Your Saturday Morning Cartoon Calvacade

Babelgum has posted some interviews that Michael Fry and Jim Cox of Ringtales shot at the Reubens last May. They've got cartoonists like Bob Mankoff, Mark Tatulli, Stephan Pastis, Michael Fry, Paul Gilligan, Drew Dernavich and, providing some much-needed incoherence, me.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 9, 10, 11 2010

 I have no idea where this is going, but Viola needed to fit into all this somehow.

This is an oblique shout out to my friend Norm Feuti who draws the wonderful strip Retail. Originally, the salesman was named "Norm Grumbels" after the department store in Retail, but it got changed. Norm Feuti is nothing like the character here portrayed, though I'm sure he's had customers like dis guy.

And this is just in answer to the above strip. Petey and Andre each get a chance to present their comic book Platonic ideal.

Bargain Galore Just Got Slightly Less Bargainier!

The first Cul de Sac book is now $4.99 at Amazon! That's up 21 cents from just days ago, proving that as an investment they'll appreciate like mad!

UPDATE- $5.20! Somebody's losing money on this deal, and I hope it's not me.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 8 2010

What a cheap joke! I'm kinda embarrassed for Petey, and for his father for the easy set up.

Bargain Galore Just Got Bargainier!

The first Cul de Sac book is now $4.78 at Amazon! It's almost like they don't want them in stock.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 7 2010

I've wanted to do a strip with a cartoon by Petey for a while, though I had no idea he'd be inspired by Waiting for Godot. And I wish he wouldn't draw so much like me.

When I steal from Samuel Beckett, this is what happens-

Today's Cul de Sac, November 1 Through 6 2010

Race you to the end of the week. Ready? Go-

This was originally the idea for the previous Sunday's strip, recounting Petey and Andre's somewhat disastrous Halloween, but that left Alice out of the picture. So a little tweaking and it's all told in flashbacks.

Not much of a joke but it sets up the week. Please take a moment to admire the crosshatching.

 Oh, I love Sharing Time! It's so fraught with drama. I'd like to know more about Kevin's stick.

 Alice seems uncharacteristically ill at ease in the second panel. Kevin's cat 'on a vacuum cleaner video was inspired by my friend Craig Fischer's favorite video "kittens on a Roomba". As Craig is a professor of film studies and English I trust his taste in such things.

 And I love it when Alice gets forcibly escorted offstage. But the thought that Nara brings a new duck-shaped potato to every Sharing Time is the peak of the week, I think.

Petey's bedroom is where most of Alice's Autopsy of the Day's Events take place. You may have noticed that Alice the Pangolin's right eyeball was coming loose a few days ago.

Barney Google and the Aesthetics of the Bigfoot Style

This is the foreword I did to Craig Yoe's big Barney Google book. I made it all up off the top of my head but I stand by every word.

An Old Yet Slightly Timely Almanack

This was a cartoon about the sound that's used in political attack ads to describe how unsuitable the Other Guy is for elective office. You know, that deep, dark chord like somebody putting both arms down on a piano keyboard, only it's enhanced and overtoned and uglified until it sounds utterly depraved. The TV screen gets darker, the announcer's voice gets ominous, they show a photo of the Other Guy, and you hear this BWRRAANNNGG. And if you're susceptible you don't vote for the other guy.

I did it in 2008 so it's got a few dated reference in it, but it still makes a modicum of sense, and these days that's all I've got.

Another Old Cul de Sac Halloween

Boo!

Today's Cul de Sac, October 31 2010, and Yesterday's Too

I drew the Sunday, below, about a month ago when I hadn't yet figured out what Alice was going to want to be for Halloween. I knew she'd started with a pangolin but didn't know if that would change or not. Knowing she was sick on Halloween I then wrote the dailies up to it which, given the strip's random nature, wasn't too hard.

The Millions Like the Golden Treasury

Which must be good news if I'm doing the math right. Thank you, fellow cartoonist Jacob Lambert! Really though, it's getting so if I don't get a good book review every day I slide into a funk and go through withdrawal. So keep 'em coming, media! 

Bonus Halloween Lazy Repost

My Halloween gift to you; an old Poor Almanac featuring three tales of terror for you to tell as you sit around the glow of your monitor. As Count Floyd would say, Pretty scary, huh, kids?

Today's Cul de Sac for Like the Last Two Weeks

Let's see, where were we?

Ha! Well, that's pretty funny, I guess.

I don't remember this one at all.

 Hey, it's gettin' crowded in this strip!

 Okay, now we're getting to material with some real weight to it. This now becomes the standard source for No Duh/Big Duh disambiguation.

Mom's final line is a little thin, but the strip had advanced the plot just enough to make its point and then suddenly the deadline loomed and somebody had to say something.

 This is based on a Washington Post Magazine Cul de Sac from 2006, where Petey was first planning his Halloween costume. I pretty much traced the fourth panel. My favorite part is Petey's redeye in the fourth panel.

And Alice's method of spotlighting candy-disbursing adults seems sensible to me.

