This comic was long in the making.  I first thought of it, or something like it, while taking Rabbi Lisa Rubin's six-month-long Exploring Judaism class at New York's Central Synagogue.  It's an overview of a few thousand years of religion and history, and I guess it stirred my creative pot.  The class is softly aimed at people looking to convert to Reform Judaism, but as far as I'm concerned it's a history lesson that'd be approachable to anyone interested in Judaism, for whatever reason.

This entire comic—lines to colors to lettering—was finger-painted on an iPad Mini2 using Adobe Draw.  The reason for using this technique was simple:  I don't know what I'm doing.  So this sort of broke my hand and now I'm investigating more normal techniques for creating comics and illustrating digitally.

The point of which escapes me.  I hope you enjoy the comic.  

The fine folks at The Rumpus were good enough to publish a few of my comics.  The comics are a set of three, collectively titled ‘Short, Illustrated Love Stories’.  I hope you read them, and enjoy them.

And if you do enjoy them (and even if you do not), please consider donating a bit to The Rumpus.  Small arts organizations are mostly labors of love for the folks who run them, and they don't expect to be paid.  That said, money never hurts them!  None of this will go to me.  It's all for them.  You can donate here.

In prepping to publicize this comic to my vast following of tens of people, I played around with different thumbnail images for the comics.  I ended up with the one above, but below are a few alternate ideas.

The fine folks at The Rumpus were good enough to publish a few of my comics.  The comics are a set of three, collectively titled ‘Short, Illustrated Love Stories’.  I hope you read them, and enjoy them.

And if you do enjoy them (and even if you do not), please consider donating a bit to The Rumpus.  Small arts organizations are mostly labors of love for the folks who run them, and they don't expect to be paid.  That said, money never hurts them!  None of this will go to me.  It's all for them.  You can donate here.

In prepping to publicize this comic to my vast following of tens of people, I played around with different thumbnail images for the comics.  I ended up with the ones visible above, but below are a few alternate ideas.

The comics above were written a couple of weeks ago, in response to Donald Trump's frothy insistence the media was crooked and showing him in a bad light, and that only this was the reason he was doing bad in the polls.

It was going to be a trilogy, and I had a third cartoon lined up, but then two things happened:

1. I got tired of thinking and looking at that man.
    
2. Actually no, just the one thing happened.  I didn't want to draw him (or some semi-acceptable facsimile likeness of him) again.

I don't know whether to envy professional political cartoonists right now.

The penguin says it all.  I probably won't win, but it's still lovely, and a first for me.

If you're curious about 'Doll Love', you can read my initial post about it from back when it was published, or just buy it—it's only $8 and I enjoyed the other stories in the issue.  When you order, remember to specify the Summer 2015 issue / volume 36.1.  Or just get a subscription.

Also, Pushcart's 2016 collection came out a few weeks ago, no doubt full of great reads.  Both this and Jabberwock Review are great stocking stuffers, especially for all your cubic, book-shaped stockings.

Carve Magazine, a beautiful Texan literary journal, is running a feature about me in their latest issue!

The feature is called "Accept/Decline" and it appears regularly in their Premium print editions.  Each edition, they focus on a story they liked but had to reject, which then went on to get published elsewhere.  They highlight the differences, if any, between the draft they read and the final published piece, feature comments from both the rejecting and accepting editing staffs, and run an essay by the story's author about getting the story published.  The essay tells the story of the story.  

In my case, the story is 'Doll Love', which ran recently in issue 36.1 (Summer 2015) of Jabberwock Review.  'Doll Love' not online but you can buy it, or read a little about it in an older blog post.  And my essay in Carve is also print-only, but their fiction is online and free, and the print edition is measly $12 bucks and comes in the mail and has that glorious fresh-from-the-printer new-magazine smell.

