Mardi Gras Parade, Updated

Everyone should come to this thing. It'll be great, and if it's like last year's parade, the whole thing is short enough that it goes around the block a coupla times so if you can view it more than once and, you know, revise your opinion of it as it goes by again. And you get enough beads thrown at you that at some point it becomes hazardous. Boy, what fun!

Meanwhile, the Godzilla-King Kong float is under construction in an abandoned body shop...



These are from more than a week ago. I understand Godzilla and Kong are much further along now and are practically ready to join polite society.

Saturday's Almanack

The Washington Post runs a column of Restaurant Closings in the Thursday local suplements, an I've always enjoyed them. So sometimes I do one, too.

The Post also runs an Animal Control Watch column and it's even better as it drily recounts anecdotes about unwanted wild animal invasions, stuck kitties, flightless birds, etc. Probably the best one ever involved a squirrel that was running amok in someone's house. Two policemen responded and cornered the squrrel in a grand piano. One officer, thinking quickly, played a riff by Toad the Wet Sprocket, which caused the squirrel to exit the piano and shoot out the window, to the homeowner's great relief. I think we're all agreed that this is something that could not have been accomplished with an oboe.

Mozart's Birthday, Part 2

Here's a nicer drawing of Mozart than the rodenty-looking thing in the previous post. Still, it's not too reverential. I've always thought that if you got a chance to actually bump into any of these mighty pre-photography historic geniuses, like Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare or whoever, you might be disappointed by how unpreposessing they were. And they might've smelled a bit unusual, too.

Mozart's Birthday

On January 27th Mozart turns 252 years old. Here's something to sing if you want to celebrate.

Speaking of oboes (see below), Mozart wrote some really lovely oboe music, including an oboe concerto, an oboe quintet and on oboe quartet. As well as all those symphonies, operas, chamber music, etc. etc. He also had a lively & filthy sense of humor and possibly told the very first Aristocrats joke.

Moonface

Here's a bonus wallpaper screensaver. Or, slightly resized, a theater curtain.

Spinning Romney Again

You may remember this from a sketch for the New Yorker a month or so ago. Waste not want no, especially if you've got a deadline and nothing new to show. Besides, doesn't the American Public deserve to see this?

Musical Petey, Coda

Here's a bit from an upcoming daily featuring Petey on the oboe. I think he's a little off beat.

Aw, Shucks Again

Tom Spurgeon sure says some nice things. I wish the guy he was talking to would shut up some and let him say more.

You really should be reading The Comics Reporter every day, you know.

(Apologies to Sam Henderson for swiping his caricature of Tom Spurgeon, and to Tom Spurgeon who I'm sure looks nothing like that. And to Chuck Jones for swiping that line from one of his Three Bears cartoons. And as long as I'm at it, my apologies to my wife for laughing at that pasta thing she made last night.)

More Musical Mirth

This nicely rounds out the completed saga of Musical Petey (preceding three postings). it's an Almanack cartoon from about five years ago and it came out in the fall, when schoolkids are selecting their instrument for band. Our excellent local music store, Foxes, in Falls Church VA, always does a booming business around then. Sadly, this doesn't mention the oboe or even woodwinds at all. Unless you count bagpipes as woodwinds, though really they're offensive weapons.

Musical Petey, Finale

Here's the dramatic conclusion. I brought the stranger-than-Petey little boy back a few times, and I gave him the strange attribute that Petey thinks he may be imaginary. His name is Ernesto Lacuna, an obscure musical pun on the name of Cuban composer Ernesto Lacuona (and boy, that gets a laff every time). You'll notice he plays the oboe.

Musical Petey, Part 2

Here's more, and yet more to follow-

Musical Petey

I just drew a few daily strips about Petey practising the oboe. When Cul de Sac was running in the Post Mag Petey played the trombone. I think he switched because the trombone is too hard to draw. (Try drawing somebody playing a trombone and you'll see what I mean; it always comes out looking like somebody's trying to wear a crutch like a hat) I chose the trombone for Petey because it was so counter-intuitive. Petey's pretty much an introvert and there's no more extroverted instrument than the trombone, it's the most glad-handing of the brass family. But oboes are reasonably funny, and they have that reputation of being the ill wind that nobody blows good.

Below is a sequence from the Post of about 3 years ago when Petey was facing his public trombone debut.

Let's Draw Hillary

I think I've drawn Hillary almost exactly 419 times now, give or take, and I just drew her again for this week's New Yorker. It took me a while to get her face down, partly because she kept rearranging her features and her hair back when she was First Lady, but now she's settled on an appropriate face for public consumption. And I have too; here are few various Hillaries.

The above was for USNews & World Report back about 1995. It's Ebullient Hillary.

