kalicofox

[kalicofox]

This is the public statement from @alepresser and myself which went up at Webtoons tonight.

Now for some ranting. Just from me, not from Ale—she's innocent of the art crimes I've committed in the past, and boy howdy have I committed art crimes.

This is the first page of my first webcomic, A Girl and Her Fed. I started this thing back in 2006. (I don't actually need a head count of those reading this who weren't yet born in 2006. I'm sure you're delightful and I wish you well in college.)

And this is the last page I drew in early 2020 before I turned art duties over to Dr. Beer. It's better, right?

Well, these days, A Girl and Her Fed has pages like this:

I drew this comic for fourteen fucking years because it's a story I wanted to tell, and I thought webcomics were the perfect format for it. I didn't know how to draw. I got better through sheer obstinate perseverance and sticking to deadlines as best I could for, again, fourteen fucking years. I sought out a replacement artist when I ran into time constraints and couldn't do art plus writing anymore; I'm a much better writer than an artist, so I had no problems whatsoever kicking art to the curb.

The first time Ale sent me art that would go up on the website—art I hadn't needed to draw myself—I literally cried in relief because I had been grinding myself down for, yet again, fourteen fucking years.

So when I read comments from people who say they want to make a webcomic but can't draw themselves and therefore need to resort to AI, that little line between my eyes gets dangerously deep.

This isn't like I'm some old dude who's bitching over student loans getting cancelled after making regular payments. This is me, someone who threw raw art onto the internet like a monkey hurling fresh poo, because I wanted to make a webcomic and the art is part of the process of storytelling via webcomics! I could've (arguably should've) hired an artist right out of the gate, and that would've been part of the process of making comics, too: a partnership between an artist and a writer is also something which grows and develops over time.

For example, after Dr. Beer and I spent two years working on AGAHF, we decided we enjoyed our partnership so much that we set out to make another webcomic! It's great! It's got wonderful art and consistent storytelling! You should read it!

But turning art duties over to unaltered images generated by AI because you want to make a webcomic but "just can't draw" is, frankly, a bullshit excuse. I'm not talking about persons who are physically unable to draw due to disability—I'm talking about people who say they want to make webcomics but simply don't wanna do the art part.

Friends, if you don't want to show your entire ass in front of God and country, you don't actually want to make a webcomic.

Do the thing yourself.

If you're scared, don't be. Take the plunge. Set a goal of twenty strips and do the thing yourself. If you can already draw but can't write? Great! Write twenty strips, write forty panels, etc. You might surprise yourself. If you can write but can't draw? Great! Draw twenty panels and see what happens.

Whatever comes out of it, it's a thing you've done yourself. It's something new you've given to the world, no matter how big or small. Be proud of that. And if you need to partner with someone else to make your comic dreams work? You can do that, too! It's still a thing you've done yourself, and many projects are stronger when done together.

...but maaaaaaaaaybe hire that partner before you've busted your own ass for fourteen fucking years. That one's on me.

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Math is really tiring, im so glad i finally get to relax and do some knitting and crochet and i oh god oh my what the fuck

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its rude to reblog things from people you arent mutuals with fyi. :/

💀 my brother in christopher

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So last night, a friend of mine said something, and my knee-jerk response was not exactly great. What WAS great, was that my brain immediately rejected that response, and reframed it in the way I've been trying to learn how to think!!!!!

It was awesome, and when I realized what happened, I was really happy!

So I thought, hey! I should get a gold star for that! I did really good! I should get a sticker! And then I remembered that I don't have any stickers. And THEN I remembered that I'm a grown ass adult! I can just *buy* stickers!

So now I have a day planner coming, and a bunch of stickers, and I have a couple of stamps that Yays got for me, so I can put stickers and stamps in the day planner whenever I do good at something! If it's a good brain thing, or a good writing day, or even just a good interaction, I can have a sticker! I'm so excited!!!

#positive reinforcement #stickers #my life be like #<3 #I'm happy

[kalicofox]

You know what? Fuck it.

The amount of notes that this post gets by the end of April is the amount of words I'll write for one of my books.

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kill the shift manager in your brain

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This is part of my ongoing Discworld jacket embroidery project. Of course Great A'Tuin has to be on there. And of course it has to be the biggest one of them all.

I'm going to put the finished product in my masterpost, but I'm so proud of the thing that I have to put it in an extra post beforehand. Enjoy!

#gorgeous art #holy shit #discworld #hot damn that's so amazing! #OP you're amazing!

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@thebibliosphere I had to repost this for both of us because OOF

[kalicofox]

In Amity Park, you pour your cooking oil down the drain. Wes was not told that this action was inappropriate anywhere else.

It served two functions; the melted plastic bits would bring about the Blob Ghosts that liked fixing things, thereby making sure they had some on hand in case the house got damaged by a ghost attack, and the blockage would slow down the other, more ravenous Blob Ghosts; the ones that ate trash.

