tomversation

Drawing styles

Today’s comic looks a bit different than my usual work. Why? Because it’s old! It’s one of my old ones.

Recently I’ve been redrawing old art, but I liked the look of this one, so I didn’t change it and a reader noticed. He commented, “This comic doesn’t have your touch. Like, you have a separate way of art and this toon doesn’t have your common art sense. But it’s funny.”

I really appreciated that comment. I like that he notices my usual style and the fact that I ever have one and I like that he mentioned it.

It’s always interesting to see how people’s drawing style changes over the years. This was my Far Side period, I did a lot of weird stuff. I have published some of them lately, but since they were redrawn, they fit in with the rest of the cartoons.

I like my line work better these days, it’s evolved, and I don’t use as much background if any, these days. In the past, I filled in the whole panel with background. But now I find it cleaner to use less background. I may put one image to set the scene – sort of like a black box theater where there isn’t much scenery on stage, just maybe table and chair.

For instance, in the snake scene above, I would have used the sign of course, but maybe just have the stage door with the star on it, where the voice is coming from. I doubt I would have used the dressing table or even the pipe up at the ceiling. And I don’t think I would have used a lot of color, I think mostly white would be the background.

Cartoonist Jason Chatfield said, “Don’t curate your art to what gets likes. Curate it to what you like.” And I’ve tried to live by that. Not so much the drawing, but the whole comic and gag. Sometimes I feel that the audience won’t get the gag or think something is funny, but I go with my gut feeling, and it seems to work out.

The lemonade comic had many comments – people were dissecting it on one website and on another, there were about 150 comments where people described similar incidents at their places of work or shopping! So you never know what is going to work, so it’s true, go with your gut and see where it falls. I wasn’t sure about that one, but I liked it so I published it.

I wasn’t sure about yesterday’s cartoon – this office one. It didn’t have a gag and I felt that people would be looking for the gag, but people got it. It was just a slice of life – a period of time where people are returning to the office and the happiness (I guess on most parts) of people seeing their co-workers and friends in person again. People liked this cartoon. So another gut reaction on my part that was right.

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Borrowing

Yes, today’s cartoon does take part of a previous cartoon. You can see the two here. The top is today’s and here below is a cartoon I ran about a year ago.

There is also another change. Before I ran the black and white one a year ago, the people did not have masks on, and then I added the masks, and that was was published! You can see the original here.

I know there are many ways to have done this – the “wholesale” could have said, “organic” or “free range” or something else, but I try to be “organic” myself when coming up with ideas and I got the idea from one of my own businesses.

I noticed that one of my businesses is popular when searched using the word “wholesale” on google. What I mean is when you type in the product and put “wholesale” as part of the search, I come up high in the searches. But the thing is, all of us who sell the same products sell wholesale. So by just putting the word there, it brings eyes and customers. So that’s what made me think of using that word rather than “organic” or “sale” or whatever .

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What a difference a year makes

A recent cartoon made me laugh before I even drew it. It wasn’t the cartoon or subject matter itself. It’s the fact that as I sat down to draw, I said out loud, “Let’s get this scene done!” I guess I think I’m shooting a movie or something these days. And possibly I am. I am the writer, director, cameraman and so on. So maybe it is a scene being shot.

I like the juxtaposition of this cartoon with one I did about a year ago, around the beginning of the pandemic. This one below.

They are both confusing due to the masks. In the last case above, masks are becoming a thing of the past, but the bank robber wants to keep his on. In the earlier one below, the bank robber is sort of infringed upon by everyone wearing masks, which struck me quite funny the first time I walked into a bank and saw everyone, including myself, wearing masks.

Here’s a little secret – they were both done around the same time – a year or so ago. The top one originally was the lady banker telling the man banker, to “calm down, it’s ok to wear masks in the bank today.” And the customer didn’t have a gun. He was just a customer with a mask. But it sat for a year and eventually, I changed the wording, added a gun and there you have it.

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Birthdays, kayaks and getting back to normal

For the past week my life has been kayaks and birthday lunches.

I’ve never been one for birthdays, I don’t see any reason to celebrate getting older, and of course my mother always cries when I say that and she thinks I wish I never was born, which of course is not the case. I just don’t like to make a fuss over it.

So usually my birthday comes and goes and my family does something, usually a cake on pizza night or something, but I guess because of the pandemic coming to an end, people want to get out, so I’ve been having lunches almost daily with different people, who are asking to take me out for my birthday, which was almost a week ago – yet the lunches keep going on and I’m loving it. I have a lot of Gemini friends, so there are lots of other birthdays during this period, so we have been celebrating those, too. So it’s been one big Gemini party lately.

