The idea of Rickets is that he’s a robot that’s destroyed his memory chip, so he’s not quite right in the head.  He destroyed his memory chip after a traumatic breakout with a boyfriend robot he had, and then set off on the road to find a new life.  I wrote the story of his relationship with the boyfriend robot and him destroying his memory chip in a storyline called Marching to “The City,” which you can read here .  The story of what happened next, and how he ended up with the rabbit and ending up living with the rabbit and Prester the bear is something that I’ll tell later on.

Before  destroying his memory chip, Rickets was one of many robots that worked at a large factory where they created teddy bears.  Rickets created Prester the bear after his breakup with the boyfriend robot, and so Prester was a little bit off to begin with, because his creator was in an off mood.  That’s sort of my metaphor for how I created Rickets, because I made him after a traumatic breakup on which I based his storyline.  Originally the cast of my comic was mainly the rabbit, and his boyfriend, who I drew as a monkey because I called my boyfriend Monkey as a pet name (Aw) and Capitalist Pig, who I used as a way to complain about my job and a lot of other things.  After I broke up with the monkey, I wanted a new character for the strip, and I came up with the idea of a little robot who was broken and had been discarded.  It seemed like a fitting, if somewhat dramatic, representation of how I felt.

Sketchbook page, 2007

Rickets is now in a highly dysfunctional relationship with Prester, wherein they like each other a lot, but Prester can never admit it because he’s a born-again Christian and professes extreme homophobia.  Rickets doesn’t understand, because he doesn’t have his memories from those days, that he’s actually in love with the teddy bear he created himself.  This is supposed to be my metaphor for an artist being in love with his own art, and it’s the same reason I find it funny to draw my rabbit lusting after twinky guys wearing rabbit ears.  I think what I’m trying to say is something about a choice we have, which is to fall in love with a real person, and appreciate the people who are really in our lives, or to yearn for a kind of idealized romance that we’ve created in our heads and possibly doesn’t exist.  The Narcissism of affection, and also of art.  This is one of the reasons I like to joke about art and sex being the same thing, because they’re both forms of communication, or connection, but whether we’re truly forming a bond with somebody else or just talking to ourselves is the question about whether it’s healthy or not.  Where Rickets’ relationship with Prester will go, that remains to be seen.

Rickets’ personality has evolved a bit.  Originally in my sketchbooks as the discarded robot in the gutter, he was much more of a sad sack kind of character.

Another sketchbook page circa 2007

Sketchbook comic, 2007

Once he was in love with Prester, though, love had re-entered Rickets’ life, and he was no longer quite so confident and superior, because he was losing the fact that he didn’t have a memory of these things, so he started to be able to empathize a little more.

I think that’s about all I’ll give away about Rickets at the moment, although I do have big plans for his future, and also the future of the boyfriend robot character, and even a love interest that’s going to try to tempt him away from Prester.  So check back, a lot more coming up.

Next up, I’m doing a post about Prester.

So, I feel like it’s time to talk in a little more about this big upcoming project to which I keep alluding.

I’m doing porn.

Gasp, you say, Rick Worley, interested in porn?!

Allow me to explain.  Or not, whatever.

So, I’ve been talking about how this project started out as a small thing and kept getting longer.  As Tolkien famously said, “The tale grew in the telling,” although I don’t think he was talking about hardcore twink penetration with a light S & M kink.  To each his own, but is what I happen to like stranger than Elves?  Anyway.

What this started out as was a little joke story, I thought maybe five or 10 pages, that I wanted to do a few years ago.  It was going to be a story about my rabbit obsessing over porn, and the main reason for me to want to do it was so that I could draw the sex.  I thought it would be fun in a trashy kind of way, and drawing sex and naked boys and talking about porn are hardly things that I’ve avoided doing in my comics.  What I’ve done about porn, specifically though, is just kind of make some jokes about the rabbit watching too much of it, and I haven’t really gone any deeper into it than that.  That’s because, once I tried to write about it in any detail, it got much deeper really quickly.  Deeper, get it?  We’re talking about porn, so anything like that is a pun, keep your eyes peeled for the hilarity bound to ensue.

I wanted to write a comic about the rabbit watching my favorite porn film at the time a few years ago, which happened to be a classic gem called Take It Like a Bitch, Boy.  Doing a bit of research into that to find photo reference and other things, I started to read about the models involved.  Up until then, I hadn’t given any particular thought to porn actors or the lives they led, I mostly just knew that this was a video with cute boys getting dick stuck in them by other cute boys, and as far as I was concerned that could only be a good thing.

