Washington City Paper Interview

Mike Rhode, the noted comics expert, historian, monster-bottler, scourge of evil everywhere & boon companion, asked me some questions which I finally answered.

Today's Cul de Sac, December 9, 2010

It's been a while since Petey practiced his oboe, at least in the strip. I figure it's something he does every day whether it's mentioned in the strip or not.  Like the family eats dinner every night, but it's not funny enough to be worth mentioning. Hey, these people can't be funny all the time, you know. They've got lives of their own too.For earlier examples of Petey's musicianship, but not on the oboe, see here and here.

Today's Cul de Sac, December 8, 2010

This comes awfully close to "isn't that cute" territory, and would cross over with both feet if it wasn't so disgusting. I'd guess that Dill's never had a piece of clothing that wasn't a hand-me-down, so you'd think he would've noticed the crumbgutters sooner. And that's a word I'm hoping to foist on the English language in a big way, so watch for five solid weeks of crumbgutter jokes in early 2011.

Another Book Signing

I'll be signing whatever Cul de Sac books are put in front of me at the brand spanking new One More Page bookstore on Monday, December 20th from 7 till 9 PM. One More Page is located at 2200 N. Westmoreland Street, #101, in Arlington VA, phone 703-300-9746, just a few blocks west of the Lee Highway exit off Route 66. Everybody please come support indie booksellers in general and proprietor Eileen McGervey in particular!

One More Page pre-opening. The little paper in the window is notice of application for a liquor license. Finally, a bookstore with its priorities straight.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 29 Through December 7, 2010

Jeez, you turn your back for a few days and look what happens.

 They haven't used the Dress-Up Corner at Blisshaven and this may be why.

 I had this all lettered and drawn except for Kevin's last balloon. I wrote half a dozen lines for him but nothing seemed to work until it struck me that he probably looks a lot like his dad.

Alice's eyes go all blank when she's being given a lecture, like she's in strategic retreat.

 The giant Sauron Claus eyeball seemed good enough to squeeze for a few more strips. It fits Petey & Alice's darkish view of Santa as a semi-disturbed, judgmental demigod with multiple personalities.

 I wondered about that thing too.

 I so rarely get Alice's hair right that I'm always glad when I do.

 In horror movies, the unseen is always the scariest.

 I hope this is the last mention of Santa's giant eyeball, I promise. Except for today's strip.

 There.

Shapes & Colors Signing at Big Planet!

On Tuesday, December 14, 2010, I'll be signing Shapes & Colors from 7 to 9 PM at Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, Maryland. Helmed by master comixtician Joel Pollack, Big Planet Comics are, of course, the premier comics shops in the DC area, its Bethesda location nestled temptingly among the fabled Thousands of Restaurants Everywhere You Look (seriously; you can't walk down the street there without somehow getting gravy or mustard all over your sleeve). All those interested are invited to line up promptly the night before at 4908 Fairmont Ave in Bethesda and please stay behind the marked police lines. For more sensible information, call 301-654-6856.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 18-28. But Not 21, 2010

My uncle Jack tells me that Cul de Sac is the first strip out of the gate with a Christmas joke. Yay!

I'd thought about doing a little arc about the Santa candle; maybe it gets left on Dad's car and melts or something. But I didn't.

Every Thanksgiving needs to be different. The simultaneous-talking word jumble was better here. And from the look of this strip and others, Mom must run a home business fixing tiny motors.

All Grandma seems to make is stuffing, deviled eggs and beet casserole. No wonder her growth was stunted.

This place may have appeared in an old Almanac "Restaurant Closings" cartoon.

Here's where I discover that bread tongs are hard to draw recognizably.

The alternate ending had Dad saying he was thankful no other diners had accidentally ingested Grandma's stuffing. Another story arc uninvestigated.

All those desserts was harder to draw than I anticipated. And who serves rice pudding at Thanksgiving anyway?

Ew, I hate to imagine what he's doing.

There's too much hatching on the slide.

Your Old Caricature from USN&WR for Today

A month or so ago U.S.News & World Report announced it was ending its availability as a subscription print magazine and switching to digital publication with some vestigial newsstand sales (see here and here). I freelanced for them for years, going back to the late '80s, doing spots and caricatures and at least two covers. In the mid '90s I started drawing for them every week, illustrating a column in the front of the book called Washington Whispers that featured inside-baseball political-gossip reporting. I'd known and worked with the art director, Michele Chu, for some time and she asked if I'd be interested in a weekly gig with a horrifying deadline that paid decently. Washington Whispers had run in USNWR for some time and several caricaturists had illustrated it, including Taylor Jones, and they were looking for a new one, ideally a local guy. So I said yes.

The deal was they'd give me the subject or situation on Thursday around 4 and the final was due on Friday around 11 (which often stretched into the afternoon). I can't remember who the first subject I did was, but I do remember it was a crummy overworked lump of a painting and they asked if I'd please redo it in a looser style, and quickly please, so I did. This is when Thursday nights first turned into all-nighters for me, a habit I'm still trying to shake. Over the next few weeks I got into the job's rhythm; get a call from Michele, do a sketch and fax it over by 5 or 6, ink the sketch onto (Saunders Waterford 140 lb hot press) watercolor paper with a lightbox and stretch the paper and watercolor it, interspersed with periods of dawdling and fretting. Then call them on Friday and a courier would show up, usually Shawn, to pick the finished drawing up. I did this for 9 years, about 50 times a year, and I learned more about watercolor and the limits of human patience than i ever would've otherwise.

