Bria’s Note: A lot of this entry was written before that fancy new poll came out the other day and made everyone way less freaked out about the whole “maybe the most powerful nation on earth is gonna re-elect the fascist’ thing, but I stand by what I have written here. Also, I’ll try to chill a bit in next week’s post – but I mean, c’mon, these are political comics, I’m gonna rant about heavy stuff from time to time!

Today’s comic comes on the eve of what is perhaps the scariest US election any of us has ever had to live through. The US presidential election has global consequences, to the point of being potentially apocalyptic, and those of us living outside of those benighted borders can’t help but look on in grim and terrified anticipation. For trans people and immigrants living within US borders, the potential outcome could mean life or death.

I remember well the awful feeling of waking up in 2016 and learning that the unthinkable had happened, and Donald Trump had been elected. But then, I had also thought in my teenage punk rock anarchist bubble that it would be unthinkable for the US to re-elect the bigoted, idiot, warmonger, George W. Bush, and yet they did – with the popular vote, no less.

I also remember well the fear that Trump would, despite all the awful things he did, be re-elected in 2020, as

well as the hollow sense of relief when he was defeated by Joe Biden on an uninspiring platform of “Back to Normal”.

Somehow in 2024 we yet again find ourselves in the same place, fearful that somehow, despite all of his obvious flaws and crimes he’s committed and all of the people who absolutely loath him, America will once again elect the worst man on Earth to its highest office.

How did we get here? How is it that this man who praises Hitler and promises the emmiseration of tens of millions of people, who is openly pathologically selfish and has an extensive history of scamming people and shorting workers, who quite clearly is mentally declining to a similar degree to the old man who was already forced out of the race, and who has 34 criminal indictments against him, including for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, how is it that somehow he is in a near 50/50 split race for the most powerful office on Earth?

There is absolutely no excuse for this race to be this close.

It is sad that apparently America really is that racist that so many people are willing to vote for Trump, but it is even more sad that the Democrats are so unwilling to offer anything to people to convince them that voting for a Democrat even means anything. Kamala Harris enjoyed a brief boost to her popularity when she entered the race, purely on the optics of her not being an old white man too senile to debate an almost equally senile old orange man, and then another when she picked Tim Waltz, the friendly woke football coach, as her vice-presidential candidate. But ever since then, at every turn she has undercut any possibility that she will do anything to actually address people’s needs. She has adopted Republican framing and positions on immigration and the border (including building the border wall that Donald Trump was ridiculed and rightfully called a racist for campaigning on in 2016), she has made no indication that she will be different from Joe Biden’s completely permissive stance on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and aggression towards Lebanon and now Iran, she has done very little to message how she will address the affordability crisis, and she has been completely non-committal on actually doing anything to tangibly protect reproductive and transgender rights. All she really ever does is gesture to how bad Donald Trump would be without really saying much about what she would do instead. And when she does, terms like “Opportunity Economy” and “Most Lethal Fighting Force in the World” are what get thrown around instead of obviously popular things like “Ending Price Gouging” (mentioned, like, twice?), “Enshrining Roe V. Wade into Law” (weirdly not promised?), or “Medicare For All” (disavowed). Despite being the first Black-Indian and first woman president of the US, if elected, Kamala Harris doesn’t seem like she will be anything beyond the current status quo, which is to say, awful for a great many people. Poverty and servitude at home, imperial destruction abroad. No, instead of offering real change to win over the very large numbers of disaffected people who either don’t see Democrats as being able to help their day to day struggles or those who can’t in good conscience vote for the party currently aiding a genocide, her campaign has been entirely directed towards trying to win over a small group of conservatives who don’t like the optics of Donald Trump. Picking up such voters doesn’t require Democrats to offer anything that would upset the status quo or the corporate donors who back the party.

They only want to win a certain way.

If Donald Trump wins, many Democrats and Democratic donors will still keep on being rich. They see their own lives and status being somewhat protected even as Trump punishes his enemies and tortures those deemed undesirable by conservative culture. But if broad sweeping change happens to the housing market or to worker’s ability to collectively bargain, or people’s ability to have social mobility, or if the vote bargaining chip that is the precarity of abortion access were to be taken off the future campaign issue list, then their lives might change! Their donors might get upset, and the elite’s stranglehold on power might be challenged in some small way!

So they only want to win a certain way. They only want to win in such a way that they get to keep on doing all the shitty little Neo-liberal non-solutions they offer instead of actually fixing anything. They only want to win by shifting their voter roster to people they don’t really have to do anything for other than scare with the threat of what the alternative might be.