A bonus enlargement for the nearsighted.

 Dill's line is my favorite bit of the whole week.

 Note the missing word "like" in the last line. Sharper eyes at Universal Press caught its absence and neatly inserted it, sparing us the inevitable global reader outrage.

There's a corn maze not too very far from where I live that features a different shape every year. To find your way through it you have to answer questions at forks in the path, making a learning experience for all concerned. Which sounds like it'd diminish the fun a bit.

 I like the leaves blowing around in the last panel.

 Petey's pumpkin inspired my friends Libby and David Hagen to carve a similarly pokerfaced Jack O'Lantern to crush the spirits of their trick-or-treaters.

I can feel my soul shriveling just looking at it, and isn't that what Halloween is all about?

 Twenty bucks for parking! I'm scared already.

 Drawing a corn maze was harder than I thought it'd be. Looks more like a giant broccoli-corn hybrid.

 Corn smut shows up so rarely in the comics these days. The corn here is slightly better than the previous strip.

 And the werewolf was a lot of fun to draw. A reader on GoComics thought his nametag said "Stan" and I wish I'd used that instead of "Staff."

Well, this doesn't bode well for Alice's Halloween trick-or-treating chances. Cue dramatic cliffhanger music

Of Cul de Sac, Joshua Trees, Tubeworms & Ten Other Things

Shaenon K. Garrity made me choke up twice this week. Once at Comixology and again at The Comics Jourmal.

Memories of the Ohio State University Cartoon Festival 2010 in Stream of Consciousness Form Part 2

Friday
The first order of business at the Wexner Center for the Arts's downstairs auditorium on Friday morning is refreshments and the official welcome by Cartoon Librarian Lucy Caswell and OSU President E. Gordon Gee (who gracefully combines the grandeur of a college president's name with a bit of gosh-wowiness), which Mike and I miss, arriving in time to hear most of Tony Agnes Cochran's talk, I Might Be Significant. Cochran's language describing his work is as lyrically comic as his strip, and one thing that strikes me is his admission that he hadn't been a huge comics fan as a kid; instead he'd come to cartooning through fine art, having started out as a painter. He also points out that Agnes's hair is shaped like Ohio, his home state. I admire Agnes as a character; she's ebullient and irrepressible in spite of her dispiriting life, living in a trailer with her grandmother, and she makes me laugh. Each speaker is allotted 45 minutes, the last few of which are opened up for questions from the audience. To mark the last question in this and all subsequent presentations Lucy Caswell rises silently from the audience to appear onstage by the speaker, a bit of stage business that becomes somehow funny each time it's repeated. There's now a brief break for everybody to stand up and sit down again, something I do rather gingerly as I'm wobbly and also as the guy videotaping the talks has his camera set up right behind me and I'm antsy about my head looming into his shots (assuming he's even filming the breaks). Then it's time for Jen Slowpoke Sorensen's talk, The Lighter Side of Impending Doom. Her power point shows Jen's deft, insightful and playful handling of sometimes grim material and I recognize every strip. One thing I really enjoy is how funny they are all over again when viewed with an audience, in the same way that I've almost suffocated with laughter watching an ancient Bugs Bunny cartoon for the 400th time when it's in a crowded theater. Listening to a cartoonist read his or her work also adds something to understanding and enjoying it; the timing and intonation is often different from what your mind hears while reading it. After Jen it is Dave Sheldon Kellett's turn. His talk, The Freeing of the Comics, is the keynote speech, and is billed as a reply to Bill Watterson's The Cheapening of the Comics, which was presented at OSU in 1989. Dave's a smart man, a wonderfully funny cartoonist and an especially good speaker. His talk is a fine piece of comic timing, with an entertainingly illustrative choice of photos and drawings, and the points he makes about the possibilities of the web as newspapers dwindle give me a few shreds of hope. I wish now I'd taken better notes, or that there'd been a test at the end. One point he makes is that we as cartoonists are businessmen/women/people/talkingdogs, deny it or claim incompetence as we might. Whatever, I feel some relief, though if someone had been selling time machine tickets to Newspaperland 1985 I'd still get in line. Now it's lunchtime and, though I have a ticket to a lunch put on at Mershon Auditorium, I instead follow Mike, Chris, Charles, Michele & Craig to the Student Union and have a Buckeye Cuban sandwich, which is very good as it lacks actual buckeyes. The next table over is a madhouse of editorial cartoonists who we expect at any moment to erupt in an intense foodfight, as everyone knows that editorial cartoonists are violent, opinionated and contentious, most often at feeding time. We finish and head back to the Wexner Center for the next speaker. Who is Paul DC Levitz, a droll, low-key speaker, somewhat surprising in someone from the gaudy, exclamation pointed world of comic books. His presentation, 75 Years of Mythmaking, the Art of DC Comics, is keyed to a massive book of the same name coming out from Taschen. His anecdotes are great and told with the appreciation of someone who came up through fandom. One thing he mentions is that there are at least two individuals on the planet who possess a complete set of everything DC published, one of them in the vicinity of Kent, England. Those in the audience who collect sigh visibly, little clouds forming above their heads containing the word "sigh" in comic sans. Lucy Caswell appears silently onstage next to Paul and it's time for James Market Day Sturm. I'd met James at SPX in September and heard him speak at Politics & Prose. He repeats part of that at OSU, showing how he'd developed the story of Market Day and showing work by Roman Vishniak, Raphael Soyer and others who'd inspired him, but also talks about his many other works in comics and the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction that he cofounded in 2004. His description of cartooning as "not writing and art, but poetry and graphic design" is my favorite quote of the weekend (illustrated here by Mike Lynch). Then after a string of questions Lucy Caswell apparates onstage and it's time for vaudeville! The wiseguy surrealism of Bizarro in the person of Dan Piraro, who bestrides the stage like the agile performer and passionate cartoonist he is. His show, My Life as a Pornographer, is a hoot, an string of cartoons sharp as barbwire, the highlights of which include an indescribable gag with the Lone Ranger, Tonto & a cauliflower and a describable gag with Medusa at a nude beach. Then, after being playfully taunted by Piraro, Lucy Casswell, the implacable Angel of Time to Stop Talking, rises into view, giggling slightly, and invites us to join her back at the Hyatt Regency for a reception in honor of Paul Levitz, sponsored by Heritage Auctions. And more TK; I'm posting this unfinished because I've been so slow in finishing it, and America clamors for more.

