Three Easy Steps to a Sunday Cartoon

Last Sunday's Cul de Sac made me happy, mostly because it started out as a kinda lame idea but ended up being pretty good. And , look, the colors came out pretty!
Above is the first sketch, where I had a vague idea involving Alice barging into Petey's room and annoying him with chatter. It was boring, so I gave her a puppet, which helped, but it didn't come alive until Beni joined her.
When in doubt for a big finish, introduce Dill. But I didn't know what he'd say until the very last minute. Above is the rough I sent my editor; you can see that I added the final comment outside the box. Then I moved it over to Dill's balloon, et voila.

Shakespeare's Birthday, Again

Today is Shakespeare's birthday, or maybe not, nobody knows for sure! Like nobody's sure if he wrote all that stuff, or looked like those pictures of him, or if he was really Sir Francis Bacon. Please post your competing and unfounded theories in the comments section.

Take a Poet to Lunch, Again

It's National Poetry Month, so here's something old and poetic.

Today's Poor Almanack

I've been wanting to do a cartoon about the Twitterverse ever since I heard the word, and figured it'd be something like the Blogosphere cartoon I did a year and a half ago. The plan was to end the cartoon with a link to a Twitter site that would, once you got there, provide the ultimate punchline. Well, that part didn't work, and I was so far behind when I got to drawing the final cartoon that I left out half the jokes I thought up (and they were classics, each and every one). And the cartoon goes off on a weird, pointless tangent about Twitterature, a word I made up after 120,000 people had already thought of it. A better cartoonist would've done a Twitterized version of Absalom, Absalom, but I've never read it and I'm lazy.

But what I'm left with is a stupid Twitter account with no ultimate punchline on it. Twitter seems to perfectly fit Dorothy Parker's implied definition of a fresh hell, but I figure let's keep our hells nice and fresh, so I'll try it until the banality and tedium of what I tweet becomes too starkly apparent. I read somewhere years ago that birdsong is really just a way for the bird to say, "bird here!" and all the music is just lagniappe, which can be extrapolated in humans to "Mozart here!" or "Leadbelly here!" or "Britney Spears here!" This doesn't have much to do with Twitter, but it is a little depressing.

Cul de Sac on YouTube, For Real This Time, No Kidding

Thanks to the fine folks at Ringtales and the geniuses at Jantze Studios, featuring the voice of the awesome and adorable Colette Jantze.

Talking Stick.

Fontanelle.

Badgers.

Coming Soon to a YouTube Near You

Okay, Okay, tomorrow I'll have the links up to the Ringtales Cul de Sac animations.

No, really.

Advertisement

For all of you who asked for it (and I mean both of you), Uh-Oh Baby T-shirts in the above style are now available in the Uh-Oh Baby store (entrance on your right). They come in various sizes, including baby and toddler. I'm of the opinion that a baby's first word should be "uh-oh", just so he or she learns early how quickly things can go south.

A Mostly True History

Easter, featuring Hopsy Bunsy & Peeps McCracken

Alice's Secret Agenda

Okay, maybe not so secret.

Deadline Enstranglement

Here's the Happy Deadline Clown, instead of the Creepy Deadline Zombie.

Scusi prego il mio italiano dei poveri

A tutti gli miei amici nella speranza dell'Italia- I siete bene. Ciao.

Cherry Blossom Time, Again

Two cartoons from years past, reposted because some things never change.

April Fools!

Kathie Kerr, the gracious human whirlwind at Universal Press, sent out this photo of the just-installed sign at the new Andrews & McMeal headquarters in Kansas City. Evidently my syndicate is now in the fast food business, which, given the state of the economy, is probably wise.

Today's Cul de Sac

This Sunday strip started out as a daily, but a sudden late-developing seismic shift turned it into Sunday, BOOM, just like that. I think it turned out OK, what with the looming Alice, but I wish I'd had time to rejigger the panels some more so the third panel was the only large one. I don't do enough panel jiggering, or fool around enough with panel shape and size and order, mostly because I'm easily confused by things like that and I don't want to drag my readers down with me. Also because the jokes in CdS, such as they are, are scattered around the strip so haphazardly that if a reader gets lost amongst the panels he or she might circle for days looking for a punchline.


And here's a bonus mystery panel from the coming Tuesday's strip, just to make things more interesting.

