Berkeley Breathed of Bloom County, posted this letter today on his Facebook page. I’m assuming it’s real. Isn’t parody part of the First Amendment?
This is a dream for a cartoonist, or anyone in fact. Lots of publicity.
Update. It seems that according to Snopes, the letter was not real. It was just a joke played by Berkeley Breathed. I got the info from a reader (see comments section), who got it from Snopes. 😦
I started a little t-shirt shop to help me raise some money to support this blog. I hope you’ll check it out. There are a few other items like mugs, too.
So far, I have three sections: Comics – TV/Moves – Pets – Pot Pourri.
Thanks!
I was talking about the humbleness of cartoonists I’ve interviewed or met. I find it quite interesting. Other than interviewing them, I’ve seen many at Comic Cons. I like to watch them, study them. I usually don’t go up to them, but I stand back and just watch. I don’t know if I’m absorbing the scene or what. I mostly see them at the GoComics booth.
I’ve watched Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine. Not stalking, by the way, just happened to be there a couple of times, a year or so after our 10 With Tom interview. I didn’t approach him, I just happened to be at the GoComics booth when he arrived a couple of times.
One time he was a few minutes late, the line of people waiting to meet him and get his autograph was long. I wanted to see how he would be when he got there. He is one of the top cartoonists today, would he act it? Would he arrive and be big, you know, like be a presence. So he arrived, had on his usual baseball cap, jeans and a t-shirt and a backpack. I wondered what he possibly could be carrying around New York City in a large backpack. Anyway, he arrived at the booth, smiled, threw the backpack down and sat down and started his thing – meeting and greeting his fans, one by one, making small chit chat with each of them, signing their books and just being humble. What I love about cartoonists. The humbleness.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I thought he would come in big and say, “Here I am, the great Stephan Pastis!” And act like he was all that. Which he is. But it was the total opposite. I loved that.
I know he likes beer. I would love to go with him for a beer some time. But I’m to shy to ask or to even approach him, even though I feel like I know him because of the 10 With Tom interview a couple of years ago. He’s a friend in my head.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of cartoonists lately for my 10 With Tom series. I’ve interviewed many people over the years from “real housewives” to authors, news reporters, fashionistas and actors. But I think I enjoy the cartoonists the most since that’s what I do and I learn from the interviews. I ask questions that I’m curious about, mostly their influences and their techniques.
An interesting thing about most people and especially the cartoonists is how humble they are. They are all very appreciative of me asking for the interview and they seem to enjoy doing it. I like that about them, they are a great group, I like associating myself with them. I’ve interviewed “the greats” and those starting out, and they all are the same – nice, appreciative and kind.
There are some interviews I’ve tried to get but I either get the runaround or no answer at all. I like to think the email went to the spam folder on those, rather than the fact that they just plain ignored me.
But my point is that I am always amazed at the humbleness and gratefulness of these people I admire, who I am interviewing because I admire. Some become friends or friendly and we run into each other at places like Comic Cons and such and I like that. I like being part of that company.
I do all of the interviews for the Huffington Post but I’ve posted many of them after they run in the HuffPost, right here in my blog. You can see them here.
I had to laugh at one major cartoonist who said he didn’t like the HuffPost and didn’t want to have his interview there. When I asked if I could post it in my Tomversation blog, right here, he agreed. So I got that interview with him. That was gracious of him to to ahead with the interview anyway for the few thousand that read Tomversation rather than the millions who read the HuffPost. Just another example of why I like cartoonists.
Saw this in The New Yorker. Hilarious. By Kim Warp.
I saw this photo on Very Old Images of NY page on Facebook. It’s a great page with so many great historical photos.
It is 1896 on Park Row. This milk wagon arrived to offer “Pure Ice Cold Orange County Milk, Fresh churned buttermilk” and malted milk offered for a nickel.
I love the photo because you can see the New York Sun and the New York Journal in the background. Not the newspapers – the actual buildings.
