My Personal Commitment to Recycling, or, How to Tell a Joke Three and a Half Times

The above is last Sunday's Cul de Sac. This is an idea I had about 18 years ago. At the time, the Post's Sunday Outlook section was interested in maybe running a cartoon by me every week, and I came up with about a dozen roughs to show them what I had in mind.

This is the sketch of the sofa-man I did for the Outlook editor. The stuff I turned in was okay, nothing special, some better than others. For various reasons we never pursued the weekly cartoon deal. But I still liked this idea, so when I turned in some roughs to Gene Weingarten when we were talking abou maybe running a cartoon by me every week in Sunday Style, I resurrected this one.
Then, when the cartoon that eventually became Richard's Poor Almanac launched, I finally used the sofa-man sketch, but I stretched it out to two weeks. The cartoons below ran in mid-1997. For those not from the DC area, Wendy Rieger is a local newscaster who's cute.


Some day I'll use the sofa-man idea again, maybe in a graphic novel, something Kafka-esque. Instead of a big bug Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into an ugly sofa, and he gets left on the curb where he's picked up by a guy scrounging for furniture for a group house in College Park, Maryland. Hijinks ensue and he finds true love at the end with a fainting couch. See? This stuff writes itself.

More for the Moms Out There

Contrary to the previous post, Mother's Day was founded 100 years ago by Anna Jarvis, whose single-minded efforts to recognize the accomplishments of mothers led to the Day's recognition as a national holiday in 1914. Her single-minded efforts also led her to become embittered by the holiday's commercializatiton at the hands of greeting card companies, candy manufacturers, flower distributers, etc, to the point where she spent most of her life and family fortune fighting those who'd tainted her holiday. She never married or had children.
I learned all this last year when I illustrated a short piece on Jarvis in Smithsonian Magazine.

Mother's Day

This is all true, every word, I swear.

Join, or Die

According to Mike Rhode's ComicsDC blog , yesterday was the anniversary of the first appearance of Ben Franklin's 1754 "Join, or Die" cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette. This image is regarded as the first American political cartoon, and there's an interesting Wikipedia page about it.
For Franklin's 300th birthday a few years back, I drew this. Franklin has always seemed like the most approachable of the Founding Fathers; he's a foxy grandpa, witty courtier, twinkly-eyed roue', home-grown Leonardo, and philosopher who wouldn't be king all rolled into one gouty package. And a pretty good cartoonist. If only he'd pursued it, what couldn't he have accomplished?

Beyond Whistler's Mother

If I remember right, the painting everybody knows as "Whistlter's Mother" is really entitled "Arrangement in Grey and Black". Whistler was a great painter and an even better etcher, but not too sentimental and a real full-of-himself jerk half the time, at least. He was pretty dang witty too, at least in person; when he sat down and tried to be witty for posterity it came out strained and mannered. His book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is unreadable, except for the title.
This cartoon doesn't have much to do with Whistler, except for the title.

Strangled by Deadlines

A current self-portrait. More later, when there's time.

Cartoon Appreciation Week

This is maybe my favorite New Yorker cartoon, or my favorite that's not by Chast, Shanahan, Zeigler, Booth.... OK, it's my favorite by Robert Weber, the master of the soft pencil line. I like it because it's beautifully drawn, detailed without being finicky, sharply composed, surprisingly gentle, and it's got Pliny the Elder in it. Something about Pliny the Elder is inexplicably funny. He named his kid Pliny too, and who names a kid Pliny any more? And you know every angel in that giant pile of angels wishes the guy with the camera would quit fussing around and take the damn picture.
That's it, I just like this.

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Alert readers (I have no other kind) may have noticed the "Cul de Sac: the Book" link to the right there.
Here's what you get-
128 pages of real paper; real ink too, a carbon-petroleum-beef mix, none of that soy stuff; there's some glue in there somewhere, too, I don't know what kind it is but don't eat it; an insightful foreword; 40+ pages of the original watercolor Cul de Sacs as they appeared in the Wash Post Magazine; the first 6 or 7 months of newspaper strips in b&w or color as appropriate; a brand new, never-seen and original isbn number; three laughs guaranteed, the rest are gravy.
Here's what you lose-
about 15 bucks including shipping; several hours of your valuable time; the respect of your peers who don't read comics because they're for little kids; some of you faith in humanity, because of all the scathing insights contained herein; your patience, because this thing isn't coming out till late summer.
Also, for the first 50 people who buy Cul de Sac, here's a limited offer! Drive slowly by my house and I'll wave to you from my basement window! Make sure your receipt is plainly visible so I'll know it's you.

How to Screw Up a Perfectly Good Joke

I got an email today from an alert reader who sent a link to the Comics I Don't Understand website. This site, for those unfamiliar with it, is where you go when you've got a comic you don't understand, and you post it and a discussion follows in the comments section where other readers try to unravel the mystery of said strip.

The alert reader sent me here , where the above strip is considered. And I was shocked, shocked. Because that's not how the joke I thought I wrote went at all. I used an old rough for this, one I did about a year ago. It went like this-

Now that makes more sense, and it's subtle, and warm and funny, yet pointed and full of heartache. OK, it's not any of that stuff, but it does make a bit more sense and it doesn't sound as unsavory as the final version. There are "Kiss and Learn" signs in front of schools around here to mark where you can drop your child off, and they parody the "Kiss and Ride" signs at evey Metro station in DC. So when I redid the rough sketch last month I carefully did it wrong, and when I did the final I lettered it in wrong again, thereby blowing the joke entirely. Proving that I don't read what I write, though my wife did ask me about it, and I sat there and read it again and didn't see anything wrong with it.

