Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?

My very first post on this blog was about winning the Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic at the 2005 Comic-Con International in San Diego. So it seems somehow symmetrical and right that my very last post follows my report on the same event almost exactly three years later.

Today I'm closing up shop here and opening a new establishment right around the virtual corner at

http://brianfies.blogspot.com.

It'll be the same old stuff from the same old guy, which raises the question: Why bother? Why force my six regular readers to change their bookmarks and links? Who do I think I am?

Well, I'll explain...

First: my site stats show me that a lot of people arrive here while searching for help and information about cancer. Mom died October 1, 2005, and the fact is that I left Cancer World that day and haven't tried too hard to keep up. I'm not an expert on anything except my family's experience. I know Mom's Cancer still helps readers facing the same dizzying, baffling, frustrating challenges we did--I hear all the time from readers who continue to discover it anew--but my blog hasn't had much to offer those folks in a long time and I feel bad about that.

Second, and the reason I made a last-minute trip to this year's Comic-Con after I hadn't planned to go at all: I'm writing a new book. It's a graphic novel titled Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? that I'm working on with my friend and Mom's Cancer editor Charlie Kochman to be published by Harry N. Abrams next spring. Charlie wanted me in San Diego to unveil it, along with other books being released under a new Abrams imprint named Abrams ComicArts, with Charlie as its newly promoted Executive Editor (Publishers Weekly ran a nice item about it here). There's some neat symmetry there as well: my first book was Charlie's first acquisition shortly after he arrived at Abrams; my next book will be his first original graphic novel under his new imprint.

Fact is, I've been working on this thing and keeping quiet about it for more than a year--maybe close to two--although I did let a few hints drop from time to time to time. Both Abrams and I had our reasons for playing our cards close to our vests, but 3 p.m. Saturday in San Diego we tipped our hand. Now that I can talk about my new book--just try to shut me up!--it makes no sense to do it on a blog named for my previous one. It makes even less sense to start a second blog for the new book and try to maintain two! So I decided to carry on with a new blog named after me, less out of ego than lack of imagination. Unless I change my name, I won't face this dilemma again.

This doesn't mean I'm moving past Mom's Cancer, or turning my back on it, or anything like that. I would have none of this without that book and my mother's great gift of allowing me to write it. As I said, I know new readers are still finding it all the time. In fact, Abrams has some new plans for Mom's Cancer I'm excited about. I'll continue to blog about it and Cancer World when I have reason to.

Same guy, same stuff--plus some new stuff.

I hope you'll follow me over to the new place to learn more about The World of Tomorrow but, if not, thanks for being here. I appreciate it.


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What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?

Voters in San Francisco have qualified an initiative for the November ballot that, if passed, would name a sewage treatment plant after President Bush. It's political theater meant as an insult. They think they're being cute and sarcastic--"ironic" in the current (wrong) usage of the term--by associating Bush with the dirty business of cleaning poo.

I come here today not to praise or condemn the president. Rather, I'd like to speak on behalf of sewage treatment.

In an earlier career, I spent many years working as an environmental chemist, a good deal of which involved water quality. I worked for and with engineers and chemists from water treatment plants, and still have friends in the sewage treatment business. And let me tell you: I am hard-pressed to think of much that is more basic to civilization. I'm serious. It's a cornerstone, right up there with roads and clean drinking water. Shut down the sewage treatment plants and see how long it takes diseases we don't even remember to charge back through our communities.

So when I heard about this initiative, my first thought was that it was less an insult to Bush than to all the engineers, chemists and technicians working at that plant who've just been told their jobs are a joke. I think the initiative's a stupid misstep that just reinforces the "elitist" reputation of its backers--evidently happy to use flush toilets as long as someone else gets their hands dirty--that could and should backfire on them. If I were President Bush, I'd proclaim it a sincere honor to have a sewage treatment plant named for me. Heck, if I were Bush, I might even fly into SFO to campaign for the initiative's passage.

More irrefutable evidence that water treatment plants are cool: they can teach you how to drive a starship. Or at least the producers of "Star Trek" thought so; when they needed a location to double for the 24th-century Starfleet Academy, they shot at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, California.

I wonder if the ballot initiative's proponents realize that Starfleet Academy will someday be located in San Francisco? We'll see who's laughing then.

Tillman Water Reclamation Facility (top)

and Starfleet Academy (below).

Two Sorry Days

I want to say at the top that I don't expect or want any sympathy. That said...

