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.

Prambulator

I did this one "on the road" during a recent trip to Arizona. I bet you're probably thinking that the black lines look slightly different. Well, that's because my travel ink is different from my usual bottle of Pelikan since you're not allowed to take glass ink bottles onto a plane in your hand luggage. Is there a finer word in the English language than "prambulator"?

Monochrome

This is the black and white version of an upcoming Rabbits Against Magic strip. I'm starting to use a lot more solid blacks in the strip so that they will reproduce better in print and not rely so heavily on color. I got the premise from the chapter on the French in "A Child's Geography of the World" by V.M. Hillyer written in 1929 (charmingly embossed as the"new and cheaper edition"). I guess people really did worry about foreign policy even back then.

Dead Day

November 2nd is celebrated in Mexico as Day of the Dead. Here in San Francisco, the sizable Latino population in the Mission district joined in the festivities. That's me (right) and my spouse (left) dressed as a tribute to José Guadelupe Posada. I posted a feeble and amateurish video here that does little justice to the vibrant street celebrations and procession.

Milestone

On November 19th I will be running daily strip number 200 on Comic Sherpa and I drew a special numerically-shaped anniversary themed cartoon to celebrate. The last panel features all eight of my main characters plus the Comic Sherpa himself. Here's a sneak preview. Incidentally I went to buy "normal" balloons myself recently and was staggered to see the cost of those shiny balloons really is $12 (although they did include the helium).

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.