Art & Morality

oh my god it’s ethan nicolle t-thank you so much for pointing me in the right direction, it’s sort of an honor to even get an ask from you.

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:26:07 -0800

Sorry I didn’t realize we were out. Tell you what, if you buy something from my www.axecopwedding.com site, remind me of this conversation in the note and I will throw in a CHOP poster for free, signed.

well, I would go get some from the store but "Oh no! Other people already bought all of this thing and we will probably not ever get any more!"

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:25:13 -0800

Oh i didn’t even realize that! I have a whole box of them in my closet. I guess i should send more to Topatoco.

“If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:40:00 -0800

“If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul.”

-G.K. Chesterton, the Red Angel

The image is of a monster my little brother Malachai made up named “Shabaccus” when he was 6 (Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth #3). He is as big as a sky scraper, shoots lava out of his feet when he flies, has giant horns, sharp claws, sharp teeth, is covered in spikes, has machine gun ears, his eyes light up, firey-orange hair and he carries a giant sword and machine gun.

“…[Syme] remembered a hornbill, which was simply a...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:30:50 -0800

“…[Syme] remembered a hornbill, which was simply a huge yellow beak with a small bird tied to it. The whole gave him a sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was always making mysterious jokes. Sunday had told them they would understand him when they understood the stars. He wondered whether even the archangels understood the hornbill.”

-from the Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

Making Comics Podcast with Doug TenNapel

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:41:40 -0800

I already mentioned this on my web comic blogs, but I wanted to post it here because it really fits under the title “Art & Morality” well. This is a podcast interview conducted by Jason Brubaker of reMIND with Doug TenNapel and me. We went to Jason’s house and recorded it live. He put it up in two parts, nearly two hours of conversation. We cover a lot of ground and talk about things I’ve never ventured into in other interviews.

Part One

Part Two

OK, so I just asked this over on Bearmageddon, but then I noticed this form, and thought maybe this is was a topic more suited discussion here than there. What would recommend as a good starting point for someone wanting to check out the works of Chesterton? Also, the Making Comics interview was awesome!

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:37:00 -0800

I gave a short answer over at Bearmageddon, but I’ll give you a more detailed answer here.

First, the reason I LOVE Chesterton is probably because the two of us have so much in common. He was an artist, even a cartoonist. He went to Art School but became a writer instead. He was a very large and jolly man (over 6ft and 300 pounds), known for his sense of humor and absent mindedness.

Chesterton wrote TONS and he wrote on just about every topic you can imagine. He was a journalist, so he write thousands of essays on topics ranging from Eugenics to the lack of the topic of cheese in poetry.

The main categories of his books you will find I would categorize like this: fiction novels, detective stories, Christian philosophy, and essay collections.

He is best known in the church for Orthodoxy, which is his personal defense and explanation of his own faith. It’s one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. If that is something you like to read about, I recommend it, but I will tell you, if you are not accustomed to the style of writing Chesterton can be a little hard to digest at first.

If you think the fiction sounds more up your alley he is probably better known for The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown Mysteries. I have admittedly read only a handful of Father Brown (sort of like Priest Columbo but more intellectual). I love the Man Who Was Thursday and want to turn it into a graphic novel some day.

If you just want to get your toes wet, look up his essays and read the title. He has a book called “the Defendant” where he writes a bunch of articles defending different things. If it sounds like a topic that interests you, check out what he has to say about it.

My favorite essay of his is the introduction to Tremendous Trifles (which is another collection of essays about the complexity and wonder of things we normally think of as mundane). This essay really sums up Chesterton very well, and I think it is pretty funny. Again, some day I will illustrate this work (it includes a fairy tale about two boys and a magic milk man).

I hope that helps. Once you read a few, let me know how you liked it. I love spreading GK!

P.S. Thanks so much, I really enjoyed that interview. Doug and Jason are two great dudes.

Ethan

Digital Bumper Sticker Wars

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:03:00 -0800

I have a pet peeve, and the internet as far as I understand was invented solely for lonesome fat guys like me to vent all things that annoy them and transmit that whining to the entire world with the click of a mouse. I have been blessed with the gift of complaining and I’ll be glad to throw another one on the digital heap before you.