I regretfully moved on in 2004; I was getting burned out and I'd started Cul de Sac in the Post Magazine while still doing the Almanac and they always clumped up on Friday. Ideally, the way freelancing worked was you'd get a few standing gigs, illustrating this or that column or whatever weekly or monthly for various clients and then you'd get one-off type jobs, a cover or a page here or there, With the decline of print this type of illustration has declined too, and I moved into newspaper comic strips I just in time to watch that decline as well. DC is a huge center of publishing, with the government and all the various associations with magazines and newsletters and such. USN&WR, The Atlantic and National Geographic are the only big national publications around here though and it's sad to see USNWR move on too. But I wish them luck wherever they go.

Here's a Clinton I did for them in '98, when he was experiencing some financial embarrassment. First the sketch I faxed to Michele.

And here's the final. I like this one, especially the suit. I've got piles of these, some good, some so-so, and I'll post them from time to time. Only the good ones, to present a slanted view of my caricature prowess.

Fan Art Friday

I hope this will be a moment of light and joy in your grim Black Friday consumo-berserkathon. Jonathan Hill sent me this wonderful drawing he did for the store map at Powell's City of Books, the massive bookstore that fills a city block in Portland, Oregon. Mingling in among the satisfied shoppers along with Napolean, Quasimodo and Huck & Jim are Alice and Petey Otterloop, happily free of parental supervisison!

Two Servings of Thanksgiving Leftovers

As I'll be away for the traditional Ohio Thanksgiving, I've defrosted these old and unrelated things. The first, a Cul de Sac is from 2005. the second, a heartwarming Thanksgiving memory a la Truman Capote, happened in 1992.


The story below originally ran, in slightly different form, in the Washington Post Magazine with an illustration by Gene Weingarten.


Eighteen years ago today, my wife, Amy, and I were about to celebrate our first Thanksgiving as a married couple. We were going to serve a large feast on our new plates on our new table in our newly rented home for as many of our extended family as could make it. The night before Thanksgiving we went to a bar with friends and we had a most festive and enjoyable time, I personally enjoying it more than anyone else. When we got home, in hopes of coninuing my festively enjoyable time, I started dancing around like Fred Astaire would if Fred Astaire danced in his socks.

Our house was old and strangely shaped and it was heated by radiators, big iron monsters, all coils and ribs and flanges. The kind of fixture that would give sensitive children nightmares. I, as Fred Astaire would not, executed a kick that planted my foot squarely into the radiator in the hall, good and hard.

Amy, seeing me suddenly rolling around on the floor, thought I was still enjoying myself, until I pulled my sock off. One toe was bent completely back, and since it was the middle one, it looked like my foot was giving me the toe, if you know what I mean. It was indescrabably funny, in a silent-film-comedy-trauma way. And it hurt like "the dickens". The dickens is when the entire output of Charles Dickens-all 15 hardbound novels, plus journalism, letters and ephemera-is simultaneously dropped from a height and hits you.

The folks at the emergency room were extremely helpful and didn't laugh and didn't yell at me when I did some doughnuts with the wheelchair and knocked over the IV stand. But the nurse on duty did tell me an awful story about when he was in the Navy and won a $300 bet that he couldn't pull all the hairs off the top of his foot with tweezers without screaming. And they gave me some Tylenol 3, the kind with codeine, the kind that comes with the warning that not everybody reacts well to codeine.

So that is how I ended up at the head of our table the next day, Thanksgiving Day, with my mangled foot elevated on another chair, presiding over our first Thanksgiving feast. And that is when, not ten minutes into the meal, I fould out I was one of the people who react badly to codeine. And it was Amy who quickly handed me a bowl, the fancy one that matched our new plates and was fortunately empty, for me to react badly in.

It's been 18 years. The toe's still there, of course, though it's still bent a little funny. The house is gone, or at least so renovated it's unrecognizable, and good riddance; it was an astestos-clad eyesore and a menace.

Somehow, subsequent family holidays have never quite matched that First Thanksgiving for intensity of emotion; not the Christmas of the Flaming Oven Mitt, or the Other Thanksgiving When the Fireplace Blew Up, or that Day or Two Before Easter When We Had to Evacuate Because of a Carbon Monoxide Leak That Almost Killed Everybody.

The only downside is that, ever since I broke my toe that night, I've been forced to draw with my hands.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 21 2010

Dill's winter hat is one of the few things I look forward to when cold weather rolls in. He was wearing it the first time I drew him, below, in March 2004.

Pearls Before Swine

Stephan Pastis is the nicest guy on the planet, and don't let him tell you otherwise.
Also, he needs just one more friend on Facebook to hit 5,000. Somebody please friend him, now.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 14, 15 & 16 2010

Ernesto's actuality is best left unexamined, I think.

Maybe he's a wormholian who can slide between realities (I knew kids like this).

Or maybe he's a projection of the zeitgeist. Whatever, he's good for laffs when used sparingly. For what it's worth, below is my favorite Ernesto appearance. Which is available in the first CdS book at Amazon for only $5.20. So that's what it's worth.

An Old Cul de Sac

Because I don't have anything new, here's one from the Wash Post Magazine. I usually found the pandas at the zoo in DC kinda boring, because most often they were pretty inert, lazing around like high-contrast carpet samples. The one time I saw them up and about, of course, they were just adorable and I had to be restrained from climbing into the enclosure and hugging them to bits.

Too Late Fall Colors Preview

This comes in too late to be useful, which is in line with the standard operating procedures that makes this blog so vital a part of everyone's daily internet read.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 12 & 13 2010

 Here are two of Petey's notable pastimes in collision- picky eating and chewing his arm off. Somebody said that the ability to hold two contradictory ideas is the mark of a first-rate mind (F. Scott Fitzgerald, I googled it), which makes sense to me although it obviously doesn't at all.

Today's Cul de Sac, November 14 2010 and Tellingly, April 17 2010

 No comment, except to say such laziness is shameful, and I'll say it again in 7 months when I use Dill's brothers' skateboard ramp for the third time.

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.