For years I went out to lunch almost daily with different friends, and family, on different days and it was just the norm, but over time it seemed to stop, but it’s back and I’m loving it.

One of the local restaurant owners saw me on the street and started complaining about the fate of restaurants these days and he said I look so relaxed and happy and don’t have a wrinkle on my face, which he meant as a put down, but of course, I took it as a compliment, especially on my birthday, the day he actually said that to me. I had to remind him that the pandemic affected everyone, not just him.

As for the kayak/canoe saga, my kayak friend traded in that blow-up thing for an actual canoe. He had some guy with a trailer bring it over to my house to store here so we can easily take it out on the water, but haven’t yet. The bay has been choppy, maybe due that big beautiful full moon. Did you see it?

He came over to try it out, to see if it worked in the water without any leaks. It’s an old, ugly canoe, and therein lies the rub. One of my neighbors objected to it being on the property. “I’m trying to make the place look nice and you have that piece of crap hanging on the wall?” He offered to buy a nice new wooden one for us all to use, something he called “Hamptons-style.”

So I told him to just wait it out, my friend will get bored and get rid of the canoe, although he didn’t take it well when I told him it had to go.

I normally would fight it and say that I live here too, I have rights. But the thing is ugly, it is not going to be used, and my neighbor always does things for me – like buy me a brand new canoe, which I am going to decline. It makes no sense for him to do that.

So between that and lunches with friends (he was one of them that took me out), that’s what’s been going on around here. Business has been picking up, so that’s great and I’m getting ready for summer travel, so that is great, too. Little by little things are returning to normal, let’s hope they stay that way.

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The waiter and the water

After this cartoon was published today, it reminded me of a priest we used to have. Some years ago, Father Eddie was one of our priests. He was from a Latin country I think, but his accent sounded like Dracula. I loved it!

One time he was preaching and he was talking about Jesus turning water into wine, but he kept getting the words “waiter” and “water” mixed up.

He would said, “The water brought the waiter and then Jesus stunned the water by turning the waiter into wine.” Ha, I laugh when I think about it – he turned the waiter into wine.

I haven’t thought of Father Eddie in years, but again, I used to love his Dracula accent.

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Creative panhandlers

I’m not surprised that yesterday’s cartoon hit home with a lot of people, they or someone they know has had a similar experience in some way.

I got the idea for the cartoon through a circuitous route. I may have told you this before, but I was at a Taco Bell drive-thru recently and this guy comes up to the car and asks for money. I told him I didn’t have change, I only had a $10.00 bill and I showed him the bill in my hand.

He then says, “I’ll wait for the change.”

Now this intrigued me and I liked his ingenuity, so I didn’t mind that. But he was annoying as he followed me and the car as I drove around the drive, waiting for my turn to order. I ordered and drove to the window, and he was still there and when they handed me the change, he took it. He didn’t even wait for me to decide how much to give him – I think it was about $3.00 and he took it. He waited between the car and the drive-thru window, so as not to miss his opportunity in the off chance that I hit the peddle and sped off, which was not my intention, by the way.

So of course, I got to mulling this over and I ended up with the cartoon you see here.

It’s dog eat dog out there, these panhandlers have to be creative.

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Faded pictures

I was looking through pictures of our kayaking adventure and also pictures from when my friend was in town in April. A lot happened – went to the zoo, Everglades, etc. But I don’t have many pictures. Is it possible we are finally, as a society, getting over taking pictures of everything, including our lunch every day?

There was a time where we took pictures of everything. My friend likes to post “stories” on Instagram, which disappear in 24 hours, so he doesn’t have any photos to see or save.

I used to take so many pictures of everything, sort of documenting my whole life. When I published the daily news, I literally would have 150 photos of an event I attended and then I would have to go through every one of those photos and edit them down to a handful that I would publish. I finally learned, after so many years of that to just edit as I went along. I would take maybe 12 photos and then whittle that down to 9 or 10. And this way, I literally cut out hours worth of work going through images.

But now I sort of don’t take pictures of things. When we went kayaking, my biggest fear in that rubber raft was sinking. Not so much drowning, but sinking and losing my keys and my phone. But I left them home and went out “naked” so to speak, and it was so much more relaxing not having to worry about anything.

I remember once I went out and left my phone at home and rather than panic, I was totally relaxed.

So I’m wondering now if we are letting up on the photos. For one thing it’s rude when you are with people, you know, you’re out and about and maybe at lunch and you are taking photos of everything. I don’t even answer the phone when it rings when I’m with people. I try to think of years ago when we didn’t have that option, so why is it so important now? Let people wait, you don’t need to text right back or answer right away or take pictures of your lunch all the time.