I love debate, and I love people. I mean this truthfully. I love the idea that I could come toe to toe with someone of a totally opposing view from mine and the two of us could hash out our differences, and though never coming to any agreement, stand firm on the common ground of our own humanity and friendship. To see each other as “fellow travelers to the grave” as Scrooge’s nephew put it to him on Christmas Eve. To share the jovial relationship of Chesterton and Shaw.

To live in a country where people could be as polarized as we are and not be at war I do not see as tragic, I see it as miraculous. There is something in human nature that has been overcome when literally two societies can share this giant continent and not begin poking bayonets into their rivals. I think, next time someone on the internet really rubs you the wrong way, you should smile at the great fortune you have that neither you nor he has a police force, a spy next door or a great leader who is on its way to turn you into ashes for opposing the thoughts of such a mighty group.

You should smile, but you should also not be naive. You should shed a tear for the tragic degradation of the use of language in common argument. Real argument is hard, hard work. It requires so much of each party. It requires seeking to understand before seeking to be understood, researching ideas you despise, and honoring a person whose views you consider, literally, the root of all evil and the key to the majority of human suffering. Most people do not have it in them, and in the internet culture we don’t even have a conversation in us.

The internet has scraped away the truth about what we really want to do in an argument. We prefer to say some short, witty jab then be done with it, never having to deal with a response. 144 characters should suffice. Any more than that and you are probably one of those obnoxious ideologues.

Another popular form of argument is to post a picture of words. It is the digital equivalent of a giant bumper sticker. Often when a van drives by (and it is almost always a van) covered in bumper stickers, most people quietly, or not-so-quietly comment that the person must be a bit crazy and probably not incredibly pleasant. But our Facebook pages and our Twitter feeds are vans, and we have all become crazy bumper sticker covered eccentrics who love to silently shout at with decals any stranger who happens by without having to deal with their response.

Even more annoying is that very often these quips and jabs, while often presented as very clever are about as close to being completely meaningless as a Lady Gaga lyric. They claim to say something, and they act as if they are being very bold, but in the end all that has been presented is a sentiment that could only make sense in the context of the times. Take for instance the idea of minorities. Most of the time when the word minority is used it is used to invoke sympathy. Of course it is rarely answered a minority of what? Take another example, the 1%. Who is the 1%? A minority. But we do not call them that because while 1% invokes rage, minority invokes outrage at the majority (again, whoever that is). We have transferred our indignation from real acts of evil to trivial percentages of nameless, faceless groups.

It does make arguing simpler. If someone says something you don’t like, you tell them they need to open their mind. Of course it is never stated why the opening of a mind is in itself a good thing, it is only stated that if you do not open your mind in such a way as you are told, you are closed minded and therefore bad (unless you close your mind around the concept of openness, in which case your head will explode).

But the terms good and bad, right, wrong, evil, holy…. those are all avoided, because if you use any of those obnoxiously absolute terms you run the risk of having to begin defining things. Clarity is a chore. Thought, consideration, reason… these are things that the whole history of human disagreement has worked hard to minimize. To regress into the exhaustive labor of listening to your opposition would simply be anti-progress. Progress of course is code for good, but defining what we are progressing toward is frowned upon.

So we trade stark and final terms like “wicked” for open and flexible terms like “hateful”. We have tossed out truth claims and clung to sentiments alone. Hate is code for evil, though we are called to hate the hateful, we are also called to not acknowledge that the evil of hatred is determined by where the hatred is aimed.

We even have shied away from positive concepts that leave us no wiggle room to flash our open-mind badge. We like to celebrate change, revel in hope and do the happy dance of free thought. It’s all OK to celebrate as long as we don’t say what we will change into, what we really hope for or if the free thoughts are good or bad. Somehow, change is a virtue and any thought, no matter how vile, is virtuous because it was freely thunk.

As I have said, I believe that mankind has, voluntarily or not, created its own vast conspiracy against the dangers of too much thinking. The intellects of our time much more often seem to teach us what to think, rather than how to constructively think for ourselves. They provide us a nice speedy route to ultimate wisdom and the convenient luxury of condemnation of our opposition without all the messy build up. When you make an argument that is inherently meaningless you get all the perks of feeling like you have fought a battle without ever stepping onto the battlefield.