Side note—my essay features a photo of me, which I've always liked and which has gotten a wide variety of reactions, from "great photo!" to "you kind of look like a farmer in this" to "were you constipated when this was taken? You look like you were constipated."  If you ever see this photo and wonder who took it, wonder no more: Joe Turic, of Less Gear More Photos.  Joe always insists on taking photos of me, whenever we're hanging out.  I mean, I can't get him to stop.  He's so insistent that I usually pre-empt him and tell him to just take the photos already.  "Just take the damn photos already Joe!  I know you want to!  Go ahead!  Do it now.  No we can't go eat or hang out with our girlfriends or go do whatever it is we planned on doing.  Make sure to get some candids while you're at it!"  To the casual observer, it might look like I'm harassing Joe into taking my pictures, but be not fooled, dear readers.

My quest to draw New Yorker-style gag cartoons continues. 

See the full comic→

(click image for larger version)

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My quest to draw New Yorker-style gag cartoons continues. Prior attempts may be found here and here. I'm working on it, okay?

And speaking of The New Yorker, my comic up there is reminiscent of this old one by J.B. Handelsman. I didn't do this on purpose, I only found his comic after mine was drafted.  I sat there, thinking, "surely they've done something with lions already." And indeed, they had.

I swear I'm not a terrible uncle in real life.

See the full comic→

This one's a sequel to my 2nd comic, which also starred my nephew.  (For the record, I'm not actually a terrible uncle, in real life.  Or if I am, my nephew hasn't commented on it yet.)

I lift so much here from Calvin and Hobbes, and I'm afraid I suffer in the comparison. Watterson's lines are so simple and rich with character.  But then again, I am finger-painting this stuff on an iPad, and I have no training whatsoever, so... I'm not too down about it.

See the full comic→

See the full comic→

This is a real tea! There's no milk added, it just kinda tastes like milk. I tried it first at Bosie Tea Parlor, a swell little tea and pastry shop in the West Village.

If you're looking for punishment, fyi, this is a sequel to an earlier pun comic.

Ah, Florence.

See the full comic→

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A Few Thoughts and Disclosures about Florence

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My cartoons look nothing like her. (Mostly this is because I lack the ability to draw a good likeness. If I sat her down and really worked at it, I could get a likeness, but then I'd have to engage in very lengthy conversation with her, and conversing with her feels like IMing with someone, trying to send large audio files back and forth, over a 300-baud connection.)

And she never wears shirts and scarves as colorful as the ones I've given her here, but I wanted to convey some sense that she's a real character.

~~~

Florence never really looks as cranky as I made her look here. Florence, if you ever see this, please know I amplified the crankiness only for comic effect!!

(The chance of Florence seeing this is... gosh, I don't know, what's the chance of us discovering alien life this afternoon? It's maybe two, maybe three times the chance of that.)