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Our kayaking misadventure

So things are slowly getting back to normal. I actually did some physical activity yesterday. It’s been so long! And the good part is that today I don’t feel achy or any pains, so my muscle memory is working.

What we did was go kayaking, but only for a short time That’s me rowing at left and that’s a blow up kayak, which looks more like a moccasin/shoe.

My friend Jorge came over with a new kayak – a blow-up kayak! I told him we had regular kayaks here at the building that we could use, but he insisted on purchasing a rubber blow-up one. So he brought it over and while I didn’t want to go out in that thing, I thought, “Let’s see what happens.”

I live on the bay so it only made sense for him to bring it over so we could launch from here and he could just leave it here for convenience if he likes.

I know Jorge almost all of my life, so it was just another day; another adventure for us to add to our hundreds, if not thousands of adventures we’ve had in our lives together.

It took awhile to blow up the thing. Maybe an hour! Eventually one of my neighbors brought down an electric pump and showed us an easy way to do it, so that made that part easy. Another neighbor brought me sunscreen and insisted I use it, so it ended up being a nice day.

We finally got the thing into the water and really didn’t get the results we had hoped for. As I suspected, it was ricikty and flimsy and unstable. He packed some sort of lunch and drinks and stuff and that thing made the kayak even heavier, plus we had all sort of supplies – life jackets, oars and other things.

We got out into the bay and paddled around a bit, but it was rocking and jiggling and wouldn’t steer right, it kept turning in circles. It was not was was expected – from him anyway. Me, I sort of predicted this.

What I didn’t predict was that I would get seasick. I’ve lived around the water my whole life and only got seasick twice – this time and once on a Key West snorkeling trip.

Anyway, after about 20 minutes of “boating” and an hour or more of setting it all up, we decided to head back and get out. And just as we got to the home docks, I got seasick and started throwing up. Not good.

I almost jumped out and swam to shore, but we made it in properly as many of my neighbors stared from out back, where some were in the pool, others sunning themselves and others getting ready to boat. For a small building, it seems like everyone was out!

I came upstairs and it seems like I fell asleep for a long time while Jorge got everything back together. When he came upstairs two hours had passed! I could have sworn it was half an hour!

We ended up going to a local place to eat lunch, but I was still feeling unwell, so I didn’t eat anything, I took it home with me. He went home from the restaurant and after another hour or sleep or so I felt much better and I texted him and told him, “I had such a great day today!”

And I did, seasickness and all.

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No more touching

The pandemic will have us doing all sorts of new things; you know, changes in our behavior and customs.

I noticed yesterday that I automatically DIDN’T shake hands. And now that I think about it, I don’t shake anyone’s hand anymore. At the beginning of the pandemic, we had to think about it and then pull back, now it just comes naturally – don’t touch each other.

Yesterday, I was with a friend and he said, “Tom, this is so-and-so” and he introduced me to some new guy in town. I said, “Hi, nice to meet you,” and that was that. We were a few feet away, shaking distance, but neither of us attempted to shake hands. All three of us talked for about half an hour and then parted, but no one shook hands then either.

I think I mentioned this before – I don’t like to shake hands, although in the past I would do it, and I don’t like to hug or kiss, which in the past, I did. But I guess this is a thing of the past. No more of this touching each other when meeting and greeting.

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Kayaking (beaching and boarding)

One of my friends bought a new kayak. It’s a blow up one. I never saw one like that before. Seems like a rubber raft to me.

He is coming over this week and we are going kayaking. I live on the bay, so we’ll launch from out back.

I told him that we have a few kayaks in the backyard that belong to neighbors, and anyone can use them, but he insisted on buying his own. He didn’t actually buy it, he won a gift certificate from a sporting goods store and decided to get the kayak with the certificate.

I haven’t been kayaking in years. For so many years I was in the ocean or bay almost daily. I kayaked, paddle boarded, swam and just hung out at the beach. Even when I was younger and was supposed to be working, I would get home and my mother would say, “Why do you have a tan? I thought you were at work all day!”

Some days I would just go out to the beach, have lunch, and then get back to work, other days I would spend all day out there. But it was almost a daily thing for most of my life. I need to get back to that.

I took this picture today, it’s a still shot from a video I took of a guy paddling by early this morning.

I’m working on getting back in shape for the summer. Actually for the rest of my life. Hopefully this and all pandemics will be a thing of the past. This kayaking and eventually paddle boarding and swimming should get me back in shape. Time to lose the pandemic weight I gained.

Stay tuned!

This is one of my favorite comics I did in February.