Ever use emojis as spell checkers? What I mean is that a lot of the time if I’m not sure of the spelling of a word while texting, I spell it until the emoji pops up, then I know that is the correct spelling.
Recently I did it with avocado, not sure if it spelled “avocado” or “avacado.”
When the emoji popped up, I knew the correct spelling, which of course, I could have used the emoji instead of the word.
I have a neighbor who has avocado groves. Every time he texts, he puts three avocado emojis at the end of the text. I guess he feels it is subliminal advertising.
Emojis are the hieroglyphs of today. Will we end up using them as our language one day? I know so many teens do. What’s old ancient is new again. They don’t even teach cursive writing in schools anymore!
European Woman Examines Egyptian Hieroglyphics – Sean Sexton, 1900
So I think I jinxed myself for doing that thermostat comic because the a/c had not been working for days. The guys that came out to clean the coils, screwed up everything. They came back a number of times, but still it would not perform correctly.
I did manage to get another company to come out Friday and they said the compressor was broken (which wasn’t like that before the other company got their hands on it). So now I need a brand new a/c, which I was expecting for years since it’s an old unit.
And it’s odd, but on Friday morning I woke up to no cable tv. I checked online and saw that the neighborhood was out. I called ATT Unverse just to get an ETA on the repairs. I guess when you are self isolating, tv is important.
But rather than tell me it was the neighborhood, some lady told me it was only my house that was down. She had me jumping through hoops for over an hour – turning the system off, rebooting, going through every tv in the house, disconnecting wires. She almost had me take one tv off the wall but refused.
She said she was going to send new dvr/cable boxes out, which would take a week. I asked her to send a cable guy out instead, she said they couldn’t do that. I said, “I pay you $500 a month for cable and phone service and you won’t send a repair guy here?” I asked her if she had ATT Uverse, which is out every other day, she said no. NO!
The other night I was watching something on the ID channel and just as they said, “The murderer is . . .” the tv went dead. Another time I was also watching a home make-over show and just as the reveal was coming on at the end, the tv went out! I just gave up and went to bed.
This reminds me of my old internet company – Earthlink. They used to host my business website. When the site went down, 99% of the time it was due to their servers being down. Which is fine, as long as it wasn’t me doing something wrong. But I would call up to check to be sure, and you know what? they never admitted it was the servers until making me jump through hoops first.
The first thing was always, “Do you have the site backed up? I am going to remove all 300 pages!” I would always yell, “NO!” Don’t do that.” They would have me then doing all sorts of things, rather than just say, “Yes, the servers are down, they’ll be back up soon.”
And we pay these companies all this money to jerk us around.
So you can probably guess where I got the idea of today’s comic if you’ve been reading this blog. I wrote about not having a/c a couple of weeks ago and that one of the culprits was the thermostat!
It’s one of those gags that makes you think. I like that in a comic sometimes, you know, it may go over some heads and not everyone may get it, which is ok, in that case it becomes an inside joke.
But for those who still don’t get it. It’s a thermos tattoo “thermos tat”, which is a “tat” these days. That’s what people call tattoos – tats.
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On Saturday I watched the NCSFest all day. It was a a cartooning festival put on by the National Cartoonists Society Foundation. It was storming outside, so it was a perfect day to stay inside. You can see over nine hours of the fest here on YouTube, watch the whole thing or pick and choose by scrolling through. The schedule is here so you can see what comes on when.
The main seminar/talk I was interested in was The Superstars of Instagram, I wanted to see how they work and mainly how they get so many followers. The Awkward Yeti, for instance has 1.8 million followers! I interviewed Nick Seluk, The Awkward Yeti cartoonist once, you can see that here.
I also liked the talk on Creating a Successful Online Cartooning Business.
There was a lot of good stuff. Jim Davis, the Garfield cartoonist spoke from his studio and so did cartoonists explaining their process from doing comic strips and panels to creating books.
In between, the yearly Reuben Awards, which are the Oscars for cartoons/cartooning, were announced. The ceremony and events were canceled this year due to the pandemic. Awards are given or best newspaper comic strip of the year, best comic panel, best greeting card comic, best online comic strip, etc. The Daily Cartoonist has a list of winners here. There is then the Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year, which went to Lynda Barry.
I love this photo of Lynda, a real artist. The desk looks so comfortable, like you can just sit down and create. I am messy, but since I do all my work digitally on a Surface Pro, it isn’t strewn with all these wonderful tools and inks and pens and such. I literally have to turn on the computer and wait for it to set up. I can’t just get comfy and into it like Lynda here.
Garry Trudeau says that cartooning is like a public utility – you just expect it to be there when you want it.
Yesterday I published a cartoon about a fishing trip. At the last minute I changed the hat color. I liked the red, but then I thought that has a connotation now and I didn’t want it to become political. I like the look of the red better than the blue hat in the cartoon, but the blue hat is generic, the red, not so much.
