“What's with all the skeletons and darkness?” I get asked some variation of this question quite a bit. Why the skulls? Why the monsters? Why does everything look like something terrible either just happened or is about to happen? My answer is usually pretty simple. “Because I can.” And I don't mean that in some defiant, fuck-the-art-world, misunderstood-genius kind of way. I mean it quite literally. I can finally draw whatever the hell I want. Which is particularly liberating

On Main Character Syndrome, Identity Theft, and the introduction of Jimmy Con I've suffered from main character syndrome for most of my life. I suppose having an extraordinarily overdramatic mother helped establish that foundation pretty early. In our household, life wasn't simply lived. It was performed. Every inconvenience had the potential to become a crisis. Every disagreement could escalate into a three-act tragedy. Every emotional disturbance required an audience, prefe

I’m convinced that if Scary Bear had a voice, it would belong to none other than Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. Why, you might ask? Why the fuck not? Look at him. Doesn’t he just look like he’d have that lazy, slightly slurred Queens drawl that 50 acquired after taking a bullet through the cheek? That unmistakable combination of menace, amusement and complete disregard for anyone else’s feelings? And the laugh. 50 Cent has one of the greatest laughs in recorded human history. It’s

There are certain things that happen during childhood that, for reasons nobody can adequately explain, become permanent fixtures in your brain. Core memories. Not necessarily the important stuff. Not birthdays, graduations (I only had one, by the skin of my teeth, or because they just wanted me gone), or those carefully orchestrated moments your parents spent hundreds of dollars trying to make memorable. Sometimes it’s something completely fucking ridiculous. I have a few. On

In the last four years of sobriety, I have lived approximately fourteen years. I had a second child. A beautiful little girl named Aria. My heart. She’s two, so thankfully I have plenty of time before she starts dating—which is good, because as a Jew in America these days, I’m already well on my way to being sufficiently armed by the time some terrified sixteen-year-old shows up at my front door. For entirely unrelated reasons, of course. Becoming her father was one of the gr

recently read something about Heath Ledger’s journal while he was preparing to play the Joker in The Dark Knight. There was a post on Instagram showing pages from it—images, scribbled thoughts, disturbing references, fragments of things he was apparently studying while trying to crawl inside the head of Gotham’s most maniacal villain. It was fascinating. It was also fucking dark. First off, I should establish that I’m partial to Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Picture five-year-old J