Tag: Behind the Moroniverse

Behind the Moroniverse – Damien Ulysses Hurlbutt

~ Jen ~ 4 Comments

The main inspiration behind fictional character Damien Hurlbutt has is so self-centered, he thinks this blog is all about him.

Seriously. I hope over time more people learn about communal narcissists and how they insidiously abuse people. Overts and covert narc-a-doodles are bad enough; communals are even sneakier.  I would not wish narcissistic abuse on my worst enemy and wish no ill will. I just wish they would all form their own narc colony on a deserted island and leave the rest of us alone. 

Or better yet, drop them from planes into an erupting volcano, and vaporize them so they cannot make more narcissists (OK not really, but it would be cool).

I was married to one of these evil souls. Had I known he was the son of Satan, I would not have dated him, moved to Illinois to marry him, leaving behind a job I loved to take one that was less than pleasant. 0/10 would not recommend.

I wish I had been given the omen.

Now divorced, this real-life neckbeard and “men’s rights activist” has told his friends that I draw cartoons of him and write stories about him.

Has he heard of Squirrely Dan?

My ex works as a senior library specialist and loves to read. I would hope that someone like him, whom I would think has a good grasp on literacy would understand that Damien and all the other morons on this blog are fictional characters — as in pretend people, not real ones. DUH.

Apparently my former husband thinks he works in a movie theater, like the random stranger whom I had met in 2004. Just like the fictional Damien Ulysses Hurlbutt, this real-life despot had been offering cloned movie tickets in return for a date, to us call-center coworkers taking breaks outside. I did not meet my ex until 2008.

I will never forgive my ex for trying to turn the spouse of my late friend against me in his smear-campaigning. Such a tender-heart, a self-proclaimed “old soul” writes lunacy letters like the drivel below and sends them to his estranged spouse’s medical providers.

Because, umm, a librarian knows more about psychology than an actual mental health provider? yeah…no.

My ex thinks so. Behold part of this lunacy letter he sent to my mental health team:

Projection: A narcissist’s calling card, as is pathological lying. Methinks narcissists have their own code of misconduct, maybe even a manual.

I will never forgive him for telling me he was “a nice guy for not throwing me into oncoming traffic” while we were walking into the hospital. Yeah, a really nice guy NiceGuy™ does that, right?

I will never forgive him for manipulating the divorce judge into letting him take custody of my cat Holly, whom he repeatedly hit (“it’s just a light tap” he gaslit when caught) and put into the shower to “punish.” Who does that to a cat? Has he helped move a body or something? Sadly he took the cat from me…

I will never forgive my ex for idealizing, devaluing me and then attempting to discard me, shortly before I left him. Rumor has it, he still obsesses over me, and makes feeble attempts to smear campaign me using the same DARVO tactics and made-up mental health diagnosis he had used in 2017. I imagine he pushes away what little friends narcissistic supply he has left.. Like his bootlicker friend once said to me, I wish he would “get over it, just move on.”

With narcadoodles, every projection is a confession.

I write and draw MoronicArts stories to cope with having been abused. I feel it helps and I am a lot happier back in New York State, doing my own thing, living with my sweet kitty, creating music, learning to speak other languages and making Youtube videos.

My hope is that my stories help others who have been abused by these monsters cope and process the crap they have been going through and hopefully bring a little joy to them, and myself also. Oh and it s fun to draw silly cartoons of fake events and pretend people doing moronic things to each other..

Do you think you may going through domestic violence or know someone who suffers it? Emotional abuse is still abuse and a form of domestic violence. Please click this link to learn more and to find help in your area: https://www.nomore.org/the-no-more-global-directory/

Your needs are valid, I believe you, and you are not alone. Healing is possible, as hard as it may seem.

Behind the Moroniverse – Character Theme Songs

~ Jen ~ 2 Comments

What kind of songs do the denizens of the Moroniverse like? Here’s a list. Have fun!

Kankakee bill collector Sybil Kibble misses eating King Kuts dog food.

JoAnn Kibble raps along to this safety song while rearranging her collection of school bus parts.

Robbie Hurlbutt sure thinks he’s number one.

Bourbonnais neckbeard Damien Hurlbutt used to jam out to this tune while driving to work at the Teirant Cinema-13, before he got captured trying to storm Area 51.

