Cool Alex Toth Drawings...

and a single panel of Mary Worth. I love that Terry Bryson points toward the window when she warns Toby. Phishing to agoraphobia maybe?
I found these drawings via Drawn! They are Alex Toth design sketches. Alex Toth the man responsible for some of my childhood and Adult Swim. He designed Jonny Quest, Birdman, Space Ghost, Mightor, Herculoids, Super Friends, Josie and the Pussy Cats and other "oh my god that was real and not some fever dream I had as a kid" cartoons.
Alex Toth has a bit of fun with Race Bannon and a gas mask. I want to make this an icon.
From Sealab 2020: Holy crap! Look at all those gauges and screens! That level of detail would have blown Hanna-Barbera's animation budget.
I think Roger had some lines in Sealab 2021. I like the close up drawing of the cassette tape player.

More drawings can be found at http://www.collectingfool.com/tothgallery.html

One of the presentation drawings screams 1970's. Hanna-Barbera pitched a cartoon about a bionic police dog! I wonder if that one actually made it to air?

Getting things done

I finally found a way to get up in the morning and make it to work on time. I use my cell phone's alarm clock feature and have the sound set to the chirps of Salvador. The sound wakes me gently rather than jarring me out of a dream and Walter does not hear it and get disturbed. I've tried it successfully for two days so far. I haven't experienced the 9:00 am - 11:00 am struggle to stay awake, either.

I've accomplished a few minor but overdue tasks.

Things have become a bit busy at work but I don't mind. Keeps me out of trouble and justifies my existence at work.

I feel good about how this week has unfolded so far. I'm a bit behind in scanning my cartoons but I still have four days worth on the hard drive. I have three cartoons in the box awaiting scan.

I still read the comics but nothing has been worth commenting on. At least the Charterstone Tales did not happen as I feared.

I finally saw the Chocolate Rain video on YouTube. Oddly enough, a reference to it appeared on both South Park and Lewis Black's Root of Evil tonight. I did not go looking for the video. I received a subscription update - looked at that video which lead to the Chad Vader parody of Chocolate Rain and finally to Chocolate Rain. I'm glad I caught that bit of pop culture when I did or else tonight's line up on Comedy Central would not have made as much sense, especially, South Park.

Massage therapy is winning the Mary Worth poll. Still time to cast your vote. If you want to know what being a super delegate feels like vote 1,000 times.

Christmas Light Chicken

I received in the mail yesterday a copy of the New Yorker Complete Book of Cartoons. The book has two CDs with every cartoon published in the New Yorker from 1924 to 2004. I bought the paperback version and this book weighs a lot. If I want to keep reading the book in bed I will need to sit up in order to avoid organ damage. Last night, I read the first decade while on my back. Thankfully, I have abs of steel and blankets to support the weight of this tome but even my fabulous abs could not support this book for more than 30 minutes. Also, the book is huge - we will need a bigger coffee table for it. Entertainment and exercise in one volume.

Whenever I get around to it, my next comic strip music video will feature Ed Crankshaft, using Isaac Hayes' Theme to Shaft. That Ed Crankshaft is one bad mother - Shut your mouth - I'm only talking about 'Shaft. I don't know what surprises me more - the Crankshaft household having that many hair dryers or Ed Crankshaft not owning a high powered heat blower.

According to Mary Worth and Me the song is Waiting for a Star to Fall by Boy Meets Girl. It's a song from the 1980's that receives very little air play - thankfully. Go to Mary Worth and Me if you feel like hearing it. Fortunately, that blog has some other fine lounge music. I'm surprised that Karen Moy is aware of anything from the 1980's. Then again, she could be close to my age and Drew and Vera could be written as people in their late 30's. Shudder.

In twenty years, Snoop Dogg's Sensual Seduction (more likely, a white person's cover of the song), will make it to the Junction Cafe jukebox.

Vera - enough with the purple! A purple Michelin Man coat, a purple blazer and a purple skirt? Angling for an appearance on What Not to Wear - the comic strip edition? Vera, you're too young for the Red Hat Society, so please stop dressing like them.

This comic strip reflect part of my job. Paperless office - not as long as we have people that cannot stare at a monitor for too long.

A comic peeve: inappropriate aging of characters. Is there a law mandating that every comic parent be of boomer age even if they are too old to be parents of the children in the comic? I estimate that the children in Soup to Nutz are between the ages of 8 and 12. Let's assume that the parents were 12 during the Cuban Missile Crisis - born in 1950. Wikipedia claims that the duck and cover was taught into the 1980's - but I'm going to go by my experience and assume that the parents went to elementary school in the 1950's and early 1960's. Both parents would be in their late 50's and would have had their first born in their late 40's. It is possible that the parents went to one of those schools that still taught duck and cover in the 1980's. The odd parental aging thing also appears in Curtis. The Duncans in Zits are of boomer age but their sons are in college and high school - a more realistic age.

I want to get this joke. Someone attempt to explain.

About the title of this blog entry - we, the next door neighbors and the neighbors across the street appear to be playing Christmas Light chicken. None of us has taken down our lights yet. If our lights stay up then there will be no nagging - the neighbors have taken down their lights, why don't you take down ours? The next door neighbor has the most elaborate set up with animated reindeer. Ours is the simplest - lights draped in a tree. The lights along our front walkway have been brought in and I put the Christmas trees up last Saturday.

Holy Bat! Batman!

