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 172 – Learn something new everyday!

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I’m traveling **again** so today’s webcomic and this blog post were all done on the iPad. I’m sure it hasn’t come out quite right, since I can’t get WordPress on the iPad to cooperate with me, but I’ll try to fix it when I get home.

Hopefully, when I get home, my new solder and soldering braid will also be there. I’m trying to complete a simple kit from WayneandLayne.com, but the solder that came with the iron I bought doesn’t melt very welland it’s making life difficult. I’m hoping new, better solder will give me a better shot at learning to solder. I suppose it would have helped if I hadn’t inadvertantly bought the **surface mount** soldering kit instead of the **through hole** kit. Oh well. Learn something new every day!

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Flashback Friday! Stereotypes are NOT super!

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“Cynical Woman” by Helen E. H. Madden, 2002

Ten years ago, long before I started drawing the Cynical Woman webcomic, I had this idea to do a short animation film about a superhero and her name was Cynical Woman.  This Cynical Woman was supposed to be cranky, snarky, and very curvy, which I knew many people would interpret as “fat.” I’d been collecting comic books for years, and I knew what the standard was for female heroes.  I did have a super-slim superhero in my story –  Glory Gal, sister of Cynical Woman and leader of the Model Citizens.  She was supposed to represent everything I despised about the stereotypical depiction of female characters in comic books.

However, I came up with this project the year before I gave birth to my first child, and due to the complexity of making an animated film and the fact that I was pregnant and then had a very colicky baby, nothing ever came of the project.  I’ve got a few odd bits and pieces of stuff floating around –  character turn-arounds, some sample animation, a few story outlines – but that’s as far as I ever got.

I’m showing you this version of Cynical Woman now because of this contest I read about on deviantArt. As a 43–year-old geek/artist, I’ve hit my limit with regards to stereotypical images of women in sci-fi, fantasty, and comic book art. Just about every time I see a woman depicted in these genres, she’s usually wearing some stupid, ridiculous costume that barely covers her watermelon-sized, gravity-defying breasts.  This attitude that sci-fi/fantasy art equals mostly naked babe running around in 8–inch heels and carrying giant sword is so pervasive, it’s mind-boggling. And just when I think it might be getting better, that artists might realize that women should be portrayed as women and not just as plastic-fantastic sex toys, I run across another image of “babe with killer-boobs” and I want to beat my brains out on my desk.

Case in point.  Recently, I found out my once-favorite magazine, Digital Artist, decided to switch formats. When I first subscribed to Digital Artist, it was a magazine that focused on a wide variety of digital art methods and subjects.  There were articles on digital painting and collage, inking manga, creating t-shirt and sticker designs, etc.  The artwork showcased within the magazine ran the range from fantasy and sci-fi to natural landscapes and animal portraits to abstract art and everything in between.  I loved Digital Artist magazine! When I first found Digital Artist magazine in my local bookstore, I turned cartwheels in the aisles. “This!” I thought.  “This is the answer to Imagine FX!  This is a magazine that doesn’t portray women like they’re nothing more than brainless sex toys!  This is a magazine that realizes not all digital artists are just stereotypically sex-starved, testosterone-poisoned guys looking for wank material. This is a magazine that realizes there are female (and male) artists out there who know digital art isn’t just about soft-core pin-up girls.  This is a magazine that realizes women artists have money and they’re willing to spend on a quality magazine about digital art!!”

Sadly, that magazine is now dead.  As of the current issue, Digital Artist is now Fantasy Artist, and it looks like the editors and publishers have very successfully managed to turn their wonderful magazine into a clone of Imagine FX. And I’m so ticked off with what they’ve done that I’m about to cancel my subscription. I’ve been advised to wait at least one more issue to be sure whether or not I want to do this, but after seeing the cover for premiere issue of Fantasy Artist and reading through some of the articles, I think it’s pretty clear that I (a 43–year-old woman with a brain) am no longer the target audience for them.

So I’m angry and more than a little frustrate, and I want to say that if you are as tired as I am of the stereotypical images of sexy pin-up babes that pervade sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book art, take a moment to think about how you could make a difference in those genres.  Enter the “Create a Fat Female Superhero” contest. Write an email of complaint to Fantasy Artist magazine. Create your own drawings of women in sci-fi and fantasy. Draw what you want to see, don’t simply accept the garbage that’s out there. Because honestly, women are a lot more than stick figures with gravity-defying boobs, no matter how much magazine and comic book editors and publishers try to tell you otherwise. In fact, it’s high time we told them what women look like. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll listen.

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Rats! Episode 100 – Parts is parts!

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

I have been there and done that, and it is not funny when you’re missing one tiny piece of an M-16 rifle. Especially that little pin that holds the bolt together. No, not funny at all.

Except in hindsight, many, many years later.

Quick tip, when you clean your M-16, take off your field cap and put that down on the table beside you. Put all the small parts in there so you can find them later.

