How does it feel to publish the 100th page of a webcomic that you started writing two years ago this spring?

It feels like when you were in elementary school and it was time to pick kickball teams and you were sure you were going to get picked last because you always got picked last but somehow a biblical miracle happened and you got picked 5th to last.

It feels like when you were a sophomore in high school and you got to understudy the maid in the school play but then the senior playing the maid got insulted that she was a senior and had been cast as the maid so she dropped out and you got to play the maid.

It feels like when your boyfriend tells you you’re pretty and instead of giving him a laundry list of all the things you hate about your feet and nose and forehead and stomach fat and self in general, instead of all that, you say “I feel pretty” just like you’re a Puerto Rican ingenue in a Sondheim musical, because you do feel pretty, you actually do.

It feels like when you’re trying to draw people as a kid and all that comes out are squiggles and dots and dashes and lines and then one day those squiggles and dots and dashes and lines form stick figures that everyone can tell are supposed to be people, and you may never be Da Vinci and you may never be Degas, but you can draw stick figures, and so you get to join the ranks of the mentally able.

www.acescomic.com , happy hundredth page, comic-baby, here’s to many more.

This is a picture of me and Boyfriend Brian on the island of Española in the Galapagos. This is not a photoshopped picture. We did not cut and paste the same sea lion over and over again into this photograph’s background. There are really approximately twenty sea lions behind us. Outside the frame of this picture, there were easily a couple hundred sea lions on the beach. In the Galapagos, wild animals don’t run/swim/fly away from human beings like wild animals do in every other location on Earth. This is because most animals in the Galapagos don’t have natural predators. Once you get off the iPhoto-perfect beaches, the Galapagos islands basically amount to a bunch of dirt clods thrown into the ocean 100 miles of the coast of Ecuador. Lots of hot dirt does not equal a plethora of biological organisms. Rather it equals a very limited amount of animals with weird colored noses and feet that evolved together in this bizarro-land environment who hang out together and don’t eat one other. Think of it as Nature’s “Breakfast Club.” Even Galapagos Sharks eat bottom-dwelling squid and fish, staying away from the sea lions, sea turtles, Galapagos penguins and snorkellers’ legs. In the Galapagos, even the sharks are cool and everyone knows that sharks are the dicks of the Animal Kingdom.

This is why Brian and I were able to lie down on the beach with our hundreds of sea lion brethren without them flippering away into the ocean as fast as their weiner-dog bodies could carry them. They just looked up at us, acknowledged that we were big, funny-looking creatures on an island full of big, funny-looking creature, rolled over to make room and then proceeded to ignore us for the better part of an hour.

Meet William Randolph Hearst, the newest addition to the cast of characters of “Aces,” a webcomic about a high school newspaper that I write and my sister Emma illustrates. One of our main characters, spunky high school girl hero Rosie, in Play-it-Again-Sam-homaging-spirit, has an imaginary friendship with journalism legend (and huge history-crush of mine) Edward R. Murrow. We thought it would be fun to give her arch nemesis William Randolph Chilton V (In the comic, just referred to as “Fifth”) an imaginary friendship with a newspaper legend of his own. And who better a friend for an arch-nemesis that “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” Citizen-Kane-inspiring Hearst?

Hope you enjoy our take on Hearst as much as Emma and I enjoyed writing/illustrating him. And click through to get to the other 98 pages of our webcomic—- we’re a really fun way to spend time f***ing around on the internet, scout’s honor.

YES PLEASE YES MUST MAKE YOU MY HANDS.

kayliafisher:

Translation from page: cut squares of newsprint larger than nails. apply a base coat of polish. when nails are completely dry, soak them in alcohol, then press newsprint on nail and slowly pull off. top coat to seal.

(via calivintage)

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

housingworksbookstore:

“I know it’s not easy being an artist. I know the gulf between creation and commerce is so tremendously wide that it’s sometimes impossible not to feel annihilated by it. A lot of artists give up because it’s just too damn hard to go on making art in a culture that by and large does not support its artists. But the people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity. They’ve taken into their hearts the idea that there is enough for all of us, that success will manifest itself in different ways for different sorts of artists, that keeping the faith is more important than cashing the check, that being genuinely happy for someone else who got something you hope to get makes you genuinely happier too.”

(via DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #69: We Are All Savages Inside - The Rumpus.net)

This is why Einstein was a genius.

Reading secrets, reading adventures!