comics – Page 19

The Christmas tree

Today’s comic is sort of true. I did this for many years – only without the ornaments on the tree!

I would throw the Christmas tree off our balcony so that the needles would not get all over the elevator when we got rid of the tree. I would have someone stand below and then throw the tree off, and they would be sure that no one was standing under it. We would then drag it to the street.

For the past few years – it could be as many as eight or 10, we’ve had an artificial tree. I bought it once, not sure why, maybe to conserve real trees. But I didn’t like it. It looked so much larger and nicer in the store. So I thought, ok, let’s use it one year and then get a real one next year. Only the next year I felt, why not use it again, it’s so easy to just drag it out of the spare room and not have to run out tree shopping, plus we’ll get our money’s worth if we use it one more time.

And then another year passed, and then another and it’s just part of the family now.

My car is a convertible and the only time I ever put the top down was to throw the Christmas tree in the back seat each December! Now the top wont’ open, due to lack of use. I think it may just need fluid.

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AIEEE! It’s Arnold

Every once in awhile, I think of the “Arnold” comic strip that I loved. It ran from 1982 through 1988. Arnold Melville and his friend Tommy Jordan were the main characters. The cartoonist was Kevin McCormick. If you click on these strips, they’ll open larger.

I read it daily in The Miami Herald. Arnold was this big nosed kid and lots of the activity took place in his school. His long suffering teacher was Mr. Arnold.

Almost daily, Arnold would screech out AIEEE! at the most inopportune time. Is there every an opportune time? It always made me laugh, it just came out at the right moment.

Most of the other characters spoke from outside the panels, you wouldn’t see them.

I think the strip ended too early, Kevin ended it, the syndicate didn’t drop it. Kevin had a big hawk fly in in the final strip and eat Arnold. Kevin regretted ending the strip and said it was too late, “the big bird swallowed.”

But again, look at Bobby Ewing and the shower bit. Maybe Arnold can reappear one day and the big bird sequence could just be a dream.

Every time I see these old strips, it brings me back to being a kid reading it. I can remember that period of time so vividly.

You can see some more samples of the Arnold comic here.

Popeye’s, Fauci and me

So yesterday I drove all over the place, dropping off Christmas presents. It was so great to see my family, it’s been so long; so many of them still separated from each other, but I got to see most of them.

My last stop was at my parents, where I brought Popeye’s chicken and we had lunch together. I’m a cartoonist, I had to get Popeye’s. What else?

Speaking of cartooning, I did a couple of caricatures yesterday, one is of me and one is this Dr. Fauci cartoon which was published today. I was watching Dr. Fauci get vaccinated on tv and this came to mind.

As for me. I am trying to join a cartooning organization and they asked for “a short biographical sketch or resume”. I read it wrong and thought they wanted a sketch to use on their website or something, so I did this sketch. I put the sunglasses on because I couldn’t get my eyes right.

New lettering alert

I changed the lettering starting with today’s comic. What do you think?

The image above has the old lettering and the bottom image has the new lettering. I think the new lettering fits more in line with the drawing style.

If you saw today’s comic before seeing this blog post, did you notice it right away? Did it seem cleaner? Did it seem like something was different? Or did you just not notice at all?

What do you think? I’m interested in your opinions.

Digital art taking vs pen and ink

Artist Tom Richmond, who you may know from Mad Magazine, and many other places, has a great blog post about original cartoon art, “Is Digital Killing Original Art?”

Well for one thing, digital art is original art, but of course Tom is referring to actual pen and paper art.

There are still many artists who prefer to use pen and ink, rather than draw digitally and it makes the original art even more valuable in the long run. But of course, most of the art these days, I daresay, is digital.

When I see original cartoon art at ComicCons, some very old, I often think, “Is this the last of it?” But I’m sure lots will show up over time, afterall, cartoonists had 365 drawings a year, so that is a lot of work over many years’ time.

I don’t remember when I went from pen and ink to digital, but I don’t think I will ever go back to pen and ink, digital is just so easy to work with, it makes the work go faster and the end results are basically the same – except for not having original art.

I remember when digital cameras firts came out, I couldn’t wrap my head arount the idea of not having film. “How can you not have film?” I thought. “What if I need copies of the images?”

To tell you the truth, in all my life, I don’t think I ever had copies of photos made after the first one was printed. Remember you used to get two prints of each one when they were developed?

Anyway, I took to digital drawing faster than I did to digital photography, which of course we all use daily now, taking pictures with our phones every few minutes. We all know what we ate these past few years, thanks to that.

But getting back to Tom Richmond, he says, “I really do find it sad that one of the major drawbacks of the rise of the computer as a tool for art is that less and less physical art is being created.”

Sad, but it reminds me of so many other things that are gone or almost gone – the sound of a typewriter bell, pay phones, handwriting, floppy disks, card catalogs, paper maps, landlines, and Mad Magazine, ironically, where many of us know Tom Richmond from.

One reason I like my old fashioned mechanic, who I mentioned the other day.

A nice little article about me in today’s paper

The Miami Herald has a little article about me printed in today’s paper. My comics are here if anyone is looking for them. They didn’t supply a link in the printed article, but it first appeared in Thursday’s online edition, on the front page! and my comics stats went way through the roof because there was a link to them there.