And they are fine with losing if they can’t get that.

If Donald Trump wins in 2024, it will indeed be a dark day for the United States, and for the planet Earth. It will not only likely plunge the USA into a cruel(er), (more) authoritarian state, but set the precedent for conservatives in Canada and other “Western Democracies” to follow suit in their political stances and tactics.

But, in truth, we are already living in a grim precedent of political tactics. How many times have we been told this is “the most important election of our lives”? Why is it in just about every election, Canadian and American, from the national down to the state/provincial, every single time we are given the choice of either an ineffective liberal who offers nothing to nobody and who represents all of the worst aspects of the system, or a right wing psycho who promises to destroy millions of people’s lives while otherwise also offering nothing to nobody? Every single time we are told to suck it up, swallow our pride or our desire for a truly better world, and vote for a piece of shit whom we hate and who will enable the continuation of all the things currently sucking the life out of us, or else we will face the threat of the evil ogre who will come in and wreck everything.

Also every single time, we are chastised for even slightly criticizing the good, nice liberal protecting us from the conservative ogre. We are admonished for demanding they actually do something or for suggesting that maybe we could vote for another party that might offer us something more. How dare you attack them during the most important election ever? Don’t you know that this shitty liberal is our best chance of defeating the evil conservative ogre who will ruin everything? Never mind that it’s basically always an election, since election season begins, like, two years before the date, and there’s midterms and by-elections in the meantime. Much like right after one of America’s daily school shootings, it’s never the right time to criticize the shitty liberal.

So we keep voting for the shitty guy instead of the even shittier guy, all the while, things get progressively shittier, culture and politics gets ratcheted rightwards, and nothing is done to address those existential problems facing us, like Climate Change.

If every single election you MUST vote for a specific party, and you aren’t allowed to ever criticize the party or demand they change policy or do better, or else face the threat of tyranny, oppression, and violence, that already sounds like tyranny with extra steps.

Liberals, and the corporations who fund both them and conservatives, benefit from an unhinged right wing. They get to wield one wing of politics like a stick, getting the donkey (that’s us, not the Democrats, they don’t deserve to claim donkeys) to work, while the other wing of politics is the even bigger stick they keep around for when we get out of hand. They don’t ever have to inconvenience themselves or their donors by actually helping us or giving us anything, because they can always scare us into supporting them. So the corporations get to carry on their merry little way, plundering the earth, and immiserating us in slower motion.

So where am I going with this? I dunno, I think this is just something every person living in a “democracy” needs to be keenly aware of going forward, regardless of who wins tomorrow.

Should Kamala Harris win, what then? We all breathe a sigh of relief and go to sleep while she continues all the worst parts of the current system while enacting new, bad things to satisfy the conservatives she’s chosen to cater to? So many said they would push Joe Biden leftwards after he was elected. How did that work out?

How did that work out for Gaza?

And Joe frankly signaled and acted out far more left-leaning and pro-labour policies than Kamala has. No, if anything, what the Harris campaign is trying to show with this election is that they can win by disregarding the Left. They can pick up all the suburban conservative votes they need in a handful of swing states by offering them what essentially amounts to Bush era Neo-conservatism. Not voting or voting third party will be even more fully nullified as a “protest” vote, they’ll never have to listen to the Left again, and they’ll never have to give the working class anything again.

The NDP in my province just did this in our recent election. In what is supposedly the most progressive part of Canada, and in a system that is not two party, our last election went basically 50/50 between the newly reformed provincial Conservative party who are every bit as MAGA as the US Republicans and who didn’t even really exist until a few months before the election, and the NDP, the supposedly left-of-centre party whose origins lie in fighting for public healthcare and worker’s rights, but these days governs more like our

