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Hello, Funny Papers Fans!
My grandpa loved to tell us grandkids he would see us in the funny papers when he said goodbye. The “funny papers” is a now antiquated term for the comic pages that used to appear in newspapers. A ritual I still have with my kids, even though half of them are now young adults and the other two will both be in high school next year, is to say each night, “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite. See you in the funny papers.”
I’m working to make the Weirdo Poetry Sunday Comics a regular event. I can’t yet commit to it being weekly, but I will be working towards that end. Most of the comics will be poetry comics, but some other types of cartoons will occasionally show up here as well.
Wild Divinity
This comic is adapted from a version that appears in my full haiku comic collection, Wild Divinity. The ebook version is temporarily unavailable but will be back up in my shop next month.
Sci-Fi Haiku
Sci-Fi Haiku has been about 85% done for more than four years. It is to be the third book in the Twisted Haiku Series, which includes Pirate Haiku and Horror Haiku. It was started before poetry comics became the primary focus of my work. It will have several haiku comics, but it will mostly be a collection of between 400-500 science-fiction haiku sans images. This will be the next poetry collection I publish this year.
Conifers and the Cosmos
Conifers and the Cosmos will be the sequel to Wild Divinity. I had a failed Kickstarter for it last year and stopped all work on it, and many other things, due to some acute personal issues. It will be published in the first half of this year.
Mornings in My Corner of America
This past week, as I’ve been driving kids to school during sunrise hours, I’ve had these poems and comics pop into my head. I have no idea if this will be a long-term project or not. I create every day because I know the muses to be fickle, but when inspiration does strike, I follow the sentiment in these lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Origins
This will be a collection of tanka comics dealing loosely with the idea of creation. While I’ve written several poems in this category, I’ve only done this one comic. This is the kind of collection that hasn’t pushed forward enough in my imagination. It may someday turn into a full-blown project, or it may remain as fragments that get used in other things.
Abstracted
While my first poetry love will always be haiku, I also enjoy experimenting with other forms of short poetry. This is an American cinquain (a five-line poem with a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable pattern). My very first poetry comics were surreal haiku paired with abstract art. I made two Surreal Haiku zines before moving on to the comic style in Wild Divinity. But, occasionally, I have a yearning for the abstract. Lately, this means different configurations of colors and geometric shapes.
Haiku Robot
Haiku Robot debuted one year ago today! I only made seven strips until taking a hiatus, but Clark, Rocket, and Tank are never far from my thoughts. I plan on returning to this strip later in the year. In the meantime, I’ll repost the original seven-strip series here in the Weirdo Poetry Sunday Comics.
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Thanks for reading! Do you have a favorite? Let me know in the comments.
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
My dad used to say, "See you in the funny papers"! My favorite out of today's group is the first comic with the whale. Pacific migrants, brilliant!!
Whenever I spent the night at my grandparents as a kid, I'd climb up into my seat at the breakfast table Sunday morning and my grandfather would hand me the funny pages so we could read the paper together.