Author: Cynical Woman

Cartoonist, Artist, Geek, Evil Crafter, Girl Scout Troop Leader and Writer. Also, a zombie. I haven't slept in I don't know how long.
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ACW Episode ?? – Oh, the horror!!

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Personally, I think this is one of the best self portraits I've ever done.

I apologize for the lateness of this week's webcomic, and for the general lack of posts this week. Last weekend, I went camping with several volunteers for outdoor training with Girl Scouts. While participating in some adventure games, I hit an uneven patch of ground and my knee went “POP! POP!” And that was that. Yours truly went down like Moses in the fifth.

So this week, I'm hobbling around the house on crutches. I'm avoiding flights of stairs as much as I can, which means I'm not getting up to the office where my scanner is. So everything on the blog is going to be dne in the iPad for a while.

Anyway, about this week's webcomic. I love candy, especially chocolate. Especially peanut butter cups. In fact the only thing, I love more than peanut butter cups is very fancy dark chocolate. So every year at Halloween, the Hubster buys all this candy. And then he goes off trick-or-treating with the girls while I stay home with this big bowl of candy that I HAVE TO GIVE AWAY TO ANY YARD APE WHO SHOWS UP AT MY DOOR!!

So. Now I have a bum knee and no candy. Except for the stuff I managed to stash away before the trick-or-treaters showed up, and that stuff is all mine. Isn't that right, my precioussssssss…

Hopefully I'll be back to regular posting next week. Until I am, it's Personal Cartoon Drawing Month (better known as PerCaDraMo) again this month, which means I'm drawing cartoons every day, so those should show up here. Enjoy!

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Rats! Episode 111 – Do you love a gal in uniform?

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Rats! webcomic

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized webcomic!

I don’t know what it’s like for female cadets today, but way back in my day, when dinosaurs roamed the upper quad…

Eh, actually I don’t know if this ever really was a problem at all. I had very little luck with dating, no matter if I wore the uniform or civvies. I was just not the kind of person who attracted a lot of dates. To this day I’m not quite sure how I caught the Hubster’s eye, but he’s still here twenty-some years later and he’s still happy to see me every day, so I must be doing something right.

But seeing this cartoon today makes me wonder. Do people love a gal in uniform? I did my master’s degree thesis on gender stereotypes and leadership roles in the military. Some of what I found in there suggested that the old roles of seductress, iron maiden, pet and mother still applied. Women had to fit on of these four roles to have a place in the military, otherwise they had no place at all. But a lot of what I found told me that women in the military weren’t running into these gender stereotypes all that often, so I have no conclusive evidence one way or the other on the subject. For my own part, when I was in the military, I was treated like a person, not a stereotype. I did my job to the best of my ability and the people around me treated me with respect. When I was in the Cadet Corps, I was treated as a geek, which I was, and I wasn’t all that popular, but that was no big shock to me because I was seen as a geek in high school and I was treated the same way there too. So, whatever.

If anybody currently in the VTCC, or anybody who was in the VTCC at any time, has any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them. Post comments here on the blog or email me. Thanks! Oh, and Happy Halloween!

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ACW Episode 183 – Let me take you higher…

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The Adventures of Cynical Woman Web Comic!

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized web-comicky goodness!

This is the perfect comic. I drew it exactly as I had imagined it. The colors came out brilliantly, IMHO. And the story is 100% completely true.

The second day of our last-minute vacation to the Shenadoah mountains, Hubster decided to take us all hiking. There was one trail, Bear Fence Ridge I think it was called, that included the words “rock scramble” in the description on the map. I was hoping for an alternate/indie music festival. Instead, what we got was miles of trail that meandered over stones taller than Hubster and I combined. I use the term “trail” loosely here. The actual footpath disappeared as soon as we hit the first giant pile of rocks. From then on, we had to scramble over the rocks (thus the term “rock scramble”) and follow hash marks of paint scattered here and there over the ridiculously increasingly dangerous landscape. And did I mention that somehow the kids ended up taking the lead? They ran right out in front of us the moment we hit the worst terrain and skipped their way up to heart-stopping heights to balance on the edges of cliffs that offered a breath-taking view of a sheer drop that went 50 or more feet straight DOWN.

Every time we reached the summit of one of these piles of mountainous stone, I kept thinking, “This is it! We can’t get any higher up! There’s no way the park rangers would make this path any worse! Not when they must know it could possibly get people killed!” But then we’d head for that next hash mark and sure enough, there was an even bigger pile of rock to climb.

When we reached the highest summit, Hubster and I stood there, staring down at the sheer drop only inches on either side of us. That was when he turned to me and confessed, “Ya know, I have a sleight fear of heights.” I swear I came so close to decking him. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that if I hit him, I’d probably knock him off the mountain, and then I’d have to go down the cliff face and retrieve his dead body myself. After more than an hour of rock scrambling, I was simply too tired to do that, so I waited until we got back to the car in a nice safe parking lot to hit him.

