It's still pretty relevant to every time I check the news...
Haircut
Cutting a baby's hair is no easy task.
Animals Playing Instruments
I'm trying really hard to get something new together in time for Zine Machine on April 16. It may be ambitious as in the first few weeks of April my son is having eye surgery and I'm officiating my friend's wedding, but I will make this happen dagnabbit. I just need to keep reminding myself that sometimes it's more important to just do something than to worry about doing it well. #quantityoverquality
In Between
My site needs a little work. The navigation is, perhaps, not intuitive. But, until I get off my keister and do some rejiggering it is how it is.
Last May I started working on a comic with my brother. The first chapter/issue was released at SPX in October. I posted the comic up here some time in January, but as I was just about to push a tiny little human out of my body, promoting this was not at the top of my to do list. So if you missed chapter 1 of In Between you can find it here.
The Double Standards of Parenthood
Kirill likes to say that all he has to do is be in the general vicinity of Yuri for society to deem him a good father.
The joys of parenting
One of the benefits of having a baby...
Dorothy!
A drawing of my 2 year old niece, Dorothy, from Christmas. She's very into eyebrows at the moment
New character introduced this February!
Experiments with watercolor
As I prepare for SPX this year, I decided to spruce up the covers for some of my old mini comics by adding color. Also, I've started posting some of my drawings on Society6, so if you are so inspired, you can buy prints of my arts here: http://society6.com/amygodfrey
The problem with progress
So there's this comic that I wrote about 10 years ago about my husband, Kirill. It was based on a true story about when his favorite disc-man, which he named "Pan-sonic," died. We went to Best Buy to get a new disc-man, but there was a giant wall with hundreds of different options. In his frustration Kirill said "Say what you will about the Soviet Union, but when you went to the store to buy something there was one of it and it worked. And if it didn't work you just bought it anyway because that's all there was. " So I made a comic about Kirill and the be-speckled cartoon incarnation of our cat, Bandit, going back home to Russia to buy a disc-man only to discover that his favorite market from his childhood was now a Walmart and had the same ridiculous options as the US.
I decided a few years ago to redraw it, because it was crudely done, only I've never been able to finish it because I realized that the plot is no longer relevant. Today if Kirill went to get a new disc-man he wouldn't be able to find one - period.
So, here are the first few pages of this ill-fated comic that maybe someday will get an ending.
On Mother's Day and Freddie Mercury
As a little girl, being like your mom is the greatest, because when you are 3 your parents are the coolest people ever, and your mom is your window to who you could become. As you get up in the single digits and enter adolescence then your teens and trying to differentiate yourself from your mom becomes much more imperative. Suddenly being like your mom in not only not cool, it's embarrassing.
Then you reach your twenties and you notice small and subtle ways you are like your mom, they way you laugh at certain jokes or the way you put salad dressing on other peoples salad and it fills you with a sense of inevitable dread that you are doomed to become your mom. Not because your mom isn't awesome, but because it suddenly makes you realize that your mom is a real person who did and does have a life outside of yours. You realize that your mom was once young like you, and that someday you too will be older and perhaps have children who have no awareness of your person-hood. You realize that you were a really big jerk to your mom for a long time and still are sometimes - you just can't help it - but now that you realize your mom has feelings, you feel really really bad about it.
Eventually you accept that becoming an adult in inevitable, and actually not so bad. I, myself, feel like I am doing adulthood so much better than I did childhood. For me, this is the point when I can really start embracing my mom-ness. The way I too can not remember the proper name for stores and will in all likelihood start calling every ice cream stand "the Tasty Twirl", or the way I jokingly pronounce words ending in "er" as "ah" like "Here, have a some chowd-ah".
There are so many ways that I am very much my mother, and really, that's okay, because my mom is a great lady. But recently, there is a way in which it feels like my mom is becoming more like me, which is a fun twist. Maybe not like me, but It's a journey that we both went on separately and at different times, but ended up at the same place, because recently my mother discovered Queen.
Queen has been near and dear to my heart for about 10 years. I don't remember the exact moment when I realized that Queen, who as a teen I had thought was silly, was actually one of the best bands ever. It was definitely around the time I checked out A Night at the Opera from the library when I was living in Buffalo. Since then there is usually a point about once a year where I listen to nothing but Queen for a few weeks.
For my mother, the moment was much more recent. I'm sure she had heard of Queen before because she was alive and aware during the 80's. And even if she had somehow missed it then, she must have picked something up during the many times my siblings or I had watched Wayne's World during the 90's. Even so, she didn't really take notice until about a year ago. She was watching a youtube video and on the side of the page where they offer other video suggestions there was Queen Live Aid. Their full concert from 1985. She clicked the link and from that moment she was hooked.
My mother, who's other favorite artists include Elvis and Micheal Buble, never seemed like someone who would embrace the guitar driven rock stylings of Queen. But as my brother pointed out, one thing Elvis, Micheal Buble, and Freddie Mercury all share are good voices and theatrical stage presence. So perhaps it's not so surprising.
In any case, as I am currently reveling in my annual appreciation of Queen, and my annual appreciation of my mother, I thought I would commemorate it with one thing we can both appreciate: Freddie Mercury.
On sidewalk painting and donuts.
Last week I went out with my friends Hope and Jesse for some renegade community art. H&J brought washable paints and brushes and we started decorating the sidewalk on Mangum St. As people would walk by and comment on our paintings, Hope would offer them a paint brush and ask them to join. Initially everyone said no. We heard many variations on "you wouldn't want me to paint", which was, in fact, not true. This was less about creating fancy works of art and more about the experience of painting together and adding some color to downtown Durham.
Eventually as more kids walked by, people started to join in. Generally the young kids would come up and show interest and take a brush when Hope offered. Occasionally the parent would then join in. One woman driving by stopped and gave us all Monuts. (For those non-Durhamites, Monuts is a local foodie donut place. You know the type where there's always something cardamom or lavender flavored. In anycase, it's a very popular, very small place where you wait in line for 15 minutes to get your cardamom flavored donut. So when someone gives you one on the street and you didn't have to wait in line for it and it's not cardamom flavored and it is covered in dinosaur sprinkles - it's a major win. End of donut sidebar)
I decided to repaint a pig I had worked on earlier in the week in my sketchbook when I was experimenting with watercolors. Initially I had planned on doing a 3 panel comic about the pig, but this one block took me about 3 hours.