A certain young star named Brent Corrigan was obviously the cutest boy in Take It Like a Bitch, Boy, and a bit of curiosity about him led me to discover his other films, which included, at the time, Cream Bboys, also a classic, although I still don’t know why there’s that additional “B” in the title.  It also led me, though, to read about Brent Corrigan, and the studio that had produced those two films, Cobra Video, and that’s when things started to get strange.

Brent Corrigan, whose real name is Sean Paul Lockhart (Which is fun because it seems to me to be at least as good of a porn name as, “Brent Corrigan”) was in the midst of a controversy at the time as what some people were calling the gay Traci Lords because he had revealed that in his first films for Cobra he had been 17.  He eventually started to say that he had been manipulated into sex with the films’ producer, Bryan Kocis, among other allegations, and then as the controversy was getting pretty dramatic, Bryan Kocis turned up murdered.  Sean didn’t do it, but all sorts of accusations and insinuations flew around.

I started, tangentially, reading about other porn actors, and they mostly seemed to have life stories that were also unbelievably fucked up in one way or another, though few of them quite as dramatic as Sean’s, and it all became kind of fascinating to me.

It became fascinating to me that, as soon as you scratch the surface, you find a rabbit hole of drugs and accusations and craziness that just goes deeper the longer you wanted to look at it.  What I don’t get about that is that, porn is just sex, why should it lead to all this other bullshit?  I think it’s because our culture is so repressed and hypocritical about these things, it pushes them to a place in the shadows where, obviously, shadiness can flourish.  If it wasn’t all secretive and underground and shameful, it wouldn’t be such a mess.  There’s absolutely no reason sex, two hot boys fucking each other for your entertainment, should be something that creates so much drama, but it does, and it does because of the very people that consider themselves moral crusaders.  They’re the ones that make it dark and scary, when it doesn’t need to be.

So what I want to write is something that asks the question of why it turns out this way.  I want to write something that portrays sex extremely, extremely explicitly, because I think the more you shine light on it, the more you see that it’s something that there’s no reason not to shine a light on.  It’s people fucking, and that’s a *good* thing, unless we go extremely far out of our way to make it so it isn’t.  I think comics is the perfect way to do this, because I’ll actually be drawing the sex I’m talking about, so there will be the visuals there that in some cases will hopefully be pretty sexy, and then you’ll go on to read about what was involved in the particular things I’m drawing, and it should make an interesting juxtaposition.

The story I’m writing starts out with the rabbit at the start of his interest in porn, when it’s just guys fucking, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and then follows my real journey of becoming interested in particular porn actors, and tells a bit of their life stories.  Sean’s will obviously be one of the most interesting, but not the whole book.  It’s that story, though, that starts out simply with me writing about sex and continues to the point of me writing about a murder trial, and I want to look at why things go that way.

It also seemed to me like a good metaphor for relationships in general.  When you first meet somebody, you have certain ideas and preconceptions about them, and then that gradually changes as you learn more about them.  Sex could be a way to get more intimate with somebody, but in the way a lot of these scenarios play out when sex is made to be more shameful, it only serves to drive people apart.

So anyway, that’s a bit about what I’m writing.  More to come.

New big post tomorrow about Rickets the robot, and then next week I’m going to post a lot about other upcoming projects and things that have been going on in my life.  Yes I know, it’s true, you’re very lucky to have discovered this website.

For the character guide on this website, I’m going to write brief biographies of each of the characters, and talk about their stories and personalities, and also talk about where they came from and why I made the characters.  In the case of the rabbit, I realized I had already written a description that I liked for the introduction of my book collection that came out last year, so I’m going to put that here.

I still remember with vivid clarity the moment when I realized exactly what my cartoon rabbit was.  Around five years ago, I had been drawing him a lot.  He seemed to insist on it.  For a few years after High School, I had decided that I was going to be an Important Novelist, and I had put drawing on the backburner, but since I was little I had always drawn, and I felt like there was part of my brain that was being neglected when I didn’t.  The rabbit started as a little logo, crawling on all fours and drawn as simply as possible, and I thought he might be an icon I could use on things, like the signature babies Keith Haring drew early in his career.

