So I decided YES! on Ollie and Jacomo, they are starting their adventures tomorrow, Monday!
My Tomversation cartoon is on hiatus and Ollie and Jacomo are doing their thing now. You can find links below each cartoon for social media sites, if you’d like to follow them daily on Facebook or Instagram and there is also a subscription link, where you can have them in your email inbox daily. Or you can just go to the website and see what they are up to there daily.
We last left them off at the Paris Olympics this past summer, now they are home in Coconut Cove. Today they are dealing with the time change due to Daylight Saving Time, like so many of us.
I was explaining in the last post how I read about a guy pretending to be a cat on Reddit for years and people loved it, they behaved as if he was a real talking cat. I thought that would make a good comic strip, although there is Garfield and Heathcliff, Top Cat and Felix. But I remembered I had animal friends – Ollie and Jacomo, and decided to bring them back.
Hope to see you over there – OllieAndJacomo.com – they are waiting for you!
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Today, February 28, there is a 24-hour economic blackout. Consumers and activists are protesting corporate greed and DEI rollbacks. So we aren’t supposed to participate in things today.
We aren’t supposed to spend money anywhere if possible, so I’m wondering about our weekly lunch that some of us do on Fridays.
Most of these boycotts don’t make sense in that the money will just be spent the next day. for instance if you need gas for our cars, which I actually do, we can just buy it the day before or after. And the same with groceries and things like that.
I guess the silence is what it’s about – sort of like the pandemic, when there was no one out or on the streets. “Enjoy the Silence,” as Depeche Mode says.
The whole thing is to mainly to boycott the high cost of living. It shows the economic power of everyday people.
So fast food, gas and major retailers are on the list to boycott for the day, which again, will only have the items purchased the day after. But the idea is to have no one in these establishments to prove a point.
If we must spend, it’s recommended that we only support small local business, none of the big stores and places, so maybe my lunch at a local restaurant can still happen.
We’ll see.
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I have a bunch of blogs going, plus my Tomversation cartoon site, where I use a blogging platform on WordPress, so I’m considering that a blog, too.
Why? I don’t know, I come up with ideas and then there is a blog for it.
I’ve morphed various blogs into something else, just using the name since I own the URL. For instance I recently changed The Morning Grapevine into a blog on blogging.
What I mean is, people are always asking me about blogging, for many years I ran a very successful blog, with lots of readers and subscribers, and it made money. So after 15 years of that, I think I know a thing or two.
I’ve helped people set up blogs and guided them into the world of blogging. I look at blogs as the magazines of today. You know, each has its own niche and audience and there is something for everyone.
I don’t now what this Tomversation blog is, I guess it’s a “personal blog” tied in with my cartoons.
I’ve thought or writing a book on blogging, or at least a booklet, so I wanted to teste the waters. So I put a blurb on a couple of Reddit subs saying something to the effect like I described above – “I published a blog for 15 years, it was very successful, made money and had lot of readers.” Something like that, but worded better.
Anyway, I got tons of responses, people asking me questions about their blogs and I thought that it might be a good idea to start a blog about blogging and The Morning Grapevine, business blog, became that blog about blogging.
I plan on having anecdotes in it, too, so as not to have it come off too boring, but I will explain how to get readers, how to decide the niche to write about, things like that. There are a few articles posted so far.
I have a message like this at the bottom of most blog articles now:
If you’re planning to shop on Amazon, consider using this link it supports me and keeps this blog free.
So if you are shopping at Amazon, which I think most of us do, if you use that link, I get commission on things you order. There is no extra charge to you. And it’s a little money out of Jeff Bezos’ pocket, going to me.
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I was watching this video by artist Mika Song about comic panels. She had a lot of good things to say about the panel. A lot of it was about restrictions. Which I like.
Even though I can do anything with my Tomversation cartoon, since it is distributed online, and there are no parameters, I enjoy the parameters. The image can be made larger, longer, a multi-panel strip and be changed from day to day, where in the newspapers, I would be limited to the same daily allotted space, I enjoy the single panel imitations and the same daily allotted space.
I’ve always been drawn to single panel comics. Oh sure, I read all the comic strips growing up, but I enjoyed the single panel stuff – Hazel, The Addams Family, Ziggy, The Far Side, Our Boarding House, Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, etc. I liked having the whole story told in one box, usually with one short sentence or text.
It’s interesting setting up the story because I have to figure out how to fit the characters and the text to make sense in the small 5″ x 5″ space.
In recent years I’ve done away with the speech balloon, although I do use it once in awhile, but I like have the letters just floating above and having one single drawn line showing who is speaking. I’m not sure where I got that from, but I know it’s from cartoons I’ve seen in the past.
I also went digital some years back. I use a Surface Pro, to draw, which I love. It has a keyboard so I can use it as a laptop computer when I’m traveling. It’s compact and easy to use and has everything I need.
I’ve done comic strips in the past and I have a few that I have done but am not publishing, but I don’t enjoy drawing the same characters over and over, not just in each pane for that day’s strip, but every day of the week. I like that I can have animals talking one day and ancient Egyptians the next.
Many single panel cartoons have the same characters. I enjoy reading the old Our Boarding House panels, where they tell a continuing story day after day, in a single panel, with the same characters. But for my own work, I enjoy using different characters each day.
Above there are six samples of my comic panel, Tomversation. You can see how I use speech and thought balloons and how sometimes I mix the two. Somethings they are not full balloons, but just part, indicating a border to separate the text from the art.
I was watching a lot of Depeche Mode videos and concerts this weekend. I don’t know why. I mean I aways loved them, but all of a sudden there they were all over my social media.
I think it started by me watching a lot of the FireAid concert on social media and from watching those bands, mostly Stevie Nicks over and over, Depeche Mode starting popping up. So I started watching them. They weren’t part of FireAid, but I guess the genre sort of was part of what was at FireAid so the algorithms brought them up.
It started on my phone and then I put them on YouTube on my big tv screen.
What I found interesting is that they sort of don’t age, although David Gahan, front man, is getting gray streaks in his hair now, but he still sings and moves like he always did. He’s ageless. Although he has almost been dead more than once. Four times he had brushes with death and he go the nickname “The Cat” due to his coming back to life over and over.
He also was a heroin addict and had a drug induced heart attack right in the middle of a concert once. I don’t say all this to put him down, I say it all to build him up – he is invincible. He does his famous twirl through the concerts, enjoying every moment.
When you watch him perform, he takes over the stage, his movements, voice and engagement with the audience is incredible, he commands the stage, even when he isn’t singing – many times he gives over the performance to the audience and has them finish singing the songs.
David was ranked at No. 73 on Q magazine’s list of the “100 Greatest Singers” and No. 27 on its list of the “100 Greatest Frontmen”.
Founding member Andy Fletcher, “Fletch” passed away in May 2022. They talk about it in the CBS Sunday Morning interview below.
I drew the above cartoon over from a previous version this weekend since he and Depeche Mode were on my mind.
Regarding the video above of “Enjoy the Silence,” my favorite Depeche Mode song, among so many, I like this video because it shows David and the band over years. It sort of intercuts them singing the song in various stages of their career. Love that.
Here, below is a recent interview with David Gahan and Martin Gore on CBS Sunday Morning.