I spent all of today doing the very thing that frustrates and angers me like no other: making a balky computer behave. Yesterday I upgraded my anti-virus software and discovered afterward that my photo uploading software no longer worked. No problem; I'll just reinstall it. Did that, then found that Photoshop wouldn't open, nor could I reinstall it--it froze up every time. This was getting serious. I could live without photo management, but I need Photoshop. Tried to fix that, and I think you see where this is going: by mid-morning I had completely screwed up everything, including the Office utilities (Word, Excel, etc.) upon which paying my mortgage most directly depends. Not only that, but I apparently crippled all the means available to me to repair the damage short of doing a complete reinstall of the operating system. Not my favorite option.

So, while my main computer passed the afternoon backing up all my files to an external hard drive--I hadn't destroyed any data yet but by that point I wouldn't have put it past me--I researched my problem online via laptop. Twenty minutes ago I implemented the most promising solution and ... it worked! Nothing was lost! All I had to do was reinstall Photoshop, which the stupid blinky box allowed me to do this time, and I was back in business.

Like I say, in a world where billions of people have no computers--or food, shelter, jobs, etc.--I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for a guy with two computers and whose heaviest physical labor for the day involved moving back and forth between them. But I hate computers when they do this--HATE HATE HATE!--and have a lot of excess energy to spew your way. What a waste of a day.

Yesterday involved a gentler kind of frustration. I sat down to pencil and ink a couple of pages and found that I just wasn't drawing well. It was like slogging through concrete. Some days go like that. Sometimes I don't notice when a brush or nib goes bad and I think the problem is mine when it's really my tools'. I remember one stretch of four or five days when everything I drew was terrible, then realized I'd lost all my mojo the same day I switched to a different texture of paper.

That didn't seem to be the case yesterday. I hadn't actually inked anything in more than a week and might've been a little rusty. You just have to work through it, and I picked a couple of pages that I thought would be less artistically challenging than others. Nobody else would be able to see the difference. Happily, in my experience, when I look back later I can't really tell the difference between work done on a good or bad day, either.

Again, no sympathy needed. I'm just venting, and in fact it feels kinda good. Thanks, I feel better now.
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P.S.: Perfect. I was just about to hit the "Publish" button when our home's cable Internet went out. If anyone other than me ever reads this, I guess it eventually came back on.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to use technology.
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P.P.S.: Got the cable back after about three hours. I should just go to bed now.

Casting a Critical Eye

Back when "Calvin and Hobbes" was an actual daily comic strip, a person of my close acquaintance looked up from the newspaper and asked, "Is Bill Watterson a really good cartoonist?" I assured them that Watterson was fantastic, one of the best working at the time, maybe one of the best ever. "I thought so," came the reply. "But it's hard to tell."

I understood the question. Watterson's brushwork is so economical and confident, I could see how it might look sloppy and slapdash to a "civilian." What was evident to me--but, as I was reminded, not to everyone--was the bedrock foundation of artistic fundamentals underlying it. Perspective, composition, expression, use of negative space. Watterson was also particularly smart about what he didn't draw. For example, if you or I set out to draw two characters walking through a snowy field, we might show drifts piled against fence posts, icicles hanging from tree limbs, rocks protruding through a crunchy crust. In contrast, Watterson followed Walt Kelly's directive: the best way to draw snow is to draw nothing at all. Feet disappearing into the ground, a scraggly weed, everything else blinding white as far as the eye can see. With such scant clues, you still immediately get a feel for how deep the snow is, maybe even its texture. That's fine cartooning.

I'm reminded of Jack Benny's ability to get laughs with silence, the audience reading his mind and filling in funnier responses than he could possibly voice. One imagines that the perfect cartoonist would somehow be able to communicate an idea by drawing nothing at all.

(Remember my post on Victorian era cartoonist Phil May? "When I can leave out half the lines I now use, I shall want six times the money." A cartoonist who figures out how to omit all the lines should get all the money.)

Of course there's more to cartooning than economy. A fairly common topic among cartoonists is "artists I didn't think were any good when I was young but love now." You hear names like Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, Chester Gould. My example is a comic book artist named Don Heck. When I was a kid reading Marvel Comics' "Avengers," Heck's credit on the title page made me groan. Part of the problem was that in the 1970s, when I was a young teenager collecting comics, Heck was in poor health and winding down his career. In addition, he was often called in to do rush jobs on tight deadlines when other artists couldn't. Frankly, I didn't catch him at his best.

But my main problem with Heck was that I just didn't "get" his style, which was so different from either the pop-art Jack Kirby or super-slick Neal Adams styles popular at the time. At his best, Heck did loose, sophisticated, impressionistic, dynamic brushwork in the tradition of newspaper great Milt Caniff ("Terry and the Pirates," "Steve Canyon"). He had a great eye for layout and storytelling, and a successful career in romance and western comics before superheroes hit big in the 1960s. It wasn't until I learned a little about the history and craft of cartooning, and maybe tried to do some myself, that I really appreciated how tremendously skillful he was.

