It’s a little spewky!
https://www.gocomics.com/lay-lines
Tag: Art
This Month In History,
Carson McCullers’s debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is published.
| On June 4, 1940, the day her debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published, 23-year-old Carson McCullers was alone in New York City. She’d come with her husband to promote the book, but he was off sailing with a friend. “She knew almost no one in New York except the kindly older woman acquaintance who had found her the room,” writes Mary V. Dearborn. |
| “She was nearly penniless, but she had to scrape together enough money to buy something to wear to a meeting with her editor the next week. June 4 was a pause. On one side were Carson’s years growing up in provincial Columbus, Georgia, and the succession of Southern towns to which her husband’s job had called them. On the other side, she assumed, would be the exciting life of an author, living glamorously in New York City, meeting the writers, artists, and musicians who had peopled her fantasies.” |
| The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was hotly anticipated, despite—or because of—its strangeness. “It did not fit any of the accepted and expected categories of mainstream fiction,” Dearborn explains. “It was neither a love story nor a bildungsroman, it did not have characters whom readers could recognize as like themselves, it did not have a happy ending, and it did not have a single strong narrative line.” It was a book about misfits, written by a misfit. But, importantly, McCullers was a young misfit, and publishing has always loved nothing better than a wunderkind. “Readers were flabbergasted to learn that this tour de force was the work of someone so young and, despite her gender-ambiguous name, a woman,” writes Dearborn. “It was hard to believe she knew so much about the ‘lonely hearts’ of others, said one critic. She seemed sui generis, unique, and as it turned out, as odd as some of her characters.” Richard Wright compared her favorably to William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and wrote that “whether you will want to read the book depends upon the extent to which you value the experience of discovering the stale and familiar terms of everyday life bathed in a rich and strange meaning, devoid of pettiness and sentimentality.” A lot of people wanted to read it. The novel became a bestseller, and McCullers, at least for a time, was offered entry into the artist’s life of her dreams. “I became an established literary figure overnight and I was much too young to understand what happened to me or the responsibility it entailed,” she said later. “I was a bit of a holy terror.” It’s hard to hold it against her, though. By the age of 30 she would have had two major strokes; she died much too young, at 50, after a brain hemorrhage, leaving behind years of literary potential along with her enduring classics. Read an excerpt of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter here. |
Cataloguing Carson McCullers’ Clothes: Long Coats, Vests, and Gender Fluidity
Jenn Shapland on What She Found in the Writer’s Archives
(click through on here or the title/hyperlink just above to read more)
It Is June-
June Means PRIDE!
Pride Month 2026
Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Pride Month is an annual celebration of the many contributions made by the LGBTQ+ community to history, society and cultures worldwide. In most places, Pride is celebrated throughout the month of June each year in commemoration of its roots in the Stonewall Riots of June 1969. However, in some areas—especially in the Southern Hemisphere—pride events occur at other times of the year.
Origins of Pride Month
The roots of the gay rights movement go back to the early 1900s, when a handful of individuals in North America and Europe created gay and lesbian organizations such as the the Society for Human Rights, founded by Henry Gerber in Chicago in the 1920s.
Following World War II, a small number of groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis published gay- and lesbian-positive newsletters and grew more vocal in demanding recognition for, and protesting discrimination against, gays and lesbians. In 1966, for example, members of the Mattachine Society held a “sip-in” protest at Julius, a bar in New York City, where they demanded drinks after announcing that they were gay, in violation of local laws against serving alcohol to gays and lesbians.
Despite some progress in the postwar era, basic civil rights were largely denied to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people—until one night in June, 1969, when the gay rights movement took a furious step forward with a series of violent riots in New York City.
Stonewall Riots
https://www.history.com/articles/pride-month (this is one of those videos embedded on the page, beneath is a bit about it, then more about the riots. Go see the video, if you like!)
How the Stonewall Riots Sparked a Movement
The 1969 Stonewall Inn Riots sparked the beginning of the gay rights movement in America. Learn how.
