Who
is... Donna Barr? Donna
Barr has been drawing since 1954, writing since 1962, published since 1986,
and publishing since 1996.
She has a Bachelors' Degree in German, and
is a veteran of the United States Army (1970-1973).
Readers worldwide
follower her THE DESERT PEACH, STINZ, BOSOM ENEMIES, HADER
AND THE COLONEL, among others.
She is recognized by her peers as
a pioneer in the field of drawn books and their use in new technologies of distribution
and reproduction. She is a contributor to the world's largest webcomics site,
moderntales.com, and its affiliate
sites.
She achieved her lifetime career goal in 2004 when her life's
work -- past, present and future -- has been accepted as part of the San Diego
State University's Library's Special Collection, and will be available to students
and professors for research, and to the public for exhibits.
She can
be emailed at barr at stinz dot com (remove spam barriers). She answers. Keep
the sentences short.
Here we go, another dumper article. All the stuff I’ve been collecting for a month or two.
First of all, an apology (kinda sorta) to everybody who starts arguments with me on email or websites and then gets all hurt and tells me they’ll never talk to me again. Well, hell, how is THIS a bad thing? I’m not your mommy, your father-confessor or your psychologist. The next time one of you passive-aggressive grovelers with your fake strokes shows up, I’m charging you $85.00 an hour, and that’s cheap. Up front. PayPal. And the guys who claim they are old high school buddies who want to talk sex to me and go berserk the first time I use the term cunt nigger (I get to use this term. I’m FEMALE, fool) – it’s $120.00 an hour for you clowns.
This is why I like the English. They will happily trade abuse as a form of national humor. Why does that have a masturbatory sound to it? This may explain much.
And now on to the list of stuff that Silver Bullet asked me to comment on. We’ll deal with that list first:
1. Submission Engine
Why I call it that. I already commented on this one. And no, I don’t remember which article so you’ll just have to GO BACK AND READ THEM ALL. Screw up a few readers’ heads while I’m at it, why don’t I.
2. Experienced Predator
I was telling someone that Roberta Gregory and I hunted outside the commie book fences and recommending said someone do the same. He frowned and said, “Yeah, but you and Roberta are experienced predators.”
3. Things My Mother Told Me That I Wish I'd Listened To
I listened to my mother. If I didn’t, there would have been mayhem. And possible loss of eyeballs and vertebrae. The woman was a grizzly bear – without the pelt. A small grizzly bear, but with total psychic teeth and claws. Brrrrrrr….
I remember her flinging a frying pan at my father, and missing as a warning. My brother remembers the pan knocking Dad down. Both times are probably true.
Dad used to hit the porch with the car a lot coming home from the tavern. He was a cheerful lush, but not so good at the parking thing with a few beers in him.
Mom told me not to drink, but as a lot of you already know from sad personal experience, I’ve had to swear off drinking in public because I get even more butthead, if that’s possible. It’s not easy being an alcoholic who thinks it’s funny. It’s not worth the hangovers.
4. Men/Women/Human Beings* Are Useless (*Delete As Applicable)
We’re going to argue about this? Show me where humans in general been useful on this planet. Whatever the hell “useful” means.
Unless disease carriers and parasites are useful, which some scientists say that, ultimately, in evolutionary terms, they are.
5. The Best Superhero Story I've Ever Read
Um… this isn’t fair. I’ve read like – one – of them. Can we include Nemesis (that British thing where the demon talks out of this throat and has a centaur wife) as superheroes? A certain room deodorizer will always bring back memories of the episodes, because I was staying at my Very First Fan’s house, in an extra room, with boxes of books and stuff, and that’s how the room smelled.
And because one of the housemates caught me carrying a coffee cup of vomit to the bathroom (I couldn’t find anything else and I like to get my head down low when I’m cleaning out my stomach, and toilets don’t work for that), I was immediately notorious for a kind of perverted neatness all over the convention:
That I do the damn things at all. Labor-intensive. Totally despised. No fucking respect. I feel like Henny Youngman with a number two brush. And there may be a reason we use a Number Two brush.