federal Liberal party or the US Democrats. The NDP has increasingly moved rightwards over the years as the old provincial Liberal party slowly Brundlefly’d into the Conservatives. They now focus exclusively on the needs of wealthy property owners and resource extraction companies. They ran a campaign focused entirely on how bad the Conservative are (and, sure, like Trump, they really are that bad) while implementing policies once only proposed by conservatives, such as mandatory rehab treatment for drug users (i.e. locking people up). They barely skated by this election but showed they could win by only catering to a certain kind of well to do liberal who is turned off by the boorish antics of MAGA conservatives. They’ll most likely continue to skate by, giving nothing to help anybody struggling, building up more and more resentment against them among the rural working class who see their material circumstances declining. Meanwhile, conservatives whip their rural stooges into hate-filled frenzies over trans healthcare and sex education in schools, and blame their worsening conditions on carbon taxes and climate refugees. Can the conservatives ever win in BC by stoking hatred in the hinterlands? Maybe. Maybe not. But as long they are too rude or crazy for a certain kind of petty bourgeois voter, then the NDP can depend on those well-to-do types to vote for them to secure their material interests without having to appear as being a bigoted yahoo. Yes, the Green Party took two seats – a huge downgrade from their position last election, their party leader even losing her seat – which means they could hold some control over the balance of power, preventing either the Conservatives or NDP from enacting some of their worst policies. But people’s fears over the Conservatives encouraged “strategic voting”, so the Greens lost a ton of progress they had made in recent years, despite launching one of the best and most thorough party platforms I have ever seen. I hope in the future more voters become willing to give the Greens a chance, but for now the shitty establishment liberals get to continue not helping anybody but their wealthy constituents and corporate backers, laughing all the way to the bank.

So that’s what we get to look forward to with a ‘win’ by the shitty liberals.

Of course, if Donald Trump wins, may god have mercy on us all. A whole lot of people are going to suffer if he does, and his victory may very well signal the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.

And, like, I don’t want to be an accelerationist, but a big part of me these days wonders if maybe that’s what has to happen? Maybe nothing real is going to change until things actually get bad? Nobody ever risks anything or does anything drastic unless they are forced to. Understandably, nobody wants to sacrifice themself for a cause if they don’t have to. Maybe the status quo needs to be so destructively upset that people are forced to demand drastic change, or take matters into their own hands and remake society out of the ashes of the old? Like finally finding the will to exercise and look after your health after your first heart attack. But, unlike exercise, which is fun and cool, this would no doubt be a terrible and harrowing time to live through, with trans and queer people at the very tip of the spear, and I do not wish for it even as I fearfully ponder if it may be necessary. But if this were the case, and nothing would ever get better until a big drastic change borne out of a crisis happened, would you want to live your entire life under an increasingly soul crushing system if it meant avoiding the upheaval? Would you be willing to adopt the politics of “Do it to Julia” and go along with the destruction of others if it meant your own status within the system were preserved?

I suppose more than anything, this kind of musing is cope in the face of a terrifying and more tangible possibility like Donald Trump winning. Nobody should be wishing or hoping for these things, but perhaps it’s better to think about how to face catastrophes in a manner that elevates our society rather than degrades it.

All I can say is that, if this is the best that our current system can offer us, if the choice is more of the same or the destruction of Western Democracy, then I’m not surprised so many people are flirting with the idea of destroying Western Democracy.

Gosh! That sure was a lot of words, on top of drawing a comic, too! Consider supporting my work on Patreon and gain access to comics and videos in advance, behind the scenes material, and hang out with me on the Life of Bria Discord!

I have mentioned previously that I had illustrated a couple of coloring books in the past year. My second book, Slayer Maidens, came out in June of 2024, but it was borne out of years of conceptual development.

Many of the book’s illustrations were based on my art series, “Lady Dino Knights”, which occupied much of my drawing time in 2022 and 2023. But those dino knights themselves were based off of my world building sketches and notes for my uncompleted graphic novel, Starfist Gemini.

Starfist takes place on Tyrant-221, one of many moons orbiting a distant gas giant exoplanet. This planetoid is populated by extraterrestrial dinosaurs, including intelligent humanoid saurians who had built a longstanding and technologically advanced civilization. Starfist is the story of the arrival of humans on Tyrant and its consequences, but Slayer Maidens depicts that world’s future. A world where humans and dinosaurs have fully integrated, and where peace and justice are maintained by the brave wayward warriors of the Dino Knight Core! There are settings and characters and creatures I envisioned in my notes that I brought to life in both the original Dino Knight illustrations and the coloring book pages that followed.

It was also an excellent opportunity to make use of my many excellent dinosaur reference models, including my homemade ones

I’ll close this post with a sample of the book. Feel free to download and color these pages below, either digitally or printing them out and coloring them like a coloring book.

And if you really like them or if you just want to help support me, you can pick up a copy of Slayer Maidens on Amazon – I make a very modest royalty from every copy sold.

(Or my other coloring book, Ultimate Dinosaur coloring #1!)

Of course, royalties take a while to add up, so if you really want to support me, I recommend signing up to a monthly donation on my Patreon

Or if that’s too much of a commitment right now, you can give me a one-time donation on Ko-fi.