People are congratulating me and I think they think my cartoons are being published daily in the Herald. I’ve been in the newspapers a lot over the years for various things (including my comics), so people are used to that, so I can only assume they think my comics are being published daily now. Many people just read headlines. I noticed on Twitter now if you go to retweet an article, it asks you if you read the article first. Love that.

It’s one of the few times I’ve been in the paper where it’s something positive. I’ve always been part of controversial stories. When I wrote the news around here, for some reason I became part of the stories. Not too long ago, was about the wild peacocks in the neighborhood where they twisted my words and had me hating the peacocks (for the record, I love them). I was interviewed on the radio for about 20 minutes and somehow one or two lines made it into the papers. That story and my quotes made it all over the country. Why Chicago, New York and Milwaukee among many others care about our peacocks is behind me. Must have been a slow news day. Here is one little blurb in the NY Post, not too bad.

I did have a nice article recently in VoyageMIA about my comics and me. I guess I gained a lot of good press (and karma) recently due to taking on the daily comics rather than being in everyone’s business while doing the daily news.

After seeing this recent Herald article, I had one friend say, “Your dreams are coming true!” But truth be told, I prefer digital comics, for me anyway. I believe that just like movies and other entertainment – digital is the way to go. The main reason is the deadlines. With newspapers there is such a long time between when the comics are submitted and when they are printed.

Currently I am updating the comics till the last minute. Sometimes late at night I’m making a change on a comic that is scheduled to publish the next morning. I can’t do that with newspapers. The deadlines are way too long.

But even with the Herald article today, it was pared down to a shorter version in print (where digital, there is plenty of room) and even the cartoon itself is quite small, where it is large and featured on the online edition, and also, there are no links to the comics or social media sites – where the digital version had that. So digital seems the way to go, I think.

But what do I know. After the print edition appeared, I seem to be getting more subscribers online. Go figure.

What I wouldn’t mind is having the Herald print me once a week and pick and choose from what was published earlier in the week and just run one, two or three comics in the weekend section or something like that. And running them online, too, wouldn’t hurt!

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each time I publish Click here.

Snoopy and The Dakota

I took this picture in 2012 at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC. I’m usually downtown more for the parade, but that year, I was at 72nd and Central Park West, right in front of The Dakota apartment building, which you can see here in the background.

This is one of my favorite photos. I love everything about it and there’s an interesting story about it that happened a day or two later.

After Thanksgiving, I was shopping around the Christmas Market down at Union Square and I stopped in my tracks. One guy was selling drawings of New York scenes and he had this exact scene you see above. He had the Snoopy balloon floating by the Dakota. Exactly! But it wasn’t the photo – it was a black and white drawing!

I don’t know why I didn’t buy it, but that was one of those instances where you are in the right place at the right time or something like that. I showed the photo on my phone to the guy at the booth selling the art and he was flabbergasted, too.

What I loved about that particular day when I was at the parade was that I was in the park. I had crossed over from the east side to the west side, but it was too crowded to get out onto the street, so I watched from inside the park. As I walked down to get to the train station to take the train to queens for my cousin to pick me up, I did it inside the park, and it was a strange experience. I was experiencing the parade almost from backstage. All the action was outside the park, but the leave-less trees allowed me to watch it through the branches from a distance, from inside the park; almost as if backstage, as if I was not actually at the event, but watching from afar. Hard to explain but very memorable.

Charlie Brown back on broadcast tv

After screwing up Charlie Brown for Halloween, I never did get to see it this year, Apple tv has made a deal with PBS to show A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and a Charlie Brown Christmas on broadcast tv.

PBS will show the episodes commercial free on Sundays, November 22 and December 13 at 7:30 pm eastern time both nights.

Details here on the PBS website.

Shots

Here’s today’s published comic and you know, what? I’m disappointed in myself. I forgot one big thing when it comes to shots – the vaccine shot! A reader pointed that out to me.

I should have had the ladies lined up getting vaccine shots in one of the panels.

I did this cartoon awhile back, so the vaccine and pandemic were not a thing at the time, but it would have been right on point if I had added the shots. Maybe I’ll redo it and post it with the vaccine shots once the vaccines are out.

Update: It was bothering me so much so I added a fifth panel!

Happy 200th Bob’s Burgers!

One of my favorite cartoons, Bob’s Burgers, is celebrating its 200th episode this Sunday!

Love that show. I mostly watch it in reruns in early evening now, and I’ve seen every episode more than once. I never get tired of it.

On more than one occasion I’ve been walking through a Comic Con and I hear their voices – especially Linda, the mother, I look up and there are the voices – the actual people – sitting at a table signing autographs! Iconic!

Even though it’s a cartoon, it seem so real. I want to visit Ocean Avenue where Bob and family live and work – with the small town seaside feel and the amusement park on the pier at the end of the street. It all feels so real!

One of my favorite episodes is Brunchsquatch – where every scene is drawn by fans. It jumps from character to character design, all different, but it works.

We have a little dive diner in town called Burger Bob’s and of course I always call it Bob’s Burgers by mistake, like, “Hey, wanna go to Bob’s Burgers for lunch?” It’s been around for many years, so it came before the tv version, but still Burger Bob’s is always Bob’s Burgers to me.