7. How To Balance Creating Comics And Living La Vida Loca
Move someplace really cheap. Use the food bank (hell, you already paid for it, and they need names on it this year, so they can have food next year – it works like army supply, and you end up taking away the rotten potatoes for compost and the weird stuff – like steamed soy grits and whole millet – that they can’t send back or get their quota cut next year, and that they have NOOOO space for. And you can help the old people carry their boxes, too, while you’re there. Tit for tat).
Learn to cook cheap. We have a wood stove and a microwave. I unplugged the electrical stove and the electric furnace. Fish a lot. Pick wild herbs and berries. Dry nettles. Can fruit. Have readers who send you thing like tea and coffee… (and that’s the closest I’m going to get to thanking him for that, because he won’t take anything from me, not even art!). Let your 1970 VW bug turn into the town character (you can damage a lot of kids with a bug – they start playing SlugBug and beating the hell out of each other). When the VW breaks down, take the bus. Bundle your phone/DSL. Get rid of your old full-size fridge and get an apartment compact. You will find out most of the space in the thing was just being used to bury strange ancient life-forms.
Yes, I’m a Techno-hick.
Sigh. My mom never taught me to manage money. But man! can I manage poverty!!! When the rest of you are starving to death after the Big One, come around and I’ll show the survivors how to gut and cook the others. But you’ll have to drag your dead relatives to my cabin by yourselves. My helpfulness only goes so far.
8. On Writing A Sympathetic Nazi
This one I don’t get. I mean, the ONE Nazi in my books isn’t even really a party member – Leutnant Winzig – (Old Scissorships, as the men call him), and he has a following of readers who think he is SEXY! You explain fans to me sometime. And speaking of….
9. My Favorite Fans
Oh, forget it. I couldn’t begin. They are fucking LEGION. These people send me caffeine and garden hooks and fishing rods and incredibly expensive digital cameras and camera outfits, and bring me Gatorade at shows and send me Root Hoodoo bottles and My Little SS Pony and help me arrange tours and crash space and feed me and buy me drinks and sometimes PLANE TICKETS and give me chicken-burning goats and offer me sheep and take me home on motorcycles and let my friends electrocute their mules and carry my stuff and edit and proofread my manuscripts and do amazing shit I cannot tell you about because that would be totally ungrateful and possibly illegal and …
Whoa. I have my own street team. Worldwide.
I would be useless and hopeless without them. What can I say? Except so many thanks I would need three lifetimes. And all I can offer in return is writing more books. It’s all I’ve got.
And they are also the same people who will NOT put up with cowardice or brutality or stupidity. They are well-read and smart and they have lives and senses of humor. I blow off the nasty people because if I don’t, then I don’t get to return the kindness of the nice people. And those are the only two groups I really recognize in the world.
Fuhgetaboudit. There’s no WAY I could begin.
I don’t charge the nice people to email me, either.
10. Why Self-Publish?
Why not? Fewer middle-men.
11. My Favourite Comics
Hey Mister, anything by Roberta Gregory or Rolf Koenig or Carla Speed McNeil or the MUCH underestimated and undervalued Colin Upton, Cuckoo, and that stupid German thing, Werner.
12. My Place In the World Of Comics
Well, it must be higher than I thought. Friends of Lulu http://www.friends-lulu.org/ just nominated me to their Hall of Fame.
I don’t get awards. I get the weird lifetime things. Like the Inkpot.
Sort of the “We don’t know what else to do with her so we’ll give her THIS and maybe she’ll go away” awards.
The Arch and Bruce Foundation gave me the 2004 award for short fiction that portrays gays from history in a positive light. This is evidently pretty prestigious, from what I hear. I only just heard about it because I moved, but they hunted me down to get me my check, bless their little hearts (and yes, I like this better than the Eisners. There is MONEY involved!).
The San Diego State University accepted my lifetime’s work for their Love Library Special Collection. Whew. Someplace to put the Black Manuscripts and all the rest of the art when I am dead – and a lot of it now because I’m tired of all this stuff.
