"GirlFlower." Like "girl power," get it?
This is one of them, Pumpkin.


Click on the voluptuous girl for more of the series!

Pumpkin is one of a new series of sketches that will be the basis of paintings and maquettes. (Yes, the Diva's finally getting back to sculpting.)

This pic was uploaded and posted via Flock, which I discovered via Flickr. It's pretty slick. Forget Flock's tagline as "the social browser." Makes it sound like MySpace for web crawling.

It's better than that. It's a browers that allows media heads like me and you to upload and post easily. (The tools to set Flock to post to Blogger, LJ, Word Press, Flickr, Youtube, etc. are click-and-give-permission from a .
It also has a nice Feeds interface.
And it's free.

Be sure to click on Pumpkin to see the rest of the sketches!

I'm going to say this, and I may regret it, but I'm going to say it. I resented the shit out of Heidi Mac saying about me "I'd hate to see her tremendous talents lost in a sea of victimhood" and I especially resent it this morning when I read Heidi's intro to her interview with Alan Moore:
"...it becomes clear that the situation with his work at DC and in Hollywood causes him a lot of very real pain. As you can see from the transcript, you can disagree with some of his actions, but not with the real passion and love of comics that motivates them."

I see. I quit mainstream comics, and seeking work in the field, and my tremendous talents [will be] lost in a sea of victimhood. Alan Moore is in "very real pain."

I trust you can work out for yourselves the very different ways Heidi describes the disgust with the state of comics when it comes from me, a woman, and when it comes from Alan Moore, a man.

Am I putting my disgust with the comics business on a par with Alan Moore's? Fuck yeah, I am. It's an inadvertently perfect illustration of the entrenched sexism of the business that Heidi approaches mine and Alan Moore's twinned disappointment so differently.

I resented that the article that statement came in was illustrated with work (very nice work), exclusively from younger artists. Subtextually, the message is, to me, young artists are where it's at, the ONLY place where it's at. I am name-dropped and used as an example in an article that doesn't even feature a single piece of my work. It doesn't mention the names of the women whose art was used, either, until the last paragraph.

Pfah.

Onward, now that I've registered my disgust, to the meat of the interview: Alan Moore talks about how he lost the rights to "V for Vendetta" and "Watchmen", which is by trusting that DC would do right by him, much the way TPop creators are saying TPop will do right by them.

Moore on getting the VfV books he said he did not want: "And so where I'm at, at the moment, it was heartbreak. When I got that package of books I took them straight out to the garage and threw them straight into a skid. I didn't even want to recycle them. That night at 4 in the morning I woke up and I had black thunder rolling in my heart. I could not sleep, I was just lying there thinking well, they're just going to ignore everything I say. It’s not my book. It's their book, but the only reason they've my name on that book is it sells more copies, and it gives them a certain amount of integrity and credibility that I don't think they would otherwise have had."

I'm perhaps overstating my case here a bit, but I think I lent an awful lot of literary and intellectual credibility to the American comics business and to the comics business in general when I entered it. I don't feel the same way about comics any more, I really don’t. I never loved the comic industry. I used to love the comics medium. I still do love the comics medium in its pure platonic, essential form, but the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise."

I'm glad it's not just me.

Awesome article by Mary McKinney (found at BadgerBag's TypePad blog) on going AWOL with academic work. I see many parallels between academic AWOL and artistic AWOL!
"The longer you are out of touch with someone, the more difficult it feels to resume contact. The more you worry about resuming contact, the higher your standards become for the promised project."

Go read. Enjoy. MAKE COMICS!

http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney

Project Runway first season winner Jay McCarroll, why is he the broke?

"'And it's hard because they want me to be Jay from 'Project Runway' and my life is not zany, crazy, always funny. My life is back surgery and I'm feeling lost. Still, I have my studio here and I have 50 looks for a [Spring 2007] collection developed and I have fabric, but where's the money? I didn't take the prize money..."

Yeah, about that. We tell him we heard a rumor that the reason he didn't accept the $100,000 prize and everything that went with it is that if he had, Miramax and the good folks at "Project Runway" would have owned 10 percent of his name (and the resulting profits) in perpetuity.

'I can't talk about it,' he replied with a grimace. 'I had a great experience on the show. But the aftermath has been confusing and stressful and retarded at times.'"

That's a bitch of a choice, isn't it?

Dr. McNinja reminds me so much of the original Tick comic. In a GREAT way.

Gunnerkrigg Court, which I found via Scott McCloud's blog. GC kinda grows on you. Give it a try.

"Those Hollywood People took all of the key heroic players and shifted them down into the paler end of the spectrum. And they were obvious about it. Yes, they knew enough about the rules to keep at least one Magical Negro around to help the newly blond haired, blue eyed surfer Ged through his Journey Of Transformation To Save The World, because lord knows white boys can't do something like that on their own.

What is that? That's spit. Gobbed right between the eyes and dribbling down."

Pam Noles on Color, and a lack thereof, in science fiction, fantasy, and Earthsea.