So we have evolved from the old nitpicking habit of trying to separate the noble entrepreneur from the greedy cheat, to the much more refined and slimline term “the rich”. When you add “the” to “rich” you almost always are not about to say something nice. You are about to take part in the old practice of condemning evil, but without using the term evil, you are going to lump all people who happen to have made a relative amount of money more than the rest into one giant loaf of rotten death. This is what we call nuanced thought, and we manage to do it with a straight face.

The simple position I try to take (that we should condemn acts of evil and praise the upright) turns out to not be so simple. I am accused of being simplistic, but I am only honest. For all the groups, sects, percentages and popular terms we use to avoid saying “right” or “wrong” all really mean one of those two things. Hope means right, the rich means wrong, the 1% means evil, the 99% means good. The advantage you have when you avoid using words that admit an absolute morality, is that in admitting that a good exists, you now you must define, defend and begin to do that giant chore of trying to unlock the very universe, the meaning of life and the purpose of man. Let’s not get all filthy digging into that. Let’s stick with calling people racist any time the argument gets a little too murky. Slinging dirt in your opponents eyes to disable them has always been considered bad form, but it has now become good form to, in the heat of opposition, empty a dump truck of feces on their entire person.

Again, racist is code for evil. You do not argue with evil, you vanquish it. You do not argue with a racist, they don’t deserve the honor. It’ a convenient label to toss around and any time you can use it you won’t have to engage in the obnoxious practice of defending your position.

Where do I conclude? Perhaps all I can do is beg you, the one or two people who read this, to not only honor your enemies, but honor the very idea of truth by doing the dirty work of knowing why you believe what you believe and seeking to understand your opposition. It will be an undertaking to last a lifetime, but it is right. Don’t settle for sentiment, for sentiment on its own is hollow. Look at the words on your digital bumper sticker. Do they really mean anything, or are they just words made to cut a gash in those you despise? Fight the redefinition of words that make communication impossible and polarity inevitable. Let your battle of ideas be a gentleman’s duel, not a terrorist bombing. Do your part to make the internet a little less vapid.

Together, if we believe, we can open our minds and unify around change and make a difference towards progress.

The end.

Believe it or not...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:41:14 -0800

I have about 10 unfinished blog posts I have written and saved unfinished for this blog. I just haven’t had the passion to make the mistake of posting them. The more I write, the more I think, and the more I think, the more I want to hold off on writing until I really feel I know what I want to say.

All that to say, sorry for this empty blog. Someday it just might have… STUFF.

Ethan

A Couple Links

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:41:00 -0800

So I started this blog and have not blogged anything yet. I keep starting, then not finishing blogs. In the meantime…

I posted a guest blog at Save the Cat and I have joined the Nobody’s Listening Podcast as an ongoing part of the lineup alongside the very funny James Kennison and John Steinklauber.

That Jesus Comic

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:24:00 -0700

note: This is an old blog I wrote when I had decided to quit the irreverent Jesus Comic I was working on with my friend Eric back in March of 2009. I also decided to write this apology for it, which many people are interested to read, but was in my now basically defunct MySpace blog, so here it is if you have never read it and want to know about me and that Jesus comic, or if you want to get my outlook on humor, morality and keeping some things sacred.

Last week I finished drawing a 90 page comic about Jesus Christ coming back to earth to kill Nazis with Ernest Hemingway, and battle Werewolf Hitler to the death. It was the crudest, darkest, and most “edgy” comic I had ever drawn. I wrote it with my friend, Eric.

I want to say, now that it is behind me, I regret it. Its one of those things that was so obviously a stupid and bad idea, I have no idea what I was thinking going into it, but I am going to try to walk myself through my thinking. Not for the sake of justification, but for the sake of growth, and realizing where I went wrong along the way.

To some people, drawing a comic about Jesus with a machine gun is no more controversial or harmful then drawing a comic about a badger eating a leaf. I think that may have partially been the attitude I started out with. I started out with the attitude, “a joke is a joke. If you can’t take a joke, move on.” I guess I adopted the philosophy that humor makes anything OK.

For those of you who are new to me… I’m a Christian. Surprise! This is the baggage this comic brings me. People look at it and see it as the obvious work of an immature atheist kid, trying to piss off all the Christians. And I did. I think I did piss off some Christians, but the thing is, I didn’t want to.

