This refers to the time that, in a fit of desperation, I finally reached out to the readers of my other webcomic The Intrepid Girlbot and asked them to help me out financially. I took donations in exchange for a nice little wallpaper and also sold original art and a few prints. The response I got was much, much greater than I expected, and it really saved my ass at the time.

I’ll remain grateful for that always.

Those really were my main thoughts while riding on the back of that thing. It wasn’t even a big motorcycle, but being a person used to cycles of the bi variety, it was a scary experience. I was convinced I was going to fly off at any second. At 40mpg. Into traffic. I shrieked in girly terror at least once. In retrospect, the boat was probably more dangerous.

Lake Minnetonka is very big and very popular in the summer.

And here I am, doing my best to be optimistic about the summer months to come. Like I said before, things didn’t go how I’d planned them in lots of ways. I did my best, though. I think I fared pretty well, all things considered. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Literally.

After this are the actual comics. This and the last update were simple little things I drew to get myself psyched up.

Those of you who’ve been following this comic for a while may remember a stretch of time last year between spring and fall when I didn’t update it for a while. One reason for this was that I was very busy with Girlbot and other projects, but another was that I’d started drawing auto-bio journal comics in a moleskine sketchbook with the intention of publishing them (roughly) as I drew them. The plan was to make one, on average, every day of the summer and have a nice little graphic novel by the end of it, chronicling whatever journey I found myself on between June and September. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it was going to be interesting. It turns out that whatever I may have expected wasn’t anything like what I actually got, as you’ll see.

Well, it got away from me, and I didn’t end up posting them when I meant to. At the end of the summer, I was left with a sketchbook with lots of finished art but also many more pages in various stages of incompletion. Around the beginning of fall, I got busy enough that I shoved it to the back burner entirely, vowing to come back to it as soon as things let up. Things haven’t let up at all, but I figured I had to make the time for it or else I was never going to get it out the door.

So one of the piles of work on my plate currently is finishing whatever pages in the book still need polishing and getting it all online. If enough people like it, I may publish it as its own standalone book. That wouldn’t be until some time in the summer, anyway.

While I’m posting this work online, I’ll be putting a new page up every weekday. Each page will be a single day from the sketchbook, which could be a single page, a half-page, or two pages stacked on top of each other. I’m pretty excited that I’m finally doing this. It’s been a long time coming!

This is my pathetic little attempt at explaining how I think of Christmas as both a cartoonist and an atheist. I was raised with it being a more-or-less secular holiday. Of course, my parents didn’t raise me with any sort of religious background, so that’s not surprising. Instead of church as the background noise of my childhood, I had Star Trek. Christmas was about snow and lights and making cookies and decorating trees and giving presents and being with family. Whatever connection I made between the holiday and the birth of Jesus was put on the same level with stories about elves making toys on the North Pole. It was a nice story. While I didn’t necessarily think they were untrue, I didn’t believe them in a literal way, if that makes any sense. I still think they’re nice stories.

Unfortunately, it’s a rather different sort of Christmas now than it was last year. I’ll just leave it at that.

These were all scribbled out straight in pen in my little sketchbook, so they’re not what you’d call “pretty,” but they give you a decent idea of my recent trip to visit my family in Memphis. I got a deal on a round trip flight, so I thought, why not? It was good overall, but this stuff happened. However you want to interpret that.

It’s getting into the fall/winter divide now — at least in Minnesota — and there’s still lots of leaves on the ground. Saw some kids having a leaf fight, and it reminded me of jumping into big leaf piles as a kid and all the possible consequences of that.

Second update since I relaunched this comic a week ago, and it’s nice. But I’m not really planning weekend updates. It’s just working out like that. Please don’t be dismayed if there’s not another comic here next weekend. Gonna be pretty busy, but I do have ideas. Looking forward to getting the moleskine project closer to completion so I can start posting it.

Well, look at that! It’s a new comic! And a new website! I’ve been wanting to get this done for ages. (Well, since May.) I’m going to be posting “quickies” — meaning comics I throw together digitally — for the time being until I’m ready to start posting pages from the moleskine project I worked on over the summer. I hope people will like that. Updates sporadic until then.

This is based on a for-real dream I had, edited for content. Both the “real world” of the dream and the setting of the movie were hotels for some reason, but the one in the movie was much more fantastic and old-fashioned. The hugging part was also just really strange, on a number of levels.

Yeah, you know what they say about dreams. No one’s interested unless they’re in them. You could probably say the same thing about auto-bio comics.

This is from my nine-days-but-it-felt-like-way-longer trip to visit my hometown of Memphis. Don’t be like my mom’s neighbors. Keep your dogs locked up, especially if they’re known to threaten people they don’t know with bodily harm.

I can’t claim that I had any great plan to help Mom when I instinctively dashed out of bed to help her. I guess I thought that even if the piece of wood didn’t serve as a good weapon — which it wouldn’t have AT ALL — I could at least wave it around over my head while making intimidating whooping noises to scare it off. It probably would have looked pretty amusing, now that I think about it.

This is a 100% accurate account of the incident, except for the last panel, which is sort of what I wish I’d been able to do. Instead, I glowered at the still-barking neighbor dog while Mom called the authorities. Seriously. Not cool, guys.

P.S. Girlbot and several other obligations have been taking up the bulk of my time, so I’m now officially changing the update schedule for WtJ to “sporadic,” meaning I’ll crank one out when I have the time and a good idea. When things calm down, I’ll hopefully be able to make the updates more regular again. Until then, there’s like 10 different ways to keep updated as to when I post a new comic here.

This one is way late, I know, but hopefully the quality of the comic makes up for it. I was going to do a totally self-absorbed, mopey comic about my mental state lately, but I saw this situation in my neighborhood yesterday and decided it made a better topic. Of course, it’s still kinda mopey and self-absorbed. This is a comic about ME ME ME!

Oh, uh, I’m pretty sure everyone involved in the fire was okay. Didn’t see them hauling away any bodies. Nice property damage, though.

Got a lovely new batch of brush pens from JetPens, and this was the first thing I used them on. Getting used to the feel of a fresh, juicy pen after months of my old, half-dry ones.

Oh, and I started another new webcomic last week. Hope some people will check it out: THE INTREPID GIRLBOT!