Secret Headquarters
The view out the window at Secret Headquarters. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Filtering by Tag: COMICS
Books I Read in 2024: Eventually Everything Connects
I adored this book. It’s such an exciting mix of genres, prose and images, the political and the personal. I can’t recall having read a book quite like this. She fearlessly ranges from her sexual experiences to her politically ideologies and relentlessly sticks to the truth that any and all binary positions are false. I would hope some young adults get to read this book, as it serves as a timely, relevant guidepost for those figuring it out.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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Scenes From an American Bukkake
The above image is a panel from “My, My American Bukkake Too,” a comic that I made in 2003 or 2004. I made the comic using photos I shot on a bukkake movie set, running the images through Microsoft Paint, and editing the results. This comic was a sequel to “My, My American Bukkake,” a comic that I made using the same process in 2002. There was some controversy around MMABT, which you can read about here. I believe MMAB was first published in Headpress 23. Later that same year, MMAB was published again, in Dirty Stories Volume 3, which was edited by Eric Reynolds and published by Fantagraphics, alongside comics by Joe Sacco, Bob Fingerman, and Carol Swain, among others. MMAB was republished again or MMABT was published (I can’t remember which one) in Best Erotic Comics 2008, which was edited by Greta Christina and published by Last Gasp, alongside comics by Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Toshio Saeki, among others. In a review of Dirty Stories Volume 3, “A Fresh Look at Porn Comix,” TIME called MMAB a “non-fiction standout.” In 2004, MMABT was published on Artbomb (a comics website created by Warren Ellis that no longer exists), where it was described as “a deeply moving account of personal loss set amidst the tapestry of sexual taboo.”
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Life in LA
Rabbits, Malibu Canyon, and a dress made of books. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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All the News That's Fit to Newsletter
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In my latest newsletter, I talk about writing blocks, the Warren Ellis controversy, and racism in the porn industry.
An excerpt:
There’s been a lot of conversation lately about racism in the porn industry. It is true: There are ways in which the porn industry engages in systemically racist practices. That is not a good thing at all, and I hope that the porn industry works to rectify that wrong. At the same time, I’ve spent over 20 years writing about the porn industry, and the one forever truth in porn was told to me years ago by a producer: If there wasn’t a demand for it, it wouldn’t be made.
Read the rest here, and subscribe here.
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Slasher
I wrote an appreciation of Charles Forsman’s Slasher for the Seriocomic series on HILOBROW. I highly recommend the Slasher series. It’s wild and outrageous and like no other comic I’ve ever read.
“Narratively, bad things happen, oftentimes at Christine’s hand: people die, people are brutalized, people are terribly lonely. But for Christine, murder is self-affirming. ‘I’ve never felt so relaxed,’ Christine texts Joshua after a fresh kill. ‘Like I’ve been holding my piss for 25 years. I know who I am now.’”
Read the rest here.
Buy a copy of my latest digital story: “The Tumor” —“a masterpiece of short fiction.”
The Girl
12 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Iterations 🎨"
I’m taking a comics-making class, and this is something I did in the third session. It’s iterations of my main character. She’s in her underpants. I decided to take the class so I could practice drawing. What I like best about the class is that it asks you to focus on creativity. Sometimes, when you’re a journalist, creativity is not encouraged. But if journalism isn’t an act of creation, then what is it?
Buy my digital short story: "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Comics-Drawing Class, Day 2
24 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Crushing it in comics class, obvi 😂"
If you’re a writer, art class is great because you don’t have to use any fucking words.
Support this artist! Buy my short story: "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
The Artiste
19 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Signing up for a comics making class for no reason other than to blow @youngmattc out of the water..."
Not long ago, I signed up for a comics-making class. I’ve made some comics in the past and had several published, and I thought it would be a good idea to have an outlet for expression that wasn’t just words. I’ve always made comics by taking photos and using digital means to manipulate them into what looked more like art. This time I’m going to try actually drawing. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at it. I’m good at the words, and the storytelling, but my art is not strong. It’s not even close. I’ve made a few ahead of time, and I bought some colored pencils. So far, they’re pretty ugly. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s what you tolerate.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Wait for It
1 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Graphic novel of Paul Auster's City of Glass 🏙"
The nice folks over at Seriocomic have asked me to write a short piece about the comic of my choice. Seriocomic is “a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels.” My contribution will be appearing in the spring. For my “comic,” I chose the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Porn Comixxx
This is an excerpt from a porn comic that I was working on in 2018. It’s about a woman who moves back to Porn Valley after a long time away, what she sees there, and how things have changed and are the same.
Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
The Annex
6 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "So happy to find this last night 💚"
I used to live in Los Feliz. Now I live in Burbank. Every so often, I go back to Los Feliz, and the other night I went to Skylight Books. My favorite thing is the bookstore's Art Annex. It's a few doors down on Vermont and stocked with graphic novels, art books, screenwriting books, photography books, and chapbooks. It's like the creative, mutant, smaller twin to Skylight. While there, I happened across a new book by Dave Cooper, a longtime favorite artist of mine. He's a maker of what could be called comics and a kind of psycho-surrealist. I first fell in love with his work through Ripple, which is a crazy magical work that forces you to think about the body, and sex, and human relations in all kinds of mind-bending new ways. A few weeks ago, when I was at Wacko, I spotted an Eddy Table doll, so I figured something was afoot. In any case, I was delighted to discover the latest work by Cooper at the Art Annex: Mud Bite. What's Mud Bite? It's hard to say. It's the story of a guy with bulging eyes, and a girl with a skin problem, and a river of mud. And there are scary bugs, too. It's a joy to encounter -- filled with curious and awful things, moments of bizarre beauty and strange twists, and oddly enlightening to your soul. Check out the trailer for "The Absence of Eddy Table." Holy cow!
Buy "The Tumor" -- my latest digital short story that's been called "a masterpiece."
Comixxx
23 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "comic-in-progress ❤️💦💯"
I drafted an outline for a comic the other day. It had to do with Porn Valley. I made it on some index cards I had lying around. I used to make comics. You can read one of them, "My, My American Bukkake, Too," on Artbomb. I made that one using photos I took on a porn set, which I ran through a Photoshop process called Stamp, then messed with them to make them how I liked. I should probably do a third one.
Buy a copy of my digital short story "The Tumor"! It's been called "a masterpiece."
Comics
What You Didn't Want to Know About Her
This sneak peek at the new upcoming graphic novel from Dan Clowes, Patience, makes it a must-read in my book.
Spoiler alert:
But then, the man comes home and finds the woman dead on the floor of their house. He's suspected of murder, acquitted, and sets out to find the killer himself. He meets a guy who has a time machine, and he uses the device to try to change the course of events that led to his girlfriend's death. He goes back to her teenage years, where he learns more about her and comes to terms with her sexual and emotional past—things he had not wanted to know about before her death. It's a time-traveling love story by a beautiful, twisted genius. We hope you like it.
[Vice]
Robert Crumb Model
This Is for the Ladies
A panel from "My, My American Bukkake, Too"
"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.
Yesterday, I blogged about art, and the other day I came across this comic I did years ago, "My, My American Bukkake Too."
There's a "My, My American Bukkake" comic I did somewhere, I just need to find it. Then I should scan it and upload it.
I can't really draw, so I made this comic using photos I took on the set of a bukkake porn movie shoot that I went to in the San Fernando Valley.
Reading the comic today is pretty weird. It's sort of terrifying, and in a way still totally relevant, and makes me appreciate my ability at that time to not really give a fuck.
There's this idea floating around that women aren't funny -- at least in part because they're not willing to make themselves look stupid.
Sometimes, I suffer from this problem. I know there are times when I've done improv and hesitated because I was thinking, Are my pants going to fall down if I do that? Or some shit like that. That gap = awkwardness = The Not Funny Valley.
After I took the photos from the bukkake shoot, I uploaded them onto my computer, and I ran them through this Photoshop process called Stamp, and then I did what I referred to at the time as "messing with them," which is to say I took out some of the white, and I shaped some of the shapes, and I added back some of the black. Then I added the text. And, voila, a comic.
Of course, today, I can see all the things I would've done differently. The images are sort of too small and squished in some ways, and the white on black writing is practically unreadable, and I don't like how some of the prose is sort of poetry-ish.
But whatever. When it comes to bukkake comics, it is what it is.
I think if a young female journalist asked me for advice -- mostly, I just hear from guys in India who want to be porn stars -- I would tell her to make a lot of mistakes in public.
Be dramatic. Do insane things. Imperil yourself. Lose your mind.
Don't be this guy. Be this guy.
Or, better yet, be this chick.
Stop worrying about content and what your dipshit peers will think and who you may or may not offend on social media and whether or not someone will google you in the future and give you or not give you a job because those jobs will kill your soul anyway.
All of those things are things you don't need in your life. They are the things that come from without, not from within. And that's what matters: What's inside of you. That is the stuff of you.
Everything else is bullshit and a waste of time in a short road that we call life that dead ends in the cul de sac of death.
Go bravely to it, not as a coward.
You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.
Wooper
via Kottke
Watch Out!
Image via @claytoncubitt