Today's single panel theme - percussive therapy with blunt wooden objects:

This really blurs the canine/ human line. For some humans balding is usually just part of the aging process (exceptions for chemo and poisoning) but for a dog balding is the sign of a fairly serious skin condition. The Pluggers disturbs me when it blurs the anthromorphization lines.

Yes, I can. I shall speak of the pompatus of love. Bizarro drew a panel using the same theme a month or so back. This artist decided to play a variation. Now, a different single panel cartoonist needs to work "pompatus of love" into their version of a gag based on Steve Miller's "The Joker"

Check out this blog post on Judge a Book by Its Cover about the wonders of the Internet and my "You've Been Warned" cartooning project. The individual panels will appear daily on my main cartoon site (A Perfect World) starting next Tuesday but if you're the impatient sort you can find them on my Flickr photostream in the You've Been Warned set

Three comics that I would hang on my fridge

Three comics that I would hang on my fridge if I read them in a newspaper. The first two I understand the sentiments expressed in the last panel and the third one I just found sick, twisted and very funny.





Looks like readers of Mary Worth will suffer through weeks of Mary's attempt to get a man for Vera. Mary did not pay attention to Vera when she stated that she did not want to depend on a man. Oops, my heterosexism is showing. Karen Moy could take Mary Worth into controversial territory and set up Vera with a woman. Or even have Mary explore her - oh god, I just made myself ill. Yeah, right. That would be too interesting. Stick with the pedestrian so that I have something to write about.

I don't observe the movement of long hair in real life but, in the second panel, the position of Vera's ponytail versus the position of her head does not look right.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This cartoon was inspired by my 6th grade band director at Memorial Middle School in Garland, Texas. The school is now some special type of school instead of a regular middle school. The band director whose name I've forgotten was a grade-A asshole to me and incompetent. One advantage to changing schools a lot is that I had a large sample for comparison.

I played the clarinet and I'm slightly tone deaf. Maybe band is not the best place for a slightly tone deaf person. But I stayed all the way through my senior year in high school. All this despite the best efforts of Mr. Asshole. I only suffered through Mr. Asshole's "teaching" for 5 months. Mr. Asshole's technique for helping me tune my instrument involved screaming at me - "YOU'RE FLAT!!!" Adjust your embouchure! YOU'RE STILL FLAT!!! Adjust your EMBOUCHURE! CAN'T YOU HEAR THAT!! YOU'RE STILL FLAT!!! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!! ADJUST YOUR EMBOUCHURE!

Not a nice thing to do in front of a whole class of 6th graders, who did not like me very much anyway. Luckily for him I did not have access to a firearm or a particularly aggressive personality. The most that I ever did to him was give him a dirty look and point out that I am adjusting the best that I can.


Later, from a different band director at a different school, I learned about adjusting the barrel on the clarinet and purchasing better reeds.

The cartoon is about incompetent people simply screaming useless advice hoping that repeated screaming will improve things.

An evil part of me hopes that Mr. Asshole died a very painful death while an incompetent doctor screamed at him, YOU'RE SICK - STOP BEING SICK!! BE HEALTHY! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU!!! WHY CAN'T YOU SEE THAT YOU ARE SICK!!!!

I would find that very funny and laugh out loud despite the disapproval of polite society. I settle for drawing a cartoon about it 23 years later.

This is the cartoon I posted for Tuesday, January 23, 2007. It is about 99.5 - "The Fox" - the classic rock station for Bryan - College Station, Texas, USA.

It took me a long time to find a logo worthy of copying and pasting into this cartoon.

Motley Crue does not belong on the play list of a classic rock station. 80's hair metal does not belong on the play list either.

When it comes to metal - my generation got the shaft. We are pretty much used to that.

Some things do not get better with age. Hair metal got worse because I matured. I cannot even enjoy the nostalgia aspect because like the music, that time of my life pretty much sucked. It sucked 80% of the time.

How to improve 99.5 - "The Fox":

• No Motley Crue or Hair Metal.
  
• Get a local morning show or even better just play the damn music and leave the comedy to Comedy Central.
• Instead of saying that The Grateful Dead are coming up, just say whether it will be "Truckin'" or "Touch of Gray". That applies to any one or two hit band.
• No John Cougar Mellencamp or any of his incarnations.
• More Jethro Tull and Yes (songs from albums besides 90125) and ZZ Top (pre - Eliminator)

The general theme - tone down the 1980's. It was not all bad but it was not rock's best decade.

I walked 5,041 steps/ 1.91 miles yesterday.

Pickles is back with her foster mom. Isaac and Loki received their Christmas ham bones and are working on them.

Walter is sick. He is resting. He thinks its because of taking too much pain medication on an empty stomach. I made him some breakfast and he took some migraine medicine on a full stomach and he is sleeping. Hopefully, food and rest will do the trick. If not, I'm dragging his butt to the doctor.

The in-laws are coming Sunday afternoon. The house should be mostly clean by then. The rest will just have to be behind closed doors.

Today, I will start scanning all the cartoons that I have drawn this week. By my calculations a cartoon drawn in 2007 will appear on the website in February.

Here is a weird thought on the ex-presidents: Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan died less than a week from each other and Gerald Ford and James Brown died on the same day. Is the life of a soul singer linked to the life of an ex-president? Who will George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton take with them when they die? Would it be in Aretha Franklin's interests to monitor the health of our former U.S. Presidents?