Wacky inventor and drugstore owner Wally Green doesn’t accept “no” for an answer when he thinks he has found the magnet to his steel.

Konrad Teirant plays a lot of Dirty Games.


Bernadette M. Cacca had loved her Turd Machine Deluxe so much, she went out and bought 19 more of them.


Gothic Diana Ross turns the men upside down with her long, long notes.

Ant D. Yu was having fun spinning this tune at the Manteno Optimal Club until Bernadette Cacca and her Poopy Groupies had showed up and made a stink. Word has it he still plays it when she’s not there.


Pat Splatt loves spammity spam, spam spam spam, beautiful spam spam spam spam.


Brandon Dixon thinks his tractor…mmm…imbecile machine is sexy.


One half of the rap group The Chickenheads, Tyrell “Ty-Fowl” Fowler burps along to this song:


Behind the Moroniverse – Scary Barry and Terry Reynolds

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Oh man, the main inspirations for Scary Barry and Terry Reynolds are people I hope you never encounter.

One hundred per cent miserable, and equally evil as her counterpart Barry, there is no pleasing Ms. Terry. She gets joy out of seeing others suffer. She’ll bite the hand that feeds her and once you’re sore from the fresh wound, she’ll bite it again to make it hurt that much more…

Imagine going on a trip overseas to study, experience different perspectives and have fun. That was my hope in the summer of 1999. when I took classes through my university for a study-abroad program in Italy.

What comes to your mind when you think about traveling?

Being forced to share a room with strangers who hated me was the last thing I expected.

Scary Terry was one of the haters. Much older than me, Terry made it a point to harass and belittle me. One time she woke me up and called me “whiny” because I was, you know, groggy like most people who just got up?

And then there was the time Terry told me to cover my legs. I have an autoimmune condition which affects my skin. get over it. Terry, if you don’t like it, then don’t look at it. Find something else to do in Italy than harass a fellow student.

I did smile when Terry had the audacity to talk trash about me at dinner, in front of all the other students from the United States. They told her to shut up and said they did not want to hear it. Neither did I.

Sadly, this Terry person (yes, the real name is Terry, different surname of course) majored in education. I feel bad for any student of Terry’s. No wonder we have some awful teachers in the school system.

When I got home from Italy, I told my family about the abuse I endured from her and her cousin, with whom I was forced to room. Since I did not grow up in a supportive family, they invalidated me by acting like it was no big deal. My feelings are valid.

To help process the trauma from repeated verbal abuse by Terry and the cousin, and the gaslighting I faced when i went home, I created my character Terry Reynolds. I will discuss the cousin in a separate entry.

Taking your road test is nerve-wracking enough. Imagine living in a small city where the sole proctor is a malignant narcissist, taking joy in seeing people fail. Meet the inspiration for Scary Barry Reynolds.

Barry (again, real first name) loved telling students “YOU FAILED” in a stoic tone, with a hint of an evil grin.

And now we get to learn about the psychic attack crap. Back in 2001 (No not 1991, sorry Greg Snyder), I received this junk mail:

Imagine greeting your proctor as you enter the car “Hi Barry” only to be screamed at, likely out of fear “How do you know my name?” And then told “I. Don’t. Like. That.”

Barry may look like Leon Kowalski from Blade Runner, and act like him. It goes without saying he would fail any empathy test. Maybe I should run the V-K Test on him and watch him fail. I just won’t ask him about his mother.

After failing my road test five times with Barry, I passed my test when I took it in another city and of course a different proctor. I had called his supervisor, per advice of my driving instructor, who failed to address the problem, saying “he makes his quota.” Yes, some doctors graduate at the bottom of their class. What do you call them? Yeah, a doctor. .

When I first got the spam, I thought it was for EarthBound cheat codes. Think again.

These morons tried to sell a psychic attack self-defense e-book. The spammer only accepted a check mailed to them, and then they promised to email you the electronic book after they got your check. Yeah, sounds legit.

The email was so funny, I had to save it, and use it for something.

Around the time I got the Defense Against Psychic Attack spamvertisement, I spent a lot of time on message boards chatting about metaphysics. Fans of Dragonball Z asked how to make “PSI Balls” and some even made videos pretending to “psychic attack” people using them. I thought the whole darned thing was so funny, it needed to prompt a story idea. Most of my ideas sat dormant in a different series, which I merged into MoronicArts.