Stupid, I know. I mean, yeah, I have never been real concerned about offending people- but those are battles you must pick when making jokes. If I make a joke about going to hell for smoking a cigar, it is because I have a prepared defense of that position. When I made the Jesus comic, I was not prepared to defend it… it was just sloppy joking, and that’s it.

The way I see it, it was a back porch laugh session me and Eric had together that should have stayed there. One of those situations where you are coming up with absurd “what if” scenarios that usually involve lots of blood and poop, and are good fun when it’s just two guys on a porch smoking stogies and drinking beers. But I had bought into the idea that whatever you do in private should also be public, or you are not being genuine. I reasoned that by being as crass and foul mouthed as I am at my worst moments in private in my public works that I was somehow being a truly genuine person. I had somehow placed being genuine above being decent.

It has since come to me that there really is a difference between micro and macro conduct. In the quaint setting of a back porch laugh session with a close friend (as Eric truly is) I would still make any of the jokes you would find in the pages of the Jesus comic. Likewise, among guy friends, I’ll fart my ass off. But in public I know why I choose not to fart out loud. It is not because I am attempting to be a fraud, fooling people into thinking I don’t fart. It’s a matter of decency, and of context. Similarly, the jokes shared over cigars with a friend whose boundaries for humor are as easily pushed outward as mine, should be left on that porch to die with the cigar butts and the empty beer cans.

They should be left there, because when you take that crass, uninhibited part of yourself and wear it on your sleeve, people will see it as the whole of what you are. They will not see it as your friend sees it, a silly moment, a passing crude joke out of the norm. They will see it as your very person. When they think of your name, they will think of that crudeness above all, and they will not only think of it as a synonym for your name, they will see you as an advocate of it. They will see it not as a joke you once told, but as a position you passionately hold.

And I don’t passionately hold any position someone might extract from the Jesus comic. I don’t think that God and Jesus are separate. I do not think angels are gay, or that God is the floating head of Marlon Brando either. The thing is, when you are careless with something, you communicate that you do not care about it. This could not be further from the truth about me… I care deeply for Christianity.

Of course, I am writing this all for me, the guy who had to learn it by drawing 95 pages of it to learn the lesson. Most of you would have the sense not to do that. And though you wouldn’t do it, I do want to say, without scolding anyone, that I was amazed how few people actually challenged me on it. I want to thank those who did, without chastising those who didn’t. I can’t, I told you not to.

With all this said, I do want to say a few other things. First, I don’t think any less of Eric. This project was Eric’s baby. He asked if I wanted to join him on it. I was basically in a deal with him where I did work for his company, and as part of that work, I co-write and draw a comic. This was the idea he was most excited about, and I jumped aboard. At first, it was fun, but somewhere around page 50 I started asking myself why had started it. This is a comic Eric wears proudly, I don’t. It is how we are different. This difference should have been more closely examined before we teamed up on a comic about Jesus. The fact is, when I started it, I didn’t know where I stood. In fact, it may have taken making this comic to bring me to a place where I finally began to see the importance of knowing my place, where my passions are, and what I want to communicate to people through my work.

Some of you are probably just confused as to why I would make such a big deal about this… if you are, you probably do not hold the Christian faith in high regard. I am not here to say you must, but I am saying that I do, and I have not done a very good job of showing it.

This project brought out a flaw in myself I have known, and ignored, for a long time, and that is my humor and it’s boundaries. I love crude humor, immature joking, pushing those walls… but it is a weakness, and if I did not believe that good truly existed in this world, it would not be an issue. But, since I do believe good exists in this world, and that we are all accountable to it, it is an issue for me. I will always think Jesus running up a piss stream and kicking a nazi in the face is hilarious, but I will not devote an entire graphic novel to that one chuckle in the future.

This is not the dawn of a new era in my work that will be nothing but stale puns and bible stories. I am sure I will tell jokes that offend some people till the day I die. That is not my point. I have not learned to give up on “edgy” humor, only that I must examine what my intentions are, and what the ramifications might be, once it is printed and sitting in stores. There are a lot of funny things in the Jesus comic, moments I created I am proud of… witty lines, some great art… but in the end I was more ashamed of myself for exerting so much energy on a comic that in the end was not something I would be proud of. I may have my most controversial work yet to be created, but if I do, it will be on a subject I will defend to my grave, not a willy-nilly mockery of a faith I happen to love.