You do realize that I’ve prepared my whole life to be dead. Which I don’t really understand because, since I don’t have kids, who the fuck cares?
And no fucking afterlife. I’m praying for oblivion. Unless --- I get a Mexican Beach (the movie version, including the big ol’ striped beach-towel, stupid sombrero, the sunglasses, the huaraches, a lot of silver jewelry -- and nothing else.) with all my gone cats around me playing with dead crabs, and a magic always-refilling glass of iced Marguirita. And no fucking hangovers. And a nice long permanent drunk, because the sensation of being bombed out of my mind is the ultimate shamanistic Dreamtime for me. As some of you can attest…
I don’t want much in life. Just enough money to be a tavern-rat…
13. Self Motivation and the Comic Creator
Yeah. Right. Like you CAN stop working with a loa on your neck. Probably Papa Legba with a hint of Papa Gede, as my Root Witch reader says. I gotta find me a crossroads, here.
14. How to Make Friends and Influence Diamond Distributors
I’m not so good at that one. I have fights on with everybody. I think I have borderline Aspergers – I can’t keep my mouth shut when something pisses me off or seems like hypocrisy or fakery. Sigh.
But Diamond? Those are just good people who work really hard and are always trying to improve services.
AND PAY ON TIME.
Okay, that’s the Silver Bullet list out of the way.
A good movie itself -- but the best part is the credit roll! It's the most riveting animation, and the music is enchanting. Except for that kitten music. Brrrr… the kitten music! Beautiful thing -- but so disturbing Dan said he didn't want to hear it again. We actually watched the credit roll twice!!!
Shield is a great series. No good guys without bad, no bad without good. Full of confusion, gossip, lies, great dialogue. Like real life. Keep it up.
Shield usually does its research, but in "Strays" in the third season, the writers got lazy. It's easy for a man to strangle a little helpless kitten. Maybe a scratch or two. But a full-grown, fully armed adult tom -- in rut?
Ain't gonna happen.
Even if the man manages to strangle the cat, he's going to the hospital afterwards. We're talking stitches. I've seen 42 stitches just because the guy picked up his two Siamese when they were backing a raccoon out of his yard; he startled them and it pushed their attack button, and they went off automatically in his hands like two chain-saws. Guy looked like a mummy when he got home. But he's a grown-up, and didn't blame the cats; he should have known better.
Full-grown cats are fully-beweaponed predators, with lightning reflexes and more strength, pound for pound, than just about any other mammal on the planet. Parents who let babies play with them are unbelievably irresponsible, and asking for a blind kid. I know my cats are predators, and I don't get stupid with them (well, I have, and I have the 4-inch scars to show for it).
If Dutch had picked up a cat to strangle it, he would have had to use both hands. That leaves him wide open to the front legs -- and the power-kicks of the back legs. Cats automatically kick to disembowel. Dutch would have been hauling for the hospital, veins spurting blood like a punctured coke-bottle. There would have been stitches. He'd have been lucky if the cat didn't sink fangs between his eyes (been there, done that -- the infection is ghastly, the eyes are threatened). And it can happen within a split second. One second you're fine -- the next you're bleeding all over the room.
Any cat-owner -- which is most of us, these days, sat and went, "Say WHAT? That is SO lame."
Next time, they should do their research. Which isn't something they usually fall down on. And think of the scene they missed out on! Poor Dutch and all those bandages...
(And somebody should have known that most wolf-dogs tend to be omega animals, without the domesticated dorkiness of dogs. Yes, they trot instead of tearing through -- they're like wolves, who are reasonable people. Maybe you folks need a full-time animal consultant? Just a thought. If nothing else, knowing the Real instead of the Stereotype always gets you a better script -- but you KNOW that!).
Terms we all need to know:
Naval Nazi: NOT a sailor in the Third Reich’s sea fleet. But rather, most creative people. Totally self-absorbed. Do not go to bed with artists and writers! Artists are nicer – but differently focused. And not on you. They will not see you, when on deadline. And writers? Fuck a writer and then don’t come crying to me.