Since starting up the blog I’ve been spending some time this week cleaning up the website, fixing links, and archiving old comics that never got an archive page. What I’ve learned doing this is that memory is a tricky thing.

In my previous posts, I talked about becoming burned out. This most certainly happened, but my recollection of how it happened is skewed. It was skewed by burnout itself – and the depression that followed it.

In my mind, I got fully burned out on comics at the end of 2020. But going through and archiving my old comics, I see that I was making comics steadily for most of 2021, which is kind of incredible because I was doing a ton of other stuff in 2021, such as making this goofy homebrew Power Rangers video. It wasn’t until 2022 that I truly slowed down on comics, but that had more to do with physical health issues than anything else!

2022 was a real low point for me. I was suffering from joint pain all throughout my body, from the top of my neck all the way into my fingers and toes. Just holding a pen or stylus hurt and I seriously questioned my future as an artist, and consequently whether I had any future at all.

I think, in my mind I stopped comics in 2021 because that served the narrative that “Depression Brain” would have me believe in. “Depression Brain” is a state that I have observed in myself and numerous others where we frame everything in the least flattering manner, where we shoot down any suggestions or attempts to help, and where everything is bad, has always been bad, and always will be bad. In my mind I had built up my lapse in routine comics uploads far longer than I had because that would reinforce the narrative that I was a failure or that my situation was hopeless.

But going through my old comics not only showed me that the narrative that I gave up on comics in 2021 wasn’t true, but it also got me going back through my old art from this era of supposed reduced productivity. Some of it I posted to social media, but much of it I did not.

I find it amazing that I evidently continued to make art despite dealing with many other challenges during this time.

Here are some of my digital works that I think are of quality. They would have been sketched on my couch during some afternoon with my beautiful partner.

This is by no means every digital piece of mine from the 2022-2023 era, but also not shown are the pages and pages of sketches and art pieces I made in the real world, as well as my many other art obsessions from this time period, such as my custom pens and the posable art models I built.

Like I said in my previous posts, I was constantly drawing and creating, but it was posting that I truly lost confidence in. And that loss of confidence poisoned my mind and skewed my view of just how much I accomplished even when I wasn’t feeling my best.

So hopefully this reminds you to look at your perception of things and give yourself credit for anything your Depression Brain has selectively edited out of your recollection to serve its twisted narrative.

I’ve been in a weird place for a long time.

When I started this comic site back in 2015, I was just starting out in transition and making a fresh new beginning in life. I was going through a lot of big life changes and dealing with some heavy emotions, and the way I worked through those feelings was making comics.

But once I got a bit of a following online, I suddenly was under a whole new level of scrutiny, and I no longer felt like I could actually work through my stuff in the same way I used to. Combine that with increasing political ennui as a result of seeing the worst people continue to gain traction in society despite all the work done by people like myself pointing out their hypocrisy and how they were harming others, as well as discouragement by the increasing enshitification of social media platforms for independent creators, I just didn’t feel like making comics mattered anymore.

Ever since around 2020 I’ve been in varying degrees of burnout. Finishing my horror story, She Never Came Out, and then my other non-horror graphic novel, Coming Out Again, shortly after, burned me out. But it wasn’t until I tried to do the follow-up to SNCO, The Urban Animal, that I got REALLY burned out, and just stopped drawing comics with any kind of regularity. You can maybe see from the content of those horror stories where my head was at. I still did quite a bit in those years, but I wasn’t the same me I used to be. I didn’t believe in myself or my art in the way I used to.

I also had some physical health issues in that time that I will talk about in a future post.

I’ve been working at all kinds of odd activities – from acting, to voiceover, to teaching karate, and running community programs in my local area. I have tried to be more open to doing a wide variety of things in the past few years. I needed to gain perspective on what mattered to me and why I do what I do.

And what I’ve learned is that making art and comics is my life.

It’s who I am.

I’ve never stopped drawing and creating in all this time, but I’ve posted extremely little of what I’ve created. I am deeply grateful for all of the people who have stuck by me and who continued to follow and support me, despite my lack of public activity.

Moving forward, I am going to be posting more. Maybe social media is a lost cause, who knows? But what I do know is that I still have my very own website where I can post basically whatever I want without fear of an algorithm crushing me. I’ll still put things on social media, but I want this currently long-neglected website to be where you can best find all things Bria. I have new comics coming, I have new art projects in development. My art is looking better than ever and I feel stronger and more vibrant than I have in years.

