Posts Tagged ‘k’
86 items.
Some animals just don’t make good house pets. I’m not talking about hell-hounds here, I’m talking about fish. They are sooo boring. At least the devil’s own hunting pack would bring some excitement into the mix. Hm, maybe excitement isn’t the right word…
Oh, right, corpses. That’s the word I’m looking for. My mistake.
The older I get the more I realize that “normal” is relative. Watch any show on the Travel Channel and you’ll see what I’m getting at. If you’re more perceptive than that, you can just watch and listen to the people around you and you’ll start to figure it out. What is and isn’t normal seems entirely defined by culture and upbringing. For instance, I am not interested in eating bull testicles. The people Anthony Bourdain hangs out with, on the other hand, often are. See what I mean?
Television is so educational.
Arguments about normalcy have been raging since before globalization was even a word and have only got more intense among social scientists as the earth has continued to remain in tact and un-irradiated. The problem with globalization is that culture is strong, it has years to develop and specialize a people to fit their environment and their needs. When cultures clash, what really happens is a battle over what can and cannot remain normal. While this is not a well defined process with leaders or philosophers debating the particular merits of a set of beliefs versus another, it is a process that happens over time when cultures meet, share experiences, or fight one another. The Roman Empire had an enormous impact on its subjects largely due to the success and spread of its culture, the effects of which can still be seen today.
So what does that all mean? Does it mean that what we think of as normal has no merit or that we are brainwashed by our societies? That’s a tough question. The most likely answer is that it’s a bit of both. We’re conditioned by our societies to experience things in certain ways (laws, media, politics). We’re entirely capable of fighting this by simply being aware of these conditions and resisting where necessary. It’s not a hopeless situation for those that desire free thought, however abstract that concept may be. As far as whether our view of normalcy is valid goes, I personally don’t subscribe to the notion of cultural relativism. In my eyes, and there are those that disagree on this point, logic and emotional well-being win the day on any argument with regard to customs and traditions. If your social norm is harmless or, somehow, beneficial, then I see no problem with it, but if what you view as normal is aggressive or harmful, then I believe there is an issue to be handled.
Really what it all boils down to is the difference in experiences among us. It’s important to note that while many of us are similar genetically or physically, our experiences differ vastly and those differences are responsible for making us who we are. That doesn’t mean we can’t find common ground, it’s just something to make you pause and think about what you’re saying and thinking about the people around you.
Because while you may think a dog shouldn’t be spewing flames from it’s fetid maw like some kind of nightmarish campfire, your friend may find that to be exactly the way things should be.
He may just be terrified that it sneezed.
FINAL NOTE: I will be at table W33 with William at SPX in Maryland this weekend! Stop by if you’re going to be there! I will have some shirts, buttons, and single comic prints on hand to sell and I would love to see some of you stop by and say hello!
14 Comments
People always say you should follow your heart when they talk about relationships. President Bush taught me that I should follow my gut. I guess following your liver is another option.
The heart as the seat of the soul or an organ of power has long persisted throughout humanity. While other organs (the liver for instance) were considered important in Ancient Egypt, the heart took a place of prominence. The Ancient Egyptians discovered, pretty early on in their culture, that the heart was responsible for the pulse. No pulse meant someone was dead and it was a short leap to deciding that when the heart failed, the soul failed and all knowledge fled the corpse. The liver, intestines, and other giblets were placed reverently inside of canopic jars for the deceased, but the heart stayed with the corpse, to be weighed by Anubis (later replaced by Osiris) against the feather of Ma’at. Having a sin free heart in Ancient Egypt meant passage to the afterlife, but a heart weighing more than the feather was fed to a ravenous beast, destroying the deceased’s soul entirely. Needless to say, the importance of the afterlife in Egyptian culture weighed heavy on the living and pushed them to lead a proper life lest they be consumed.
The thought of being spiritually devoured is terrifying. The thought of devouring spirits, on the other hand…is making me kind of hungry.
The Egyptian concept of the afterlife was a strange one, for sure. Living on the Nile was about the sweetest thing you could ask for in North Africa and it’s clear from the mythology that many Egyptians didn’t want to part with it. Their afterlife reflects the lives they held dear. With precious treasures, and sometimes even living animals and humans (though this was done away with later in favor of clay representations) being buried with important members of society, the reflection of the living world in the afterlife is clearly a key concept. While it wasn’t an amazing life for everyone (there were slaves and lower class citizens) the afterlife seems to have been important to everyone.