As was common practice in many cities, the New York Police Department would occasionally raid bars and restaurants where gays and lesbians were known to gather. This occurred on June 28, 1969, when the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
When the police aggressively dragged patrons and employees out of the bar, several people fought back against the NYPD, and a growing crowd of angry locals gathered in the streets. The confrontations quickly escalated and sparked six days of protests and violent clashes with the NYPD outside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street and throughout the neighborhood.
By the time the Stonewall Riots ended on July 2, 1969, the gay rights movement went from being a fringe issue largely ignored by politicians and the media to front-page news worldwide.
(snip-here ends our history.com lesson for today)
A Jenny Lawson That Was Just Disinterred From My Inbox!
Don’t begrudge yourself happiness, sweet friend.
Hello, lovely!
This is my last week of book tour for How To Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay and I have conflicting emotions because touring can be hard with anxiety and chronic illness, but it’s also so uplifting to see people in real life and remind myself that the work I do does make a difference even when my mind says otherwise. It can be so easy to listen to the lies that depression tells, and it helps me refill my cup in a way that I can’t explain.
I suspect that you also probably have no idea how much the work you do in your own life (including the work of just being human, kind, and yourself) makes ripples in fantastic ways you’ll never see, but never doubt that it does.
I drew a lot last week because I was in a depression and it helped, but my brain wouldn’t work enough to put together the words I wanted on the drawings so instead of showing you the three unfinished sketches that I’m still working on, here’s a drawing from the book that I’ve been reminding myself of during this depression:
“Don’t begrudge yourself happiness.”
Because there isn’t enough joy in life to just let it pass you by. When it arrives, celebrate it…enjoy it…don’t let guilt or the drudgery of life get in the way of grabbing joy and whimsy and relief whenever it comes and however it shows up. Because you deserve it.
And I do too.
And when this depression passes completely I want to be ready for it.
I super crazy love you,
~ Jenny
Behind & Present With Jenny Lawson
I am forever behind, but there is joy in that
Do you remember last month when everyone was so excited about Moon Joy as we watched Artemis II? I have a confession to make.
I did not watch it.
Perhaps a combination of my anxiety plus a little leftover trauma of watching in Challenger live in Elementary school? Regardless, I couldn’t enjoy it until I knew that they were safely back home, but then I did a deep dive and that is why I am forever experiencing pop-culture moments behind the rest of the world. It’s also why this week I decided to draw something that might have been more timely before, but I suspect you will forgive me.
It reminded me of how amazing space is…of exploration and joy…and of the idea that we are each an actual part of the magic of that universe, even when we feel that we are so tiny and unremarkable.
So this is just a reminder to you that you are truly made of stardust. Nearly all of the elements in your body where made in a star, and many have come through several supernovas. The actual iron in your body is from a star going supernova. So if today you are feeling small, remember that you are magic in astounding ways.
PS. I know I normally just talk art here but I thought maybe you’d want to see this. Yesterday I started fostering a feral rescue kitten to try to fill the kitty-sized hole in my heart right now and I’m pretty sure this tiny, nameless orange gentleman will not be leaving us because omg, y’all.
This Week’s “Lay Lines”
Clay Jones & Open Windows
(You want to click through to see this first one well. I don’t know why WP miniaturized it, but it’s really good.)
Vulgar and self-aggrandizing
Trump plasters his name everywhere
Orange Chicken
Did Donald Trump sell out Taiwan?
Donald Trump went to China, and all he got were some seeds.
Donald Trump did not receive any help from China on ending the war in Iran or reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but Chinese President Xi Jinping did give him some rose seeds. The Chinese leader gave Trump a tour of the Zhongnanhai Garden, where he admired the roses. I guess he admired them so much that Xi decided to give him seeds so that he could grow his own roses. He didn’t even give him roses, just the seeds. You know that Donald Trump does not care about growing some damn flowers.