Slide the arrow back and forth on the image above to see the two colored hats.
It’s interesting. Talk about branding. Just the color of the hat brings out such strong emotions.
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VoyageMia, did a little interview with me regarding my comics, you can see it here.
It’s only a few questions. It reminds me of when I did my Ten With Tom column for the Huffington Post. I am thinking of getting back to that, I met so many interesting people through it.
So here is a funny and weird story – I didn’t have air conditioning for almost two weeks. Yup, summer in Miami – no a/c. Oddly enough, the way my condo building is situated, it doesn’t get so hot on my side of the building, so I managed without the sun beating down on me. But two weeks – no a/c!
The unit was working perfectly, I only had to have the a/c guys out to clean the coils, because there was a leak, but as for cold air, it was blowing ice cold as usual. Well, the guys came and cleaned the coils and it all went down hill from there. From that moment on, I had no cool air coming out.
They ended up coming over four times, three of those time to try and fix the problem after they cleaned the coils, each time leaving and feeling it was all perfect. In the end – after their fourth visit – the problem was solved. The thermostat was turned off! There’s a button that puts it on “hold” and that stops sending contact to the main unit on the roof, so only room temperature air would flow, when you “unhold” the thermostat – cold air returns!
It’s like having your tv or computer not work and someone says, “Well plug it in!”
I had a feeling something was wrong with the thermostat, but try and tell an expert that you solved the problem and you get an earful on how you don’t know what you are talking about, “leave it to the experts!”
There’s a cartoon in this story somewhere, I’m thinking it over.
I’m trying to think what life was like before social media or before reader interaction. Even when I started blogging in 2005, there were comments. Good or bad, you always knew what the reader thought.
As much as I say I don’t like comments or interactions on social media, I think I do. Basically because it’s nice to see people responding to my comics. It’s not that I need likes and shares, but it’s nice knowing that people are seeing the work and enjoying it (or not) enough to leave a simple thumb’s up.
I have a friend who is against social media, and it sort of reminds me of him saying something like, “Is life about how many likes you get?” No, no it’s not, but when you write a book or paint a picture or produce a movie, you do want people to like and respond to your work.
Which makes me think of what life was like for cartoonists before social media, and maybe even today for those who are published daily in the newspapers. They create the comic and it’s published and then what? Crickets? There is an audience, but no instant response like you would have with a live audience. But I guess that’s how tv and movies have been for years, you put it out there and don’t instantly get the audiences response. Do they like it? Are they watching?
With social media, it’s instant and the reader is part of the process, right there – live.
One place where I don’t interact is on Instagram – not the comments section, I do interact there, but I’m talking about the private messages. The main reason is because most of it, 9 out of 10, are spam. But I did make a mistake last week of responding to a reader and it ended up being a bad thing – he was one of those stalker types who wanted to argue, so I regretted reading his messages and then responding to them. I won’t do that again.
But other than that, it’s nice to get a response of some sort, even a simple thumb’s up. Sort of like getting applause on a stage or something, knowing the audience is out there.
Yesterday’s “Ice Hole” cartoon got a big reaction and lots of shares on social media. I try to be cerebral but I guess the simpler and crazy ones are what the masses like.
This comic came to me while watching one of my favorite shows, Life Below Zero. I wasn’t really paying attention, I think I was dozing off, and I heard Chip Hailstone, one of the people on the show, say to his kids, who were going ice fishing, “Hey, there’s an ice hole!” And it made me look up and laugh and just totally struck me as being hilarious. And voilà – there was a comic idea.
I played around with it a bit. At first there was a bear hibernating behind a bush and he heard the guys say “ice hole,” and he looked up with one eye open. It was titled, “Trouble Brewing,” but I couldn’t get the image setting right, so I made it another ice fisher.
Oh yea, one more thing. People think those are women. They are men. But as I see them as women, I think it’s even funnier – sort of like Lucy and Ethel go ice fishing.
I read a recent review of a cartoonist who worked around the turn of the century – last century, and it said the cartoonist had a “slap-dash, energetic style,” which today’s reviewer liked. It made me take notice because one of the cartoon syndicate heads said that I draw too fast.
Would he have liked my work better if I drew slower?
I was fascinated that he said that because he never saw me draw, but he’s right, I do draw fast. It’s just the way I work. I watch movies and documentaries on cartoonists, as I mentioned in a previous post, and I see how slow they work. They are so meticulous with every line and I wonder how they ever get anything done at that rate. But they are syndicated and I’m not. So maybe there is something to the speed at which one works.
But look at the photo above, that’s me working at home – see that John Lennon painting? That’s a large 4′ x 6′ piece of art I bought at a charity auction years ago. It’s by an artist named Michael Israel. He does those “art attack” things, where he paints the image upside down in about 20 minutes, he turns it around and there you have an incredible piece of art! He works fast and comes out with masterpieces, so there may be something to slap dash and energetic.
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