No, butt Bernadette does: Behind the Moroniverse

~ Jen ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Are you holding a grudge? About?
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Behind the Moroniverse: Peppi and Bernadette

People ask me how I come up with my silly original characters and their absurd fictional stories.

Reality imitates art, or is it the other way around?

Here is my first concept drawing for the MoronicArts portapotty empress Bernadette Cacca from 1995, more than two decades before I met my former neighbor who shares her name in 2018. Apparently someone thought my blog was all about her. Does she burn her poopies too?

No, Bernadette, it’s not about you, it never was. My characters are fictional, as in pretend, fake, not real.

She does not even look the same, just shares the name because when I started developing her I wanted a woman’s name that could be shortened to “Bern.” I was torn between Bernice and Bernadette and I chose Bernadette, possibly rooted in the previous trauma caused by this person’s harassment in 2018 but at the end of the day I don’t really remember.

Tonight, I was minding my own business photographing the beautiful sunset silhouette by the trees, when one of my neighbors on the other side of the complex who is older than I — and should know better — egged me on.

Trying to mitigate whatever nonsense she was up to, I introduced myself and said “look at the pretty sky.” She mentioned she was Bernadette from next door when I had previously lived there in 2018 and had still a beef with me from when I had lived next to her SEVEN YEARS AGO. I did not even recognize her.

I had not seen her since I moved out. One would think she had matured by now, however she was the same 8-yr-old trapped in a 70-year-plus old body (or was it 80?). “Now you see the real me, I don’t like you. You told (the landlord) on me,” she said. What a dork.

“Mommy, she told on me!”
– Crybaby.

I told her that I handle things like an adult and asked her to stop harassing me. I talked to her neighbor down the hall while Bern was visiting someone else and she went from listening to me, to “Oh you better look out, Bernadette’s coming back.” I said, “so what? That was 8 years ago. I don’t care.”

Bernie cussed me out again as she walked past me back up the stairs, she and her sycophant put on a side show, complete with twerking the wooden fence attached to the apartment building. I kid you not. Then she pretended to dial 911 saying I was stalking her.

MMMMkay. I walked away from those circus freaks and told another neighbour from the same building about it and he cussed me out too!

What in the everlasting…I had no words.

It was a 3-ring circus now complete with flying monkeys and Spucklers. I thought the dude would be nice to me because we had mutuals, but nope, think again. Now he was also cussing me at me to “get the f*** away” like the other empathy-challenged humans putting on a show.

I got away from him, told all the tag team of all three bootlickers I wanted no contact with any of them, hand held up shaped like a big fat zero, as I emphatically said again – “ZERO CONTACT.”

I got to chat with some mature, non-screamy neighbors and had found out from one of them that Bernadettes’s a narc-a-doodle doo, just like my character, looking for supply but going about it differently. One of the maintenance men oversaw what went down, he advised me to call the landlord which I did. I left a voicemail for the him, after I sat down with a friend and opened up.

The landlord’s handling of Bernadette’s malarky with grace and dignity back in 2018 is precisely why I came back here: I needed a landlord whom I can trust.

And no, Bernadette, I still won’t take your crap.

Here’s another view of the imaginary Bern, not one of the real-life Bernies, let alone a famous one.

How Jen Makes MoronicArts

~ Jen ~ 2 Comments

“The sillies are manufactured in my brain, roll off the conveyor belt, out my hands and onto the paper.”

PS: “Moron” is the Welsh word for carrot.

PPS: Jen makes MixedMoronicArts, too.

Behind the Moroniverse: Peppi and Bernadette

~ Jen ~ 5 Comments

Manteno’s own Peppi and Bernadette Cacca might seem like empty characters at first, however there is a much darker side to them. Like all my characters, the Caccas are inspired by a combination of real people.

I have known Bernadette’s main inspiration my entire life. She had lived next to my grandmother. As kids, she was the entitled brat who wanted things her way or the highway. I used to try and dodge her, running the other way because she annoyed me so much, but then she would not leave me alone.