Sewer siblings: See:
Toilet children: The kids who get flushed down the toilet or thrown out on the tampon when the blastocyst simply gets dumped as defective or wanders past the uterine wall. If you have three siblings, you are bound to have Sewer Siblings.
Borders Gets Stupid: A colleague said he heard this at MOCCA: "If it's not superhero or manga it doesn't belong in graphic novels."
NO way. I can't believe anybody at Borders is that dumb and out of the loop. This has gotta be a misquote. Borders is certainly more on top of things than THAT? Because that's just plain -- clueless.
If I were Borders I'd be doing damage control ASAP.
Shell Shock: Email Discussion where I’d talked about the ex-marine friend who handled my fits at a convention one day, and when I actually got up and walked, he calmly explained, “Oh, we’re all taught to deal with battle fatigue.” Evidently the Marines are taught to deal with the symptoms and not where it came from. Battle fatigue can come from bullets or 15 hours of stress or being chased by a rhino. In all cases, your body THINKS you’re being chased by a rhino. It doesn’t know from bullets, yet.
But it's got weird symptoms, Battle Fatigue: Violent hand and limb shaking that you CANNOT stop. Walking up and down. Tearing hair. Babbling. Crying and even screaming and wailing. A horrible horrible feeling of -- disassociation INSIDE your body. Images in your head you cannot turn off. "Get me a gun, I want to blow these demons out of my skull."
It scares the hell out of people. I've come around to find medics in my face, who promptly tell the people who called them: "It's just exhaustion. We see this all the time." Which is comforting, knowing it’s kinda normal, and not some weird thing from Mars.
Dan (my husband and former army buddy) doesn’t freak over it because he’s seen guys in the field get it. I’ve seen film of guys in WWII with it.
It's annoying as hell being inside a runaway body you cannot get to come to heel, but you know it will be over, and you've done it before, and it's not lethal or anything.
But it is freaky to watch.
And my friends who know it and ignore it as I vomit my brains out in a toilet are stared at in horror by people who think they are callous beasts.
Which leads to things like my 6-hour ride on a French train while vomiting practically the whole way. We called it Puking My Way To Paris.
(Now you know when I read those little minis about throwing up I just snort “Amateurs.” Nobody knows catting like ME)
Now a word from our readers:
Yes, I got an email after the Creepy Christians article.
And I’m sticking it in with this one because what happened with hotel rooms is just proof again of what organized religions think of women.
All right, you people in organized religions – including those who managed to get themselves free and then, just because you’ve bred, you decide to cram the SAME WOMAN-HATING GARBAGE into your kids’ heads –
It is not up to ME to explain why I don’t like your fricking religions.
It is up to YOU to find out what they DID. Broadly speaking. They all of them have a filthy history when it comes to us broads.
Asking me to ‘splain to get mythology off the hook is like saying that “Well, I didn’t do anything to the black people.” At least have the decency and guts of the Germans – who have decided that, even if they or their children are not personally guilty they still have a civilized obligation to work very hard to assure that such things never ever happen again.
There is a REASON that Wiccans want to take your faces off when you start explaining to them that, no really, “Our religion really DOES like women, and We’ve Reformed and I personally never did anything like that so why blame ME for burning all those people and locking them up and basically making their lives miserable?”
I’ll tell you why. Just because the pagans and so-called (and I’m not using this term as a form of generalized Red State abuse) “witches” in Europe didn’t get a freeze-dried Rwandan Dachau to contemplate and weep over doesn’t mean their ghosts aren’t still walking the afterlife where the organized religions put them.
And I hope they all come visit you some night.
And the faggots they’re carrying aren’t the fun kind.
It’s not MY people’s fault that the word “Christian” is beginning to mean Bigot, Woman-Hater, Child-Beater, Environment-raper, Narrow-Minded uneducated trailer trash. That’s ALL the doing of Christians themselves. So if you don’t like it, don’t whine to me that “Oh, that’s not what Christianity is about.” Do something about it. The person you call your god was willing to get nailed to a tree to make things better for everybody. Where are YOU?
