JoanHilty.net

This week: "You Talked Me Out of It"/"Closed To You"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:13:00 +0000

For Patsy, truth is stranger than fiction, and also more strain.

This week's strip: "Packaged Foods"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:50:00 +0000

A couple unpacked boxes of random comics and magazines for which I've drawn have been sitting around my apartment since I moved into it in 2004. The explicit indie gay comics, the courtly queer rodeo magazine for which I did a short-lived serial, and a very mainstream, conservative Nashville Opry magazine carrying my illos of George Jones --all sitting cheek by jowl in a sort of weird Darwinian cuddle. What happens when I move them to a new place next month? Are they dying to secede from each other, or did they all learn to just get along?

Ghostwriting in the Book Review

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:11:00 +0000

This popped up on the Web recently...I'd just about forgotten I had done it! That Polanski movie "Ghostwriter" is about to release. He stole the idea from me, you know.

This wk's strips: "Marquee Values/My Favorite's Things"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 06:12:00 +0000

Regarding Karima's T-shirt here, Neda Agha-Soltan, martyr of the 2009 Iranian elections, would have been 28 on January 23. Her name does indeed mean "voice" in Persian. Here's hoping 2010 will bring volume to that voice.

This week's strips: "Parasolitude"/"Plague Grounds"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 05:18:00 +0000

Oh lord, is it February already?

MLK Day: Andrea Lewis, the JazzDiva

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:07:00 +0000

I skipped this strip in the queue for a while, because it seemed appropriate to use this day to remember radio host, journalist, musician, and old friend Andrea Lewis, who died with shocking suddenness this past November.

I’d already been in the middle of a radio-show storyline when I found out, oddly, so it seemed like a sign to pay tribute in the strip, somehow. But in the wake of such awful news, it was hard to come up with anything that’d be appropriate to a lightweight comic strip, let alone sufficiently honoring of her professional legacy and my personal memories of her. I settled for a visual salute to Andrea’s warm, brilliant presence in the studio and everywhere else, and to her nickname JazzDiva, as well as a background hat tip to Louis’, one of her neighborhood haunts in the Ocean Beach area of San Francisco, the city she’d called home for decades since driving there solo in a van from Detroit.

Fortunately, others have done a superior job of honoring her life and work. You’ve got to scroll the dial just over halfway to get to this tribute show on KPFA, and I wish they'd also archived the longer tribute hosted by her colleague Victoria Z, but it's a good sampling. Tributes by The Progressive and California poet laureate Al Young, and Youtube coverage of her Nov. 24 memorial service in Oakland are all good too.

I last saw Andrea in July '09; we had lunch just down the road from Louis’ at the Beach Chalet. It was an unusually beautiful afternoon for Ocean Beach in July; we caught up the way old friends do when they live 3000 miles apart; she followed up with a Biblically long Facebook message about her favorite guitar apps that reminded me what an impressive music geek she was in addition to everything else that made her so remarkable. Four months later, she was gone. She was so young, she’d accomplished so much, she’d had so much left to do.

There are any number of ways to honor Dr. King today. For me this year, it’s remembering a friend who walked with his spirit, working til her life’s end to give voice to community activism, to explore how all forms of oppression are connected, and to find beauty in a remarkably wide range of personal experience. And promising to do as much as I can in service to the memory of both.

This wk's strips: "Subtraction Action"/"Ring Out the Bold"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:03:00 +0000

The Gallery is back up--small blooper on my web guy's part, but he's been busy putting together the gigantic strip archives I finally got to him, which would make anyone tired. Right? Coming soon! No, really...soon!

This week: "Dose-Foolish Thing"/"The Hard Sell"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:16:00 +0000

Hey, sorry for the posting delay, I overslept, the dog ate it, I meant to call, the bus was late...it was the holidays. Happy New Year. Here's to 2010.

This week's strips: "Voice Aggravated"/"No Thanks For Calling"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:36:00 +0000

This week's strip: "Loose Talk"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:33:00 +0000

Who doesn't give advice to one's exes? It's so right, yet so wrong.

This week's strip: "Pickypocket"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Just in time for Black Friday!

I’d never heard of Buy Nothing Day ‘til now, reading an old punk-anarchist friend’s online argument that it’s “ill-conceived, privileged, and useless.” He’s got a point – and I’d add “undersold”, no pun intended, given it’s been around for 17 years and still makes barely a ripple annually.

