white supremists – moses jones: apocalyptic mama

born in a white town (post script)

i am done with this project!

yay!

i did it. i said i would do a comic about my experiences as a white person and my personal experiences with racism. it isn’t going to turn the world on end. it may not do a damn thing. i’m hoping it might make a couple other white people reflect on their white impact. maybe it will shed light on the white mind? or start a conversation? or maybe it will sit on the internet, gathering dust. but i did it.

next i want to start playing with just using my brush & ink. let my pens have a nap (not too long of one or their ink dries up and then i curse a lot as i try to unclog $20 pens…. i could journal with my pens and create with my brush maybe.) i have a few books on chinese brush painting. painting (i used to do a lot of water color) is relaxing. maybe it will bring me out of my current funk.

i will post progress reports on this next project as progress happens.

thanks for sticking with me through my journey 🙂

born in a white town (page 3)

again. i should be scanning these in.

one day i will.

there is a lot of color on this picture. i kind of rushed it & fucked up the color. i had iggy telling me the colors of the rainbow while his colorblind brother told us we were wrong and that there were only like 2 colors in a rainbow. i should have let the ink dry between colors. i should have been more patient…but that could be my epitaph…. sigh.

and i touch on my disenchantment with cooperative living. though i still have hope that it could be a good thing, my one experience with it was pretty traumatic. but all i mention here is how white white white it was in our “diverse” cooperative house.

so, again, main story and side stories.

born in a white town (page 2)

i like this page a lot. i hope y’all can read it. i have the main script and then a side panel of events as well. a scanner would obviously work better than my trying to stand there with my camera and get enough light while not creating a shadow while trying to frame it so it will crop evenly while trying not get bumped by a feral child running past.

if there are bits you cannot read, let me know, and i will either get a better picture or write out what is said in the comic here in the blog post.

hopefully you get the gist of it.

page two! a timeline of my whiteness. that i remember all my relationships with other races is telling of how little diversity i have had in my life. despite my being so fucking progressive and open-minded and choosing to live in “progressive” and “open-minded” college towns.

i was born in a white town (page one)

this is my memoir comic on growing up white. it isn’t very thorough. maybe i will work on doing a more thorough memoir that will touch on this more in depth…but for now, it is a big step for me to write about this and to try to do a memoir comic at all. i prefer fiction because it is like hiding in plain sight. a memoir is when someone pulls back the curtain on my fiction and says, “look! here she is! and she is not a wizard at all. just a plain old human being.”

hence my hesitancy to write memoirs.

but here is the first of four pages. i was going to wait & put them all up at once…but i really don’t want my audience to wander off. plus y’all are probably used to my being serial with my presentation.

i’m not sure how i feel about this page. it fits better with the rest, i guess. alone, not so much.

i worked on this with my kids running about which is how i am doing art these days even though dusty criticized me for it (but fuck it’s not like he’s volunteering to take the kids for an adventure to give me time to work on my art because then who would play killing floor 2 for him? [snark]) i gamble that i won’t get bumped and that if i do i will be able to work the resulting smudge in as part of the whole. misha watched as i was doing shadows. every time i brushed in a shadow, she would ask, “pee?” so maybe my shadows look like pee. everyone’s a critic.

slow! artist with children

a million years later….

i finished inking the first ink on the pages of my short comic about my experiences as a white member of our society. after i put up klu klux kraken i realized that that comic leaves us hanging. we need to do something…but what? my first “what” is this comic i was born in a white town. i just want to identify that racism is prevalent and start a conversation about it. so i’m sharing my–not that exciting–but hopefully relevant first thoughts about race and how i have interacted with it in my own life.

or something like that.

at least my self-portraits are convincing. here is misha saying, “two mommies!!” as she points to some of my self-portrait work in this comic.

i have been doing a lot of my comicking as my children run about. i can’t survive their bedtimes to do art later…so i am learning to do art as they interact with me. it’s rough. my train of thought is often derailed. and i get bumped and get grumpy about getting bumped…but at least i’m still going!

though i do not have a room of my own…maybe i am a new breed of writer. one who can function amidst chaos….

though i still wouldn’t mind a room of my own….

sigh.

maybe one day…and then i will get bored and wander out of it to see where all the excitement is.

klu klux kraken

here’s what i ended up with.

i think i’m happy with it. i tried to go all symbolic & stuff. i don’t know.

racism is a monster. i know that much. how to stop it?

how do we stop it?

progress report

slowly…so slowly.

i would make a poor current events comic stripper.

however, unfortunately racism isn’t going anywhere anytime soon (unless my fantasy of donald trump as the pied piper leading all of the racists out of town comes true.)

i did start working on my second racism-themed comic, my racism/kraken comic. i started it in my head this morning as poppy lay screaming at me. i am trying to wean him from nighttime nursing. i am losing the battle. he is a very tenacious baby. and i feel like a bully for trying to wean him…but my boobs!

i digress.

i started writing my kraken comic in my head this morning & then somehow snuck some time during the day to draw it out. i wish i were more eloquent. i wish i was more artful. but this is what i got.

as far as the memoir/personal insight into racism comic goes. i am still working on it. but as stated in the previous paragraph, i am suffering a lack of creative confidence.