The Den

The Lighthouse

January 25th, 2021

There once was a dude on a ship.

He didn’t remember how he got there.

But he was in the middle of the sea, in the center of a storm that had been raging as far back as his memory could recall. The wind cut his cheeks and the rain soaked into him, pushing up feelings like guilt and regret, anger and deep despair. But instead of trying to find a way through the storm, or to face the feelings, he let the wind and the rain drown him, again and again.

He was scared, he didn’t know how to get out, and he sincerely didn’t think he could.

But he did. One day, he became so sick he threw up off the side of the ship, and it was enough to drive him back to the wheel, to give it a honest shot through the dark. He struggled. He steered close to jagged rocks and sirens and Death herself. But along the way, fragments of stars and particles of sunshine would offer glimpses to another world.

And then it happened. It was late at night. He felt like he was in the middle of nowhere when the ship abruptly stopped. He had reached the shore.

He was saved.

He looked to his left. There was an empty lighthouse. To his right, a stone path to a warm cottage. He realized that he was already saved, and if he wanted to, he could walk to the cottage and enjoy the rest of his life.

But.

When he was on the water, there were no lighthouses for him. He saw that he could potentially be that lighthouse for somebody else.

There once was a dude on a ship.

What he did once he got off defined who he would be.

A More Perfect Union

January 20th, 2021

It was pointed out to me today that the Constitution starts with the promise of a “more perfect union” — the key word not being “perfect,” but “more.”

It immediately states that there is nothing perfect about us or this country, and that it could be and will be better perpetually. It is our job as citizens to keep progressing.

Last night, I was watching a talk show, and they talked about Biden’s “radical empathy.” The people having the conversation admired it, but it also made them nervous. Can a person or a nation care too much?

To that I say: relationships and families and communities and countries are destroyed by hate every day. The quiet kind, the loud kind, the violent kind.

But if our country gets consumed by compassion? If we fail by embracing kindness, intelligence, and love?

I will pick up my violin, I will take up my bow, and I will play until that ship is completely underwater.

Happy Inauguration Day, fellow Americans.

Any & Everything

January 19th, 2021

Anything can be saved. Everything can be destroyed.

These were two phrases I repeated in my head when I was still “in it.”

I repeated them because I knew I wanted them in my first comic book, and because these words were keeping me alive.

I spent a lot of time thinking about my value, or lack thereof, as a human being. I was a hollow mess. I wondered often if I had done too much damage, in every possible way, to be able to recover. I didn’t know if I was worth saving.

Then I would repeat: anything can be saved.

And I believed it. I still do. Even if it doesn’t happen like you thought it was going to happen, anything and anyone can be saved.

But the one phrase wasn’t enough.

I realized that if I kept living the way I was that there wasn’t going to be anything left. Thus, everything can be destroyed.

I decided to bookend the first issue of The Flying Squirrel with these words, utilizing the shape of an hourglass: the first page is the top, where the sand begins its journey, and the last page, the bottom.

And the pages in-between forever hold the time I decided to try to save something.

[The Weirdos: Volume I is now available on dennisvogen.com, Amazon, and Comixology]

No Justice, No Peace

January 18th, 2021

Today is a wonderful day to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Do you want to know what’s not a great way to celebrate him, though? Cherry-picking one of his quotes about “peace” or “unity” and calling it a day.

If you’re just a regular ol’ white person reading this, did you know that he thought we — the moderate white people — are the biggest threat to equality in this nation? Bigger than the KKK even. And now you may be thinking: how is that possible? I’m not even a racist!

Okay.

It comes down to this: the people who misunderstand or despise the peaceful protests of Black Lives Matter today are the same kind of people who misunderstood or despised Reverend King decades ago. And there are a lot of people in both these cases.

Scroll through your feed real quick. See all those comments comparing a near-universally white insurrection to the rioters who took advantage of BLM protests last summer, but contributing that violence to Black Lives Matter like these are even comparable situations? Those are your moderate whites — the ” But I’m not a racist!”, the “But I have Black friends!”, the “Sure, protest, but do it in a way that does not interfere with any part of my life” — and they are alive, unwell, and the biggest, loudest threat to equality in this nation.

Choosing the MLK quotes that make you feel good as a human misses the entire point of MLK.

Read his letters. They feel like they could have been written this morning. They’re eloquent, and include hope as an ingredient, but they also describe the very real struggle in the fight for justice.

And that is more what he was about. Not a silent, unfair peace — but justice. For all. He wanted America to be true to the words it put on paper.

So to really celebrate the man and his words today, let’s make sure we’re reading and sharing ALL of them. It’s the only way we’ll be able to see through to his dream.

You’re Going To Make It After All

January 18th, 2021

You would think that because we’re not prehistoric people fighting for our daily survival that we wouldn’t be so stressed out.

But what humans did was change the definition of survival itself.

It is no longer just having shelter and something to eat and not dying.

It’s having a home that isn’t affordable for most people to own outright. It is always having reliable transportation. It is having clothes and accessories and makeup that somehow translate all of the things you are on the inside. It’s acquiring the most current technology. It’s acquiring a lot of material things, actually. It’s throwing parties and having weddings and preparing funerals for people whose costs while living haven’t even been paid in full yet.

And it’s, you know, not dying.

When we settled the original threats to existence, we just invented more and then built them up like skyscrapers. We created traditions and expectations and then dedicated every generation to come to kill themselves by living with them.

For me, panic mode, most of the time, starts when I am thinking about how I am going to keep all of this up. I find peace in the moments when I recognize that we make most of this shit up.

