Today's Cul de Sac, October 11 2010

OK, who doesn't want to see comics about Italian Renaissance clowns? Nothing'll perk up a cartoon like commedia dell'arte! I'm thinking I've pretty much cornered the obscure reference niche, scaly mammal/archaic theater division, in newspaper comic strips.

Today's Cul de Sac, October 10 2010

This Sunday was done while I was in the thick of doing some Grandma dailies last month, so I was in a kind of Grandma mood. My neighborhood has sections like this, where some grandma-sized houses have been replaced by mini-mansions, sometimes at a rate of 1 to 3. And sometimes leaving behind a lone grandma house nestled in like a squirrel among elephants. 

When I was a kid one of my favorite picture books was about a grandma whose small house stood in the path of a planned superhighway. What I remember of it most vividly was a flock of construction machinery looming over her tiny house, poised to superhighwayize the place. It had a happy ending of course; the highway bifurcated to avoid her house and the last picture was of her waving to the endless clog of traffic like it was a friendly neighbor. I don't remember the name of the book and I've forgotten the vagaries of the plot, but that last bit I'm pretty sure is accurate. I do remember that the part of the book that most appealed to me then was the road-building machinery. I used to think that stuff was great and I still do, and I'll rubberneck like an idiot at big yellow heavy contraptions that flatten out roads and hoist bridge pieces into place. Everybody else in the car might roll their eyes, but get your fun wherever you can find it I always say.

Today's Cul de Sac, October 9 2010

Thanks to this blog being on Pacific time I can still call this "Today's" Cul de Sac. I've got nothing to say, except to point out what a marvel of research and scholarship this strip is. It presents facts available nowhere else, search as hard as you will. If you need a Wikipedia citation look no further.

And here's the link to SavePangolins.Org in handy clickable form.

Today

All I want today is homemade cherry pie and a mention on Tom Spurgeon's list.

Today's Cul de Sac, October 8 2010

That's a nod toward Batman/Bruce Wayne there in that second panel. If circumstances had been a little different Michael Keaton might have one day donned the pangolin costume. 

Today's Cul de Sac, October 7 2010

What can I say? This one wrote itself. Though Petey only wore a box on his head once, in Halloween 2008. 

Today's Cul de Sac, October 6 2010

I really should find some explanation for Sofie, but I haven't thought of one yet. Though I am guessing she's a part-time student at Blisshaven Preschool, as that would explain her infrequent attendance. When I started doing the strip I assumed everything needed to be thought through and justified. But nope, most of it's just slapped together, with hopes that the logic behind it will emerge with time. I'd hate to call it faith-based, but there ya go.

Meanwhile, look at the funny face Beni's making!

Today's Cul de Sac, October 5 2010

Here's a cheap and easy way to draw a comic strip: use an old strip and slightly change the words so the joke part seems different! Keep this under your hat, because if other cartoonists find out about it or the syndicate learns of this, well, things could get ugly fast.

The above strip is semi-identical to one that ran on October 10, 2009, which is less than a year ago, so the gag isn't even cold in the grave yet and here I am exhuming it for another moldy run-through.

Really what happened was kind of funny- Haha, I laugh just typing about it! I liked that old strip and I wanted to draw it again, or at least the second panel of it, so I justified it by making it a flashback. Last year at this time I was having some issues with drawing, meaning in this case that the strip was more assembled than drawn, a photoshop Frankenstein's monster patched together of bits and pieces of drawing and lettering. So I wanted to try it again in hopes of getting it right this time. Though, I dunno, the crosshatching on the cannon is a little clumsy both times, so any improvement is pretty minimal. But I loved putting Dill in the cannon and I might do it again before another year's gone by. Maybe I can get a Christmas strip out of it.

Today's Cul de Sac, October 4 2010

Ah, a cheap yet somewhat satisfying exploding lunch bag joke. Just what the readership of the Scranton PA Times-Tribune need as an introduction to this laff-filled comic strip, making its bow in the spot left empty by Cathy's graceful exit.

today's Cul de Sac, October 3 2010

Petey hasn't tried to chew his arm off in way too long. Somebody's got to pick up the slack.

Once again things end up in Petey's room. I must be getting lazy. The real lazy part of this is that I did one rough for the five sofa panels and just varied the poses. Which is also the part of the strip I'm happiest with, the small gestures, body language and minimalist acting that gives intensity to Alice's building frustration. And makes it funnier, I hope. The dialog is pretty much a transcription of a conversation I have about three times a week, and with about as much resolution.

