Happy Thanksgiving

As soon as I've finished up some drawings we're escaping to Salem, Ohio for Thanksgiving. My wife's family farm is just outside of Salem, and it's got a huge kitchen that sometimes produces food without human intervention; at some point over the holidays, someone will discover a pie, side dish, casserole, etc. that no one's entirely sure where it came from. Everything else is made by Aunt Marge, with help from whatever spare hands are available. Every time we go there we're thankful for Marge's hospitality, and Uncle Phil's too.

Weather permitting we'll be lolling on the porch after the meal, or at least in front of the fireplace , groaning blissfully. When I get back I'll tell you the Adventure of Our First Thanksgiving as a Married Couple, and what happened that involved a trip to the emergency room and why I still walk funny sometimes.

Till then everybody go somewhere among friends & relatives, eat too much and loll around and groan blissfully. Here's a bonus Cul de Sac for you to enjoy while you do. Grandma is very much my Grandma.

More Thanksgiving Fun!

This week's Poor Almanack. Ha ha! Who knew Thanksgiving was such a fun holiday!

Is It Thanksgiving Yet?

Not quite! But you can pretend it is with this handy Thanksgiving Parade in cartoon form. From about 1999; if I drew it today the Rugrats balloon would probably be Spongebob.

Dream Previews for Next Week

As it's a holiday week, you're going to be busy next week running errands, gathering supplies, seeing the relatives, traveling, etc. etc. So I thought I'd give you an early "heads up" of what to expect in the dream department.

Another Exclusive Preview Available Only Here

This is from an upcoming strip, or a string of strips, wherein Petey faces off against Babies. Reading the strips you'll suddenly realize what feral, terrifying creatures babies can be, especially if they're traveling in packs. This isn't the punchline, so I'm not spoiling anything.

It's Still A-Comin'

This was prettier in color, but here it is in black & white.

Thanksgiving is A-Coming

This is all true, I swear, every word of it. Kids, if you've got a report on Thanksgiving to write, please use this as a source! Then let me know how you did on it, and how the parent-teacher conference went.

What I'm Reading

When I really should be drawing. My favorite story in it so far is about an animated feature that never was, an aborted collaboration between Walt Disney and a young Roald Dahl about Gremlins. That would've been something to see, as I think of Disney's and Dahl's sensibilities as being pretty dissimilar, though both had a good sense of the dark side of a story. Heck, Dahl's stories are about as dark as children's literature gets, and about as funny, too.

I hear that Wes Anderson is doing an animated version of Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox. That might be something to see, too. I wish someone would do George's Marvelous Medicine. And if you're going to animate Dahl, it'd be great to see it done in the style of his long-time illustrator, the great Quentin Blake. His is another name I meant to add to that list of those who inspire me.

Now I gotta go draw, after I read the next article in Hogan's Alley.

Sweeps Week!

Is it time for Sweeps Week yet? I have no idea, but here's a cartoon on it anyway. And a Shark Week is in the works.

Otterloop

Anyone living in the DC area recognize the joke behind the name "Otterloop" (at least I hope they do; it took me forever to get it myself). It's a play on "Outer Loop", the outside, counter-clockwise ring of DC's Beltway. You would most often hear it in a sentence with the word "delays", as in, "Delays on the Outer Loop start at the Springfield Interchange." If you don't live in DC and aren't familiar with the "Outer Loop" be glad, it's usually a nightmare. And the "Springfield Interchange" is even worse.

Looking at the map of the Beltway provided above and comparing it to Mr. Otterloop's head I see a resemblance, kinda. But mostly it looks like an upside-down cartoon dialog balloon.

Family

Here's a panel from a strip that won't be in papers for another month, and since it isn't the punchline I'm not giving anything away. Sometimes people ask if I get ideas from my two daughters and the answer is yes of course, but not directly. Usually things are rearranged for comic effect and filtered to protect the innocent. This, though, is taken almost verbatim from something my wife said to my daughter. I encourage the girls to come up with more comic bits & routines and to say more of the darnedest things, just to help Daddy out with his work. In return we provide them with a household full of eccentrics like James Thurber had, so they'll have material to draw on later in life should they ever take up cartooning or literature. It's the least we can do for each other as a family, I think.

Some Literary Laffs

Tonight I went to a talk on The Graphic Novel in the Classroom with my friend Mike Rhode (see ComicsDC under Nice Places to Visit to the right). Me, I'm all for gettin' kids' noses in them funnybooks, so I say the more of 'em in the classroom the better.

I'm feeling all frisky 'n' literary, so here's this.