~~~

One time Florence gave me a cassette tape of her opera singing. I sincerely wanted to listen to it but, without thinking, asked, "oh, do you have this in digital form, like, mp3s or, y'know, is it online somewhere?" Quickly realizing she didn't fully understand what the English I'd just spoken meant, I tried to recover and said, "Or, uh, CDs? I must still have a CD player somewhere, I think." Which wasn't much better. I hastily recovered, thanking her profusely and insisting I would listen to the music soon. This was years ago. It occurs to me now that maybe the NYPL branch down the street has a tape player lying around somewhere. Hmm.

~~~

Florence might be superhuman.

She's really, really, really old yet still lives alone and from time to time even seems to host gatherings.  Mostly I don't notice but, a few months ago, one of these got so rowdy (some piano player got a little too enthusiastic playing Puttin' on the Ritz) that building staff had to come by and intervene.

(Florence, if aliens are discovered this afternoon, please know it was not I who called the staff to shut your piano player down!)

'Doll Love', a short story of mine, is out now in the new issue of Jabberwock Review, a lovely literary journal from Mississippi!

Becky Hagenston, the journal’s editor, says this story is 'strange, sweet, and utterly hilarious'—she is obviously a woman of exquisite taste (and talent: she just won an O’Henry Prize for a story of her own.)

While you can in theory purchase this journal in a physical book store, I would be gobsmacked to learn of anyone actually managing to find it on a shelf.  You can order the issue, though, from the Review itself, for a mere $8—you'll want to specify Volume 36.1, Summer 2015.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that I alone was not responsible for this story.  In conversation years ago, my dear old friend Hyunmi and I, together, non-sequitured our way to the story's premise.  Hyunmi is an Ivy-League-educated PhD and mother of two, and while I won't share the premise here, I should probably warn you that it involves characters having sexual intercourse with inanimate objects.

There’s a new entry over in the Writing section: I took at a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, and posted an account of the experience.  I wrote this for myself at first, to help cement my own thoughts into long-term memory.  It turned out substantive enough that I thought it might be of interest to others.

Click here or on the image to read the post.

Three short-shorts of mine were just published by the fine folks over at Catch & Release, the online arm of Columbia University’s Columbia Journal.  The pieces together are titled “Short, Moderately Sad Love Stories”, and you’ll find them here.

Someday I hope to record one of these shorts as a song, and expand another and turn it into a cartoon.  For now they’re just text, and I hope you like them.  Whatever you think, let me know—leave a comment, tweet me, email me, send me a raven.  Whatever works.

One more thing: if you click over to the Publications page, you might notice that, a few years back, Keyhole Press’s online magazine published a piece of mine with a similar title to this new one, “Short, Improbable Love Stories”.  The new piece is a sequel of sorts, and if you like one you’ll probably like the other.  The older piece is here.  It made people cry.  (In a good way, or so I was told.)

I tried to make a New Yorker cartoon and this is what I ended up with.

Click here or on the image to see the full comic.

(click the image for a bigger version)

This is some low-lying listicle fruit, I know, but I hope you like it and, more than that, I hope you takes its lessons to heart.

Click here or on the image to see the comic.

I actually said this pun aloud.  I was very proud of myself. You'll like it, I think, unless puns drive you nuts.

Click here or on the image to see the comic.

Old images, new comic: this one's a remix, its panels taken from the last one, tweaked and repurposed.  I'm not sure why but the realization I could remix my own stuff got me all gleeful, almost as gleeful as I was when I uttered the pun above aloud.  

Note: I was very tempted to jam-pack this description with puns, but my schedule's kind of nutty today and I didn't have the time to think of any.  If you've got puns of your own you'd like to spread around, put them in the comments below and I'll take a peak when I can.

Being unreasonable is a valuable life skill which everyone should cultivate.  

Click here or on the image to see the new comic!

This comic takes its inspiration from Plato who, in his Allegory of the Cave, famously posited that if a man lived in a cave all his life and was brought only desserts for his meals, he would have very peculiar ideas about nutrition.

None of which is true, but this comic does have a backstory:

I drafted it the other day while having dinner at Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant and a 24/7 institution in New York City's East Village.  You'll find a glass case full of eye-catching desserts near Veselka's front door, and I tried to draw some of them in the comic: there's the carrot cake (far left), and the chocolate-drizzled rugelach (far right), and the banana-cream pie (in the foreground and near the middle, though the real-life version has, somewhat unbelievably, more cream on top than I drew).  There's more but this paragraph is getting long.