Today's Cul de Sac, October 2 2010

And here's the wrap up to the great bug excursion. Petey's room is a good place to end things, I don't know if it's the dead-end quality of Petey's preferred lifestyle or that Petey just presents a good sounding board for Alice's rants. It's probably just that I like to draw Petey in his black shirt on that plaid bedspread. And I like to letter Petey's sardonic advice that always goes unheard.

120 Years Ago Today

October 2nd is the birthday of Groucho Marx, born Julius Henry Marx in 1890. In celebration, I propose a national Walk Like Groucho Day, to be held on this date annually. Everybody walks like Groucho, or we line 'em up against the wall and Pop goes the weasel!

How do you walk like Groucho? You just squat and scuttle, taking long strides, not as extreme as a duck-walk and not as athletic as a Silly Walk. If you can wear a tail coat that flaps behind you so much the better. I've included this chart which illustrates Newton's 2nd Law of Motion (Force = Mass x acceleration), and shows ground reaction forces measured in various strides and different types of footwear. Please note the looping blue line labeled "Groucho". I'm sure this'll help you a whole lot. The chart was taken from Dr. Chris Kirtley's site Clinical Gait Analysis http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/. (You can't propose a day of national celebration without some kind of scientific & academic support.)

Old Stuff by Request

This is the Cul de Sac that ran in the Washington Post Magazine on September 2, 2007, the second to last one I did for the Post before syndication. I'm posting it at the request of Haywood Wigglesworth, who sent a kind email saying that this one was a family favorite and hoping that it'd show up in one of the future collections. Unfortunately, it likely won't be included as it's a pretty DC-centric strip and those will either not be reprinted or will be saved for the special 50 year all-inclusive reprintatathalon that might already be available for pre-order on some parallel world Amazon. So I hope this will do till then.

For those not living in the DC area, Theodore Roosevelt Island is an island in the Potomac that's both a wilderness preserve and a memorial to Teddy R., with a 17 foot statue of the man himself waving at you as if to say, "Get off my island!"

Today's Cul de Sac, October 1 2010

Uh huh, a shaggy bug crossing the street story. 

More TK. And if you have trouble reading this please let me know

Formatting Foul Ups

Will anyone who has trouble reading any of the preceding Today's Cul de Sac posts because the text looks screwy please either email me or leave a comment. I fooled around with the last one and hope I've fixed it, but I can't tell as it's always looked fine in my browser (Viewmaster), (no, sorry, Safari).

Thank you, and my apologies for the inconvenience.

Today's Cul de Sac, September 30 2010

I hope everyone is braced for this to devolve into a shaggy bug story, because that possibility is sure looming large. More TK.

Today's Cul de Sac, September 29 2010

This whole week is really an exercise in drawing Dill in the same pose (or almost the same pose; he is crawling pretty vigorously). You'll note Dill's small flash of semi-sarcasm in the last panel, likely brought on by the momentary insight into social behavior that following a bug for three days can inspire.

Today's Cul de Sac, September 28 2010

Ah, the tension builds.

A note: for those of you hoping Dill's bug turns out to be a bed bug or stink bug, all I can say is Probably Not. We don't deal in possibly controversial subjects torn from today's headlines, thank you very much. We'll leave that to Hi & Lois. Actually, the sudden newsworthiness of bugs hadn't struck me until I read this strip today and I kicked myself for not jumping on that whole bed and/or stink bug bandwagon, just as a public service of course.

Today's Cul de Sac, September 27 2010

Thus we begin an epic chase that will lead to a conclusion so staggering you'll wonder how your threshold for amazement got so low.

Today's Cul de Sac, September 26 2010

This is a subject I've been meaning to address for some time- the grocery store gumball machine array. Again, I thought it'd be fun to draw the ranks of gumball machines (and I wish I'd've overdone it a little more in the second panel) but also because those things can loom large in a child's mind. I remember trips to the grocery store when I was a kid where all the grocery shopping was just an irritating prelude to the moment when I got to put a nickel or a dime in a gumball machine. Though not really a gumball machine, as I was more often after some plastic novelty army man or gewgaw. And, of course, I was usually disappointed.