Complicated mythology surrounds the afterlife of the Ancient Egyptians. Gods came and went as protectors of the dead and techniques for embalming and mummifying the dead improved and changed. The importance of the afterlife, however, never really changed throughout the long reign of the Ancient Egyptian people. Consider that because of their meticulous cultural methods and emphasis on the afterlife, they’ve become one of the best understood cultures of the Ancient world. One could argue that they’ve attained a kind of cultural afterlife, living for, I’m sure, ages to come in human memory.
This comic is a true story, though an abbreviated one. When I was a wee lad I jumped in a puddle during a rain storm and fell into an aquatic world of magic and mystery. The mer-people that inhabited the strange underworld I found myself in needed my assistance in slaying a particularly ornery sludge monster that threatened their homes and livelihoods. I wondered what a nine year old boy could do that fully grown merfolk couldn’t, but, wrapped up in the majesty of it all I resolved to try my best. It was about this time that I drowned, having forgotten that I was under the water.
After drowning, I woke up from the fever dream I was having. A few days later, the rather nasty disease boiling my brain away abated and I went on to live a healthy and semi-productive life into my 20′s.
True story.
Imagination is a strange and powerful thing. When you actively utilize your imagination, everything has significance in some fashion or other. Every tree could have a life of its own, every toy has a history, and every star harbors incredible alien life the likes of which have never been seen on this planet. Writing comics has forced me to engage my imagination, to grapple with it in a difficult way. When non-artists see comics or art, they are often impressed with the imagination that it takes to create the things they see and read. There is a mystique associated with creativity that most people fall prey to (I do at times, when I see artists I’m impressed by) that makes us think, “Wow, how did they do that?”. We often consider ourselves inferior in those moments, thinking it impossible that we could ever match what these individuals have accomplished. This is, in a way, our own imaginations at work.
The reality is that imagination and creativity are tools. Creativity is as much work as any other, though often more mental work than it is physical. We all have the capacity to create and conceptualize but it requires time and effort as adults. As children, our minds are free from the limitations of the physical and social world allowing us to come up with the most outrageous concepts. Part of being an artist (professional or otherwise) is getting in touch with that side of your mind again and it can be a struggle.
As for me, I find solace in imagination. Stories and concepts allow me to explore other worlds and people while I sit bored in class or at work. That’s a powerful thing. Having the ability to conceptualize the unknown is what has set humanity apart from animals and given us everything we’ve got. Admittedly, some of that has run out of our control to some degree, but it has, for the most part, been positive for us as a species. With a more responsible long term approach to our imaginations, life on this planet could be pretty swell.
At least we don’t have to worry about drowning on the sidewalk.
Weird new art! Cool? Cool.
At some point, I’m sure, many people face questions about their existence and the existence of the universe. What are we here for? What is our purpose? Are jelly donuts really jelly donuts? I’m here to answer your questions:
Maybe.
I hope that helped.
Ah, science, bane of my youth. It’s no wonder some people are terrified of it when you really think about it. While it is true that I am a big fan of science (I wanted to get involved in every scientific field when I was a kid, still kind of do) it is also true that science nearly destroyed me as a person. Listening to ideas about the Big Bang in seventh grade was a huge mind fuck in a serious way and gave rise to a lot of weird thinking.
You see, people that have to be funny are generally very negative people. Comedy is how some people interface and cope with a world that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. If you’re into comedy and also into writing (as I am) then odds are good that you’re pretty messed up. When I learned about the Big Bang, I started to have existential crises. I hadn’t believed in God for a while at that point but this one theory lead to a whole slew of thoughts that I couldn’t really cope with. I began to think about how a universe (clearly a something) could come from nothing. That made me reconsider a deity of some variety but that just gave me the same problem. Where would that deity come from? Then I began to question reality itself, question my existence, and question my questioning.
Eventually I decided to say screw it and start drawing comics. Life is pretty sweet, whatever the purpose of it may be and there’s not enough time in the day to wonder, without real purpose, what it’s all about. Examining our relationships, interactions, and ourselves is complicated enough without the metaphysical implications of existential crises added to the mix. It’s awfully difficult to enjoy what we have when we try to wrap our heads around what amounts to unsolvable problems.
That’s not to say we should never consider them, but being consumed by them makes you a pretty miserable person.
I say this because I know first hand.
Fortunately, it seems a bit more difficult to think yourself out of existence than I’ve made it out to be in this comic.
This whole Crystal Skull-2012-Mayan Calendar-Aztec Curses nonsense needs to come to an end. The Aztecs and the Mayans were certainly advanced people in their own way and they deserve our respect and recognition. However, if they were not prescient enough to foresee the coming of Pizarro or the seemingly random collapse of their entire empire, what can they possibly offer modern humans in terms of accurate and useful prophecy? I posit that the answer is nothing.
