....which contained a generous portion of Mom's Cancer. In this photo, I think she's looking over at me to see how I felt about what she was saying. I felt great. She's brilliant. 

I did have a rare "Marshall MacLuhan in Annie Hall" moment on Saturday. I was watching a panel when, during Q&A, one of the speakers referenced a bit from Mom's Cancer. Because it was unplanned and off the top of his head, he didn't quite remember it right. I caught moderator MK Czerwiec's eye; she read my mind and handed me the mic.

"Coincidentally," I said, "I wrote the book you're talking about..." which got a laugh in the room. The speaker had no idea I was there, of course, and he and I had a nice exchange both then and afterward.

The conference ended Saturday night with an event at Red Emma's bookstore and coffeehouse, a Baltimore institution of heroic free expression and literature. This is the bookstore portion of the building....

...and this is the restaurant/bar/coffee house portion, which was huge. Graphic medicine folks took over more than half of it. At left in this photo is a group interview of people who have new books out, available for sale and signing at the counter.

I didn't have much time for sightseeing but did get to the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum the afternoon of my first day in town. Perhaps fittingly, it is a strange little museum. It's a tiny house with tiny rooms, and you have to reserve a timed ticket because the whole thing can hold maybe a dozen visitors at once. I enjoyed it but would only recommend it for a dedicated Poe fan.

Baltimore's harbor was lovely. In particular, it hosts several historic ships, including a submarine, the last surviving ship from the Pearl Harbor attack, and the sail-powered sloop USS Constellation. I didn't have time to explore them, but it would be a top priority on my next visit.

Thanks and farewell, Graphic Medicine 2026. We'll meet again.

250 Words on Notable Quotables

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

Sometimes a particularly memorable quotation makes its way into everyday conversation. Mine come from TV and movies rather than literary classics because I’m bourgeois. Some favorites I actually use:

“Everybody remember where we parked,” said by Captain Kirk (William Shatner) in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home. It’s both a sensible thing for a parent to say in a parking lot and for a Starfleet captain to tell his crew when disembarking from an invisible time-traveling spaceship in 1986 San Francisco. 

“Important safety tip, thanks Egon,” said by Venkman (Bill Murray) in Ghostbusters after Egon (Harold Ramis) warns that they might disintegrate themselves. Useful for both dire and trivial hazards.

“I’ll alert the media,” said by the stuffy butler Hobson (John Gielgud) to his man-child employer Arthur (Dudley Moore) in the eponymous movie, after Arthur announces his plan to take a bath. Distilled sarcasm for any occasion. 

“Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” –Robert Redford, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

 “A man’s got to know his limitations.” –Clint Eastwood, Magnum Force.

“Have fun storming the castle!”—Billy Crystal, The Princess Bride.

“You sit on a throne of lies!” –Will Ferrell, Elf.

 “Hang onto your wigs and keys.” –David Letterman.

“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.” –Super Chicken.

A good quotation can delight listeners when they get the reference and mystify them when they don’t. The challenge of working one into a conversation is that it’s hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. 

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Tribble Couture

 

One of my favorite humor writers, Merrill Markoe, posts a Substack newsletter, one of the recurring features of which is "Who Wore It Best?" that compares the latest fashion designs to more prosaic inspirations. It's always fun but I had to share this one in particular just to preserve it for myself. HA!

This is a cosplayer I photographed at the Denver Pop Culture Con in 2019. I pretty much laughed myself sick when I saw it, and despite all the screen-accurate Iron Man and 12-foot-tall Galactus constructs I've seen since, I think it remains my favorite costume ever. If recent fashion trends are an indicator, this cosplayer was years ahead of her time.

250 Words on Criticism & Editing

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

One of my breakthroughs in becoming a professional writer, back when I was a cub reporter, was learning to not take criticism personally. The closer your art is to your heart, the harder it is to stand by while a colleague or editor rips into it, but sometimes that’s the job. 

My advice: don’t react right away. Sit with it a while. If it’s from someone you respect or in a position to pay you, consider the possibility that they’re right.

Here are some things NOT to say:

“I meant to do that.”

“You’re not reading it right.”

“It’s not finished yet.”

“It’s not my good stuff.”

I understand the defensive impulse to pre-emptively disparage yourself before your reader can. Beat them to the punch. But if your work’s not clear, not finished, or not your good stuff, why are you wasting their time with it? Show them nothing but your best and have the confidence to stand behind it! 

If someone does you the favor of giving feedback on your work, shut up and listen. Don’t explain, make excuses, or argue with them. If two or more people get hung up on the same point, they’re right, you’re wrong, and you have to fix it. 

When my book editor at Abrams, Charlie Kochman, has a question about my work, we talk it over but he always leaves the solution up to me. He makes me better without leaving fingerprints. I think that’s a gift that all good editors share. 

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The Kohoutek Effect

A front-page article in my hometown paper today, written by a reporter from the Sacramento Bee paraphrasing another article from Forbes, describes the cosmic wonders readers can look out for in July. 

For example, did you know that the Milky Way will be visible in July? And that the sky will be dark, and the Moon "largely invisible to the naked eye"? Also, a comet will pass by Earth on Tuesday, and in late July you'll be able to spot Saturn's rings through a telescope.

