I’ve been reading a lot of old Bringing Up Father comic strips on Facebook, they pop up daily. If you click on these, they will open larger.
What gets me is the detail. I can’t understand how George McManus, the cartoonist, drew the same characters day after day, multiple times in each strip with such precise detail. His linework is amazing.
Brining Up Father featured Maggie and Jiggs, the two main characters. It ran in newspapers for 87 yeras, from 1913 to 2000.
Jiggs is an immigrant from Ireland who comes to the U.S. and wins $1 million in a sweepstakes. So now he is up in the world but prefers his working class life. His favorite food is Corned Beef and Cabbage, which he gets often at his friend Dinty Moore’s restaurant.
The art has an Art Nouveau/Art Deco design, which makes it stand out. When McManus passed away in 1954, other artists took over the strip until its ending in 2000.
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I’ve been seeing a lot of trash in the ocean and bay lately. Not too long ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, I had written about how the planet was healing itself and nature was reclaiming itself. The water and air were so clean. Now it seems to be getting back to normal, although I don’t remember seeing so much trash in the water as I do now.
What I mean is, I live on the bay, so daily I look out at the water and for all these years I really didn’t see anything floating around in the water. Now I do on a daily basis. It’s trash – paper and plastic. I’m not sure why there is more these days than in days past, but it’s out there.
The cartoon above is not really funny, it’s sad, it’s a commentary on how our wildlife is being treated.
Ironically, I’m not seeing as many people out in the water as during the pandemic. Back then, there were people in boats, paddle boarding, kayaking and I used to see one couple floating around on a large inner tube for hours – on a daily basis. They would lazily go from one end of our little inlet to the other. And with all of these “quiet,” “gentle” forms of water activities, there was no pollution or trash. Now that we’re back to motors and boat tours, ships and tourists and the lot, it’s showing.
I got the cartoon idea below, which ran at the beginning of the pandemic, by what I would see daily – lots of water sports activities.
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I joined OMNY – the click and pay method on the NY Subway system. They’ve had it for a few years now, but I’ve always bought a weekly pass which allows you unlimited rides for a set fee, rather than paying for each trip, which is $2.75. I think the weekly pass is $33.00 now, but it adds up fast, $33.00 is 12 trips, which do go fast. Round trip is two trips right there!
The advantage to the weekly pass is that you don’t have to always think, “Is this trip necessary?” I think that’s a saying from World War II days, but with the weekly pass you can travel to your heart’s content.
Another plus is that people “swipe” for people. Like you are leaving a station and someone says, “Hey man, can you swipe for me?” And you swipe for them to let them in, and you’re not wasting any trips that way.
The good part about the OMNY system now is that you swipe for each individual trip, but once you reach the $33.00 limit within 7 days, you automatically get unlimited rides for that week. Clever. So now everyone gets a weekly pass as long as they end up paying for it. It’s called the “Weekly Fare Cap.”
I remember the days of tokens, all those coins in your pocket, and then I remember when the MetroCard started, now they will phase the MetroCard out by 2024 and it will all be tap and pay.
You don’t have to sign up for the OMNY card, you can tap your credit card at turnstiles if the card has a chip and you can also use Apple Pay. But if you want the unlimited ride thing, you need to sign up for the OMNY card, which is actually just signing up a credit card and every time you tape that card – Visa, AmEx, etc., it registers the trips on your OMNY account.
So you can have an actual OMNY card if you wish, or just use the actual credit card that is activated and linked to the system.
My father was in the hospital recently. Nothing major, he had hurt his leg, he had to have it checked out. He would get anxious at times and I guess to calm him down, they had some sort of nurse in the room with him. She was just there for comfort, not to actually nurse him, more of a sitter. For a few days it was a different person each day.
It was unnerving at first, but then sort of turned into a reality tv camera – you know, it’s there, but you don’t notice it/her. You go about our conversations and business and she is just taking it all in, but you ignore her – you know, “Don’t look at the camera!”
Well, one nurse was a complete mess. She complained of having a headache, she had a backache, she also said her blood sugar was 300! and she some other issues. She complained about not having eaten, she wanted to know where her replacement was so she could go down to the cafeteria and eat.
