Fan Art Saturday Falls On A Wednesday, Peeps Edition

My friend Joe Sutliff, who had some time on his hands and has talent to burn, sent me these Peep Dioramas he did for the Washington Post's annual Peeps competition. I am astounded, as I'm sure you are too.

It's stuff like this that makes drawing a comic strip worthwhile. As anyone who's actually eaten a Peep will agree, I'm glad they've found another use for them as building material, and I hope they develop some way of constructing low cost, environmentally friendly housing out of the damn things. And that when they do they can find people who'd be willing to live in spongy pink and yellow houses.

Joe also made this, Alice's big ugly fountain. It's amazing, and it actually works! Dang, Joe!

My Little Scheme Begins to Bear Fruit...

Ahahhahaha! This latest bit of news confirms it! Even as I foretold, the nation's economy teeters on the brink, and my fortunes increase!

Drawing A Mostly Accurate Map

Before I drew this I went back to a Cul de Sac from April 18th 2004. Here's the first panel-

Which was also used in the first syndicated Sunday strip-

Then, because I wanted to research the roots of this image as an excuse to put off starting work on the thing, I looked at the Tower of Babel by Breugel-

Which is especially interesting because it's under construction and it's got little clouds around it. Then, in the interests of further procrastination, I looked up Mont St. Michel, which is the coolest place around-

There's also the city from that Creepy Classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-

And Minas Tirith!-

By now several weeks had elapsed, so it was time to do a rough-

That's in brown Pitt marker. Then I had to do something larger and more detailed-

This is about 11 by 17 and it's where I sketched in most of the ideas, about half of which were left out because they weren't any good. But I like this in some ways more than the final. I like the ghosts of lines and stuff that's obscured and the way it shows the process. Then I did another, simpler rough that I won't show because it's boring. But here's a detail from the final-

And now, because I don't know what else to add, here's a drawing from an old Joel Achenbach column in the Post Magazine. It's my dream house if only because it's got a great porch-

Today's Cul de Sac

I'm putting this up just because I like it. The only thing I'd change would be to add "Oh, no!" in Alice's balloon in the fifth panel, right before "The children fell into their ice cream!"

Census Laffs

This is a ten year old Almanac, back when Stomp jokes were new and untried. Below is an illustration from Smithsonian Magazine for an article that somehow dealt with the beginnings of census taking and which I no longer remember anything else about. But the flies were fun to draw, I remember that much.

Spring Again

A lazy repost because it's Spring. Note the laughably outdated reference to the lack of snow this winter. This was the first Almanac I did in color but because of a production glitch it was printed in black and white.

A Mostly Accurate Map

This is hot off the drawing board, or really the watercolor paper stretching board. It's for a show opening next month at the Charles Schulz Museum, curated by cartoonist & historian Brian Walker, that features comics with a definite (if invented) setting. I'm loaning a few daily and Sunday strips and the cover of the first CdS book, and I wanted to do an additional piece for the show.  A map sounded like fun, as long as it wasn't too accurate. So here's this. I'll update later with some behind-the-scenes how-to stuff. 

St. Patrick's Day SpecPatular

Another old Almanac. See also here.

Today's Cul de Sac

For some reason the comics on GoComics.com aren't always showing up today. So, here it is, exlusively at this blog, for now. 

How to Draw Alice in Fast Motion

See here. My thanks to my friend Chris Sparks, who filmed this and thoughtfully provided a soundtrack by Beethoven that covers up my usual stream of Popeye-voiced drawing-time profanities.

Oscar Time, In Living Color

I'd like to thank th-

Another Kite-Eating Tree

Here's the rough and the final for today's strip. It's always more fun to do a larger and more intricate drawing than a strip with lots of talking and stage business, the trick is in finding a good enough gag to make it work. This one seems to. Cartoon trees are enjoyable to draw, as Dr. Seuss or George Herriman would tell you. And kite-eating trees are doubly so, as Charles Schulz would tell you. The hard part in this was making it look like it was full of kites and not just a random mass of triangles. The rough held together pretty well (this is the one I sent to my syndicate editor, the gentleman & scholar Greg Melvin), so I tried to follow the structure in the final too.

It did get a little fussy in the final, the little slope in front is clearer in the rough, but I think it still reads as a mass of kites in a tree. The only thing it needs now is color, which is done at the syndicate by Melissa Mallory. The final version that appears in a newspaper near you (I hope) can be seen at GoComics.

I have an idea for a tree in Grandma's back yard that's a balloon magnet, that's full of little colorful shreds of rubber. I'd thought of it a while ago and I still don't know what to do with it. But after seeing a couple of balloons stuck in a neighborhood tree and finally seeing Up last night, it's sticking in my head. I don't know, it sounds too hard to draw.

Searle at 90

Master penman Ronald Searle turns 90 today, and this is an update of a post from a coupla years ago. I'd meant to do something new, but I don't have the time now so it'll have to wait a few days.

