Drivel that cannot fit in a single panel comic.

Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

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.

Friday, January 18, 2008

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

Saturday, January 05, 2008

You've Been Warned!

I found a cartooning project courtesy of the always brilliant blog: Judge a Book by Its Cover and this hilarious post: http://judgeabook.blogspot.com/2008/01/youve-been-warned.html

Maughta and one her co-workers at the library were reading passages from James Patterson's current best seller, "You've Been Warned ("Fear is just the beginning")" and found it quite amusing. This book is number one on the New York Times best seller list for hard cover fiction.

Maughta typed up a list of all the last sentences of every chapter of this book. I read them and several of them caused single panel cartoons to instantly come to mind. This would be a fun challenge: draw a single panel cartoon for all 110 last lines of each chapter of You've Been Warned. This could keep me going for several months. I've been in a bit of a writing slump anyway and this might be just the thing to get me out. Some of the lines will take some creativity in coming up with a humorous visual. I'm excited about cartooning again! Thanks Maughta and James Patterson!

Sunday, February 11, 2007

This just in...

My brother-in-law had a book just published through Amazon.com

You can find it here: http://snipurl.com/19wo0

Description:
This is a story of a group of girls who attend a college of magic in the mountains of Colorado. They have nothing in common but have to become friends to survive the deadly feud between members of a evil family that has their unyielding grip on the world. The girls experience the light and dark sides of sorcery, fighting dark assassins, evil witches, a mighty dragon, and are helped by the friendly school janitor who is biggest mystery of all!

I haven't read the book. I've been asked to help promote it. I'm not an Amazon.com affiliate so I receive no financial benefits from any sales, only benefits of better family relationships.

Please check it out and write a review.

That's an hour glass on the girl's forehead.

Here is John's website: http://www.artoflawmack.com/