Where I'm Going Tomorrow

My friend David Hagen, the only man I know who's met Hillary Clinton and Mr. T, has a show of his paintings up at the Century 21 Exhibit Space at 1711 Wilson Blvd in Arlington. And tomorrow there's a reception from 6 to 9! Will Hillary and Mr. T attend? Who cares? David'll be there and that's enough for me!

Cartherding

About five years ago I was in the parking lot of a big box store, probably Costco, and I saw the most sophisticated form of cartherding on the planet: guy driving a little electric tractor pushes a line of seeming hundreds of grocery carts gracefully across the lot. As he went by, warning lights flashing and horn beeping, everybody in the lot turned to watch, like he was an unexpected parade float. The fact that I remember this is further proof that the dial on my excitement meter only goes up to about five.


Not that Dill's goes any higher.

What I'm Reading

When I should be drawing. I'm poring over Stay Tooned, despite it's distasteful and off-putting cover (John! I'm kidding! aha-ha-ha!). It's been said that Stay Tooned is edited and published by John Read with the combined energy, charm and talent of ten men, plus two. And it's true! In this issue, I especially enjoyed meeting up again with RJ Matson, who I knew when he was living in DC in the 80s, reading Tom Richmond's excellent advice on drawing, and Benita Epstein's chicken cartoon, which makes me laugh every time I think of it. And I enjoyed everything else, once I got past that cover (and skipped pages 70 to 78; sheer boilerplate*).

I've reread the Stephan Pastis interview by Tom Heintjes six times at least. It's funny, passionate, misanthropic, inspiring and even thrilling. Makes me want to quit my job and be a syndicated cartoonist. And there are at least 800 articles I haven't even gotten to yet. I shouldn't waste so much time drawing so I can catch up on my reading. I'm still only on page 85 of Great Expectations, and I bought the book a year ago next week.

*John! I'm still kidding!

Dill

With the kind assistance of John Heltman, Dill now has his own Facebook page. Which is more than I ever expected for him (Dill, not John).

And Cul de Sac is on Facebook too! Who knew?

Also I'd forgotten this; Dill's last name is Wedekind, which seems like a really cheap joke. But I can't speak for his parents' sense of humor.

Spring Again

Here's one from '04, which as you can see is pretty similar to the one below.

Spring

Another lazy repost. I'll put up a slightly newer one later.

I Have No Explanation for This

But I'd guess "growth spurt". 

St. Patrick's Day SpecPatular, Again

I posted this last year too. Lazy, lazy. But wouldn't this make a fine novelty placemat for your Irish pub?

And here, I'll make this educational, if only tangentially.

In 1963, General Mills vice president John Holahan inventively discovered that Circus Peanuts shavings yielded a tasty enhancement to his breakfast cereal. General Mills formalized the innovation and created Lucky Charms, the first breakfast cereal to contain marshmallow bits (or "marbits"). -Wikipedia

Urquhart

"Otterloop" sounds like it's Dutch, probably, but "Urquhart" I know is Scottish. And it's as much fun to type as it is to say ("Urkut"). It's a mild reference to my favorite movie, Local Hero, and its multitasking hotelier Gordon Urquhart, and also to my own Scottish heritage. Thompson is a sept of the Clan MacTavish, but I've also got Malcolm (and Whitt and Church and Scattergood and other English names) in my familly.

It tickles me to suppose that there was some likelihood of a hyphenated name in the Otterloop household, until they said it out loud and thought better of it. But Madeline Urquhart Otterloop could console herself with the knowledge that one of the coolest castles in Scotland is Urquhart Castle. below, and that it sits on the banks of Loch Ness.

Rough Week

Here's an exclusive first look at a future week of Cul de Sacs in early rough form. Uh-oh, spoiler alert! You can see I'm firing on all eight cylinders with this sequence, and the three Sunday roughs on the right are obviously instant classics. Even the last one, which I can't decipher (I think it says "Farley undied").

Actually, no, I dropped the fourth and fifth strips, labeled "closet", because they're pretty obviously not funny, and substituted two called "cart". So I'm only firing on about six cylinders. But this is what my initial rough for a week looks like, when I tally up the loose ideas stirring around in my head to see if there are enough to fill a week, or even two. 