I’m always passing the Sun building in NYC, which is behind City Hall, away from newspapers row on Park Row and I had always thought it was the original Sun building, but I looked it up and the Sun moved to the 280 Broadway building behind City Hall in 1917. It was fist built for the A. T. Stewart Department store in 1846.
The “new” building on Broadway is large and just went through an extensive renovation. In each corner, there is a big clock sticking out that says, “The Sun. It Shines For All.” Still there – 100 years later.
Here are the two buildings in 1914. In the old days, they used to post the news and sports scores right outside the buildings. No digital banners. It was chalk and or ink on paper posted to boards out front. Here the crowd is looking at baseball scores.
I was talking about drawing Fred Flintstone and wondering if my mother ever saved any of my old drawings. I have to ask her.
Well, one of the things I always regret was giving away a full color comic strip of All in the Family that I created. It must have been an art class project, because I remember doing it in class. It was a Sunday strip, you know, full size. It was All in the Family, which was the number one show on tv at the time and I drew some sort of story line – three or four rows of comics, full color. Colored in with watercolor I remember. It was all the characters -Archie Bunker, Edith, Gloria, Mike; and the house as the background scenery in each panel – really a nice piece of art.
And I gave it away!
A classmate liked it and I gave it to him. Just like that!
I wonder if there is a way to put a call out for it now. You know – “Wanted, the old 1970s All in the Family comic strip I drew in art class.” Maybe I can do a lost and found thing on Craigslist or something.
I had this original TV Guide, too. I collected them all when I was a kid, I would just throw them in a box after we used them for the week. I had hundreds from the early 1970s until the 1990s. But they were all destroyed in 1992 in Hurricane Andrew. 😦
I think the first character I ever drew was Fred Flintstone. Why? Who knows? You would think as a child I would be more into Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry, but I was always a Hanna-Barbera fan and for some reason, I would draw Fred all the time. I wish I had some of those original drawings, maybe my mother has them stashed away somewhere, you know how mothers save all that stuff.
I loved the tv show The Flintstones and also so many of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons – Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Magilla Gorilla, Peter Potomus, Touche Turtle and so on. I vaguely remember them being on tv early evenings, something like 7:30 pm and each night was another show – Mondays was Huckleberry, Tuesday was Quickdraw McGraw and so on.
One of my earliest memories was maybe when I was two or three years old, I remember my mother chasing me around our Brooklyn apartment, trying to get me into the bathtub and I remember Huckleberry Hound coming on tv. The theme song was playing as I was running around, trying to get away from taking a bath!
But even with that early memory, it was all about Fred Flintstone. And did I become a Hanna-Barbera fan because of my mother? I mean, I’m assuming she put those shows on tv for me, so she chose them rather than other things like Bugs Bunny. I remember our house was full of Hanna-Barbera toys – I remember life sized cut outs (at least for a three or four year old they were life sized), I remember a Dino mechanical toy. I remember that at my grandmothers’s house. I can literally see that in my mind, walking on her kitchen floor. I looked it up on Ebay and found this. This is it. It’s going for over $800! I saw one cheaper, about $44, but it isn’t in mint condition like this one.
I saw two great movies yesterday – Mama Mia, which I saw so many times on tv and I think two or three times in the theater when it came out in 2008. And the Absolutely Fabulous movie. I had never seen that before. I enjoyed that.
At the very end of AbFab, during the credits, they play this song that I loved, I looked it up. It’s called, “Where Do You Go To My Lovely,” it’s by Peter Sarstedt.
It’s about a girl named Marie Claire who grew up in poverty in Naples, Italy and then became the height of jet set society, speaking many languages, jetting around the world, being the “it” girl. People thought it was about Sofia Loren because she grew up in poverty in Italy and became a famous jet setter, but Sarstedt claimed he had no one in mind when he wrote the song. Year’s later he claimed it was about his wife.