Except that "trash" really meant "anything inanimate", and it was better to hold those off with a distraction while summoning the helpful Blobs.

When Wes was doing what he normally did, his new roommate almost broke his legs vaulting over the counter to stop him.

"What are you doing?!" Jimmy shouted, voice cracking. "You'll melt the plastic bits and clog the pipes!"

"....Yes?" Wes didn't understand.

Then he did.

"Oh! You don't have the-okay. So how do I get rid of it here, then?"

"No, go back. We don't have the...what?"

Wes sighed, put down the pan, and pulled up a copy of the NDA he'd signed to be able to leave Amity Park.

"Confidential."

Jimmy, somehow, convinces him to break the NDA on the grounds that NDA's are not legally binding if the corporation or group that made him sign it were doing anything illegal.

Then Jimmy convinces him to say everything about his town again, but to his reporter friend Clark Kent.

Somehow, that evolved into Wes visiting his parents and smuggling both Jimmy and Clark into Amity Park.

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yes I'm now on the other side of top surgery and I'm allowed to lift things again 💪 You might have already seen this one on my substack -- did u know you can subscribe to my substack for early access to comics like this?! Sent directly to your email inbox??? FOR FREE????? (there is also an optional paid tier for exclusive bonus content for five bucks a month but like 80% of my posts will be free and publicly available) ty ily♥

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the genius of megamind (beyond the obvious genius ofc) is that it's superman parody actually presents a genuinely unsettling depiction of the "hero" that I like wayyy better than "what if superman was evil" or "what if superman was wrong"... it's "what if superman didn't care"

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Down and Out

phic phight prompts taken from @sillysugargliders and @akela-nakamura

“Technowizard!” Tuck declared, pointing up towards the glass ceiling. The ratty Hack-A-Thon tee-shirt and Star Wars print pants did not an imposing outfit make.

Sam’s avocado-coated face barely even looked up from her phone. “Lame.”

“The Finest Pharoah!” Tucker tried again, glaring straight down at Sam as he posed again— this time, with his other hand.

“Cringe,” was Sam’s bland contribution.

Tucker threw both his hands in the air in sheer exasperation, narrowly avoiding sending Sheila2 flying up into the air with them. “The— oh shoot— the Tech Menace! The Electric Enemy!”

“Makes you sound like a bit-rate villain,” Sam drawled, finishing out her level of tetris with perfect accuracy. She clicked off the phone before she could get suckered in. “Tucker, have you considered any good names? At all?”

Fair revenge was fair revenge, and Tucker didn’t want to waste his own pillow on vengeance. Using Sam’s bamboo-woven pillowcase against her facemask was fair game— and her shriek of rage over the smeared facemask was just desserts.

Tucker eventually lost, of course, smothered underneath the very same pillow he’d assaulted his friend with, but hey; he’d given it his all, and that was what mattered in the end.

Winning would be nice, though. You know. One day.

In the meantime, though, they were squatting in Sam’s greenhouse, reclining on air mattresses on recycled wooden palettes. It was kind of cold— Tucker was glad Sam had thought ahead and brought blankets— but there were no bugs, and there was no rain, even if there were frogs singing bleakly outside glass walls throughout the night.

Sam was good at pretending it didn’t bother her.

Tucker knew it had to, though. Sam was used to having things. Being comfortable. Having her bamboo toothbrush and toothpaste tabs at the ready, with her natural fiber blankets and her desktop computer and a credit card that would solve the majority of her problems.

Instead they had used the cheapest versions of everything at the dollarstore. Abrasive discount soap. Deodorant with added aluminum. They’d brushed their teeth at the spigot where the hose screwed on, and tomorrow they’d wash with the hose the same way.

Card could be traced. Tucker was the only one who’d been carrying cash in the moment.

Man, Tucker thought, tunnelling himself under his blankets. Running away sucked. At least the only thing Tucker had to miss was his parents. And his spare parts.

…He hoped his parents weren’t looking for him. The "proper authorities" had probably already informed them he was infected. They should…they should hopefully know that being gone was safer than being there.

Sam’s black-nailed thumb and green-coated face peeked at him from under the covers. Without his glasses, she mostly looked like a blob, so Tucker just waved. He wanted to be social. He wanted to be happy.

It felt like everything was falling apart through his fingers, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“Hey,” Sam said. “If you want to charge your tech, I’m out of the plug.”

It was a sweet gesture. “Thanks,” was all Tucker could say. But he didn’t want to leave his cave.

Sam, of all people, knew what level of trust the gesture meant when Tucker gave his phone over to her. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to; it was the same level of trust Sam was showing to him by letting them stay here, together, instead of apart, the way Jazz had originally planned.

Running away properly would have been safer. But here, in this moment, they were warm, and safe, and somewhat fed.

Tucker stuck his face into his pillow and thought It doesn’t get much better than this.

…Man, it was supposed to be roast beef dinner tonight. He was missing out!