One new place you can follow me for updates is my BlueSky, which I made a while back but haven’t done anything with until now.

If you would like to support my work and keep me focused on making art to share, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or you can purchase one of my new coloring books, “Ultimate Dinosaur Coloring and Slayer Maidens.

(I have new coloring books in the works among my upcoming projects 😉 )

Expect more frequent updates, by all means watch my social media channels, but also maybe consider getting out of the social media sphere and spend more time on some good old fashioned websites!

This comic is indicative of my mental state – NO I am not befriending neo-nazis. I mean I sketched it up on a whim but then sat on it for over a week because I was unsure what to do with it, before accidentally posting it as a blog post when I meant to just make a web page for it. (don’t manage your website before coffee, kids!)

Art is my life, but I feel all my hard work isn’t being properly focused. This is why I am planning to finally get some help – NO I am not checking into a psych ward (though I probably should). I am planning to take on an assistant, somebody to help me in my studio and manage my page. I know I could be a lot more effective in my efforts if I had somebody backing me up and taking care of things that, frankly, I am not very good at. I’ll keep you posted about how this proceeds, and hopefully it will translate into things running more smoothly around here.

I identify as a Taoist, and part of my practice as a Taoist is to follow my natural inclinations in order to sort through the confusion of living so much of my life as the wrong gender and find my “true nature”. This led me to learn in 2020 that I have ADD (they don’t often diagnose adults with the ‘H’). These two things translate into me constantly trying new things and pursuing many different projects – often too many.

One thing in particular I am trying out in 2021 is spending less time on social media. But I still want an outlet to write my thoughts down, as well as broadcast some of the many different things I get up to as an artist. So the obvious choice is to resurrect the blog format my site once followed back when I started it up back in 2015!

My big focus in 2021 will still be on my horror “graphic exorcism”, The Urban Animal, sequel to my previous horror story, She Never Came Out. Currently my plan with TUA is to complete and release chapters 2 and 3, before wrapping up the remaining 5 chapters to release leading up to Halloween 2021.

I am also spending a lot of time doing live streams, primarily through my twitch page. Sundays at 6 PM PST I host The Sunday Portrait, where I interview and draw a new guest each week.

Tuesdays at 6 PM I stream my attempts at toymaking on my show, Dollarstore Kitbash.

And on Thursdays (also at 6 PM) I run voice feminization workouts for trans people on Transgender Voice Training Time. Episodes get uploaded to my Youtube channel so trainees can go back to them to train alongside.

This Spring, my new graphic novel, and sequel to First Year Out, Coming Out Again, is being released by Signing Dragon Press. This story continues after the first book, but focuses on a variety of characters and explores various aspects of identity and how people’s identities can evolve over time. Look for it in March 2021!

Finally, I am opening art commissions once again! Pencil head shot sketches start at $10. Send me an e-mail at lifeofbria @ gmail.com to get a quote for your project.

I always have lots of arty things on the go, so be sure check back here every Friday to get a look at what I get up to in 2021!

– Previous –

I was hired this week to do a commission of a Shin Godzilla. The thing is huge; much bigger than my drawing desk. This makes it hard to photograph. But I did my best to document both the entire composition as well as a scan to show the fine details. What do you think?

Would you want a Bria monster hanging on your wall?

I’ve barely been bothering with updating the blog on here as much as I should because I’ve been focusing on building up my Facebook Page. And, let’s face it, that’s where the majority of the action happens. So you should definitely check it out if you’re worried about missing something!

But, with the new year comes a new season of my weekly podcast, Live With Bria. Season two kicks off with a one-on-one interview with Sophie Labelle, world famous author of the trans webcomic, Assigned Male. We’ll probably talk about trans stuff or something. I dunno, she’s kinda on vacation right now, so we mostly just stay up all night drinking boozy coffee and drawing.

Oh yeah, there’s a new comic up, it being Friday and all. Them comics are going to be coming at a reduced rate for the next few months, as I seriously need to get my butt in gear working on this graphic novel. Look for them every Monday, and probably Friday, if I have time.

But if you’re wanting more Bria content, consider becoming a financial supporter of Life of Bria through Patreon. People who pay a monthly subscription are ultimately what keeps this comic going, and those who are generous enough to do so are rewarded with extra exclusive content not available to the general public, as well as varied rewards, depending on how much you donate. So please consider signing up today, I promise you won’t regret it.

Support Life of Bria on Patreon and keep the site afloat!!