Humanity, unlike the rest of the natural world, is obsessed with its own demise. Consciousness seems to come with an angry hooting ape attached to its back. That ape likes to remind a great many people in a most impolite fashion that we are going to die someday. For some reason this ape also thinks that we are all going to die together and that this demise is just around the corner. Look at any number of myths and stories from any number of cultures. The apocalyptic scenario is ubiquitous across all of them. You’ve got floods and fire and the leviathan of the Bible and similar events in the other Abrahamic traditions. You’ve also got Ragnarok from the Vikings, flood myths from Native Americans, apocalypse in the form of cold and darkness from Asia. This method of thinking is everywhere.
Here in the “modern” West, minds seem to occupy two primary spaces. The first involves the Biblical Apocalypse scenario with Jesus and the Devil engaging in some badass kung fu for our souls. The second camp seems obsessed with 2012 and the strange ‘artifacts’ of ancient cultures such as The Crystal Skulls. Somehow, like a Venn Diagram of idiocy, there is overlap. I’ve heard of and talked to people that are simultaneously very worried about 2012 and who are, at the same time, awaiting the return of Christ-Jesus, Lord of Hosts. Trying to wrap my head around that is like trying to grasp a lively fly betwixt chopsticks.
The Crystal Skulls themselves are terribly interesting until you actually read about the legitimate experiments performed on them: experiments that have all said that they were created sometime in the mid 19th century with rotary tools. And yet, people still pray to these things and fear them. Rather than look at ourselves, many of us still look to the sky and to the ancient world looking for our doom.
But, I ask, if the ‘ancients’ were so goddamn wise, why are they all dead and gone? Maybe they, like us, were all just phenomenally lazy. Maybe some things never really change.
Atlas. That dude is pretty goddamn strong. Or is he? I mean, you have to be OUTSIDE the world in order to hold the damn thing up. Does that mean he’s in space? Does the earth weigh anything out there? How does he survive? What, exactly, does he even stand on? I think I need to sit down…
The story of Atlas is actually much different than most people realize. I’ve used the more modern interpretation of Atlas holding up the earth for the sake of comedy but in Classical literature and art, Atlas was tasked with holding up the sky. Kind of a bit harder to make a joke out of that, but hey, that’s what this space is for: clarification.
There are a few stories in Greek myth that mention the Titan, the first being the story of the war between the Gods and their predecessors. Atlas, like most of the Titans, sided against the Gods and, after their defeat, was punished accordingly. Atlas was given the rather joyless task of supporting a pillar between his shoulders that would keep the heavens from crashing down on the earth. He spent a great deal of time like this until Heracles (read: Hercules) showed up asking for his help. The hero had been asked to retrieve the golden apples of the Hesperides, but was unable to acquire them without the help of Atlas. When asked for his assistance, Atlas was happy to help as long as Heracles could support the sky while he was away. Heracles took the sky up and Atlas went off to retrieve the apples, successfully. While free, he realized just how great it was to be rid of his thankless job and told Heracles he’d have to stay like that for a while. Heracles agreed, happily, but asked if he could retrieve a cushion for his shoulders first. Atlas accepted, taking the pillar back and giving Heracles the golden apples. Heracles wandered off and left Atlas to his work, never to return. Pretty clever move for a guy not known for his brains.
Anyway, this is where we’ve got the phrase “He’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Like most things, it’s a slightly twisted version of the classical idea, but it works.
Personally, I prefer the classical interpretation. It seems somehow more elegant.
Another comic with fireworks in it! Another comic sort of about Independence Day, but not really! Seizures! Foaming at the mouth! Excitement!
There isn’t really a ton to say about this one. I can’t come up with enough to fill this space about having mental issues enough to cause you to see amazingly coloured lights fill the night sky.
Instead, let’s talk about the new site a bit! As you can probably see, it is mostly done. There are a few more things that need to be added (a home button for instance on the left sidebar) and a few things that need to be fixed (the “Share This” button) but overall I’m very happy with how everything turned out. I’m terribly sorry that it took so long to get the site working but you should be noticing much more consistent load times and less outages now. With Coestar’s help (from over at Xenostarz) we were able to resolve all the major issues the site was suffering from. The long and short of it was that there are just too many of you awesome people visiting and our setup was not optimized to handle it.
So everything is as it should be and it is, hopefully, more friendly to look at here. We have nested comments so replying to a comment actually works, the archives are all here and there’s a nice new drop-down archive thing, and to top it all off the store is working still (just gotta get some t-shirt pix put back in there). This week I hope to actually write and draw the mini comic I’ve been wanting to do to celebrate the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of Happle Tea (which was July 1st) and that will join the shirts in the store.