“...I still think that Technowizard is a cool name,” Tucker grumbled to himself. Sam shot him a fond, if exasperated look.

“No.”

“Fine, bossy. What did you pick?”

“Foxglove,” Sam replied simply. “Most famous poisonous plant in the Western world. It’s poetic.”

Tucker thought on it. It…had merit, but… “You know people are going to shorten it to Foxy, right?”

Sam paused.

…She set her phone down with clear disgust. “Ugh. I hate that you’re right.”

“I’ll never let you down,” Tucker offered, very seriously. “I’m always right.”

Sam pulled the blanket back down over him until he squawked in indignation.

“Okay,” Sam’s voice came in muffled through their blanket barrier. “Maybe we can both hold off on names until we decide how we’re doing this, exactly.”

This, of course, being their new life on the run— ideally, taking down the GIW and their hold on Amity Park, or in the short run, cutting and ditching in every effort to not get captured. Their plan so far wasn’t much better than “wait for Danny to get home from Space Camp”, but, you know…needs are as they must. Or something.

“How about Cryptid?” Tucker offered, poking his head out of his blanket hovel. His glasses were…somewhere, but no matter where he groped for them, his hands still came up empty. “Short. Simple. Lots of hard consonants. Easy to muddy up in an internet search with other information. They’d be looking for you and find, like, the Entfield Horror.”

Sam gave that thought its due while Tucker found his glasses. “It’s…better than Inviso-Bill for sure.”

Okay, that one was worth the laugh.

“You could try Technomage,” Sam tried out in turn. "It would be like naming a snake 'snake', since you’re going through magical puberty or whatever, but…”

Tucker snorted. Magical puberty.

…But.

She’d been the first to notice when Tucker hadn’t even needed to touch Edna (PDA of the month) to write her new programs in class. She’d taped over his stylus to prove it to him— and Tucker hadn’t even noticed with the weight of a phantom stylus in his hand as he coded telepathically. Realizing he hadn’t been tapping any of the buttons had been. Spooky.

His phone didn’t need a SIM card anymore. He was saving his family a lot on outgoing and ingoing calls, apparently, and the reported number of texts they’d had to pay for was a big fat goose egg.

Also, he was pretty sure someone was emailing him at the moment.

…He wasn’t sure how he knew. But. It kind of tasted like blue raspberry. It was probably Danny’s sister.

So. Um. the magical puberty thing hadn’t been too off track. It had certainly been less subtle than Sam’s newfound ability to speak with plants, but…at least talking to your flowerpots looks normal from the outside looking in.

Apparently lawn mowing day at school gave Sam real trauma, though. Finding her in the nurses’ office with her head buried under her denim jacket had been scary.

“Better than nothing,” Tucker begrudgingly agreed. He left his glasses wherever they were; he’d find them in the morning. “I mean. We technically don’t even need names. If we just start breaking their stuff, they’ll probably name us anyway.”

Sam laughs. The green on her face is gone; she likely wiped her mask off when Tucker couldn’t see. “With you hacking their stuff?”

“And you growing your freaky vines out of their gear,” Tucker added. “The…what’s the one. The one that ate that one house?”

Sam leans her head down onto Tucker’s mattress. Her clean, damp face swims into view. “Oh. The kudzu?”

“Uh huh.”

“Yeah, I can cultivate that— not here, since it grows so fast. Did you know Kudzu’s supposed to be eaten? People usually take it off the roadside in China for an easy food source. That’s why it overtakes so much stuff here: there’s no one taking on the role of its natural predator.”

Huh. Well, sounded like something Sam would know. Tucker wedged his pillow further underneath his head; Sam’s still had some goop on it, so he gave her his extra blanket instead.

Sam stuffed it underneath her head with no issue. Without her purple lip and filled in brows, she just looked like Sam— just like a girl in his class, who wanted to make the world a better place, and didn’t know how to do it.

Tucker wanted to do better too.

But they wouldn’t do it alone. They’d be better off with Danny than without.

“All we have to do is make it until Danny comes back. And then we can reconvene.”

…And then what?

“And then?” Tucker asked, a little too quiet.

Sam had never backed down from a challenge. She never would. “And then we kick ass.”

Well. When she said that, it was all so simple.

The lights clicked out in the greenhouse, and just in time— the outside started to burst with light and sound as agents tore up the road outside the Manson property.

The door was locked. The daisies at the door and the wispy strings-of-hearts would give them more than enough warning if the agents swept through.

It was bedtime, or good enough as.

Sleep wasn’t restful, but the quality of the night didn’t matter; it only had to get them to the next day.

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you know you need to get back to non-gmo grassfed organic canon when the group chat AUs start turning into stuff like the characters hiking the Appalachian Trail. but will I? Non.

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Me: I hate gossip

Also me:

#dude (neutral) same #laugh rule

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the best trope in media is: “characters turn on the lights, see the monster, and immediately turn the lights back off”