Today's comic was written and penciled by my wife! (I did inks and colors) I am very proud of her and want to encourage her to make more art and speak her mind. The neighborhood my wife and I live in is a battleground. Dueling graffiti marks the signposts, walls, and pavement. Messages of love and mercy to the Palestinians being starved and murdered, vs insults against these messengers and calls to bring home the remaining Israeli hostages.

All of us really do seem to exist in parallel worlds now. Talking to clueless liberals who seem utterly unaware of the terrifying reality facing trans people right now. Witnessing right wingers fabricate an entire fiction where trans people are responsible for every mass shooting and terrorist action. Massive internet meme-cultures that are incomprehensible to outsiders. My understanding is that there are apparently scores of people who had only ever known Charlie Kirk to be a sort of inspirational speaker who encouraged hard work and going to school?

This week's comic is my first in... a while. I've made no secret in these blog posts how I've felt 'stuck' when it came to making comics. Whether it's feeling trapped by the exhausting pressures of social media, discouraged by the state of the world and the evident failure of beliefs I once held about the power of art to effect social change, or simply just dissatisfaction in my line art vs my landscape paintings, comics just haven't been forthcoming for me, even as I have resurrected this blog and done my best to post regular updates.

It looks like I'll need to update my previous blog post, because I recently discovered one more postcard painting from my 2024 series, "In the Spaces III". This is actually the first of these paintings I ever did, and it was done at this time back in 2023, when I first got the postcard watercolour paper that I would use for the project while I was visiting Sophie Labelle in Finland.

"Choklit View" from ITS #2. A view of downtown from Choklit park, near my home. In May of 2023, I began upon a project of learning to paint. I started out doing loose plein air sketches of landscapes in a cheap little book using dollar store water-colour paints. Over the course of the Summer, these paintings became increasingly complex, and once I had filled the first book, I immediately set out to bind a new book out of dollar-store water-colour paper and began on the next iteration of landscapes, which were even more complex than the last.

I won the Fighting Spirit Award! There are moments you build up in your mind that can never live up to the image in your head, and then there are moments that loom so large in your mind that you don't know what to do with yourself once they are over. Things that occupy your every waking thought and action for such a long time that coming back to the rest of reality after they've past leaves you directionless.

There are moments that you build up in your mind for so long that, when they finally come, there is no way they could ever live up to whatever your idea of them was. I remember reading trans people's depressed accounts of not feeling "different" post-transition - it's not that transition wasn't a powerful and necessary process for them, but that after years and years of yearning for something that seemed impossible, they expected to feel fundamentally different once they had "crossed the threshold".

I originally came up with the concept for this week's comic probably about 10 years ago, and while I have long kicked myself for leaving it on my massive pile of unfinished projects and unrealized ideas, I am thankful that I never published it before now. When I first wrote it, this comic was, in my mind, about feminism. It's commentary was meant to be something about the asinine misogynist line of "

I honestly can't remember if I ever posted this comic before. As I've written before, I have so many comics that I've done and then just sat on, I can't always keep track of what's been put where. Yeah... I could have checked if I posted it anywhere, but.... nah. Luckily, greed and evil are evergreen content! During this time of terror and uncertainty in the face of rising fascism in the United States and their Genocide Colony, Israel, so many people are hurting and in need of help.

Well, I won! I took home the big bag of rice from the 2025 Vancouver Spring Sumo Basho! All of my three whole weeks of training paid off! I couldn't have done it without the help and support of my coach, Sony, over at Praxis Grappling, and the Kensington Judo boys, as well as the loving support of my wonderful wife, and the help and support of my best friend and long-time training partner, Jazz.

Something very disturbing is happening with the proliferation of artificial intelligence