I don't speak Italian either

I wish I'd learned how to at some point. From what I can tell, the above is saying something nice about Cul de Sac for which I'm grateful, though I'd like to've seen them translate "Otterloop" into Italian. Mille grazie to Gianfranco Goria for this!

I tried French for a couple of years in middle school, until the teacher finally suggested maybe I'd like to try another language. So I tried German and had an easier time with it. But Italian, that's the language of art, music, love, food. And cartoons! Or as we say, fumetti.

One thing I do know in French is that cul-de-sac means bottom of the bag, and I only know that because Washington Post Genius Editor Pat Myers told me.

Voutch!

Hey, go look at this guy'swork. It's great. And thanks to RC Harvey, who mentioned it on his blog over on gocomics.com.

How would you pronounce Voutch? I'm rhyming it with "couch", but it's French so it's probably more "vooouuusssh". And I wish the images on his site were larger and the type more readable for those of us who squint. Not that I can read French anyway; I got the above image here.

More Names, or, The Place is Getting Crowded

Lyonel Feininger, Ed Koren, J J Sempe, Jim Borgman, Elzie Segar, Frank Willard, Saul Steinberg, William Steig, Barry Blitt, Bruce McCall, John Cuneo, Heinrich Kley, Peter Steiner, Steve Brodner, David Levine, Chuck Jones, Chris Ware, Crockett Johnson, Percy Crosby, Dr. Seuss, Lisbeth Zwerger, Ernest Shepard,...

(click on dailycartoonist at right for some explanation, if necessary)

Peanut Allergies

Here's this week's Poor Almanack. Charlie Brown's head, for all it's simplicity, is hard to draw. And the zigzag is even worse.

Comic Strip Previews

I did this at the beginning of the year. Let's read it and see how well my prognostications panned out.



Yup! Looks like they all came true (I knew that squid would get those Pattersons). Except maybe the last one, but it's only a matter of time before the van pulls up in my driveway and the Pulizter people leap out with a bouquet of helium balloons and the giant novelty check and knock on my door. Or maybe they just push it through the mail slot, I'm not sure. But either way, I'm ready!

Hey Writers!

These are all drawn from real life, except the old guy losing an overshoe in the Metro escalator didn't realize it'd happened until his wife pointed it out. She then turned to me and said, "Isn't life funny?" and I said, "Oh, yeah."

The Pixar Story

On Wednesday I snuck out of work and went downtown with Ann Telnaes to see a documentary called "The Pixar Story". It was produced & directed by Leslie Iwerks, daughter of the great animator Ub Iwerks, and it was showing very briefly in DC to qualify for the Oscars. Ann and I were the only ones in the theater, maybe in the whole theater complex, so we could chat during the show. Ann trained as an animator at CalArts, the school that produced John Lasseter and she knew some of the people in the documentary.

Watching it I was struck by how dicey a business like Pixar can be, how close it is to the verge of collapse from one blockbuster to the next; Toy Story did spectacularly well, but then A Bug's Life had to do even better, and when Toy Story 2 almost fell apart and had to be redone the whole company almost fell apart with it. And Pixar's partnership with Disney was played as a somewhat atonal counterpoint to its ever-changing fortunes. Ann booed when some of the Disney executives were interviewed, especially when the subject was Disney's idiotic switch from 2-D animation to 3-D, when they let go animators with years of experience in classic animation. Now of course Lasseter's in charge of Disney animation so things have changed and We'll See. Disney's always been a company that can put a smile on your face and make you grind your teeth hard enough to loosen a molar at the same time.

It was an interesting film, very much a bouquet to John Lasseter, his cohort of geniuses and their story-telling skills. We bought a little Pixar stock years ago and haven't paid much attention to it, though they do send shareholders a nice poster every year, so maybe I've got a vested interest. I admitted to Ann that I choked up at the end of both Toy Stories and Ratatouille. But then I blubber when the laundry soap works in the TV commercials, just 'cause everybody is so happy about it.

Drop Panels

Drop Panels are the title panels in Sunday strips that are used as filler or dropped because they're filler. The size and shape of a Sunday strip is an arcane science that I haven't figured out yet, I've just used a default 1/4 page size. But there are things you can do with a drop panel, like do a nice drawing or a separate gag or reproduce a sketch like Zits does, and I need to do something more interesting. So I'm coming up with some different title panels, with maybe a little gag in them. Here are a couple of roughs that I like, especially for the scratchy velocity of the line. They're on my to-do list, like finishing this week's strips, mowing the lawn, cleaning up my studio enough that I can walk from one end to the other, and arranging for a lasting worldwide peace based on love & understanding. And maybe tune the banjo if I've got time.