something like a scribe
oct 30, 2026
These past many years,
I’ve felt something like a scribe.
My partner & I both love live music; we’re always going to shows. Here in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas. As a housebound cartoonist, that’s been one of my cherished times out in the world. Sometimes a faceless voyeur watching the people around me, sometimes a chatty passerby & fellow fan of the band.
All those small warm moments linger. Chatting with people in line, overhearing people who drove up from the Valley to see the show. Or bonding with the Uber drivers about the old clubs in Austin or San Antonio (“you saw The Cure THERE???”). Maybe on the way to Dallas, we stop at Bucee’s, and as we wander through the beaver merchandise and food counters to get to the bathroom, we try to guess who else is on the way to see the same kpop show as us. Perhaps I’ll see a couple with incredible fashion sense. Perhaps I’ll see some particularly funny graffiti in the bathroom stall. Vines draped on power lines. The x on the back of a girl’s hands. The singer’s Doc Marten that almost clocked me in the face.
Sometimes, it’s just something about the city. The strip mall in Houston that still looks straight out of the 80’s. The cold, sprawling brutalist architecture of Dallas. The too-hot over 100 degree summer day in San Antonio, where I can’t imagine anyone outside on the hot concrete. The twin claw machine arcades one midnight in Houston that are as busy as a nightclub.
And I think:
I want to draw this.
So I come home, and for most of my days, that’s what I do. I put digital pen to digital paper, and I transcribe my memories like this, old & new.
The antique stores in downtown Bryan I visited often when I was a teenager. The stillness backstage as a high school play goes on. The posture of a crush I had in college or a friend from high school. The specialty enchiladas my mother-in-law makes. The Turkish telenovela dubbed into Spanish that I watched when my partner and I started dating. The train tracks in my neighborhood. The rowdy queer teens at the hardcore show. The manic-looking cartoon rabbit on the wall at the punk club. The melancholic feeling driving for hours in my Honda Accord in the dead of night on a lonely Texas highway, thinking about my future. The power lines & concrete & prickly pears & big skies. The feeling of being out at night. The feeling of falling in love.
I want to savor these things as long as possible. To etch them, engrain them into my brain folds. I want to capture them & give them to others to feel, to remember. Not as photographs, not as recollections.
But as stories. As a living flame. I want to spread it. I want you to feel its warmth within you. I want you to go out at night, to fall in love, & to make art.
That’s all this life is about, as far as I’m concerned.
In a roundabout way, I’m trying to tell you that these are my thoughts about artificial intelligence. What’s the point of having a machine do this for me, when the physical act of writing in my diary with a slick red gel pen, when the physical act of typing this freetalk out on my tactile clicky retro keyboard, when the physical act of feeling the iPad screen push against my apple pencil feels so good?
The challenge of synthesizing all these visions & commemorating them into my comics is, in-and-of itself, the point & the reward.
You are the crucible of all your artistic influences, of your memories, of your nightmares & daydreams. And when you do an art that requires any kind of physical finesse, your body itself is the instrument that brings that out into the world.
It’s not about level of ability, about skill or talent, or any seeming lack thereof, but about the harmony of the muscles you do use, moving together, conducted by your heart & your mind & your soul.
That is the pure expression of art, at least the way I do art. It is not perfect. It is beautifully & grotesquely human, just as you are, just as you were made to be.