I worked at Borders at the time, back when there still were Borders, and I would draw him on the schedules or papers, whatever was around when I was bored or listening to something inane from a customer on the phone and I had a pen in my hand.  Really quickly, though, the rabbit started to stand on his hind legs, and almost right after he started to have word balloons next to his head and appear on the marker board in the store’s breakroom saying things like, “Fight the man!”

The moment I remember clearly like a lightbulb going on over my head was when I realized that the rabbit was just me.  He was saying the things I wanted to say.  All at once, I realized that I could draw myself as this rabbit, and draw my own life in comics, and it could be totally me at the exact same moment when it also wasn’t me, because I’m not actually a cartoon rabbit.  I realized that he could be me just as much as I wanted, and then could also go on any adventure and do anything I wanted him to that I couldn’t really do, and it wouldn’t in any way be breaking character.

I called the whole thing I started writing A Waste of Time because, while to me it felt like this transcending liberating vehicle where I could write anything I wanted and live as close to or as far from reality as I liked, I could also see where to other people all these bizarre comics about this cartoon rabbit and his emotional problems might seem like silliness, and a total waste of time.  I think that feeling was crystallized by my boyfriend at that time, who somehow didn’t immediately jump on board with my visionary genius.  We were often fighting about money, since we just had completely different concepts of it.  He was a few years younger than me, and while I was still working at Borders, he was already on the second new car he had purchased and felt naked if he left the house in jeans that cost less than $300.

Once, a friend of mine in Chicago emailed me to say she worked with Jeffrey Brown.  She worked at a Barnes and Nobel there, and he worked with her.  She sent me a handmade zine he had done, and this one degree of separation from somebody who did comics was a first and a thrill to me.

I showed my boyfriend the comic, “Look, my friend in Chicago, she sent me this, she works at Barnes and Nobel with Jeffrey Brown!”

“Who’s Jeffrey Brown?” my boyfriend asked.

“Who’s Jeffrey Brown?!  He does autobiographical comics, and they’re great!  It’s just the type of thing I’ve been wanting to draw!  He’s one of the biggest people that does it!”

“So, this is one of the biggest people doing what you want to do.  And he works at Barnes and Nobel.”

“Well, yeah.  I think he needs the insurance or something.”

“Wow.  This is quite a lucrative career you’re choosing.”

My boyfriend then, he just really knew how to boost your confidence.

But the thing is, if you choose to look at it that way, all anybody’s ever doing is wasting their time.  We’re all just trying to fill up those hours until we die.  But what I’ve always felt is, what’s so horrible about that?  Because the choice we have is whether or not we want to waste that time with something awesome.  I keep chasing after guys, even though I’ve had relationships much worse than that one, and I keep making comics, even though there are totally talentless people in other fields making more money than me, because these are the things I love to do.  And if I’m gonna be wasting my time, I’m at least gonna waste it on something that fucking rocks.

-Rick Worley, 8/20/2011

OK, I think one of the things I’m gonna do as I post portraits for the character guide over the next couple weeks is also post the non-colored versions of the portraits, because I’m going to be moving the colored ones to an earlier place in the archives.  Generally, I think I’m going to be moving the order of the comics in the archives on this website around to make them into a more cohesive reading experience, so if links go dead that might have something to do with it.  I might also remove some of the older comics that I don’t like anymore, but I’ll try to resist that temptation.

I thought that, with the non-colored versions of the portraits, I could blog a bit about the projects I’m working on and things.  In general, I’d like to start blogging more, and we’ll see how that goes.

So, Damaged Goods.  I’m calling my next chunk of work that for several reasons, the main one being that it’s about coming to terms with your past so that you can move into the future.  It will involve dating strips, and the rabbit looking back on past relationships and now seeing them from a new vantage point.  It’ll also involve the origin story for Prester the bear, which fits with the title in its own way because he’s a teddy bear that didn’t quite come out right, and so he didn’t sell as fast as the other teddy bears, which is part of the reason for his misanthropic attitude about things.  It seemed to apply, too, to my frustration over how hard it is to earn a living doing the things you actually want to do, which in my case is make comics, so the name Damaged Goods is also a bit of a joke on my comics, like the name A Waste of Time also is, because I guess from some point of view my attempt at a comics career could be seen as me trying to sell faulty goods.

So, to that end, Capitalist Pig is gonna be a big part of the upcoming storyline, and will hopefully provide a good sounding board for me to talk about issues like creator’s rights, and what our society does and doesn’t seem to think is valuable.  The recent controversy over the Watchmen prequels has led me to have discussions with people in which I’ve been astonished to see how little some people can value the contribution of the people who actually make a work of art.  Some people don’t really seem to get that the artist might be important to the production of art, they kind of seem to think it’s all fodder turned out by some mysterious machine for the purposes of their enjoyment.