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ACW 171 – Let there be light!

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I’m easily entertained.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting, working on various projects that I want to try with the Girl Scouts this coming school year. You see, one of the moms said she and her daughter would only stay on if things were “interesting” this coming year. And yours truly took that as a challenge. Then I read through the badge and journey books and found them to be… boring. Sure there’s some interesting stuff in there, but it’s been presented as dull, dry, and devoid of fun. And for all of Girl Scouts emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), there was danged little of it appearing in either book. So I started looking for ways to rewrite the books, ways that included doing more interesting activities. Like say, learning basic electronics by making LED throwies.

To be clear, I checked with people at our service unit and council to make sure I had leeway to do this. The girls do NOT have to earn any badges. They can do whatever activities they want. But anything we do that doesn’t comply with the badge guidelines can only count toward patches. What’s the difference between a badge and a patch? As I understand it, badges are approved by Girl Scouts USA, and the guidelines to earn them are in the Girl Guide books and Journey books. Patches are for any other activities the girls participate in. Badges go on the front of the sash or the vest. Patches go on the back.

Right now, I’m pulling together a list of projects the girls can do, some of which they can earn badges for and some of which they will earn patches for. Wherever possible, I’m shooting for badges. A lot of the badge requirements can be dressed up as a lot more fun than they’ve been presented. But if I come across a cool project or activity that we don’t have a badge for, and the girls want to do it, then we’re doing it.  Because you know what? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges. They’re nice to have, but we don’t need them.

What we do need is to educate girls to be leaders, and to get them excited about STEM. So I’m doing all I can right now to make that happen. I’ll be sure to share the results with you as we go along

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Episode 99 – Just a short walk in the woods

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Two miles is a loooooooooooooong way to walk if you’ve got to haul a ton of equipment on your back. It’s one of the reasons why I always hated going out into the field. I just didn’t have the stamina to carry a heavy pack and a rubber duck (the nickname for the fake M-16s we had to carry) up and down a mountainous road. Plus we always went out into the field when it was freezing cold. And we had to eat MREs, which in general were pretty gross back then. And we had to pull guard duty half the night, and then would get attacked by another group of cadets at some godly hour of the morning. And there was always some officer breathing down our necks, screaming at us, “What are you gonna do NOW, cadet?! The enemy’s called in mortar rounds! What are you gonna do?! Die?! Is that your plan?!”

So no, I didn’t enjoy going into the field. And I didn’t care much for camping in general except when I went with my family, and since my dad spent 21 years in the Infantry, it was pretty much just like going out on a field training exercise.  Except maybe he didn’t yell as much.

Then last April I ended up taking 7 Girl Scouts on a local camping trip. I stressed over this dang trip for weeks. Since I was the volunteer in charge for this outing, I had to plan all the meals, buy all the food, figure out how we were going to get it all cooked. I had to put together the packing list for the troop equipment we’d need and another packing list for the girls. I knew it was going to be cold and muddy that weekend too, and all the while as I prepared for this trip, I kept having flashbacks to my days in ROTC.

Naturally, I was miserable the day we headed out for the camping trip, but the girls were really excited, and I was determined not to pass on my loathing of camping to them.  This was something they wanted to do, so they should enjoy it and I shouldn’t rain on their parade.  Then in all the hustle and bustle of setting up camp and feeding the girls and participating in the classes the service unit set up, something really weird happened to me. It actually got to be kind of fun.

The thing was, I knew what I was doing, unlike my 20–year-old self back in ROTC. I knew how to set up camp and I knew how to get the food cooked, and I knew how to keep the girls busy and get them from one activity to the next without losing any of them and I knew to make them drink water and wear bug spray and sunblock. I knew what I was doing. And I was doing it automatically, without having to think about it. Because I was trained to do it in Army ROTC and in the Army Reserves.

At one point during the weekend, one of the older Girl Scouts from another troop gave me a really funny look.

“What?” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know what it is, but you look like you belong out here?”

“Say what?”

She shrugged. “You’re not wearing camo or anything, but you look like you belong out here doing what you’re doing. Like you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh. That might be because I spent some time in the Army Reserves.”

“Yeah! That’s it! Hey, they let you in the Reserves with hair like that?”

“Uh, no…”

It’s strange to me how much I fall back on my military training these days. I wasn’t a career officer, and I certainly wasn’t an Infantry man. But the training I had was intense enough that it still hangs with me. And it’s come in handy now that I find myself leading a troop of Girl Scouts. As much as I did not enjoy my time in the military, I never would have expected that to happen.

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ACW 170 – Deep Thoughts

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Yes, my youngest child actually said these things.

The kids and I come up with a new theme every summer, some sort of activity we do together, some book we read together, or some show we all watch.  The first summer we did this, we spent every evening reading the Bone graphic novels. It was the first time I think I ever really enjoyed summer.  The summer after that, we made pie every week and raised a lot of butterflies. The summer after that, last summer, we watched the anime series Chi’s Sweet Home every night before bed (and raised more butterflies).  For this summer, we’re watching Star Trek, the original series, and doing lots of DIY projects, including some basic electronics projects like crystal radios and LED throwies.