Just so we're real, REAL clear on the concept here:
YOUR COMFORT ZONE: is not this blog. If it bothers you, ask youself why, don't tell me to shut up, or even tone it down.
BITCH: I am, and I get to.
WHY: I'm not doing this so I can sell books. I'm doing this because it needs to be done, it's needed doing for a long time, and there's no reason why I shouldn't.
BADLY: is I will take any well-intended advice to "calm down", "move on", "let it go".
VICTIM: Is what I'd be if I was still in comics and saying all this stuff.
SMACK UPSIDE DEH HEAD: Is what I give myself for trying to convince Paul Riddell to go back to writing. I had no business doing that, I was a jackass. I plead good intentions. I'm glad he's forgiven me.

Onward.
I have been in a pissy mood since a same-day registrant without a real name posted to the comments thread of What a Girl Wants #15:
"...and yet here you are, further propogating the falsehoods by NOT taking down everything you wrote, or retracting (which someone on Colleen's blog suggested you do) but by remaining silent...which leads people to believe that you are still correct about all this, when you aren't. [Lea here to point out Ronee has information Colleen doesn't.] So unless you want to point out things that Colleen said that you feel are wrong, thereby pointing everyone FURTHER into the direction of who this person is and what really happened, and jeopardizing the whole entire case, now is a good time to be quiet, thinks I."

Man, that honked me off.

Scott Beiser, someone I used to share studio space with back in teh EIGHTIES, and have known off and on since then, said in the comments thread of What a Girl Wants #15 at Buzzscope:

"Lea's [strategy] seems to be to withdraw, partially anyway, from the comics community, so as to avoid the things which offend her. This might be the best strategy for Lea, but maybe not for some/many/most other women."

You misreprent my strategy as avoiding what offends me. Your phrasing, in fact, offends the shit out of me.

It's beyond not reading books that aren't for me, or passing on conventions because I'm tired of traveling to what Carla Speed McNeil calls the "world's largest optical migraine", or staying out of shitty retail stores. I tried all that shit.

The comics culture as it is doesn't just offend.
It demeans, depresses, and annoys the shit out of. The dominant culture in my avocation, comics, is one of "boy's club." The ads on comics sites, the news coverage, the magazines, they ignore women.

Women's work is undervalued, even if she can, like Ginger, dance backwards in high heels until her feet bleed. Award nominations and award wins show this. (And this is from someone who's won one and been nominated individually and as a contributor.) Guest lists for cons demonstrate this. Observe the tokenism in those lists. it looks as if most cons would rather have a grade z male artist before a popular female who's main sin is being a webcartoonist. (I'm not talking about myself, thanks.)
"Best of" lists remind of this. Comics "news" coverage applauds the man who creates the soap opera, and ignores the woman who did. The man who does something new will be the first who did it, regadless of how many women beat him to it.
Even in tangentally-related comics coverage, take a look at a list of "comics chicks will like". Good luck finding a woman-created comic in most of those articles. You'll see a lot cape titles, and the balance made of of the Usual Suspects, all male.

In the Boy's Club, there is only the Only Girl in the Room. If you're that girl, it's great. You begin to believe there's parity, until you're turfed for the new Only Girl in the Room. Then you believe your sisters again, too bad you pissed them off so bad by not getting what they were telling you because you didn't want to believe your reign was finite. Then, though, you can say they all turned their backs on you. That always sounds better than admitting you might have, maybe, dismissed them as jealous or unimportant. I am reminded of the Robin Williams joke "I clawed my way to the middle, and fucked it back down."

Then there's physical gropings, face-to-face dismissals, having male (and female) professionals repeatedly stand you up for apointments at shows, having dudes suggest a man could really help make your work accessible, having the men side up with each other (even when you have PROOF one of them had sided with you at one point), the dismissal of ideas as "girly", and a thousand small cruel cuts that add up to an awful gut wound you're holding the edges of with both hands and antidepressants.

That's NOT fucking avoiding offense.
I can just walk through San Diego blindfolded for that, avoid most online comics sites, and stay out of 99% of comics shops. What you said is like telling some biddy with a political agenda who doesn't like "Desperate Housewives" to turn off her fucking TV. But she doesn't need her TV to make a living in what she was trained for.
I needed comics, because that's what I trained for. And now I don't.

That's not avoidance. It's survival. You wouldn't tell a gal being abused to stay with the shithead because lots of women are abused, happens all the time, some women get killed even, what about the children (books) and what will you do if there's no male presence in your life?

And, Scott, since I'm in a fightin' mood, who are you to say what some/many/most women need?

What if half the women working in comics just...walked away? Bye-bye to comics' top colorists, writers, and artists. Bye-bye to editors, competent assistants, and bookkeepers. Bye to the lady who fills orders, the gals who run the exceptional comics stores.

Comics would be at home alone with a frozen TV dinner and no idea how to microwave it. (Comics doesn't know the instructions are on the end flap.) After a few hours of Spike TV, and some quality time in the square office with Miss February, it'd get pretty damn old.

And I'd laugh.

EDIT: Original comment at Buzzscope deleted.