Fear & Trembling

These comics began with me not being able to get out of my head a murdered prophet, and her prophecy while I was at church. Then I drew a comic about cops snorting coke. It just felt appropriate. Rani Baker was beautiful. Trans Mothers deserve better. I don’t mean the white trans women who dip their dick in some AFAB’s pussy and carry on Hitler’s 14 words. I mean trans women who are Destroyed For Comfort, and create life despite. My goal is a kinder world.

Pages with links:
01: You Don’t Know, Jack
02: Free Country
03: LAMB CHOPS
04: omg scents
05: the eternal return of overwhelming theology
06: Guest-starring Jason Statham for some reason or another…
#007: (blood type b positive): “Catfished”
#007: (The Type O Negative Edition): “+current- affairs”
#008: The Secret Founding of the Cute Little Dead Girls Society
#009: “LUX AETERNA (aka no one is innocent)”

What follows is a bunch of lightly edited ramblings mostly about the first two comics.

When I was a kid, I remember these TV commercials for “The Picture Bible” graphic novels. They were BLOODY. j/k the only blood is goat’s blood on Joseph’s technicolor dream coat, and it’s a HEAVILY sanitized version of events in the Bible. I think some of the images were repurposed for a copy of an NIV Bible I had for a time? Which is funny, because I think the church I got that Bible from (Anchor Church of God on North Baehr in Wichita, Kansas) is VERY adamant about the King James Version. Might be part of the reason I’m not a Christian anymore? They didn’t give me the proper spiritual guidance with the right version of the Bible. Hmmm… How sad. Anyways, another inspiration for me might be more well known: CHICK TRACTS. Jack Chick is kinda awful.

Did I say sanitized? I meant gay and kinky as hell. And why is it always folks getting Judas’d 30 shekels?!

In the second comic, I’m just proud the city manager and mayor look like Dr. Gero and Cyborg 18, respectively. Delicious in Dungeon is amazing – which I bring up because it may or may not be as obvious that my Jesus is based on Senshi from Delicious in Dungeon – but it’s nowhere near as iconic as Dragon Ball. I was worried I’d just mess it up so bad they’d look like… I dunno… nothing? Something else? Especially considering that Dr. Gero has A WHOLE VIBE:

PLEASE SUPPORT THE OFFICIAL RELEASE (and Goddess Rest Akira Toriyama’s soul).

With Mayor Cyborg 18 (I’ve been watching DBZ in Japanese, they’re called Cyborgs and you’re wrong), I kinda just didn’t want the Mayor (if her Sight Giblets™️ ever grace my comic) to feel like I, a white lady with a small talent for art and story-telling, was reducing her to her race/ethnicity/nationality/skin color/hair color/sex/gender/gender/identity/whether or not she sexually identifies as an attack helicopter. I want her to recognize the magnificent power she wields as mayor (or as someone who sexually identifies as an attack helicopter if she does, eternal h/t to Isabella Fall), similar to Cyborg 18, and use it with the tenderness and care it deserves…

REMEMBER WHAT CYBORG 16 SAID ABOUT PHYSICAL MEDIA.

…BUT I’M GETTING WAY OFF TRACK NOW, because I wasn’t supposed to be talking about the themes, just what I was proud artistically. Which I guess kinda go hand in hand.

Anyways, in the first comic: I just wanted to draw Jesus as a hen because the image was just burned into my brain from the scripture reading that week. The text is just a bunch of related internet/weeb BS because I WANT THOSE FASCIST FUCKS TO REMEMBER WHAT TRUMP AND THOSE MORALIZING WEIRDOS TOOK FROM THEM!

PLEASE PRESENT ID TO VIEW THIS IMAGE.

As a pinko commie socialist what-have-you… I’m not against sex. Or sex work. Or porn. Or fun. I’m against unnecessary suffering. I’m of the opinion that suffering shouldn’t be assumed and should be avoided if possible. Pornography is a form of sex work. I want the people who do it to get paid fairly for it. For all the belly-aching from conservative talking heads about taxes, they are loathe to talk about wage theft in the form of profit. Profit is what the “job creators” earn from their workers’ labor and “taxes” are what tend to be unevenly levied (percentage-wise) against low-income earners. Case in point: household items. Since (I think) food tax in Kansas has (finally) been abolished, we’ll use a 6-pack of beer as an example.

1 6-pack of beer costs we’ll say… $3.99. I have no idea how much beer actually costs. I don’t drink often. Wichita sales tax is 7.5%. Near as I can tell (I’m not a law expert), there’s a 10% alcohol tax from the state of Kansas. Now, I don’t know if that includes sales at places like grocery and liquor stores, but let’s say it does, for the sake of funsies. So let’s count that up:

Step 1:
$3.99
+ (3.99 x 0.075) <- Wichita sales tax
+ (3.99 x 0.1 = ) <- Kansas alcohol tax

Step 2:
$3.99
+$0.30 (rounded down, let’s be merciful to the state, shall we?)
+$0.39

Total
$4.69… which doesn’t sound like a lot to higher income readers, but to lower-income people, it is a lot, and I’ll demonstrate how, and why I’m using beer as an example.

