Honorable Mention

The great Brian Anderson (Dog Eat Doug cartoonist) was kind enough to select my comic strip as his TBBA spotlight on The Gigcast podcast episode 165 a few weeks ago. My web hits went threw the roof in the days following so it's clearly a very popular podcast. It's a great listen so check it out.

Goodbye Opus

After returning twice from the dead, it seems that Berkeley Breathed is finally putting Opus the Penguin out to pasture. November 3rd will be the last ever "Opus" strip as the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist dedicates his output exclusively to children's books. Because no newspaper I read on a regular basis ever carried Bloom County or Outland I was a bit of a Lemon-come-lately to the strip but I quickly caught up through the numerous collections and treasuries. There is no doubting its influence in the cartooning world, especially the way in which it dealt with socio-political issues.

Day of the Dead

November 2nd is Día De Los Muertos, easily my favorite holiday of the year despite not being a day off work. There is something about the combination of changing seasons, the celebration of mortality, the bright Mexican colors and the encroaching winter that tickles my fancy every year. Here in the predominantly Latino Mission district of San Francisco there is an annual procession which always brings an unriviled carnival atmosphere to the neighborhood. Many of the images for Day of the Dead were produced in the printshop of former political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada, one of my all time favorite artists and a huge influence.

I Captured a Bo Bo

This might be my first ever cartoon. I drew it on Tuesday 10th October, 1972 when I was six. It's the illustration for a story about a man who makes monsters in his office. The blue monster can produce gold coins from his foot (obviously some sort of metaphor for the federal reserve bank). The story ends after the man goes to war against France and everyone is blown up by the Irish Republican Army. And who says children are innocent.

Rabbits Against Dinosaurs

Here's an advanced screening of a forthcoming Rabbits strip. The great Bill Watterson drew a lot of big dinosaurs into his Sunday Calvin and Hobbes strips. Here I try to cram three into one panel of a daily strip. Read into that what you will.

Vintage Zoo Elvis

I just spent a happy hour scanning in some recently discovered art from my past. This one is from a particularly lame comic strip I drew for a local fanzine in Brighton, England back in the eighties when I was at art college. The strip was called "Zoo" and mostly featured a chipmunk who had a crush on a giraffe. This was the only even vaguely amusing strip out of the thirty or so I drew. I'm not even sure what kind of animal that was supposed to be.

Wordle

I just discovered Wordle, a great application that analyzes text and then creates a "word cloud" based on the frequency of each word. Here's a cloud based on all the text in this blog.