Truly there is no more treasured person in all of Education Assembled than the teacher of Continuing Education courses in Comics. Ranking higher even than the American Sign Language (ASL) teacher, higher than Ukrainian As A Second Language (USL), even pulling even with the Creative Scrapbooking (CPb) teacher! Now, combine this celebrated position in civic culture with a person like myself; a person known far and wide for his sagacity, his perspicacity, yea even his sesquipedality. What you get is a position as revered as the most hallowed in the community: as revered as the “Security-Guard-In-Training”; as treasured as the “Cable Television Installer”; as feared and respected even as the mighty “Assistant Principal” himself.

But lo! I am informed by my prospective employer, Central Piedmont Community College, that if enrollment in the first class in this series doesn’t grow, then the class will be cancelled. SO! Get thee to admissions, my loyal and future students! That is, if you live within driving distance of CPCC, located here in the heart of educational Charlotte, North Carolina. You can see a rundown of the various classes in the series here on the CPCC site, and this handy link will begin the odyssey of signing up, or maybe paying money, or even both.

The first class is 8 weeks long, will meet on some day of the week, presumably Saturday, and will be involved mainly with Scott McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics” as a foundational text. Over that I will include my own patented brand of stuttering, clumsy, but ultimately and sublimely efficacious comments and humorous anecdotes. La Profesora is ready to educate you!

This week I make another stab at New Year’s resolutions, though I failed at nearly all of last year’s attempt. But that’s okay right? In my mind, just trying is half the battle. The other half, of course, is “knowing”, as anybody who watched cartoons in the 1980’s can tell you.

My other (un-comic-cized) resolution this year is to get on a serious SCHEDULE. I have high hopes for my comics output this year, and in a few weeks will be starting a long memoir project. Plus on top of that I have freelance work, which I really need to do a lot more of in order to not become homeless; plus hand-lettering work, which it looks like I’ll be doing a ton of in 2010. PLUS working for Heroes and organizing HeroesCon and all that that entails, which in the spring and summer is an incredible amount of work. SO. Schedule. If you guys see me on Facebook, that means I’m not on schedule, so tell me to get off Facebook.

And guys, listen: thanks so much for all the support and encouragement I got in 2009–I will need that and more in 2010. I know that, together, you and I, we can achieve our goal of making me rich and famous. It takes a village, and all of that village’s money. Thanks in advance!

I’ve been having a fun time drawing elephants for the last couple of weeks, ever since drawing this elephant for a local business. Something about them, I think it’s their totally nutso shape, like giant old men that used to be fat but are now wrinkled, too much skin over the same old big bones. Giant formerly fat old men walking around on all fours, to boot. So, this week’s strip, which was highly pleasurable to do, although good gravy I’m tired of lightboxing acacia trees forever, probably. BUT I have other ELEPHANT ADVENTURES! strips planned, so perhaps the acacia and I will meet again? I thought I’d start your week off with some ponderables. YOU ARE SO WELCOME.

Guys I know it’s a little lame to use your blog just to post funny stuff from YouTube, but whoa. This thing made me laugh so hard my whole shirt front is snot and tears now. Thanks to my brohambles Nate Stapley who mentioned it on his Twitter. By the way Nathan is my second-favorite Twitterer in the world, dude is funny. Okay so anyway, behold the fishermen:

Hey did you guys know that I set up an Etsy store recently? Oh yes, it’s true. I’ve been selling stuff on there, like DHARBIN! #1 & 2, NUTTED!, T-shirts, all that kind of stuff. But now I’m starting to put up my originals for sale, which is exciting, since they seem to be selling. I’m thinking I’ll throw them up in small groups from week to week, 5-7 at a time. Of the five I put up on Monday, only 3 are left, so you’d better get cracking. Here’s an example of one of them:

If you know my good friend J. Chris Campbell, he apparently really wants someone to buy this page for him for Christmas. I agree that you should do this thing. NOT ONLY THAT, but if someone buys it specifically for J. Chris, I’ll put another little surprise in the box for him, so you’ll get DOUBLE value! Holy! Guys I have to tell you, as someone who has worked in the comics industry since 1996, this is quite a deal. You are really going to feel bad if someone who ISN’T J. Chris purchases it, aren’t you? SO WILL I (not that bad, though, I’ll still be getting PAID, C.R.E.A.M. [Cash Rules Everything Around Me]).