First, for a $10 bottle of wine, it’d be $11.75 and for a $30 boxed wine, it’d be $35.25. To hasten things, simply multiply the tag price by 1.175 and round up at the hundredth decimal (the 2nd decimal place).

I’m relying on alcohol for my example because lots of higher income people read. They’re weaponizing text. Specifically Robert A. Heinlein’s work as one example, among others. And Heinlein wasn’t a bigot. Misguided for today’s world, but no bigot. Heinlein wrote a lot of books with military themes because that’s what sold books. His first book, For Us The Living, draws a clear line between what is described as a “sexualized underworld” (paraphrasing from memory) and a nationalistic, hierarchical Christian authoritarianism that happened in the US about in the time frame that we are now (I’m going to come back to this, because I’m going to draw my own line from my own perspective because I have been, am, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, that. bitch.). However, this book didn’t get published until after he died. This book was described in the foreword as a sort of “seed, containing the DNA for all his other works,” (once again, paraphrasing from memory). I can definitely see it containing the ideas of Job: A Comedy of Justice, Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land. I can also see it influencing Octavia E. Butler’s Parable novels (including the foreword), but she could have just as easily wrote those all on her own.

Now, people with money and land (the owner class), don’t have as much to worry about from an alcohol or even a grocery tax. There is a reason why 69 cents, a dollar seventy-five, or even $5.25 is called “chump change.” A property tax, however, is a thing that they dread more than anything. They have to pay it for everything they hold a title on. Every piece of land, every vehicle, every business, etc. Some of them put them in shell corporations overseas to avoid taxes while spouting nationalist rhetoric and calling themselves “smart,” but that’s not very patriotic of them, is it?

“That’s because [he’s] smart,” he says, as he tells you to hate yourself and everyone around you and you just… believe him? It’s not like Ms. Super-Predator was much better, but Kamala Harris was playing a far more dangerous game and deserves a lot more credit and mercy, y’all…

Now, why don’t the owning class, who ultimately pays the most in taxes, just abolish taxes AND the government? Same reason they push them to have 42% of Wichita’s 2025 budget go to the cops (if you put the numbers in a spreadsheet, that’s what it comes out to) and the same reason why those cops who get paid 42% of the budget have been arresting black folks 42% of the time even though black folks only make up 10% of the Wichita, KS population according to the 2020 Census. If you truly believe black folks are 31% more criminal than white folks, or however the math on the statistics shakes out, and you’re not racialized as though you are black, ask yourself how you came to the conclusion that black folks are more criminal than white folks or any other kind of folks.

Ultimately, it comes down to unhealed trauma. The endless diffusion of violence. In Ferguson, it exploded. I don’t know much about that Charlie Brown looking fuck who murdered Michael Brown, but I wouldn’t be surprised if his dad or uncles hurt him. I know my dad tried to teach me misogyny at the very least, and as someone who was assigned male and was self-aware from a young age, I rejected it. I put him in his place, even if it meant facing his wrath. I would be very surprised if racism is any different. The racism he and other white male authority figures tried to impart to me was more subtle at the time, but in hindsight with the lens of various black women authors who OTHER white male authority figures are trying to ban in schools and libraries, that racism is SUPER obvious now. My dad, and those white male authority figures, are just full of hate. They hate themselves, and they hate the world around them. Not to sound like Dubya Bush circa late 2001, but “They hate us because of our freedom,” and Dubya Bush was only saying that because 9/11 was very clearly blowback from US foreign policy according to the intelligence community at the time. The accusation is the confession with these folks. Every time. They can’t stand free people. Hence the need to force people into their boxes. Hence the need for clear answers to the question “What is a woman?” Answers that involve function rather than form.

Now, coming back my link between the “sexualized underworld” and nationalist Christian authoritarianism, back in my early days in transition, there was a lot of queer stuff that happened in Wichita in Yahoo Groups. I remember seeing one group with an image of one dude sucking another dude off on a back drop of a full series of Left Behind novels by Tim B. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins around 2007. I’m pretty sure I remember that specific guy who posted that photo asking for hookups in the local adult theaters in town. More recently, there was a Catholic guy who wrecked his own home by not paying me the proper respect. I told his wife what he was doing after he sent me an email expecting me to just give him free photos. I make it a “big deal” and “lord it over people’s heads” (as I’m told, but that’s not how I perceive it) that I transitioned socially in 2007 and started HRT in 2008 at 21 and 22 respectively because there are so few of us who did and lived to tell the tale. I grabbed my transition by the balls. Literally. Red-pilled since 15Oct2008. Red orchids delivered 13Feb2017.

So what’s all in the comics?

AND THAT’S JUST IN THE FIRST TWO!!!

Remember, on that free country thing, I’m the crazy bitch who wrote this for my intro on my first published work:

I fought hard for what little stability and freedom I now experience in my life.