So, to those of you who read the Jesus comic as atheists or agnostics, thinking I was rooting against the religious, mocking their silly ideas along side you… I was not intending to, but I am afraid I was. Forgive me for deceiving you.

And to my fellow believers… sorry for being the retarded, obnoxious brother in the family. Sorry for my pride in and recklessness in my art. Sorry for alienating you, and trying to make you feel like squares, when I was just being sloppy.

I am not going to disown this book, and I will definitely not be disowning Eric. We are going to start a new project together that is a little less, shall we say, sacrilegious. Something we can call our own. I think we did some great work together on the Jesus comic, and I am looking forward to focusing those strengths onto something I won’t be so weary of down the road. [note: as of 10-26-11 that project remains unfinished]

Part of my problem? These last few years I have really been hiding, trying to avoid truly, honestly saying if I am or am not a Christian. Well… I am. Saying that alone puts an enormous amount of responsibility on me to not be a total douche. That’s not a bad thing. That’s pressure we could all use.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Ethan

This was the original design I submitted to Threadless for my...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:28:59 -0700

This was the original design I submitted to Threadless for my tee-shirt design. They had to cut some of the colors out and I like how it turned out, but I wanted to show how it was originally intended.

Holy crap, you do indeed have a tumblr now. This has pretty much made my day. I'm a huge fan of your comics and I'm uber keen to read your opinions on stuff.

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:08:38 -0700

I know this is not actually a question, but I felt I should give you an answer anyway, because you were the first person to ever send me a question. So thanks. I am starting to rethink this tumblr thing though, only because it seems to be hostile to commenting. For now I’ll stick with it.

"Politicians can solve almost any problem — usually by creating a bigger problem. But, so long..."

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:53:38 -0700

““Politicians can solve almost any problem — usually by creating a bigger problem. But, so long as the voters are aware of the problem that the politicians have solved, and unaware of the bigger problems they have created, political “solutions” are a political success.” -Thomas Sowell”

- http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/10/18/random_thoughts_111714.html

No Bears or Axes

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 04:25:00 -0700

I have the same weaknesses as most artists, I don’t know when to shut up, I think people want to read or look at everything I come up with, and I am very opinionated. I have the temptation, like most artists, to use my art to trick people into a sermon by giving them something totally unrelated. I admit this temptation while I also admit that this quality in artists (and any profession) really annoys me. You read a web comic about a clumsy woodchuck and suddenly find a blog about global warming underneath it. You take a class in 14th century Greek Pottery and get a lecture on why George Bush is the devil. You decide to follow a ficitional cartoon character on twitter and are inundated with Ron Paul endorsements. I understand the desire to use a platform to share information that is, in your mind, for the greater good. But I find it dishonest, even immoral to advertise one thing then present another. If your blog is titled “how to square dance” and half the entiries are praising Tea Party rallies, you have done something immoral. You have lied.

So I have decided to hopefully lead by example. In our feelings-based culture, compartmentalizing is a forgotten art. We can’t be friends on the street and enemies in the ballot box, it seems that there is a large group of people who have to mingle their politics, faith and opinions into everything, especially places it is the most unwelcome. I think honesty is a good thing, but it is bad to force your honesty on people in dishonest ways. I think it is important to share your beliefs, but to offer a piece of bread than give a scorpion is just mean. Hey, that’s in the Bible. (admittedly out of context)

This blog is me, talking about whatever comes to mind. I know that even here I have to be careful what i say, but I ask you as my reader to afford me the same respect I have shown you in not misleading you by way of my art. If you find what I say here annoying, don’t read it, but if you liked my comics before, there is no reason to stop once you realized you consider me a buffoon on other subjects. This wil almost inevitably happen for most of you at some point. But if I had to vet every artist I admired to make sure they were aligned with every doctrine I hold sacred, I would have to burn a lot of books and block a lot of web sites. Likewise, even if i find your way of thinking completely reprehensible I sincerely want you to enjoy my art. I love America because people with such opposing views can still have a beer together, though that fact seems to be fading.

I know this all makes it sound like I plan to say some ultra-controversial things here, and maybe i will. What counts as controversial nowadays fills a wide gamut. But controversy will not be my intention. I just want to be able to talk about life in general and not feel like I am using my art to lure you. If you came here, you came to get to know me. If you want to know my work, that is already knowable elsewhere.

Ethan