I don’t know who else needs to hear this today, but these thoughts help me when the sheer volume of materialism is suffocating.

If you have shelter, and something to eat, and are not dead: I see you. You survived in the most primal of ways today. And you are the stunning result of strong, beautiful human beings who did just that.

falling asleep behind the wheel

January 16th, 2021

Highway hypnosis is the phenomenon of daydreaming so profoundly that you find yourself at the destination of a journey without being able to remember how you got there. It’s called that because it usually happens behind the wheel.

I never thought that my grief would sometimes manifest itself in this way.

Often, I’ll wake up in the morning and make a mental note of my routine and what I have to do that day. Suddenly, as I’m opening a breakfast bar or taking my multivitamin, I’ll find myself in the thoughts of a woman who is dying.

It’s visceral, stress-inducing and strange, and by the time I get back to me, I find my fingers running through my hair, covered in finishing paste, and I am somehow dressed, having apparently taken a shower.

It’s a Freaky Friday form of time travel. Sometimes it’s life-affirming, giving me the perspective I need to live the best life I can; sometimes it is soul-crushing, and enough to make me question even the simplest aspects of the life I live.

When I pull back on the entirety of my existence, I see it as its own highway hypnosis. I am a person who is made up of everything I have ever said, done and experienced, yet at any given time, I am remembering almost none of it.

When I think about that, it too makes the bottom fall out of my stomach.

I think this why we become obsessed with making a roadmap of who we are. We do it in journals, with photographs, online. We draw family trees around our hands and keep calendars that act as mile-markers.

And the most important constants we mark on our maps are the people of our lives. I wouldn’t know who I am or what I’ve been without you. Any of you.

And then the reason for the highway hypnosis of my grief, the foggy gaps I drive through day-to-day, comes into clear view: how am I supposed to accurately keep track of time when the biggest constant of my life is gone?

Brushfire In-Depth: January 14th, 2021

January 14th, 2021

The creation of my first all-ages graphic novel, Brushfire, is well underway and (as promised!) here’s an update of how it’s going.

This is concept art for arguably the most important location in the entire series: Faribault’s Central Park. Brushfire — which, if this is the first you’ve heard of it, is an advanced wildlife society dedicated to adventure, education and community — is actually located UNDERNEATH it all, in the burrow our characters call home.

This piece was created using various painting tools in an art program called Infinite Painter on my tablet (which is one of my favorite art apps on Android, and I’ve used quite a few). The backgrounds in the series itself are quite different, but it’s fun (and helpful) to use different brushes (like the watercolor I used here) to experiment, and to create different moods and settings. I’ve been very inspired by the hand-painted backgrounds seen in Disney and Warner Bros. animated work for this series.

I’m almost done with character design for Wave I, which has been an almost overwhelming task on this project. With The Weirdos, I basically had to design four characters (one of whom was a literal stick figure); then I’d design additional characters when needed. The initial cast for Brushfire is at least FIVE TIMES that size.

The art style itself has also gone through a lot of development; this will look nothing like The Weirdos, or anything I’ve ever put out. The Weirdos has a “style” all its own that I created over five issues, and I hope to carry a tradition of not repeating myself every time I start a new comic series.

I mentioned “Wave I” a few paragraphs back, and that refers to the book I’m working on. Brushfire will consist of three books, called Waves, and the entire series is already laid out from start to finish. This allows me to plant seeds on the very first page that might not bloom until the last. That kind of stuff is exciting for me!

I hope you’re all as well as you can be. The world is really hard right now. I’m finding relief with a crew of small, furry animals who love life, science, exploration, and each other. I can’t wait for you to meet them, too.

Told Ya

January 14th, 2021

Imagine that you’re at a restaurant with your family. A few tables down sits a man, and he is drunk. Initially, he’s just rambling incoherently and maybe using language and slurs that make your family uncomfortable.

Eventually, though, he starts to say undeniably threatening remarks.

You alert some of the staff and the manager, and they ignore you. They say he’s a good man, and there’s nothing to worry about.

A few minutes later, he gets up from his booth, walks directly over to your table, and punches you as hard as he can in the face.

As you lie on your back, breathless, blood openly draining into your lungs, he does something inexplicable:

He tells you to relax.

He addresses the entire restaurant and, just seconds after hitting you, he declares that this is a time for peace and unity.

Even more inexplicably, some of the other patrons stand by him and say he is absolutely right.

The police aren’t called. Your bill isn’t comped. Your family is terrified.

And you are expected to comply.

It would be horrifying to find yourself in a situation like this. It would be degrading to be on the other end of this gaslighting.

It would say everything about the people who were inside the restaurant.

Forgive & I’ll Live

January 10th, 2021

Somebody on the internet set me off tonight.

Someone I love said, “You’re a writer. You should be better than the words that you’re saying right now.”

She’s right.

I can not, no matter how hard I try, ever understand people who live to set fire to the world, and who intentionally choose to hurt other human beings.

And as my thumbs trudge through the icy social media slush, it feels like those people are growing by number and getting louder.

And I think that’s where the anger comes from today. I feel alone.

I’m frustrated. I’m sad. I’m sorry for the times I said something mean or stupid. I’m sorry for the things I’ve done to hurt anybody.

Part of the human process, at least for me, is to get up, recognize that I am flawed, and then forgive myself for all of it — so I can live today in a way that I don’t take my past out on my present.

I don’t always succeed.

But I gather letters and words together and I try to use them in a better way, like a shovel to clear a path to understanding.

I just have so much trouble accepting that some people will choose to sit in a storm.