Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding

Hello friends! Thank you for coming. Here are some of the questions most frequently asked by the voices in my head. With luck one or two questions will align with those you yourself may have. Feel free to comment if you have any inquiries that the voices in my head overlooked. Tell your friends, it’s free to sign up for my Patreon, purchase of paywalled material is optional and affordable.

1. Are you okay?

Physically I’m fine, aside from gradual loss of eyesight and tooth loss from stress. For the past 10 months I have been struggling extra with severe depression and feelings of absolute worthlessness. Often I can’t control my temper, which was never good in the first place. From 1991 to 2024 I had deadlines for printed periodicals to fulfill. Now I don’t. This is the best I can do as far as explaining myself (see also my Bands I Useta Like site). Last year I produced the least amount of original work that I have in decades.

A cartoonist draws cartoons for the entirety of his or her life. Retirement comes when your body shuts down and physically prohibits you from drawing. Otherwise you keep it up until you die. That has always been my plan.

I don’t give a fuck what your politics are; the Biden administration was fatal for America’s creative class. Period. If you see a printed comic book selling well in 2025, it’s either junk from a branch of a faceless mega-corporation, or a DEI-based grift. What DEI has taught me is that a comic book drawn by a “trans”, non-white or non-male high school dropout is worth more than a comic book drawn by someone with decades of experience in the medium. Even if the former example doesn’t sell a single copy. Even if they literally can’t give it away.

There’s no point in me telling you this. The people who could change it are too happy with how things are. The days of publishers defending a saleable yet controversial artist are deader than disco. Deader than Ed Piskor, all due respect.

Talk out of turn, and any publishing imprint you could name will throw you to the wolves without a second thought. You could ask Ed Piskor about it, if the “professionals” who drove him to suicide last April weren’t still working in the industry.

2. What’s happening with Bands I Useta Like?

It’s a website and five proprietary comic magazines. The magazine was compiled into a book. There are two limited-edition collections of the titular strip. At present the website has 577 posts, dating back eleven years. There are roughly 140 comic strips viewable on the website, for free.

A sixth issue of Bands I Useta Like magazine has been informally in production for years. At one point it was called Bad Shape©. At present I am entertaining some radical ideas about a “brand refresh”. Don’t let that worry you; I pay out of pocket for web hosting and domain name registration, so there’s no chance I’ll just throw my hands up and quit. (Never let a domain name lapse; you’ll never get it back from degenerate Chinese squatters. I don’t care if they’re Chinese. They’re fucking scum.)

Quick quiz: which of these options holds more long-term value for a human being?

a. An independent comic book that you purchased off a shelf with your hard-earned money
b. An independent comic book that was given to you free by its creator, as a token of gratitude for your support

I have wasted my life trying to market my work as well as creating it. No one has ever done this successfully. I mashed my cartoonist identity up with my skills as a website designer and came up with worthless mush. I don’t care what “people want to buy”. I care about doing what I need to do and that’s it. Show me a cartoonist who worries about their “bottom line” all day and I’ll show you a literal prostitute.

If you like my work, if you like the idea of the characters I’ve created continuing into futurity, you have nothing to worry about.

3. What’s happening with Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding?

CFB  had an unplanned hiatus for seven months not long after I was laid off from my “straight” newspaper cartoonist job of 26 years, in March of 2024. Without a publisher paying me regularly I stopped being a cartoonist and stopped drawing altogether.

CFB has been a website since 2017. There are six collection books and over 500 pages of original material, dating back to 2009. I have attempted vanity animated projects of the property at least three times, and each time I have been discouraged by Adobe’s nefarious subscription requirements. Animation is a glacial prospect, requiring months if not years of work. Adobe Creative Suite is like $60 a month.

My considerable skill with Macromedia Flash is extorted by the Adobe company. I don’t have the time to learn another animation program, so I get to pay out the ass as a reward. Do me a favor and make that make sense. Adobe is just like my old alma mater SCAD; they don’t want to inspire artists and creatives, they just want to make as much money as possible off people’s pipe dreams. SCAD got me my first newspaper cartoon job in 1991. You will literally never see or hear a successful creative thanking that school more than I just did (granted I’m not successful).

By the way, from one who knows: Photoshop in its current subscription-based version is as much ruined as it is improved over the 20-year old version I used until a few years ago. Recently I thought I’d lost my mind because I couldn’t find the Paint Bucket tool. At one point, the canvas began involuntarily rotating, without provocation, and I had to shut down and restart because I couldn’t stop it. But hey- the Selection brush is back!

Oh yeah- I forgot to mention. Couple months back Adobe customer support fucked up my laptop. I had to go to Geek Squad for help. At present, the single solitary program I can run on my laptop is Photoshop. Adobe CC took up all my hard drive space. I’ve been too scared ever since to install anything else. I almost bought another laptop. Oh wait, no- I got scammed on Facebook  by a “free laptop!! For real!!!” offer.

I’m doing you a real big fucking favor right now by not raging on people from/in India. I’m respecting your intelligence on the matter in the belief that you will eventually figure things out. I’m trying to be nice.

Facebook, Adobe, anything connected to Elon Musk- I am trusting that you will eventually work out which nationality of people has made them almost unusable. If you think it’s funny, or you think I’m being racist, then someone else pays your bills, or you live in India. GFY.

Ceaseless Fables, on its dedicated website, is clearly marked “GENUINE LABOR OF LOVE”. It has never made me a dime and never will. It will continue as long as I want it to, or until I die, whichever comes first, and then it will be totally forgotten about. If I’m lucky I’ll get an independent licensed toyline out of it, which is one of my long-term goals. But the point is that it continues whether people care or they don’t.

I don’t care which comic books sell right now. I can tell you without knowing that I wouldn’t wipe my ass with any one of them. Japanese manga is literally the only thing keeping the medium afloat. Look at any current Marvel comic book and tell me that children would learn to read in the opposite direction so they could experience it. Bull shit they would.

That’s right folks; comics in Japan are so good that American children learn to read right-to-left to read them. They don’t even bother to read Marvel comics left-to-right. All those totally amazing tales of transgendered wheelchair-bound Muslim BIPOC superheroes are going to waste. Even Fantagraphics’ incredible high-priced chapbooks about lesbians enduring the COVID lockdown or Donald Trump’s genocidal fascism collect dust on the shelves.

Golly gee, I don’t know what went wrong. It must be the patriarchy or white supremacy or something. There’s no way in hell it has anything to do with amplifying the voices of the most insufferable, entitled hucksters on the face of the earth. Naw, I’m sure it’s “whitey” and his incessantly racist fixation on antiquated notions like “merit”, “dignity” and “effort”.

This is why I’ve stopped talking to people. This is what comes out. No one wants to hear or read this shit.

Funny thing- you know what else no one wants to hear about these days? Marvel. Star Wars. DC. Superheroes. Hollywood. Celebrities. Pop musicians. Activists. Politicians.

Because every one of those things has been poisoned by unqualified people who got the job because their identity checked off a company’s ESG/DEI quota. Until that stops, nothing will ever get better. The entire creative world will continue to exist only as a promotional tool of whichever social agenda makes the biggest parent company look the most “progressive”. And anything that goes against that agenda will be shunned and destroyed. Forgotten as anything but a cautionary tale.

Here comes the part where I’ve burned myself out. Manic phase: concluded. I’m gonna go lie down and try to dream about life 20 years ago. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Everything is fine. Don’t worry.