Mama Mia always makes me feel sort of how the Sarstedt song does – melancholy. Not because of the story, but because of the music. The Abba songs being back so many wonderful memories, starting, I think when I was in junior high school. When I hear the song “Waterloo,” I can picture myself in my mother’s car, with the song playing on the radio, like it was yesterday. That song was released in 1974, so it was 1974 I am remembering.
Other songs from later years remind me of being out in the clubs, when I was young and it was my first experience going out, so the memories are special for that reason. So as I listen to the songs in Mama Mia, I can almost remember where I was during certain periods of my younger life, it’s like going back in time. It’s exactly in my head like one of the Abba songs in the movie, Slipping through my fingers, which says, “Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture, And save it from the funny tricks of time.” When I hear the music in the movie, I can almost see a photograph in my mind of that time period. Weird.
10 With Tom
10 questions in 10 minutes
I’m a big fan of Nick Seluk and his daily comic strip, “The Awkward Yeti.” The comic is often a clever commentary on the struggle between our hearts and our brains – it always hits home and many times provokes a belly laugh. The Yeti has a running dialogue many of his body’s organs. You can read The Awkward Yeti at GoComics.com here.
TOM: Heart and Brain seem to have their own spin-off from “The Awkward Yeti” how did that come about?
NICK: Brain first joined Lars (the Yeti) to help me get deeper into the anxiety-driven inner dialogue of an introvert, but it wasn’t long before Heart joined as a counterbalance. Heart and Brain found a dynamic that worked well for me and for my audience, and before too long Lars was on the sidelines (although he stars in his own self-titled series online at Webtoons and still makes cameos). I found that through Heart and Brain I could express myself better, and in a way that many people could relate.
TOM: What did you do before you became a full time cartoonist?
NICK: Before going full time as a cartoonist I was a sort of graphic designer / art director type for several years. I worked in corporate America with tons of huge brands, a job I ended up hating enough to want to start my own business instead. I needed to do things my own way, but more than anything needed to escape the constant meaningless small talk.
TOM: At what point did you first realize you were famous?
NICK: There are over six billion people who have never even seen my work, so fame is pretty relative. But, having a line of people waiting, actually WAITING for me write my name on a book is very humbling. I guess you could say I was humbled first at San Diego comic con a couple years ago, when I was signing books with my publisher and they had to close off the line. But other than that, it’s not like people recognize me on the street or anything.
TOM: What bores you?
NICK: Conversations about sports. (but not the sports themselves).
TOM: Favorite tv show?
NICK: I have lot of favorites, but I think Louie is one I especially look forward to. I’m a sucker for most of the popular action-heavy shows, too (Marvel Netflix series, Game of Thrones, etc., etc., etc.).
TOM: What famous artist, dead or alive, would you want to paint your portrait?
NICK: Picasso, but during his blue period.
TOM: What are two things you would do if you woke up to find yourself completely invisible?
NICK: Hide from my responsibilities, then go back to bed.
TOM: What song would be the theme of your life?
NICK: Do You Realize by The Flaming Lips, but, like, in a good way.
TOM: Superpower if you had one?
NICK: The ability to make other people fly. Whether I would use this for good or for evil is TBD.
TOM: Other than your own, what comic strips are your favorites? Past and/or present?
NICK: I was always a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Foxtrot and The Far Side as a kid, along with almost anything else in the newspapers at the time. I read every comic strip every day for many years, even continuing on through college with titles like Pearls Before Swine. When I first got into webcomics I enjoyed two groups: the first being the established comics like The Oatmeal, SMBC, and Cyanide and Happiness (all of which I still like to read); the second being comics that I happened to find early on, whether because we started at the same time, or just crossed paths online. That list is pretty long and includes a lot of people I see regularly at comic cons (a big group of us will be at Kansas City Planet Comicon this year).
Thanks, Nick!
tomversation.com 