But I am kinda proud to be on the Comics I Don't Understand site for the first time. And probably not the last, either

My Yard These Days

Every one of these is drawn from life, especially the last one. We once kept Christmas lights in our big shrub in front till summertime, and I snuck out one night and pulled them out, hoping nobody'd see. We should've just kept them there and plugged them in, like it was intentional. Nothing much in our yard is intentional.

Ciao, Balloons Blog

Do I make less sense in English or in Italian ? I know for sure it sounds better in Italian.

Cartoon Appreciation Week

I figured something with wiggly lines would be appropriate after the earthquake, so here are two masters of the inky jitters, Ed Koren and R. O. Blechman. Back when, I tried to draw like both of them, sometimes simultaneously, with unsatisfying results (about the third drawing I did for the Post was one where I tried for Blechmanian spareness, but I over-did it and the drawing practically evaporated in printing; I thought that was the end of my career right there). But nothing'll free you up from the awful tyranny of a neatly inked line like these guys.

That's not exactly true, their lines are perfect, it's just that neatness doesn't count. Koren draws the spaces in between things and his lines jump from one to the next like electricity, but slower, like dust motes. And Blechman draws like each line's a teeny organism in itself and they all just met up at this moment to form into something worth looking at.

Earthquake!

So there was a big boom and the house shook slightly this afternoon. And this is why, according to the US Geological Survey.

More Cartoon Appreciation Week

And get a load of this sculpture of Rumsfeld by Oliphant! I don't know about you, but it makes me itch to take a big lump of wax and express my feelings for various incumbents and incumbent wannabees, and their henchmen too.

Those in the DC area can get a load of this sculpture in person if they head over to the Stanford in Washington Gallery on Connecticut Avenue near Woodley Park. Along with almost a hundred other Oliphant drawings, prints and sculptures. Go, it's cathartic!

Cartoon Appreciation Week

Well, Cartoonist Day is over for another year and it couldn't happen soon enough for me. But it's allegedly Cartoon Appreciation Week, and to celebrate I'll put up some random cartoonlike things that float my boat and you might like too.


This is by the 19th century French scupltor Jean-Piere Dantan, known as Dantan Jeune, who sculpted many serious portraits of contemporary politicians, artists, writers, musicians, and such. He also did caricatures of them, most of them pretty dang wonderful (though not as fine as Daumier's). This is Hector Berlioz, the great romantic composer who was slightly nuts and had one of the great heads of red hair in history. It's from the book "Dantan Jeune, Caricatures et portraits de la societe romantique". My French isn't so hot, but looking at all the charming little gargoyle heads filling its pages make me wish I knew the first thing about sculpting.

A Very Happy Cartoonist Day

To one and all.

May the Fourth

As I learned last year from my old friend Barchan, today is May the Fourth Be With You Day. Back in 1977 I went to see Star Wars (the first, real, one) on its opening night at the Uptown Theater with a bunch of friends, which establishes my geek cred if there was any doubt. All the shows were sold out, there was a line around the block, and we ended up seeing the added-on midnight show, and some of us appeared in a photo in the Wash Post the next morning of all the geeks in line to see a movie. But we all knew it was an event somehow, and the line was the place to be. The Uptown is still the best theater in DC; it's got a huge screen and a balcony and the blockbusters open there. I've stood on that sidewalk out on Connecticut Avenue for dozens of movies since and nowadays I drag my daughters along, or vice versa.

Each of the subsequent movies in the SW franchise have been another big step down for me, until when the last one came out and I was ready to throw something big and wet at the screen. The above cartoon was drawn before I saw it, but I'd already figured it wasn't going to be much fun. George Lucas will likely spend the rest of his career tinkering with his Star Wars oeuvre, reworking CGI effects and monkeying with the explosions and stuff. Which is fine by me as long as he doesn't make any more crummy movies.

Comic Strip DVD

With the excitement of Free Comic Book Day is behind us, it's time to prepare for the big celebration on May 5th! And May 5th, as we all know from watching all those beer commercials on TV, is Cartoonist Day! At least, I think that's what those beer commercials are talking about; what else could the Fifth of May be?

According to the Cartoonist Day website , the date was chosen because the first comic strip, The Yellow Kid, first appeared in a newspaper on May 5th, 1895. And I believe The Yellow Kid is still running in about 5000 papers worldwide, now drawn by its creator's grandson's second cousin's brother-in-law. And what's more, May 3-10 is Cartoon Appreciation Week! So I urge everyone to spend the week Appreciating Cartoons, and if you see a Cartoonist, give him or her a hearty slap on the back, a big "thank you" and maybe as much change as you can spare. Unless he happens to be the Yellow Kid's creator's grandson's second cousin's brother-in-law.

I'll spend the week posting cartoons, and drawing the g-dd-m miserable things too. This one is drawn from life, as we have a cat named Fred and a mouse somewhere in the house. And that looks a lot like our house, too.

Happy Free Comic Book Day

This is today's Almanack. I like the last one best.

Countdown to Free Comic Book Day Part II: Lo, It Approacheth Ever Closer!!

The excitement is at fever-pitch as we approach Free Comic Book Day 2008, which is of course tomorrow. This cartoon is from last year. Mangaloid Wars X: Giant Spazzoid Zombie Robots Invade! is just about my second favorite thing I've ever written, and if they made a movie of it I'd totally go see it. If only to see Michael Bay's take on Tennessee Williams.

Again, thanks to Mike Rhode.