This was for the NYer when Hillary was running for the Senate. It's my favorite Hillary so far.

This is a sketch of Hillary I still like, done for no reason except I'd finally figured out how to draw her.

This is the drawing for this week's NYer. It was one of those jobs where the deadline suddenly shrank into a matter of hours as the piece was still being written. So it got a little too tight and careful, but it came out OK in the end, I think. And now seeing Ann Telnaes' masterly rendering of Hillary as something between Judy Jetson and Patty & Selma Bouvier makes me want to try drawing Hillary all over again.

A Talking Editorial Photoplay by Ann Telnaes

Everybody go over to The Washington Post , slide down to Hillary's Fairy Tale on the middle left, and click on it to enjoy the animation genius of Ann Telnaes. Quick!

UPDATE: I switched the link to a direct-to-Annimation link.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's Ann's animation for Friday . For some reason the page is balky for loading, give it a kick or two and it comes through fine.

Almost!

Note to everyone who requested a print of that Beethoven drawing; they're almost in the mail! That is, I've found enough of them to cover demand, and there are probably more somewhere in that g-dd-m closet. Expect one in your mailbox soon, this year certainly, or double your money back.

Drawing Monsters, Updated

These are two sketches I did for a Mardi Gras parade poster, of course, as I'm sure you can tell. Which'll possibly be turned into a float even, with people on it throwing things, maybe even me.


Update. Here's a bonus drawing of King Kong. Did you know that in the original scritpt, King Kong was going to be a proboscis monkey?

A Cul de Sac of Yesteryear Again

This is from New Year's Day 2006. I reused some of this in a different form in the daily strips a week before Christmas. If everyone forgets about it, I may reuse it yet again. Maybe by then it'll be Classic Cul de Sac.

Elephants for Monday on New Year's Day!

From all of us to all of you, a very Happy New Year.

The Year in Review by Dave Barry, With Added Drawings

The Post Magazine this Sunday has Dave Barry's annual review of world events, and he's not making any of it up. And I got to illustrate it, and illustrating Dave Barry's stuff is like dynamiting fish in a barrel, only more fun and less messy. The hard part is that Dave Barry tends to use up all the good jokes, leaving me scrambling to catch up. Here's the cover and below are some of the inside illustrations. I like the Gore caricature so much I'm showing it twice, because I'm show-offy.

Talking Animals Again

I have to reintroduce Mr. Danders, as he's the actual star of the strip, maybe. I know how he talks, at least in my head, but I wish I knew what he sounds like. Elmer Fudd with overtones of Truman Capote is as good a guess as any.

Alice's Indignation

I worry that the strip for December 26th dealing with Alice and her Dad may be a little harsh, and that Dad shows up in too poor a light. I got an email from a reader complaining about the Sunday strip where Dad bounces Alice on his knee; the actual complaint was based on a misreading of the strip, but it made me pause and think (which isn't always a good thing to do, but sometimes is).

But in regards to the December 26th strip, adults make a fuss over children when they do something cute, especially if it's an unwitting cute thing, and kids don't always appreciate it. Let's just say that Alice and her Dad have a loving yet fraught relationship, like all such relationships. And that she's probably got the more potent personality so they're not too unevenly matched, despite the disparity in size.

A Cul de Sac of Yesteryear

This is from the Post Magazine of December 10, 2006. It's all true, pretty much. Sorry to chop it up into bits; I still don't know how to tile images after scanning them. Maybe next year.

Heroescon

Oh, Boy! And Hully Chee! I got an invitation to attend the Heroes Convention in Charlotte NC next June! My thanks to Dustin Harbin, the Human Fireball, Con Organizer, Comics Creator & Creative Director of Heroes Aren't Hard to Find, the Premier Comics Shop of the Great City of Charlotte. My Mom was from Charlotte and she'd've been proud. Some nice folks in Charlotte. I'm looking forward to it. Go, look around their site, ooh & ahh at their guest list, then come on down!

Elephants for Monday on Wednesday!

Since I didn't post any elephants on Monday, here are some extra bonus elephants two days late. This drawing's about 20 years old, and it's from an image I'd remembered in a Time/Life book on evolution we had when I was a kid; a creation/universe myth with a bowl shaped world supported by elephants on the back of a giant sea turtle. Terry Pratchett uses the same myth, but his is of course a disc shaped world. It makes sense to me which ever way the world's shaped, as long as I don't fall off it. I think the title of this drawing was The Commuter.

This Week's Almanack

Okay, fine. Too much Beethoven? Want some cheap laffs? Here.

I actually used the joke about a German Expressionist Christmas in a Cul de Sac a few years ago in the Post Magazine. At some point the Otterloops will go to a P J Piehole's Family Fun Restaurant and the two strips will merge into one seamless universe.