Oh, the things we go through in the name of true, pure, senses-shattering beauty.

So if you guys have not been following my Twitter feed, you may not know that last Thursday I, at long last, after great GREAT trepidation, went under the knife and had my two front teeth cut out. They’re the same teeth I knocked out originally when I was thirteen, and which then the dentist crammed back into my head. After the root canals, they told me they’d turn black and fall out (OMG!) in around 7 years, but today I’m 35 years old, and more than 22 years have gone by. Apparently the teeth had become fused to the bone over the years, so instead of dramatically turning black and falling out, they just turned a sort of muddy brown over the years, and little pieces would break off now and then.

Either way, it turned out that, while they were indeed fused to the bone, they were being “resorbed” by my body, meaning my body was eating them slowly away, and soon they’d just break off and fall out. I really can’t think of anything more terrifying to me–after all this time, including the entirety of my teenage years and adulthood, of being afraid of my teeth falling out, it’s a pretty powerful fear for me. So I agreed that we should cut these badboys out and start putting something in their place, rather than wait for the worst weekend ever to occur, or one to break off while I was kissing a girl or eating peanut brittle or something.

This is what they looked like a few weeks before the surgery:

(that photo’s by my man Dylan Chorneau, he’s kind of amazing)

So it happened. The night before me, Dylan, Piemaker and Anida met for a last toast to my poor old little brown beans, splashing a little Jameson’s over them one more time. The next morning my friend Kate very kindly took me to the oral surgeon’s office, whose receptionist you can tell a direct lie to and she’ll choose to believe you because she can tell you would argue her forever otherwise (the lie was whether or not I’d had a cup of coffee that morning: I had). A few minutes later I was waking up high as all get-out, blood all over my mouth, and with something massive inside of my mouth. It was the appliance that my actual dentist The Roz (Dr. Gordon Roznik, D.M.D.) had made for me, essentially a retainer with two big ole teeth on the front.

You have to remember that I’ve had these undersized weak teeth–I don’t know if I’ve ever bit confidently into an apple in my adult life–forever, so the idea of something being normal-sized in that space was pretty weird. So at first I guess I thought it was normal for my mouth to not be closing all the way–strangely, before I busted them out I had some big ole buck teeth, so I just assumed it was back to that. Remember I was high as heck on Thursday.

But by Friday my face was hurting like crazy, and I could tell the appliance wasn’t fitting right. I also was getting more and more concerned throughout the weekend about this pain in my face–I can definitely be pretty whiny, but I’m not bad with handling pain, especially when taking these massive 800mg Motrin’s every 6 hours. But the pain didn’t seem to be lessening at all. I really hadn’t had any instruction from the surgeon as to what to expect, so I felt kind of lost–I would take my appliance out and peer at the horrifying wounds and just sort of wonder if that was how they were supposed to look.

That’s why I love The Roz so much–on Monday morning I trooped down to his office, ostensibly to follow up on the fit of my appliance. But while I was in the chair I asked The Roz to check out my wounds–sure enough, I had the dry socket! TIMES TWO! Without hesitation The Roz was cleaning those badboys out, before I even had a chance to grab something to keep from screaming, then packing some sort of numbing medicine stuff in there to promote healing, then handing me a bottle of special rinse and patiently answering all the questions I was wincing out at him. Time elapsed–maybe 4 minutes. Charge = $0. The other guy cut my teeth out for $900 and all I got was a handout telling me to rinse with salt water and apply ice!