I clearly remember her insisting on calling me my deadname, despite my pleas for her to stop. Bernadette hasn’t any concept of boundaries and neither does her main inspiration. She just pretends to care.

In high school, she had found a way to manipulate people into thinking she was a wonderful person. I had to ask her an urgent question for a design I was creating for a play in which she starred, right before I had to catch the bus to trade school to design it. Instead of turning around and answering me, the “stage manager extraordinaire” sitting atop a desk kept talking faster and louder to the other student, drowning me out.

To add insult to injury, the real-life communal narcissist tricked the teacher into making ME apologize to HER. I will never forgive her for that abuse.

The real-life communal narc had been working on an app-only HBO show of some sort and playing piano for an LGBTQIA+ charity. You read that right; the same person who deadnamed me repeatedly is raising money for an LGBTQIA+ cause. Hmmm…

Now she is gaslighting people into thinking she cares about the Russian invasion into Ukraine, singing at charity events to raise money, and course to get that almighty photo opportunity. My best friend and her husband have family in Ukraine; this is personal for me. I do not care about a moronic photo op when my friends and their family are fighting for their lives, running from a DIC-tator who wants to bring about the Apocalypse.

I read she yelled at a late-night television host for getting too close to her piano. This behavior does not surprise me, having come from a person who has a history displaying her sense of entitlement to those closest to her.

I created my character to help cope with a lifetime of abuse from a narcissist who tricks virtually everyone into seeing her mask, which I suspect has been crumbling. I hope it falls off for good and she slithers away into a life of obscurity, working by herself, abusing nobody. Or maybe she will live out her life in the bog, devouring the living like the character whom she had inspired, Bernadette Moran Cacca.

Have you known a person like this?

Peppi Cacca’s name came from a rabid doorman in Italy who sexually assaulted me. Character Peppi Cacca’s main inspiration is a toxic, former neighbor who had stunk up my apartment with skunky weed and sadly abused his cat. I had gotten the idea from Pepe LePew and used to call him Pepe LePuke as I heard him through the ceiling vomiting every morning while he was upstairs visiting his boyfriend with whom he was having an affair. I am so glad to be out of that apartment complex, and in a much quieter, cleaner place – waking up to birds in the trees, not skunk-weed stench.

Awhile back, I had overheard him on the bus bragging to the driver about his drinking, making the excuse “can you blame me?”

I blame him for his own behavior.

Behind the Moroniverse: A writer shares one of the same big reasons I write.

~ Jen ~ Leave a comment
#La disobbedienza civile/Civil disobedience

Standing up for yourself — and others — is essential. Letting morons continue to create malarky only enables their stupid behavior. Who will it be to stand up in the face of absurdity?

Maybe it’s your turn.

Behind the Moroniverse – Pearl Jo Hurlbutt

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Back in 2017, I wanted to create a character inspired by my parents’ elderly neighbor who would call them several times a day, asking for favors, not taking no for an answer. Her original name was “Katy Scary.” However I felt the need to make some changes as the neighbor had gotten ill and sadly passed away. 

Instead of modeling the Hurlbutt matriarch after my parents’ neighbor, a former co-worker came to mind who fit the personality and loo of the character I was developing..

Some time ago, I had worked in a call center. If you had to call T-Mobile and were greeted by “Rep 12-3456”, that was me, and yes that was my real ID. Seated to my left was a young male who told tall tales of going to Afghanistan over the weekend and coming back to work on Monday. Seated to my right was this lady who wore muumuus to work every day, until our supervisor complained about her violating our already casual dress-code. 

This 55-ish slovenly lady asked me for help with her workstation and her calls. I have always loved to help people, however I felt this woman took advantage of me by asking the same questions repeatedly without showing her appreciation. At this call center, we could all relate to the challenges working with our customer base and would go up to a random representative in the break room and vent. However, the main inspiration behind PJ seemed like she was uncut for the job due to her poor emotional range. She had no regard for boundaries, just randomly talking to people bugging them, even if they had made it clear they were busy. 

Back in 2019, I parodied the Peloton bike ad which raised controversy from its sexist overtones. I drew her son Damien dreaming up the idea of buying one of their bikes to help his mother lose weight. 

Of course, her next-door neighbor Sybil Kibble thinks PJ is great, because she is just as moronic.