If the last few years are any indication there'll be no new Harry Potter adventure unleashed at whatever remains of the bookstore in your neighborhood in 2010. After a decade of publishing Harry Potter books author J K Rowling seems to have hit a bump, her prodigious imagination stalled, and it may be permanent. There'll be a few more movies, and a goblin "Christmas at Gringots" TV special, but that's it for the books.
So, to assuage any pointless residual Potter anticipation, I've put together an almost complete collection of Harry Potter Poor Almanacks. This first one was from 2000, before I'd read any of the books, though my wife had. And before the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire, had been released, as you can tell from its misidentification.
It was a lot of fun to do; cartoons are always fun to do when I'm working from ignorance. By the time I did the second Harry Potter cartoon I'd read at least a couple of the books. The cartoon below is not the actual second cartoon (which I gave to a friend) but the reworked version I did for the Almanac book that incorporated some from the first cartoon. I hope that's confusing enough.
After two of these, I'd established a tradition of Harry Potter Poor Almanacs appearing every summer, and I took it as seriously as Rowling probably took her little series of books. For the next installment I took it in another direction.
But after years of this grind, I was getting pretty burnt out and tired of the whole thing. This is pretty evident in my penultimate cartoon (note the reuse of the Marmite joke; as it was from the book I figured it was fair game).
But I knew there was more to say. This final cartoon considered the Rowling oeuvre and its effect on human civilization.
The end.