I’ve been writing comics with Capitalist Pig for a while, but I haven’t used him all that much recently as I’ve been spending a lot of time telling dating stories and stories involving the relationship between Rickets and Prester, and things like that.  When Capitalist Pig was last part of a major storyline in my comics, though, Rickets and Prester tried to murder him, and failed, so obviously there is some tension there that’s going to continue to play out, and I think it will fit in nicely with the current state of the relationship between them.  It also seemed to fit in nicely with a lot of the current zeitgeist of the World, and things that are going on with Occupy, and my own personal struggles to make a living as an artist.  The relationships between money and power seem to be on a lot of people’s minds, and mine very much so, so it’s all going to play into some big plotlines involving Capitalist Pig.

In general, the ideas about career will fit in with a lot of what I’ve wanted to talk about as far as figuring out what it is you want to do with your life.  The rabbit trying to figure out what it is that will make him happy will also include him thinking about relationships, so there will still be lots of comics about dating and relationships including, eventually, comics about the happy relationship that I’m in at the moment :) The comics usually take much longer to draw than to write, so sometimes there’s a lag of a few months between how I’m showing my life in the comics I post to the website, and what’s actually going on in my life at the time.

There will still be plenty of comics about sex, too, and actually the other big ongoing project I’m going to start talking about soon will have sex as one of its major focuses, so, don’t worry, I’ll still be drawing plenty of smut.

Alright, so for the next couple weeks the posts I make will be character portraits for an ongoing character guide for this website.  I figured I’d post this one first, because it’s just an image I’ve wanted to do for a long time as a little allegorical representation of the characters.  Rickets and the rabbit being different representations of me, I liked this little image of them together, and Rickets with the flower, and all the little things in here that are kind of ongoing symbols I’ve used in the comics.

The next posts I do will be individual character portaits, and I’m going to attach little biographies to them of the characters that will hopefully catch up new readers a little, but will also talk a little bit about my thoughts about the characters, and also probably give some details about their backstories and what’s coming up for them that I haven’t talked about on here yet.

I like that I did this picture, because it serves a really useful function for me.  Whenever life seems hopeless, or the World seems like a dark and scary place, or somebody talks about something a Republican Presidential Candidate says as though it actually made sense, in those dark times I can always just look at this picture and remind myself, “The World’s not so bad- It can’t be when there’s a guy who looks like that who posed for hours in that position so you could draw him like that from life.”

I wrote some comics about this guy a while back, and they appeared in my book.  We actually only went out on a few dates and things ended amicably, so I still talked to him from time to time, and eventually I brought up the fact that it occurred to me that out of the guys in the book I talk about dating, he’s the only one I hadn’t done a portrait drawing of.  So, we hung out a few months ago and I did a drawing of him that I’ve already posted on this website.  The drawing turned out well and we both liked it, so I started to talk to him about doing another one.  When we were talking about what pose to do, I said that I didn’t want to start getting repetitive with pictures of guys just sitting or lying in bed, and I thought it would be fun to do something with his wrists tied, or slightly kinky in some way.

Turns out he didn’t object to that at all, and the boots and gloves were actually his suggestion.

I kind of drew this to commemorate the completion of my book that was published last year.

I was in the last few days of working on the book, and having the general predictable cycle of self-doubt and despair that it was all pointless and that the book was shit, and who was I fooling to think anybody was gonna want to read this? and etc., and then something happened that I took as a sign from whatever great unknowable forces there are out there…

I got a friend request and a message from some cute guy I’d never met before on Facebook.  He was really cute, so I was wondering what it was all about.  I messaged him out of curiosity, and he tells me he’s a fan of my comics.  That’s great, I don’t mind being Facebook friends with people who are fans of my comics.  But then, almost immediately, he asks me about portraits I’ve done of guys in the past, and whether or not I knew them personally or if they were fans.  I said that most of them I’ve known personally, but sometimes I draw from photos guys have sent me.  After I said that, he proceeds to email me almost 30 pictures he had already taken for the purpose of sending them to me.

Pictures of himself in underwear, pictures of himself without underwear, pictures of himself in and out of various compromising positions.  He was even wearing glasses and things in some of the pictures specifically because of things he had read in my comics about various sexual fetishes I have.  He had pretty much done a whole little multi-costume strip-tease show for me in the hopes that I would make a drawing out of one of the pictures.