Today is the day Hurricane Sandy is supposed to do its worst damage to our area. Hopefully everyone out there stays nice and safe today. I plan to hunker down on the couch with my latest stash of yarn and work on more creepy craft projects. I think pretty soon I’m going to start posting pics of the weird dolls I’ve been making. I’ve been showing the works-in-progress on Twitter, and folks really seem to like them, so I may start blogging about crochet and spooky projects on a regular basis once I’ve got a few more pieces made up. So you have something to look forward to! Or run away from screaming! Depends on if you like crochet, I guess.

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Rats! Episode 110 – Fight the power?

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Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized comic!

Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized comic!

Some days you just want to rage at the machine… or, in this case, the Cadet Corps. Go for a jog and blow off the steam that way instead. It’s not worth the stick cards.

By the way, do you guys still do stick cards? I think I still have some tucked away in my closet somewhere.

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ACW Episode 182 – Vacationing with the Hubster

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The Adventures of Cynical Woman!

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized comic!

This is exactly what it’s like to go on vacation with Hubster. I have been married to this man for almost 20 years, and he has just about damn near killed me every one of those years by taking me on vacation. I remember our honeymoon. It was a death-march through Disney World. In Montreal, he walked us up and down the mountainside of the Mont Royal cemetery, looking for some mythical passageway to the park on the other side of the hill. He never found it, and when I slipped and fell in red clay mud and ruined my best linen skirt, trying to follow him down a steep path, I nearly killed him and left him there among the crypts. And then there was the time he nearly killed my aging mother by walking her to death in the Virginia Zoo.

Anyway. A week and a half ago, the kids had a four-day holiday from school, so at the last minute, Hubster planned a trip to the Shenandoah Mountains. He and I both went to college at Virginia Tech, so we love it up there. The kids had never been, and we hadn’t had a vacation in the last couple years, so I thought, why not? It was only four days, and surely the kids would slow him down…

We headed to the Shenandoah National Park on Thursday and spent the night at the Big Meadows Lodge. Beautiful place, absolutely gorgeous. The main lodge has a large sitting room with lots of comfy chairs and couches, a roaring fire place, and a big picture window view of the mountains. While Hubster played checkers with the kids, I sat on one of the comfy couches and crocheted contentedly.

It was the last peaceful moment I had all weekend.

Before dawn the next morning, Hubster got us all up so we could hike to one of the local viewing spots and see the sun rise. The kids started complaining right off the bat, but I knew it was way too early for that yet. This was only the first of many hikes Hubster had planned for the day. When we made it to our destination and the sun came up, the kids suddenly got all ecstatic!  “WOOHOO! WE HIKED ALL THE WAY OUT HERE BEFORE THE SUN CAME UP!! IT’S SO BEE-YOO-TEE-FUL OUT HERE!! NOW CAN WE GET BREAKFAST?!”

So we hiked back to the lodge, had breakfast, packed up the car, and checked out before heading out on our next hike. Which was considerably longer and tougher than the first one. And the hikes only got longer and tougher from there.

Long story short, the kids discovered that day what I had known for two decades. Given the chance, their father will walk until every member of the family falls to the ground dead. And then he’ll keep walking, not realizing he’s left us all behind. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love us. I know he does. But the man has to walk. And since I married him, I have to walk to. Until death do us part.

‘Nuff said.

I’ll try to post pics from the trip later on in the week. As exhausting as this trip was, it was beautiful.

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Adventures of Cynical Woman – post mini-vacation

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A good cartoonist would have a backlog of comics available when they go out of town. A good cartoonist would plan for surprise mini-vacations. A good cartoonist would have figured out how to draw without getting carsick while riding on the Skyline Drive.

I am not a good cartoonist.

I'll have a comic posted about the aforementioned surprise mini-vacation next week. For now, this will have to do.

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Flashback Friday! Zombie

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Zombie! by Helen E. H. Madden, drawn with ArtRage in the iPad

Unlike other Flashback Friday drawings, this one is from not-so-long ago. In fact, it's the first drawing I ever did on an iPad. It was Christmas, almost 3 years ago, and the iPad was brand-new, right out of the box. I'd been dying to try drawing on an iPad, so I spent most of Christmas Day sketching this.

Three years later, I think it's safe to say getting an iPad changed a lot of things for me. It got me more interested in digital art, let me improve my drawing skills, and helped me realize that more than anything, I wanted to throw myself into my art. These days, I draw on the iPad, sketch cartoons in pen and ink, and create odd little characters out of felt, thread, yarn, and whatever else I can get my hands on. It's a happy way of love, I have to admit. And it all started with this drawing.

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Rats! Episode 109 – Strange life

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Rats! webcomic

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This is pretty much how I felt when I was a freshman at Virginia Tech. Me in my uniform, surrounded by all kinds of strange and weird people. Not that I wasn’t strange and weird myself, but these folks were a different kind of strange and weird, you know?