I am Zorry

My spousal unit and I often joke about how the English mispronounce Spanish words even worse than people in the US. "Jaguar" [JAG-YOO-ARR] is one such irritant. It always reminds me of an advertisment for English classes in Tegucigalpa that tried to make learning English seem really easy by using homophones. A cartoon coati is saying "Jaguar you?" to a fox who exclaims 'I am Zorry". If you don't speak Spanish that will make no sense but if you do it's highly amusing.

An Ape Like Tea

This is based on an actual tea called "Monkey Tikuyin" produced only on the Mo Ye mountains in Fukkin (settle down now) province. The tea plants grow on high cliffs where people can't reach but where presumably it's safe for certain types of monkeys. It tastes like regular green tea. Darjeeling of course is an Indian tea. Kwazulu is from the Natal province of South Africa and is the usual choice for my morning cuppa.

Retro Decoman

Here's me celebrating something or other in the observation bar on the Queen Mary which is docked at Long Beach, California. It's a hotel, museum and dining establishment these days but still oozes with the golden age of cruising decadence. I think I was drinking some odd little cocktail (not shown) and wishing it was 1949 all over again.

Happy Alcoholidays

I like to include a lot of vintage "fad" toys in my strips. Here's one with the thermodynamically powered drinking bird also known as bobble, happy, dippy, dipping, tippy, tipping, sippy, sipping, sippy-dip, dip-dip, dinking, dinky-dinky or dunking birds depending on which part of the planet you live in. It was invented in 1945 by Miles V. Sullivan who was a Ph.D. inventor-scientist at Bell labs in Murray Hill, NJ, USA. I don't know if it would actually work with alcohol as it would be liable to evaporation than water.

Greetings From Yesteryear

I didn't do a holiday card this year but I did find this old postcard design I did a few years back that I never had printed up.

Boop Island

This strip represents the first time I've ever drawn the rabbits' backyard. I guess they now live in the suburbs since I was too lazy to draw anything but tract housing in the background. It's details like this that probably hold me back from being a world dominating cartoonist. I also struggled to think of Eightball's ideal female companion. I originally had Whoopie Goldberg in the rough until I decided that it had to be a non-human. I'm still not sure Betty Boop is a good match for him but as far as I know she's still single and available.

Jimmy the Corn Man

Art Imitates Taquería

This strip was based on a real life offer that my local taquería, Casa Sanchez on 24th Street in San Francisco, was doing a few years ago. They had a much cooler mascot called Jimmy the Corn Man and anyone who had it tattooed on their body got free burritos for life. They would post photos of the tattoos in the window. They soon discontinued the promotion and closed down for several months. They're open for business again now but I don't know if the inked patrons still get the free comida.

Vintage Geekiness

Sorry about the lax postings of late. Hello? Anyone still here? [crickets]. I've been busy with exciting undisclosed happenings. Here's a special dip into the "where are they now?" archives of my past comic strip glory. This was a two-pager that ran in a few fanzines from a series of semi-autobiographical strips I did back in the eighties when was a serious young nineteen year-old in important trousers. I say semi-autobiographical because I'm supposedly the tall one with the buck teeth and impaired vision who had zero success on the dating front. Tex (?!) was my good friend Alan who now lives in France and is now some sort of martial arts expert. I used a lot of Zip-o-Tone back in those pre-computer days (called Letratone in Britain). This was supposed to be a sort of English Archy & Jughead-type feature. It was discontinued after a few months for obvious reasons, most likely because all the strips were just as terrible as this one.