Below is Searle's illustration for the song "National Brotherhood Week" from the book Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer With Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle. The original hangs in my dining room, just waiting to offend an unsuspecting diner. I think it's the only piece of art I've ever bought, and when I first unwrapped it I studied it for almost an hour, sometimes with my nose an inch from the paper. For a long time his style exerted a tidal pull on me, as it has at some point for a lot of cartoonists for over sixty years. Look at those hands! just clumps of fingers sprouting out of sleeves, and look at the way he's laid out the page in bendy chains of rectangles, look at how he's balanced the various line weights and the black sleeve and the curly hair, and look at all those gormless-looking faces...

I've heard that Searle plans his work pretty carefully and his unmistakable wiry, sprung lines are laid down with a lot more control than might be apparent. His work always makes me aware of how liquid ink is, how it skips and splotches and pools when it hits the paper.  Though he used to draw not with ink, but with a kind of stain meant for I think furniture. He liked it because it aged interestingly into a greyish purple, and because it handled differently than regular ink. They don't make that brand of stain anymore, and he's drawn with regular ink for years, and better than just about anyone else.

Happy Birthday to Mr. Searle, and I hope he's well and working in his converted windmill in the French countryside.


For a great recent interview with Searle, go here. For a fascinating and wide ranging tribute blog go here. For a deeply moving video interview in two parts, go here. The best thing I can think to say about his work is that when I look at it I remember why I love to draw, even though as he says in the interview, it's just slog, slog, slog.

Dr. Seuss's Birthday

Dr. Seuss would have been 106 today but, sadly, he left us in 1991. So he doesn't have to suffer through this cheap mockery I did for a Poor Almanac some years ago. And geez, it's fun to write in that rhythm. From what I've read, he either heard the catchy beat (trisyllabic meter) in the engines of a train heading west or a ship heading east and used it in his first book, And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street.  Whichever, it sure worked for him.

In Seuss's honor, today is Read Yourself Sick Day. So get out there and read something, and not on the internet! Something on paper, like a book or a newspaper. Right now! Go! 

Hey, Denver Post!

Phooey!

Fan Art Saturday Falls On A Sunday This Week

David Paccia, who runs the blog David Wasting Paper, sent in these two fine portraits; Dill looking horrified and Alice probably provoking Dill's horrification. Thanks, David! He's had an excellent run of interviews with cartoonists & illustrators on his blog in the last few months, so go and read!

And Mr. Chris Sparks, designer, comics aficionado, cheesemonger and friend, sent me this design for a magnet he's produced. Excellent, and I understand there's nothing like it for tacking vital papers to your refrigerator, dishwasher, robot or other appliance. Thanks, Chris!

Your Unnecessary Spot Illustration of the Day

For a year or two I did a spot drawing in the Post's Health section for an article that answered readers' health questions. I have no idea what this question was, something about weight gain among babies. But as the burning issue of today is obese children this seemed a good time to post this. I think my wife wrote the first balloon and I did the second.

Historic Otterloop Artifact

Here's something else I found recently. It's a page from a sketchbook I was using in 2003 when I was trying to think up funny names for a comic strip. Right before your very eyes you can see the actual invention of the word "Otterloop," just like watching Beethoven think up da da da daaa, or Shakespeare come up with "Hamlet", or George Lucas putting the words Jar, Jar and Binks together! And the hokiest part of it is, the final names are underlined, like one of those unbelievable clues a detective in a noire thriller finds, where there's a name and address heavily underlined in a phonebook with the note "let's kill this guy" written under it. But that's how it happened and there's the proof. I might have googled the word "Otterloop" to see if anybody else had used it. I did that the other day, and I found the photo below. It's a bus turnaround in Toronto called the Otter Loop that (as of 2006) was in danger of being torn down, and had some people interested in preserving it as an historic example of mid-20th century Toronto area bus turnarounds. That's the kind of vital provenance that you don't usual dream of when you think up a funny name, and I'm glad I underlined "Otterloop" and stuck with it, all right. 

Richard's Poor Almanack

This is a book I found on eBay a year or so ago and promptly lost, then found tonight on a bookshelf, of all places. It was copyrighted in 1907 by Maurice Switzer who, from what I can tell from some googling, was an author and humorist of the early 20th century who wrote a half-dozen or so books (some of which were illustrated by Frank Godwin, the illustrator and cartoonist who drew the strip Connie). This book, the Almanack, looks like it was produced as an advertisement for White Rock Beverages, as you can tell from the citation on the cover. And every so often there's a full page that says something like, "You should drink White Rock," so it's pretty soft-sell.

It's a handsome little book. I like the almanac parody look of it, with little decorative bits and devices. The humor's kinda thin, as you can tell from this brief excerpt.

But I don't know, if you look at my Almanac book in a hundred years (and please try to hang on that long, or maybe consider cryogenics) you might find yourself wondering when the laughs start. Meanwhile I'm just grateful that you can't copyright a book title. And I'm thinking, maybe White Rock would like to update their advertising with a slightly more contemporary Almanac, like mine.

More Snow Jokes

I we all laugh hard enough, maybe the snow will melt faster.