Still, there’s something to it. For ten of those years at least, we’ve been buying instead of building, with increasingly little to show for it. We aren’t a manufacturing economy anymore, but pretty soon we won’t be a consumer economy anymore, either. With our vast land and resources we’re capable, somehow, of the next big thing, but nobody knows what it is.

This wk's strips: "Low Pitch"/"Ideal-O-Logue"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:33:00 +0000

Most of the NYC subway's remaining elevated lines are along the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront and do have beautiful views, sometimes on the platforms themselves, as with the Marcy Avenue stop pictured in both "Ideal-O-Logue" and this article, though I was insane to fixate on that as a backdrop with just hours to go before deadline...

I've enlarged the thumbnail strip having been made aware, by myself and others, that the blog can be a little hard to read. Remember that you can still click on the strips to get a larger image still. But I'm curious, anyone else finding the site hard to read in general? Think I need to bring up the point size?

Miami Book Fair

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:20:00 +0000

I'll have two strips in the Color of Comics exhibit at this weekend's Miami Book Fair, which seems to have taken rapidly to comics and graphic novels. Hear hear.

Does the Color of Comics Matter?
Friday, November 13, 6:30 p.m., Centre Gallery, Third Floor, Bldg. 1

Is there a need for race and multicultural representation in comics? Does the presence or absence of certain people in an entertainment medium affect the way they are perceived in the real world? Is “looking for a face like mine” relevant at a time when this nation has a black president?

These and other questions will be explored when artists featured in the Color of Comics art exhibit sit down with moderator and show curator Alex Simmons, writer for Archie Comics. Panelists include syndicated cartoonist Jerry Kraft, Mama’s Boyz; Ray Felix, Runaway Slave; Dawud Anyabwile, Brotherman; Fernando Ruiz, Archie Comics; and Anne Sibley O’Brien, The Legend of Hong Kil Dong.

This week's strip: "Radio Tires"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:47:00 +0000

This week's strip:"Draw, Sucker!"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:22:00 +0000

In an era of bank predation so rampant and unregulated that Congresspeople actually have to rouse themselves to propose legislation requiring banks to warn against overdrafts, isn't it time for a little reverse-engineering? I have an imaginary computer programmer all ready to help.

This week's strip: "Miracle Cur"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:06:00 +0000

These dog owners who can't make their babies obey even minor commands in the park: I always wonder if they act just as helpless when the dog eats their underwear, bites their kids or runs in front of a bus.

This week's strip: "Fence Me In"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:35:00 +0000

The mighty Jennifer Camper...

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:16:00 +0000

...on Grit TV with Laura Flanders!

This week's strips: "Medicinal Value"/"Try Me"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:57:00 +0000

Just back from Cape Cod. If I can ever figure out how to do it without becoming broke or alcoholic, I may retire there. Off-season of course, just like we do now. Someone (this time, the sweet husband-&-wife retirees whose birdhouses we stopped to photograph while biking Truro's back roads) always asks if we're in town for Women's Week. The answer's always no. I hope all the girls have a rippin' time in P-town and send me the pictures, but I'm old enough to have seen just about all these performers already and I never did too well at the big Girl Events anyway; someday, children, you'll hear about my disastrous trip to the Dinah Shore.

This week's strip: "Psychic-Out"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:20:00 +0000

For more on Warehouse Workers United, go here.

This week's strip: "Sporting Complex"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:54:00 +0000

Inspired by a night at Gotham Girls Roller Derby. Bronx Gridlock kicked Manhattan Mayhem's butt. But I love you all. Especially GalXC and Surly Temple.

This week's strips: "Reservations"/"Wrong Baby Wrong"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Let's face it, some of our darkest moments have been in restaurants, and it wasn't the mood lighting.

This week's strip: "Hotwired"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:37:00 +0000

You know, on this topic, the iron tried to electrocute me yesterday. I don't think it was coming after me for not updating the strip, but one can never be too sure.

This week's strips: "A Far Cry"/"Terms & Limitations"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:55:00 +0000

The Bitter Girl archive project is underway--and not a moment too soon, since PlanetOut has once again slimmed down and done away with all its comic archives. You can still catch up on strips from 2003-07 here at Gmax, and strips from 2007-onward by scrolling down to "Our Past Editions" at Seattle Gay News, but by summer's end everything (including 2001-02) will be right here on this site. If it kills me.

This week's strip: "Topical Disease"

noreply@blogger.com (Joan) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:46:00 +0000

Funny you should say that, Jess, 'cause the karma train's coming for you in a week or so.