Memories of the Ohio State University Cartoon Festival 2010 in Stream of Consciousness Form Part 1

Thursday.
Driving to Columbus from Arlington with Mike Rhode doing all the actual driving. Using only the incremental step-by-step Google Maps directions which means we have only a vague notion of where we really are. I swear it's always foggy on this one stretch of I-68. We pull off onto a smaller road because the directions tell us to. Everything's uphill, all the way there.  Seeing a lot of the mountains of scenic southwestern Pennsylvania. Oops, tires need rebalancing. Stop at McDonald's. Pass General Braddock's Memorial marker; Mike guesses French & Indian War. A lot of towns that look like model railroad towns enlarged to livable size, some where the nicest building around is the local funeral home. Yay, West Virginia, closely followed by Yay, Ohio! And eventually Yay, Columbus, my wife's hometown! Skip through town and head right to the OSU campus Hey, there's the indomitable Chris Sparks exiting the OSU parking garage! Got to the tail end of Michael Tisserand's Herriman lecture, where he showed a photo he took of the actual Coconino County sheriff's office, bland little building with no Offisa Pupp. First of many visions of Jenny Robb (OSU Assistant Professor and Associate Curator of the Cartoon Library) ever on the wing, keeping things moving. In the registration line at the Cartoon Library Brian Walker tells me about his upcoming Garry Trudeau art book from Yale press. Time to start cleaning off the studio shelves again to make room for new stuff. Missed the Krazy Kat Kake but enjoyed the other food at the Cartoon Library reception, chatted with Columbus homeboys Nate Beeler (now of DC), who grew up romping in the wilds of the Cartoon Library and teething on Caniffs,  and Jeff Stahler, who's worked on every Festival. Met the accomplished & charming Prof. Tom Inge finally but too briefly. And here's elfin mandarin RCHarvey! All right, now we're cookin' with gas! John Read got me the last glass of wine (the birthdate stamped on some bottles of beer made them contemporaneous with the previous Festival). Established festival-long habit of standing in the exact spot most necessary for traffic flow. Goggled at the Herriman originals with Rina Piccolo & Hilary Price while getting that self conscious feeling you get when you stare at Art from inches away in public but it's Okay because it's Funny Art. Back to the hotel for check in and start bumping into people I knew or soon would. Dinner at large yet quiet sports bar across the street with Mike, Craig Fisher, Charles and Michele Hatfield, Harry Katz, Martha Kennedy and David Berona, several of whom had spoken during  the academic portion of the Festival on Thursday. We talk mostly about kittens on a Roomba. Or is that the name of a fancy drink? Memory slightly blurry. Back to the hotel, Jenny Robb flies past with Matt Groening, brief pleasantries (didn't ask him to sign anything, which seems to be his full time occupation), then up to bar on the second level of the atrium lobby, and memory gets blurrier mostly because it's late and also because, hey, there's Tom Gammill! I swear it's always foggy on the second floor bar.

Other Bargain Galore!

The second Cul de Sac book, Children at Play is also on sale at Amazon!

Bargain Galore!

The first Cul de Sac book is now on sale at Amazon! For the billions of you still without one who're on a budget.

Today's Cul de Sac from Yesterday, October 17 2010

I might be remembering this wrong, but Lynda Barry (America's National Treasure and, in Ernie Pook's Comeek, the cartoonist who most understands childhood) said something once about the dreamy mood kids get into when sitting at the breakfast table reading the back of a cereal box. Why some forward looking cereal manufacturer hasn't published a great comic artist on their box I'll never know, except that there aren't any forward looking cereal manufacturers.