I won't embarrass the reporter by naming them, but I can only imagine them sitting in high school science class whining, "But when will I ever use any of this stuff in real life?!" Today is that day.

The article contains kernels of truth but they're garbled into incomprehensibility. 

The Milky Way is visible year-round. The kernel of truth is that the summer is a nice time to see its bright core, but there's nothing special about July. Just get far away from city lights and look up.

The July sky will be as dark as usual and the Moon will be as visible as ever. The kernel of truth is that the next full Moon will happen toward the end of the month, on July 29. That is not newsworthy.

The comet, named "10P/Tempel 2," is passing closer than usual to Earth but will still be tens of millions of miles away and invisible to the naked eye. 

Saturn's rings are visible through a telescope anytime Saturn is up, which it will be all summer and into the fall. The visibility of the rings varies as we see the planet from different angles in its orbit, and on rare occasions they seem to disappear when we view them edge-on, but they will look very impressive for several years to come. 

I think articles like this do real harm, and not just the pain they cause me when my eyes roll too far back into my head. People who read this will go out expecting to see these marvels and be disappointed. Their trust in mass media will erode (appropriately, in this case) and their interest in stargazing will plummet.

Which is too bad, because there are infinite marvels to be seen when you know where, when, and how to look, and have a trustworthy guide.

(This post's title, "The Kohoutek Effect," comes from my astronomer friend Sherwood Harrington, who remembers the widespread disappointment in the 1970s when the "Comet of the Century!" turned out to be something of a dud. I remember!)

250 Words on Adulting

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

“Adulting” is a newish word for an ancient concept: growing up, shouldering responsibility, making your way in the world. Most of us ease into it, some have it thrust upon us, others never get the hang of it. 

I notched an adulting milestone one night my car broke down as I was driving back to college. In those pre-cell-phone days, I found a house that would answer a stranger’s knock after dark and called my Dad.

“Well, you have AAA,” he said. “Take care of it.”

I don’t know what I expected him to do, but his unwillingness to charge to my rescue was a shock! Then I took care of it. I don’t actually remember how I solved the problem; probably had the car towed to a mechanic. What I never forgot is that it was my problem to solve, and I did.

Similar rites of passage might be taking out your first loan, making your first major purchase, deciding on a big move, accepting or leaving a job. As my daughters grew into women, I saw how difficult adulting could be. They always knew that their mother and I had their backs, but some of my proudest moments as a parent came when they solved a big problem that we only learned about afterward. 

That said, I have my own definition. When the toilet paper roll is down to its last square of tissue and you replace it instead of leaving it for the next person, you’re adulting. 

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250 Words on Cursive

[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 hear that schools don’t teach cursive anymore. Nobody needs to handwrite when everybody types. Dump your quill and parchment in the dustbin, Pops! 

I strongly disagree but can’t back up my opinion with a rational argument, only an aesthetic one: I like cursive. I remember learning cursive and feeling it rewire my brain, so that writing became less like typography and more like sketching. Letters swooped and looped and interconnected; writing in cursive changed the way I conceived and transmitted ideas. The medium shaped the message.

I also appreciate how handwriting changes over time. Anyone who’s read the Constitution knows that the so-called “long S” used to look like a tall “f” (“Congrefs”), but you don’t need to go back centuries to see orthographic evolution. When I learned cursive, capital “G” was a loopy-cornered block, “Q” was a big number “2,” and “S” looked like a treble clef. When my daughters learned it a few decades later, they were all streamlined to more sensible modern forms.

Cursive has life and personality. One glance at my mother’s instantly recognizable handwriting transports me decades into the past. A person’s signature represents commitment and gravitas. It becomes their avatar, which speaks for them when they can’t speak for themselves.*

I confess I’m judgmental about people who can’t write cursive. If you’re an adult who still block-prints like a seven-year-old I will think less of you, and I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. We failed you, even if I can’t quite explain how.  

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* To discourage forgery, I actually have two signatures—one I use to sign books and another I use for real life—and it’s like they’re two different people. Book-Brian is more fun and outgoing than Real-Life-Brian. I can see it in their handwriting.

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Deep Quake Thoughts

SCIENCE! We got a couple of blaring earthquake alerts on our phones at 8:10 this morning, braced for impact, and felt nothing. It was a 5.6 temblor about an hour north of us, and although news reports said it did some damage up there, we felt nothing. 

However, 20 minutes later, Karen noticed that the quake had been detected at our locale after all--not by our puny human senses, but by the grandfather clock by our front door, which stopped at exactly 8:10 a.m. Its pendulum happens to swing north and south, and I imagine a seismic wave rolled down from the north and hit it out of phase at just the right moment to halt it. 

We've seen evidence of earthquake waves in our house before, including a pretty big quake that left books on a shelf arranged in a sine wave pattern. I witnessed them myself during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, when I saw cars bobbing up and down on a blacktop parking lot like boats on an ocean. 

Everything is waves, man. Light's a wave, gravity's a wave, atoms are waves, Earth is a wave, I'm a wave, you're a wave. I didn't expect to find myself thinking such deep thoughts when I got up this morning.