Not only that, but The Roz hooked up my appliance too, although he had to shave some of my crooked teeth down to get everything to fit, and now my fake teeth are so sharp I could bite your finger off. But when I left his office I was feeling 1000% better than when I walked in. It’s not just The Roz either, it’s his whole staff, everyone is just super friendly and relaxed and trying to figure out how to help you, from the hygienists to the receptionists. I feel like a star when I walk in there, it’s amazing. We’re talking about THE DENTIST here, you know? But I love The Roz, he’s the best, and that’s saying something for a guy with more than his share of dental fright (me). Check out what I look like now, I’m giddy:

Okay that’s all I have to say–isn’t it plenty? I’m working on a short comic about all this to post next month, so you’ll get the update then. In the meantime, if you live anywhere near Charlotte and are looking for the baddest-assed dentist possible, please accept my highest possible recommendation for Dr. Gordon Roznik. Don’t worry, he doesn’t go by “The Roz,” that’s just what me and the Piemaker (another patient) call him. The staff crack up every time too–”the Roz told me to check and see if I have enough insurance left for a deep cleaning.” Anyway, love The Roz. I had to take down the video I had up here–I couldn’t figure out how to keep it from playing by itself all the time, it was driving me nuts.

So my strip about my 14-year old fashion sense comes to an end. I sure do love my Mama a lot, when I was working on this last page I was just thinking about how sweet it was that she made me CLOTHES, you know? I mean, the lady sewed me up a matching shirt and shorts, who cares if it was a few years past their most fashionable application? My mom’s a sweet lady, she deserved better than me in high school, but what can I say, not many of us were saints to our parents in high school, am I right? Not that that makes it any better or anything.

I think this is going to be the last strip I do at this tiny (5.25″ square) size with brushes–I was doing these as a tryout for the longer stories I’m about to begin, but the size + brush combination is just not yielding very good drawings. So I’m going to return to nibs for awhile, at my customary (still tiny) size of 8.5″ wide. I passionately want to be able to ape Kaz Strzepek’s awesome idea to work small enough to be able to carry it everywhere, but it just hasn’t worked out yet for me. Besides, I need to stylize things more anyway, I keep trying to put all these dumb details into backgrounds, and the drawings end up looking watered down, somehow overworked and underworked at the same time. Preposterous!

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this little story. Of all the ones I’ve done, this one produced a lot of response from people. But my favorite response was from Mike Konold, who sent me this amazing picture of himself and his sister wearing some sweet jams in front of Niagara Falls! I don’t know if she is really wearing jams, but hey– tie goes to the runner, I say.

Mike included this little anecdote: “Your comic is reminiscent of the time I went to school with my hair blow dried back with the sides slicked back with gel thinking it was way cooler than my standard towel dry and comb forward style. I faked an illness so I could go home after first period, sparing myself 7 more periods of humiliation. I think my parents knew what was up since the very next day I had my old hair style back.” HAW! I love it! Anyone else have more pictures in jams? Because guys: let’s share.

“How little the universe knows about the nature of real cruelty.”

Even as Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides is poised at the lip of his own final ascendancy, he is again revealed to be just another part of the system of systems on Dune. Though he strand an emperor and his retinue on his planet, lead an army of sandworms riding Fremen through a ruptured Shield Wall, even dare the spice trance to become the prophesied Kwisatz Haderach, still his own baby is killed in a chance raid. To my mind, from this point onward, both throughout the climax of this novel and in its sequels, Paul Atreides becomes little more than an automaton, grappling and failing with his own prescience, with his own awareness of his locked-in place in his system.

As I said at the beginning of our merry Book Club, the best parts of Dune to me are about systems, whether they be systems of people, systems of politics, systems of ecology, or systems of systems themselves. The book is not perfect, far from it; and when it strays, it strays widely. It’s almost as if, wanting to write about the IDEAS of Dune, Frank Herbert spared little time to consider some of the characters and their part in the story. For example, the part near the end where we are led to believe that the Count Fenring could have killed Paul had he chosen; as if the idea of the leader of a newly victorious army submitting to single combat wasn’t preposterous enough, we should believe that his army would stand by while an even-more dangerous opponent were arranged for?

