This is without a doubt one of the more peculiar spontaneous drawings I’ve cooked up.  I think I had been listening to something on NPR about teaching children philosophy and somewhere in the conversation dualism came up.  Dualism “is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.”  That is, the belief that there is such a thing as the mind, which is not simply a term for a material state of the brain and which is non-material.  One of the big problems for any belief of this sort is how to account for the interaction between the physical and the non physical, AKA, the “problem of interactionism.”  The French philosopher Descartes, whose particular ideas on this topic are now known as “Cartesian Dualism” wrestled with this problem and theorized that the location in which this odd interaction was supposed to occur was the pineal gland in the brain.  Presumably at the time no one knew exactly what this gland did, so, hey, maybe it’s where the mind and body interact, right?  Of course this really skirted the issue.  The problem isn’t where such a thing would occur, but how.   At any rate, here’s the cartoon.  Anyone other than me probably would have done something that makes more sense and is funnier… like some guys sword fighting, you know “dueling?”

I’m doing a three page story for the Wide Awake Press Free Comic Book Day comic.  The book’s going to include work by Duane Ballenger, J Chris Campbell, Andrew Davis, Justin Gammon, Josh Latta, Pat Lewis, Brad McGinty, Rich Tingley, Rob Ullman and me.

Anyway, the theme of the work is food and I was looking around for some food-related legends, folk tales and whatnot to maybe illustrate for the book and I stumbled on a pretty amazing Japanese legend.  I think it’s just way too gross to do for this book, and I’m planning instead to do a 3-pager on the origin of the hushpuppy, but you gotta dig the imagery of this goddess vomiting up fish for the sea and game for the land–and then the moon god getting so grossed out that he just straight-up kills her:

According to the legend, the moon god, Tsukiyomi, was
dispatched to earth by his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu, to visit Ukemochi
no Kami (Goddess of fertility and food). The food goddess welcomed him by
facing the land and disgorging from her mouth boiled rice, turning toward the
sea and spewing out all kinds of fishes, and turning toward the land and
disgorging game. She presented these foods to him at a banquet, but he was
displeased at being offered the goddess’s vomit and drew his sword and killed
her. When he returned to heaven and informed his sister of what he had done,
she became angry and said, “Henceforth I shall not meet you face to face,”
which is said to explain why the Sun and Moon are never seen together.

I wouldn’t have done this second section as part of the comic, but here it is:

Another messenger
sent to the food goddess by Amaterasu found various food stuffs produced from
her dead body. From her head came the ox and the horse; from her forehead,
millet; from her eyebrows, silkworms; from her eyes, panic grass (a cereal);
from her belly, rice; and from her genitals, wheat and beans. Amaterasu had the
food grains sown for humanity’s future use and, placing the silkworms in her
mouth, reeled thread from them, thereby beginning the art of sericulture – the
production of raw silk.