JAQrabbit Tales

tales.jaqrabbit.com/cumming-out-...

Bisexuality is confusing to many people... including bi people. Like... when and how do you tell your date about it? A straight boy doesn't have to explain his sexual history to a girl before bumping fun bits with her, but apparently he's expected to do that if that includes boys. #Bi #QueerComix

FUN FACT: Many indigenous Australian languages don't have words for left/right but instead use south/east/north/west to indicate relative direction. So you might have a "north hand" which becomes your "south hand" if you turn around. Unsurprisingly speakers of these have a better sense of direction.

... it’s very difficult for characters to carry on a conversation while one of them has his mouth full.
Follow the links to get around Meta's censorship: jaq.one/tales.html

...I resolved to make it work… and to add to the challenge, do it all in a 9-panel grid: one of the most notoriously “boring” page layouts. And the pun of “talking head” dictated what the story was about. 🙂 Making it even more difficult was the practical matter that...

This tale was conceived as a pun and a challenge: do a story that consisted entirely of talking heads. In addition to being one of the most innovative bands of the 1980s, “talking heads” is also disparaging term for a comics scene that consists of nothing but close-ups of people in conversation...

Many Democratic politicians have forgotten that leaders can shape public opinion, rather than just always follow it.

Republicans learned this lesson over a decade ago.

Elected officials should not be a moving polling average. They should be humans with values and willing to stand up for them.

... "how do you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume?" I assume there was no implication that he was sexually grooming this girl, but to my ears the song sure as hell sounds like it! Which may be why I thought of it in the context of this piece.
tales.jaqrabbit.com/to-sir-with-...

...probably because of the theme song, which was a #1 hit back in the day. Poitier's "Sir" is a strict teacher who pushes his English juvenile-delinquent students to take their education seriously. The song is written from the perspective of one the girls, who croons things such as...

... since this kind of gritty style doesn't play to my instincts.
The title of this piece is a reference to the 1960s Sidney Poitier movie, and the lettering is lifted from it. I haven't watched the whole film, but it's... not like this. Even so, the title has always seemed a little creepy to me...

One of the challenges of this series has been matching the art with the tone of the Tales. One way I've done that has been collaborating with other artists, but funds and opportunities for that are limited. The tales involving "Sir" have been some of the biggest stretches for me...

... But he gets there on his own terms, not the terms forced on him, and that makes the difference.

...but a relentless spiral to the bottom. And I'm not here to tell that kind of story. They kinda suck. I need to rewrite the ending. It won't be a "happy ending" (except in the slang sense)... Our Hero ends in much the same place....

I started a new Tales script a couple days ago: a coming-of-age lost-innocence episode. Last night I got kinda drunk and figured out how it ends. Reading it today, I think it's super hot. But on my walk I realized it's basically "Breaking Bad". Not actually the same story...

Rep. Zooey Zephyr - My Wife - just gave an incredible speech against a drag ban in Montana. It was so strong that a Republican rose to speak passionately against the bill, chastising the sponsor.

The drag ban dies in Montana, flips 10+ Republican votes!

This is the power of representation.

I recently drew a meeting between the US Dennis the Menace and the UK Dennis the Menace. jaqrabbit.com/blog/dennis-...

...one with a word balloon carefully covering some very frontal male nudity, and other with the balloon placed to the side. He used the latter, which led to a few mentions of my contributions in reviews of the book overall. 🙂
tales.jaqrabbit.com/scout/

...I intended this series to reflect that. It had actually been published once before I posted that, in an anthology called Anything That Loves, featuring comics looking at the “wibbly wobbly” world of diverse sexuality. I gave Zan at Northwest Press two versions...

When I first published this story, a few months into posting installments of the series, "Scout" kinda surprised some people, who thought I was just doing a straightforward Gay Porn Comic. Nope. Sexuality doesn’t fit into neat little categories—mine especially—and... #QueerComix #GayComics

...but I liked jogging enough to keep up them when they were out for just a training run. But there comes a time when you find you… can’t keep it up.

tales.jaqrabbit.com

This is one of several Tales drawn by Rick Worley, whose series “A Waste of Time” told me that he would be an ideal artist to draw a gaggle of track-and-field boys, and that he had the storytelling chops for a story without any dialog. I was never an athlete in school (team sports are toxic)...

One of the most common arguments you hear from fans of generative ‘AI’ is that it’s not plagiarizing people’s work, it’s just learning like a human learns. So I’m going to break down why that’s just not true, and why it can never be true, with the existing systems. 1/

I see that as a systemic thing, and I've made that argument trying to save many articles. I'm just saying that I don't know this specific editor's motive.

For me, the most difficult comix scenes to script are oral sex scenes. Which isn't hard to understand if you've ever had a partner ask you a question when you obviously have your mouth full. You have to either stop what you're doing or hold your answer for later....

The key to keeping the article – documenting part of our culture – is to add those kinds of references, and *politely* discussing why it should be kept, on the article's "talk" page.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belasco...

Their argument for deleting it is that there aren't enough references from reliable, independent sources to demonstrate that he's "notable". To be honest, there isn't much to find online. But articles in newspapers, magazines, and other offline media would also count.

The Wikipedia article about cartoonist Belasco has been tagged for deletion. This *probably* isn't motivated by the fact he's gay or African American... there are just lots of Wikipedia editors who think it has too many biographic articles, and suspicious about anybody they've never heard of...

With Comixology getting dragged even farther into you-don't-own-the-stuff-you-buy territory, Sweet Shop looks like an appealing alternative. The developer has all the right priorities: making this for the love of comics. And the fact they've struck a deal with Image gives it credibility....

My comix do LOTS to alienate my readers: the M/F stuff alienates the gay men, the BDSM alienates the sex-positives, the humor alienates the sex-fiends, the twinks alienate the bear-chasers, the experimental stuff alienates everybody....

In semi-fictionalizing myself online, one of my favorite recurring jokes is that Jonny Quest is my cousin. I’ve had the idea for this sexy “crossover” for a long time, and at one point I had a really great Hanna-Barbera-style artist lined up, but that went nowhere. So I’ve decided to do it myself.