Tempting as the desserts look, I have to admit I don't go to Veselka for them, I go for the borscht.  Veselka's borscht is tied for my favorite in New York, and there are days I wouldn't mind ordering it as an appetizer, then as a main, and then also as a dessert.  And I know that might seem like an unreasonable thing to do, but, I think you now know my feelings about being unreasonable.

A new Thoughtful Forest Creature is up, and this one comes with haiku!

Could there be the makings of a forest band here, do you think?  Shy Badger and the Two Haiku?  (Maybe Badger is very shy in real life, but get him on stage and suddenly he's some kind of furry Ziggy Stardust, with rainbow lightning painted on his monochrome face??  Maybe.  Maybe.)

But listen, the more haiku, the merrier, and surely you can do better than I did above, so if you've got a little poem of your own, add it as a comment.  Maybe it'll crack through Shy Badger's shell.

In the Writing section, you'll find a brand-new illustrated essay about creativity and owls and penguins, written last month, and also an old story I've always been fond of, written back in 2002.  There's a gallery page with other new comics and drawings, a list of my publications, and finally, in the About page, there's an in-depth exploration of my history and psyche.  By which I mean the opposite and, also, a picture of me and a tree.  Wherever you click, I hope you enjoy it, and that you tell me if you do.  (Tell me if you don't, also, but, y'know, take it easy.)

To be continued, till next time, yours truly. Etc.

ps. There's also a scrapbook of sorts about mindful meditation, a rolling progress report I'm keeping about mindfulness as I learn about it.  It's not got much to do with the rest of the site, so it's not linked to up in the navigation bar, but, if you go in for this sort of thing, it's here.

There's just no pleasing some people. (Click the image for a bigger version.)

A new Thoughtful Forest Creature!  I call him Doleful Deer, though I hope he's not really too doleful.  Maybe he's just daydreaming?  (Or maybe he's just cold, this birch forest looks awfully snowy.)

Coloring this guy was a pain in the behind, it took a lot of trial-and-error.  Drawing the birch trees, however, was very calming—once I got the first one done, I settled into a kind of trance, drawing squiggles and lines for what seemed like the whole day.

As many noted historians and philosophers have said, you can do wonderful things with your fingers.  And since a few people have asked: this is how I've drawn everything digital, so far—with my index finger as a stylus.  I've been using Adobe Illustrator Draw, which is a very limited program, but one I've really liked because it's free and it allowed me to get going with digital fingerpainting without investment or forethought.

After drawing Pensive Bear the other week, I thought he might want a friend, so I drew this owl.  He was originally going to be Pensive Owl, but my drawing skills are not what you'd call "precise", so he ended up more Anxious than Pensive.  Thus was he dubbed Anxious Owl. 

If you want an in-depth look into how this owl was drawn, check out The Story of Anxious Owl.  It's an illustrated craft essay about creativity and writing and drawing.  And also penguins.  Lots and lots of penguins.  

I think I'm going to keep drawing these creatures, which means I might just have inaugurated a series... I'll call it, Thoughtful Forest Creatures.  I'll post them as they're drawn, here in the news feed, but you can find them all in the gallery, too.

People tell me Pensive Bear is sad, but I don't think so, I think he's just thoughtful.  I'm not 100% sure what he's thinking about, because I don't speak fluent Bear and couldn't ask him for specifics.  Nevertheless, I am a world-renowned bear whisperer, so I can tell you that Bear is most likely rigorously training himself in the art of lucid dreaming.  

All bears do this.  Hibernation is a months-long sleep, and it's a lot more fun if you can control your dreams.  Why let your deep psyche determine your dreams, after all, when it'll probably just hurl you about its manic surreality, willy-nilly, and leave you anxious or frightened?  No, better to take control of your dreams.  Then you can be Superbear, leaping redwoods in a single bound, or you can just be a ladies' bear, or a bear vixen—the ultimate ursine seducer.  And as many a renowned bear philosopher has said, perhaps all of reality is just one big dream?  And if you are in a dream and can control it, is it really a dream?  What separates it from reality?  If you dream for months and months, who's to say you're not really just awake in another world, a world slightly more loosey-goosey than the one we call real?  

Thus whisper the learned bears, of which Pensive Bear is surely one.  I'm just telling you what I heard, folks.  Bears.  Hibernation.  Starry Nights.  Lucid dreams.  

Makes sense to me.

If you have any other explanations for Pensive Bear's pensiveness, or ideas for what he might be dreaming, you are welcome to leave them in the comments section.