There's a kind of raw power and beauty to this stage of the process, I think, and it's lost when the extraneous elements are added. You know, the lettering, the drawing, the squared boxes, the point, all the things that editors deem as necessary for a comic strip and that clutter up my time. In the future this will all be so much easier, when they develop that Wacom tablet that you'll wear like a hat, with its instant imaging cranial interface that'll further undermine the existence of print, or paper, or pen & ink, or any kind of instrumentality at all. Then we'll be like the Krell in Forbidden Planet. If "Monsters from the Id" wasn't too close to the title of an existing comic strip I'd go ahead and copyright it right now.

Bugs

My studio is in the basement and I see these things sometimes. This time of year they're revolting little harbingers of Spring

Kim Jong il, Bobblehead

Back when the Almanac was printed wider, and sometimes even in color, I did a few cut-out bobbleheads of newsworthy individuals. And who's more newsworthy than weirdly foreshortened megalomaniac Kim Jong Il? Actually I'm just posting this as a consolation toy for all of you who didn't want to cough up $48 for a tiny rubber Raymond Scott.

Art

I swiped a bit of dialog for today's Cul de Sac (above) from an illustration I dId for Why Things Are at least 14 years ago (below). The small girl in the illustration, who's something of a proto-Alice, is my then-expected older daughter Emma, who turned out to look only slightly like that. What I like best is the drawing Emma's done. I wish I could draw like that all the time. It's probably dangerous to think you're drawing with childlike innocence and immediacy; dangerous only in that you're just kidding yourself. Adult perspective is not so lightly overthrown. But maybe if you think of it as post-expressionism it's okay, and by you of course I mean me. Wouldn't it be fun to draw the whole strip in this style? And by fun I mean for me. Probably less so for you, or for the people who complain about stylistic changes in comic strips.

And, seriously, that's a little better than most four year olds draw, if I do say so myself.

Raymond Scott, Bath Toy

In honor of the centennial of the birth of musical mad scientist Raymond Scott, the toy company Presspop has produced an action figure of the poor unsuspecting man. It's terrifyingly realistic, and includes a CD, a clavivox and a pointing finger to play the clavivox with.

You know Scott's music whether you know it or not. Likely it's permeated your consciousness through its use in old Warner Brother's cartoons via Carl Stalling. And there are a dozen or more CDs of Scott's music, some performed by him and his quintette, others by bands like the Beau Hunks. Scott himself made an appearance in Michael Chabon's Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, at a party where Salvador Dali wore a deep sea diving suit. And now you can have your very own six inch tall Raymond Scott to fill that Raymond Scott-size space on your shelf.

My thanks to Ted Pratt for pointing this out to me.

Today's Poor Almanack

I'm not sure this makes much sense, but it made me laugh when I thought it up (which is often a warning sign). Originally there was as set-back-your-clock joke in there somewhere too, but it got lost in the final. And I'm not sure if "Pecunia Fugit" is correct, because I don't know Latin.

Cul de Sac on YouTube, Updated Slightly

This is pretty cool!

Well, it was pretty cool, but it's gone now. More later.....

Update: it should be up  again next week. I'll let you know.

Comic-Con Magazine

A few months back I did a joint interview with the below-mentioned genius, Stephan Pastis, for Comic-Con Magazine, courtesy of the gracious Gary Sassaman. Well, the whole magazine is online here. You can turn the pages and everything, and little lap cards fall out of your computer screen. You'll instantly notice that Stephan is better-spoken, better-groomed and generally more thoughtful than I am. I think he's taller, too.

March

Here's a repost from last year, only because we're expecting 5 to 8 inches of snow.

What Stephan Pastis Does While Waiting for his Tuna Sandwich

Stephan Pastis, the genius behind Pearls Before Swine, orders a tuna sandwich for lunch, and amuses himself unconstructively by doing this.

Today's Poor Almanack

Here's a slice of desperate graveyard humor for the imploding newspaper business. If they could only reposition themselves as something more necessary, newspapers might survive. Did you know that you can clean glass with a newspaper and white vinegar?

Mardi Gras Parade 2009

The First Family makes its way down Wilson Blvd on Fat Tuesday (photo thanks to Jennifer Hart, Arlington), and they're followed by Gov. Palin, below (photo thanks to Bono Mitchell). I appreciate these as I was stuck at home and missed all the fun. My daughter Charlotte represented the family, kindly chaperoned by Mike Rhode and his daughter Claire.