Anyway, I hope you like what we’ve done with the place! Thanks for sticking around and accept my apologies for the site being so wonky for two whole weeks! <3
*Sorry for the late strip! We’ve had to move servers and I wasn’t sure if I could post or not so I gave it a bit of time. The slow and often not even working sites (for both para-ten and HT) were a direct result of Happle Tea being visited so much by you awesome people, apparently. Coestar, the administrator and leader behind Xenostarz, where we were stationed had kindly let us hang out on his server but it was getting pretty rough and something had to be done. Hopefully our new home will be the solution and result in more pleasant trafficking on our sites. Thanks to Coestar for giving us a home for the last year, to Kyle Gibbons for giving us a new home, and to both of them for helping us move!*
Have you heard anything from God lately? It seems like that guy was a big deal for a while and then just sort of dropped off the radar. I wonder if he ever plans on getting back in the limelight.
It’s been a long time since I ever set foot in a church, much less Sunday School. I recall some awkward moments questioning the validity of the arguments presented and a reluctance to colour Jesus hung bleeding from the cross with brightly hued crayons. That somehow seemed more sacrilegious than anything I could say. How do you colour the greatest suffering ever inflicted on another human being, son of God or not?
That’s not to say that the focused laser of my eight year old mind was directed only at the Christian establishment. It was not and has never been. I think I was nine when I questioned my mother about the existence of Santa Claus. Does that make it okay? I sure hope it does.
But seriously, Christianity, as such, has never been a problem for me. I have, however, always found it difficult to reconcile the sort of willful blindness people have about their faith. Picking and choosing what to believe is nothing new with human beings, but it always seemed silly to me to call yourself part of an organization with a strict set of rules and tenets and then cherry pick what parts were important to you. Really, I wish people focused more on the good aspects of the Christian faith and followed Jesus’s teachings properly and with action. That’s something I haven’t got the willpower or inclination to do on a personal level and I deeply respect those that dedicate their lives to helping those less fortunate than themselves, in the name of Jesus, Zeus, or nobody at all.
I always wonder what these comics relating to God might mean to a deity of that caliber. How would they take them? Curiosity and humor are things built into us and if such a being exists, one hopes they are as forgiving as one has heard.
Ninja. The name alone conjures images of silent, deadly assassins from Feudal Japan. What do you think of when you think about ninja? Magic? Mysticism? Deadly martial arts? Vanishing acts that involve a piece of wood? My answer is: all of the above.
Thanks to Liz for this strip idea!
Ninja are probably the closest thing we have to an example of a serious modern myth in evolution. Hollywood, video games, and books all have something to say about the mysterious assassins but almost none of it is actually correct. Like most myths, there are elements of truth and because we’re closer to the real lives of these people, we can see it a bit more clearly. In a few hundred years people may not even remember what they were really like, even though ridiculous stories will still be told about them.
I guess we know a bit about why Lil K resorts to murder so often, now. His secret is revealed at last! Too bad this comic hasn’t got anything resembling continuity or this could be an incredible plot twist!
Today is my end-of-year critique for school. Once this is over I can finally relax a little bit and find some time to get things done. Buttons, mini comic, and a brand new comic will be forthcoming over the summer, not to mention a proper hub site for Studio 10kM. I am looking forward to it!
Fear brings out some pretty crazy stuff in people, things you might never have imagined.
The creature mentioned in the strip, albeit briefly, is the brollachan: a strange monster from Scottish lore that is sort of undefined in its appearance. In all the stories pertaining to the creature, this is one fact that remains unchanged. It somehow hasn’t got a shape of its own. Some stories tell of how it takes the shape of whatever you fear the most, a trait it shares with one of the creatures in the Harry Potter series, I believe.
This comic raises a lot of questions. First: who is Sasquatch’s dad? Second: How many people has Lil K murdered? Third and most importantly: How does a ghost have a ghost? I feel like that last bit needs to be explored in a later comic.
The store is now working properly, shipping is working right, the costs are working properly, and you will be asked to supply an address as is only right and proper in shipping products. I’m terribly sorry that it took a few days to sort it out but now that it’s working, it should be easier next time around. As I’ve said before, buttons shall be offered soon alongside the shirts. This brings me to my next point.
I’m offering everyone a chance to help decide what the VERY FIRST Happle Tea mini comic will be! I’ve got some ideas and you can all give me your thoughts via twitter and tell me which one you like best. Then I will print them and sell them after the 1 year anniversary of Happle Tea on July 1st. Stay tuned to Twitter, next week I’ll let you know what the choices are!