Trump’s trip to China was a total and abject failure and failed to secure any agreements or promises. Trump came home empty-handed. (snip-MORE)
Trumpy Poo
Donald Trump found a new shitty way to grift
In 2023, a government contractor pleaded guilty to stealing the tax information of Donald Trump and other wealthy Americans and leaking it to media outlets in 2019 and 2020. After he was restored to the presidency in 2025, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for “allowing” this leak, along with a $230 million lawsuit against the Department of Justice for the Russia collusion investigation he faced during his first term in office and the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago.
Since he is the president of the United States and head of the executive branch, and the DOJ and the IRS are agencies under the executive branch, Donald Trump was the plaintiff and defendant. Basically, he was trying to hand himself $10 billion of our money. Even Richard Nixon didn’t try to get away with this kind of corruption. The only kink to Donald Trump’s plan of grifting us out of $10 billion is that it had to be approved by a judge. (snip-MORE)
Art & A Mental Health Moment Or 2 With Jenny Lawson
There is still whimsy and warmness in the world and you deserve it.
Hello, friend!
I am two days late on sending this because I was stuck in a depression and it ate all of my extra energy. I started and stopped several drawings because I’m not sure if I didn’t like them or if I just didn’t like me very much. My dr recommended sun and exercise and other things that sound very easy when you are not depressed and it reminded me of a poem my mom read to me so often I’d almost memorized it. (All of A.A. Milne’s poems are the songs of my childhood.) If you hate poetry, skip this part.
The poem always made me feel both cozy and sad at the same time, which was a confusing thing for a small child but also a combination that my brain would grow to specialize in.
It reminded me that recently I’d read that tiny harvest mice have been found asleep in flower beds and so I decided to draw that:
“Sometimes harvest mice will crawl into flowers to feast on the pollen and stamens and will fall asleep inside.”
The drawing is simple and plain and fairly unimpressive, but it made me feel warm inside my heart and that is a very special sort of magic.
This is all a very long way of saying that whimsy and comfort and coziness and nostalgia and joy are all worth more than we give them credit for…whether in drawing mice or reading poems from childhood or eating nectar and drunkenly falling asleep inside flowers.
Go find comfort, my friend.
I promise that you deserve it.
Hugs,
me
More Fun + A Little Eye Candy
From The Smart Ones:
Cover Snark: Detective Stabler, Is That You?
by Amanda · Apr 27, 2026 at 2:00 am
Welcome back to Cover Snark!
Elyse: The artist was sick the day they learned to draw the lower body.
Sneezy: Never skip leg day.
Amanda: Her dress reminds me of those Barbie dress cakes.
Sarah: That is just So Much Dress.
Also, are his trousers open in the front?! My word!
From Syntha: I don’t even know where to start with this one.
Sarah: He looks like someone. Who does he look like. It’s going to bug me until I figure it out.
Elyse: It’s orange Detective Stabler.
Sarah: YES I THINK YOU ARE RIGHT.
Elyse: Doink Doink!
Sarah: Syntha also sent this and I have to say, I respect the attempt:
Syntha: The giraffe neck just looks so silly rising out of the jacket.
Amanda: Honestly, this one is perfect.
No notes.
Elyse: His center of gravity is just so fucked up.
Can you imagine the orthopedic issues that guy has?
Sarah: I really can’t fault any of it.
Sarah: This was a suggestion while I was looking at the Neckromancer (I see what was done there) and in icon size it looks like he is drooling.
Amanda: You can just tell this man has an overinflated ego.
Sarah: He is his own Chosen Champion, huh? Yeah, I see it.
(snip-Far MORE snark in the comments, on the page)
Some Art From Jenny Lawson
Accidental art therapy
(not tiny monster penises)
Hello, friend!
This week I revisited the Lynda Barry Making Comics book because I was on book tour and a tiny sketch book was easy to bring along on plane rides. The exercises were out of my comfort zone but sometimes I think that can be a good thing. This exercise was called “Close your eyes and draw a mermaid.”
Another was to choose a character and sketch their entire life cycle. I chose Beyoncé the Giant Metal Chicken, obviously:
I did a self-portrait…sort of:
And drew with both hands at the same time, which is much harder than it sounds: (snip-MORE; go see!)
Scottie's Playtime 