The fact that the comics I were doing elicited this kind of response from a cute guy I had never met I couldn’t take as anything other than a sign from the Universe that I was doing the right thing with my life.

OK, a little bit of information about what’s going to be coming up with this website and my comics.

I’ve finished posting the strips that appeared in my book that was published last year, and am going to spend the next couple of weeks posting odds and ends and related things before jumping into the strips that will be part of my next set of strips, which I’m calling Damaged Goods.  It’s all part of the ongoing stories that I’m collectively calling A Waste of Time but I’m grouping strips into chunks and collections and storylines, so before I go on to posting more new strips I’m going to be posting some odds and ends related to the book and some miscellaneous things I’ve done.

Coming up starting next week I’m going to be posting portraits of some of my characters with blogs discussing them, and that will go into creating a character guide for this website.  The next two posts after today will be portraits of guys I’ve known, and they’ll have stories attached to them too.  I haven’t decided yet if these drawings and comics relating to the points in my life when I made them will be part of Damaged Goods, but we’ll see.  They’re new content that was made after I finished the strips for this last book, and leading up to Damaged Goods.

Then there are a few other odds and ends I might post before I start posting the first strips that will officially be part of Damaged Goods.  I’m hoping to get far enough ahead on those strips that I can be posting them as I work on my next project, because that will require lead time if I plan to keep posting three times a week.  The next thing I’m going to be working on is still part of the whole A Waste of Time project, and it features my rabbit, I plan to work on it concurrently with other strips, but as I was writing it it started to become such a large story that now I think it’s going to be its own graphic novel.  I don’t feel quite ready to start talking on here about what it’s going to be about, but it’s going to be in the 150-200 page range, and a lot of the pages will be more complicated, drawing-wise, than shorter strips that mainly just feature dialog and my characters, as far as the drawing parts go.

So, the idea is to have the first few chunks of Damaged Goods on here, and then to start in on my big mystery project.  Along with all that, I’m trying to work on putting together an EP of songs for Dove of Love, and I’m also going to work on another side project, which I’ll also be posting more about soon. So, a whole ton of stuff coming up, keep checking back, even if sometimes I miss a few days of posting here and there, and I know I sometimes do.  The plan is to, as often as possible, still stick to the Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday posting schedule, but that might get messed with a little bit from time to time as I try to get all these projects going, along with some other things I haven’t even mentioned on here yet.

So, yeah, exciting times :)

Alright, so the last couple strips have discussed Prester’s favorite Christian Rock band, Dove of Love, and I thought I’d post this colored version of their poster and talk a little bit more about what the band is like.

I’m hoping to make an EP with a couple of their songs that I could sell at comic conventions, or maybe include in a future book of my comics, and probably also have available online somehow.  I have some ideas about there sound, and I can probably write their lyrics, but I don’t play any musical instruments or anything like that, so I’ve been talking to musically talented people I know about collaborating on this.  If anybody out there is interested, email me and who knows, we’ll see what happens.  The sound I’m thinking of for Dove of Love is kind of a 90′s grunge band sound, only like kind of bad, low-budget imitation grunge.  It’s supposed to be a parody album and funny, but I’d like the songs to be strong enough that it’s actually enjoyable for people to listen to.  Like I was saying about Dove of Love before, the idea is that I’m joking when I make fun of these things, but Dove of Love doesn’t know that they’re joking.  It’s a fine line there.  I think if the songwriting is strong enough and the songs have strong melodies and everything, this could be an awesome little EP.

As the whole Dove of Love part of things develops, I’ll be posting to the Facebook page for the band , and also the Tweeting for them at twitter.com/doveofloveband , so follow those if you’re curious :)

This is one of the ones where a character is more obviously a mouthpiece for me.  I get really tired of Christians talking about their morals, which either fall into the category of destructive, or have nothing to do with whether or not you’re Christian, like, “Thou shalt not kill.”  And then there’s all the other stuff, like all the wackiness in Leviticus about everything from animal sacrifices to stoning people and selling them into slavery, but for Christians to have an awareness of all that, they’d have to actually read the Bible, which is pretty rare.  The irony is that what they point to as rules that should guide behavior is actually an excuse for them to behave however they want, because they pick and choose whichever bits appeal to them.

I could say more about this, obviously, but maybe for the moment I’ll give my soapbox a break and let the comic speak for itself :)