The kids are enamored with Star Trek. Absolutely in love. We’ve been watching an episode a night, and we’re not even through the first season yet. I’m in love with it too. I’m glad to see that a show I watched as a kid has stood up so well to the test of time. STOS isn’t perfect, of course. There are still plenty of episodes where you can spot plot holes big enough to drive a bus through. But when the writing lags, the acting, the sets, the costumes, and the effects still manage to suck me in. I’m enjoying this as much as the kids, and Hubster’s even having a good time watching with us.

One thing that is obvious is that Star Trek is still thought provoking. After every episode, the girls both have questions to ask. Pixie’s philosophy question, (“Are we real, or just someone else’s dream?”) isn’t a fluke. We’ve been getting all kinds of questions like that from her.  Meanwhile, Princess wants to know how the show was made.  “Mom! How do they make the star ship fly around that planet like that?”  “Mom! How do they do they make people disappear when they do the transporter?” “Mom! How did they make Spock’s ears pointy like that?!” It makes my heart go pitter-pat to have these discussions with my kids. What’s even better is that with today’s technology, we can make our own little movies. I spent one evening last week showing the girls how to make a “space ship” (made from an egg-carton Pixie painted up) sail across a scene (our very dark-colored carpet) like it was flying through outer space. All we needed, aside from the egg carton ship and the dark background, was a simple stop-motion animation app on my iPad. And then used iMove to put that together with another stop-motion scene of little toy people rushing out of a castle to greet them.  Add a little music and voila! We had three seconds of a movie.

So that’s our summer fun. And I’m working hard to figure out how to extend that fun into the fall. It gets hard to do stuff like this during the school year. Homework and Girl Scouts and karate classes eat up so much time. I’m trying to work out a schedule that will let me plan our free time better so we can keep doing this. We’ll see if I can make it work. If I can, maybe I can extend that summer joy into the rest of the year.

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Flashback Friday! Magneto!

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“Magneto” by Helen E. H. Madden, ink sketch, 21 July 1993

I don’t know what possessed me to draw this particular image of Magneto. I know I copied it out of a comic book, but I don’t know why exactly. Or rather, I do know that I was trying to improve my art skills at the time by studying other people’s work and copying, and I do know that at the time I was seriously addicted to comic books. But I cannot tell you why I chose to draw Magneto. I don’t recall him being my favorite X-Men villain/anti-hero/hero (depending on which storyline was going on at the time, he could have been all three at once).  Why didn’t I draw Storm or the Sensational She-Hulk, two characters I absolutely love? Why didn’t I draw Wolverine?  Or why not draw Dream or Death from The Sandman?

No idea. But as far as copies of drawings of Magneto go, I don’t think this one is half bad.

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Rats! Episode 98 – Under Pressure

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Things are no better today than they were when I drew this comic. Back then it was all tests, papers, quizzes and presentations. Now it’s kids, work, house cleaning, kids, more work, etc. The fact is, my life is non-stop stress. I do find ways to deal with it, but I have to be careful not to get too overloaded. So for any of you college kids out there who think you’re overloaded right now? Just you wait. Life does get busier!

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ACW 169 – I’m in a Mood

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That’s my hair all right! And I have been in a mood lately. A nostalgic mood, to be exact. Not sure what started it. It might have been the trip up to Pennsylvania a few weeks ago to see my aunt. My late grandma’s old house is right down the road from my aunt’s place, so I spent a lot of time in that neighborhood as a kid. Being there as an adult with kids of my own was kind of startling. It was nice to see my aunt and uncle again, but sad to realize the house my grandmother lived in had been sold to another family. I had a hard time picking it out because they’d made changes to the place.

I also spent some time this weekend touring an old light ship, which really made me nostalgic. That light ship looked and smelled exactly like the Army tugboats I used to work with. Walking through it, seeing the tiny little kitchen and the tiny little bunk rooms and the tiny little office for the ship’s captain really took me back. There’s nothing quite like small military boats. They are a world unto themselves. I caught myself thinking while we walked around that if the apocalypse were to suddenly hit, I could be quite happy holed up in that little boat, even it if was permanently dry-docked in cement. It would make a neat little house.

I think maybe the final kicker to my nostalgia trip is the book I’m currently reading, “Howl’s Moving Castle.” I had seen the movie years back, but hadn’t realized it was based on a book. I made my find in the kids’ section of our local library and immediately snatched it up. Reading that book reminds me of all the evenings I spent at Virginia Tech watching anime with my friends. I miss those days, especially when summer rolls around.

Oh well. That’s enough of my trip down memory lane. I’m going downstairs now to watch TV with the kids. We’re watching “The Menagerie” from Star Trek, the original series.

I know. I know. Have fun, ya’ll.