Dune is my favorite novel, although I would never say it was the best-written novel I’ve ever read, maybe not even close. But it’s the novel that has always excited my imagination most–not only do I still feel transported when Paul is standing on the Shield Wall gazing down on the Emperor’s ships in the plain of Arrakeen, but I still can feel my brain churning over the many many MANY ideas packed into the novel. While a book like The Great Gatsby or Crime and Punishment might excite me as an intellectual, Dune excites me as a HUMAN; it excites the part of me that is optimistic, that believes that humans are capable of true greatness. It excites the part of me that believes the IDEA is the important part, and all the rest is just artificing.

Where Dune–and indeed, much sci-fi–breaks down is in the meeting between these ideas and the necessity to decant them to the reader. While Dune does work best when it’s more about its characters than its more fantastical elements, the finale of the book attempts to tie up a lot of plotlines through the convenient device of just gathering all the remaining characters into a room and then killing some of them and having others give speeches.

above, by Warren Craghead

After chapter upon chapter of Thufir Hawat’s machinations within the Harkonnen family, he just sort of expires after reaffirming his loyalty to Paul. The Baron himself is dead at the start of the climax, and everyone else–Gurney, Jessica, Stilgar–just sort of stand around for the denouement. Which is a big knife fight. When I first ready the book as a teenager, I was like “hmm, that’s weird, didn’t see that coming.” Today it sticks out like a sore thumb. All the menace and portent of Paul’s “the nature of real cruelty” moment are drained away for me by this climax. The very idea that the Emperor and an entire universe of CHOAM businessmen could be convinced that “well I guess there’s nothing for it but to make the dude Emperor” is just insane.

This may be one of the things the movie did better–I haven’t seen it in a million years, but I know when I bring up Dune to friends (most of whom have never read it), the two things they say, doing impersonations from the movie, are “He IS the Kwisatz Haderach!” and “The spice must flow!” But in the book, I don’t think a strong case is ever made for the spice as an irreplaceable quantity–while we see Guildsmen from time to time, it’s only ever briefly, and there’s really no sense as to the sense of terror they might have that something might interrupt their access to spice. Surely not enough to allow someone to maneuver his way into ultimate control of… well, everything?

I was explaining Stranger In A Strange Land (another great sci-fi book) to someone the other day. “It’s an amazing book, it’s really almost a religious text, about a man with amazing powers who becomes a sort of Messiah.” Then I added, “You just have to get past the idea that he was raised by Martians.” Most great sci-fi (to me, to me) is an idea so huge that you need to place it in a fantastic setting so that it can work. But what often prevents good, even great sci-fi from being true literature is this same fantastic setting, which robs the book of some of its impact, some of its relevance to the world which WE live in.

But I would hazard that Dune is and will always be among the very greatest of sci-fi novels–even with its inconsistencies and warts, the ambitious scope of the book’s ideas is still flabbergasting. Not to mention the incisive, almost prophetic understanding Herbert has for sociology and ecology. And, my favorite of all, of humanism, of the potential of regular human beings for true greatness.

Hey, do you guys know about my Etsy shop? Well sure you do! Now available at said Etsy shop, is this delicious American Apparel shirt, hand-screened by the enormously competent folks at Contagious Graphics, and featuring my face, my poor distressed face. I originally printed these for this year’s SPX, but still have some left. Think of it like a time capsule–why, just LOOK how much longer my hair and wild my beard are! Truly, I need you to love him, now more than ever!

Also at said Etsy shop are my 26 Cartoonists print, plus DHARBIN! 1-2, Nutted!, and other stuff. Later in the week I’m going to try and get up some originals, but we’ll see how that works out. Busy week this week, in the good way not the bad way. Okay go send me your money!

Due to a bunch of busy-ness (is it “business”? Like a lot of good would be “goodness”? Doesn’t seem right) and other stuff, I’m going to put off the final post of the mighty DUNE BOOK CLUB for a week. Besides my own needs (paramount), I figure this will let some of you who started the book a hair late (I’m thinking of you here, Naseem) catch up. And of course, as this blog post will live throughout time immortal, you are welcome to join the discussion as well, time travellers of the future, archaeologists of the blogosphere.

In the meantime, get in there with the discussionizing! I love to read these comments, just love it.