She didn’t get the memo to shut up and just “film” the scene.
My father was cracking up. He said, “She is supposed to be taking care of me, but I think I have to take care of her!”
Other than all that, she was very sweet, at times she reminded me of my grandmother, my father’s mother.
One man sitter was noisy as hell. He totally ignored us, which was good; he was on his cell phone most of the time, talking loud, which was bad, almost yelling; he was a loud talker. I had to literally shout over him to be heard in the room!
Dad’s home now. The nurses/sitters are off “filming” someone else now.
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I love this cartoon because I love the characters. I drew this months ago and it had different text and context. I don’t even remember what it started out as, but I changed it so many times over the past few months.
I didn’t change the drawing, I changed the wording. It reminded me of something someone said on social media about the New Yorker cartoon I wrote about the other day – that “they draw the images and then figure out what they are saying later,” which of course I don’t think that’s the case, but maybe it is, because this Wordle gag ended up that way.
One part of love about the cartoon is that the thought Steve is thinking “Ouch!” as a Wordle answer is not really an answer because it’s only four letters. But it almost makes it seem like his whole life is Wordle, including all his thoughts.
I find it silly that people post their Wordle scores on social media every day. The silly part is that you don’t see their answers or the way they got to the final word of the day, it shows blank boxes. It doesn’t show what the previous word tries are or even what the word is.
Maybe people just hit a “share” button on Wordle somewhere and it posts your final score without you even realizing what it looks like on Facebook or wherever.
It’s like saying, “I’m great!” everyday.
One friend of mine posted his score every morning and I actually appreciated it because it reminded me to play the game. But posting your score without any concept or content is like saying, “I won an award for something,” and not saying what the something is.
It’s annoying when people post this online, but then again, it gave me the idea for this cartoon, so it all worked out.
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He kept telling me to do something with “intense” and “in tents.”
“Get it?” He asked. Yes, I got it, but I didn’t know how to put it together. It took a couple of weeks and a couple of different drawings, text and concepts until I came up with this. Lots of changes to come up with this.
This one is self explanatory. Not to put down New Yorker comics lovers, but I wonder if they just pretend to get most of the gags just to be part of the “in crowd” or whatever you call them.
Not being sour grapes here, it’s just a gag and I do admire the cartoonists a lot who do work for the New Yorker. I have interviewed many, I have gone to some of their talks and showings, went to a Roz Chast exhibit a few years back at the Museum of the City of New York.
I’ve submitted stuff to the New Yorker and I know it’s a numbers game to get your first cartoon published and then become “one of them.” But the thing is they take too long to respond to your submission – sometimes eight months! And they have first rights of refusal. So imagine me sending them my fresh work, unpublished, and then waiting months for a reply. The work I publish daily would be eight months old after getting the rejection from the New Yorker, and then is it work publishing “rejected” work?
I have two cartoon styles – one was designed to be a “New Yorker style” and the other is the one I have used all my life, I call a Hanna-Barbera style, or “Flintstones style.” So I have accommodated my work to fit in with the New Yorker, and I like it. I go back and forth, depending on the gag, to see which drawing fits.
Like this one here I call the New Yorker style.
And this caveman one is my “Flintstones/Hanna-Barbera style.”
By the way, this caveman one, speaking of Flintstones, has been one of the most shared, viewed and liked cartoon of all of mine, so who knows what style is best. I just go with my mood that day. Same with the borders. Sometimes there is a very think board, sometimes a wild fat freestyle border, other times no border.
I think the fat, freestyle border works with this chicken cartoon.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say today!
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The U.S. Postal Service has announced some new 2022 stamps and you can see here that these new Peanuts stamps will be added to celebrate Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday.
There are 10 designs surrounding Charles Schulz’s image.
Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamps from original Peanuts artwork.
I’m going to buy them, and of course never use them. The release date has not been announced, but I’ll be checking the stamps on my snail mail to see who uses them first, it would be interesting to see who does! Schulz was born Nov. 26, 1922, so possibly November would be the date they are released.
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