maria_sputnik

You draw the most amazing menagerie of unsettlingly weird and yet adorable animals.

what a sweet compliment...

i'm kind of surprised by how animal-centric my comics are. but this last year i have been animal crazy. ponies! horses! dogs! squirrels! bring on the mammals!

I love this -- waiting for part 3...

I'm glad! Part three is not very far away.

I LOVE THE WORST HORSE

did I tell you i had a dream where a raccoon was menacing me and then it reached up and opened its chest and a redheaded woman stepped out?

I SWEAR IT WAS NOT ME. i don't even have red hair...

maybe it was my vicious, urban, garbage-eating power animal

do you remember Orson Welles' The Trial? your songs are like, i dunno, Julie Doucet's version, though that's a purely visual evaluation: i like your stories best (and, sure, PONIES).

no i never saw welles' trial! but maybe i should look it up.

i'm glad you enjoyed the comix, toaster of mystery.

That was fantastic!

thanks troy! i'm glad you like it!

I love this!!!

i am very sorry i never mailed you your copy IT WILL STILL COME SOMEDAY maybe with special effects like foil embossing or candy hearts to make you forget how fuckin' late it is

only semi-relatedly, isn't it weird that we met more than four years ago? time is like a mack truck! i hope i make it to dc before another four years lurks by

ughhh it IS weird and hard to believe! i remember eating Thai food and sitting around our living room like it was yesterday. waah!

don't worry about the hard copy, i'm happy to see it here! and are you moving to nyc? i may have missed out on details of your nomadic/schooling plans. (if so, i would be happy to visit you up there)

yes, i am moving to nyc, though not until april. when i do, you are heartily encouraged to visit...

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IS VERY MYSTERIOUS

the end of this story will be done around halloween, for the sf comix festival APE

I would like to add a one billionth degree of expression of delight in this last horse, m. sputnik!!!! & hopes for more, too, please.

sadly, another last horse did do what your heroine wouldn't do. I was going to see if you'd seen that non-story yesterday but wasn't sure if you were back by computers again-- and then! damn it, the Last Horse.

poor serbian horse! what a bizarre newsstory! i wonder what the backstory is on that!!

I always wondered how the Horse Taxonomy came about. Also apparently have to look up Alemaheyu Eshete. Just met an Alemaheyu, first time I've heard the name and I'm in love with it.

The horse thing is a Buddhist story:

"The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver's will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn how to run!"

Suzuki Roshi goes on to say that, when it comes to Buddhist practice, it may not be such a bad thing to be "the worst horse." After all, the best horses have the least to gain: they're already the best. The so-called worst horses, on the other hand, will undergo the most transformation, the most improvement, if they stick with it: "In your very imperfections you will find the basis for your firm, way-seeking mind. [ . . . ] So I think that sometimes the best horse may be the worst horse, and the worst horse can be the best one."

But this story was also sort of based on my feelings related to tiny guide horses for the blind.

And Alemayehu Eshete is rad -- you can hear him on the Ethiopiques record series, which is one of my favorite groups of albums!

in this comic i'm confusing two ethiopian singers, alemayehu eshete and tlahoun gessesse. i love them both, but gessesse sang "sethed seketelat," which is playing in the first part of this comic and is one of my favorite songs of all time

I love that you just used the word "rad."

Love it all over again. This time i wonder what's up with the unhex-er's face? He's like a spooky translucent pompom ball with a blobby landlocked country eye. Uh - awesome.

Also I've been reading Leonora Carrington stories, which are also horse-y. She meets a horse that shows her a secret building with a turqoise and gold dance floor. You can tell it's surrealism because she's worried she'll be late for lunch.

there was a horse in that painting we saw at the met, too, wasn't there? some kind of fabulous beast? ... + i didn't know carrington wrote stories! going to hunt some down.

the unhexer's face was based on a picture from my bedroom wall -- a photo of a corn husk mask i ripped out of a book. the book said looking @ the mask would help you remember your dreams. //i just googled it up (hoping to link you to a picture) and discovered that the masks are part of the "iroquois husk face society" and that we're not supposed to look at them (like we're probably not supposed to look at the boli or that horrifying kalimajklt thing), and the iroquois have been getting them back out of museums and have mostly convinced people not to put pictures of them on the internet, so whoops, FORGET I MENTIONED IT

i seem to often be drawn to things which i shouldn't look at

the blobby eye was because my pen exploded on the airplane

and p.s. did i forget to tell you, it looks like your house is on fire

Horses galore - rocking horse on the wall, a horse out the window, and a pony of ephesus in the room with her next to the weird smudge. I'm reading the House of Fear and there's more besides, mostly collecting the same stories a couple times. The surrealist short stories are really dreamy.

I've been meaning to ask you, can you smell or taste in your dreams?

Hmm, can I? I would assume yes, but can't think of dream odors or flavors off the bat. When I used to record my dreams into a microcassette recorder I once captured the dream-fragment OLIVES ARE THE GREEN FRUIT GOD LOVES, but don't remember eating the olives

How about you, can you?

Ephesus is that statue of Diana with a bazillion breasts. Except some scientists and experts think they were bull testicles. But all about fertility either way, even though Diana was a virgin forever. The weird pony dog in the Carrington painting is all super-bosomy.

I can't think of any dreams where I've tasted or smelled anything, or even eaten anything. But definitely seeing and hearing and sometimes feeling. I feel like I'm missing out.

this is pretty much the best comic. ever.

awwwwwwwwwwwwww :D

there is so much good drawing here

looks pretty good on Internet, too

and yr handwriting looks like Aaron Cometbus

This shit is famous, damn

--mza.

BY COINCIDENCE, googling for that song I found this wee gem

"The delirious nightclub pop of Tlahoun Gessesse, the star of the seventeenth volume, is just as impassioned...Gessesse's startling voice often leaps from a quivering moan to a scabrous shout while the tunes blue the line between secular and sacred: On 'Aykedashem lebe' ('My Heart Will Not Betray You'), Gessesse sings in Amharic, but soon the lyrics dissolve into an anguished, almost supernatural 'Mmm-mmmhh!' As the singer cries helplessly, 'Aykedashem' becomes a case study in the sort of desire that requires an exorcism."

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