Art by Don Heck ca. 1966

I've learned you can come to respect work that you don't particularly like. I recently had a cup of coffee with a syndicated cartoonist, during which the conversation turned to a comic strip done by another syndicated cartoonist. "I don't really like his strip," he said. "It's just not my thing. But you can tell at first glance that he's a great cartoonist who belongs on the comics page." I think that's a mature way to look at things, and I've got a fairly long list of artists like that: I'll probably never buy their work, it just doesn't appeal to me, but they're obviously very skilled professionals doing terrific stuff that somebody out there will really appreciate. I'll also admit there are artists I still don't get despite the raves of people whose opinions I trust. I'm always open to the possibilities that either they're wrong or I need to get educated.

How can you tell the good from the bad? The "so good it looks simple" from the "looks simple because it really is simple"? I'm not sure. Read a lot, I guess. Good cartooning is always clear; if you have to stop and go back because you missed something or don't understand what a character is doing or how the action progresses, that's a failure (the cartoonist's, not yours). You shouldn't have to think about it. If a piece of writing or art makes me care about the characters and feel something--happy, sad, even appalled--I figure it's doing something right.

Honestly, I think I divide other people's work into three categories: 1.) I could do that. 2.) I wish I could do that. 3.) Wow, I have no idea how they did that. I think many people's taste evolves and matures as they realize that a lot of work they thought fell into Category 1 really belongs in Categories 2 or 3.

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The Denial of Something Essential

Last weekend I read a Q&A column by San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle, in which a reader asked why modern film actresses don't get the same loving attention to lighting and cinematography that, for example, Von Sternberg lavished on Marlene Dietrich. The reader asked, "What's missing?"

"Black and white is what's missing," LaSalle replied. "The denial of something essential (like color) creates a longing in the viewer, which translates into an arresting image."

I think exactly the same thing happens in cartooning. It's all about "the denial of something essential," distilling characters and situations into the fewest words and lines possible--just enough to communicate an idea. When information is missing, readers fill in the rest--they yearn to fill in the rest--and the less the cartoonist gives them, the more invested they can become. Paradoxically, the more abstract a story, the more real it can seem. Somehow, a few squiggles of ink become a boy waiting by a mailbox for a Valentine's Day card that never comes. A few squiggles of ink can make you happy or sad. That's amazing.

I've mentioned this before, but I got a modest glimpse of this with Mom's Cancer when I heard from a few readers who said, "I'm not like you, my family's not like yours, and we weren't dealing with cancer, but it's just like you were in our living room." None of the details fit but somehow it still hit home in a way that felt very specific. That's also amazing.

Even more than black-and-white film, I think cartooning demands that its readers do their share the heavy lifting. That's one reason the characters in Mom's Cancer didn't have names: if I don't tell you what they're called, maybe their name is the same as yours. That's also why my editor and I didn't want to put a family photo in the book: it would've turned those abstract characters who maybe sort of resemble you and your family into real people who don't look anything like you at all. The more details I give, the more opportunities you have to find differences between us. I've thought a lot about how and why cartooning sometimes seem to tap directly into a reader's brain, and I think that's close.

I really like LaSalle's "denial of something essential" formulation. Of course for that to work, you also have to provide something essential and meet the audience half way. Otherwise, you've denied them too much to make any connection with the work at all. I think that's the difficult and rewarding (when it works) give-and-take conversation that the best writers, artists and cartoonists have with their readers or viewers.
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Storming the Canon

Deadlines. Lots and lots of deadlines. Your loyalty is appreciated and feared.

Rod McKie is a British cartoonist, critic, and Internet buddy of mine, and one of the early supporters of Mom's Cancer who encouraged me to seek publication. He's got a blog I like in which he wrote a recent post about graphic novels that opened with, "Okay, I think I can just about stop doing the nerdy 'graphic novels' air-brackets." Rod argues (if I understand him right) that graphic novels have proven their worth as literature and it's time to quit explaining or apologizing for them. Writes Rod:

Often, a novel is full of impossible, trite and inapt descriptions that seek to convey, for instance, a sense of place. They work in absence of a visual image, employing metaphor and simile and symbolism, and almost always speak of comparison, which is of course one of the constraining limits of language itself. A graphic novel, on the other hand, still uses the same language, but the image is often there, on the page, where 1,000 or more words of descriptive text would be. The written text then, the words on the page, can be more sparse or even non-existent. It seems that when this is the case, the literary critic cannot understand how to 'read' the work, and so, one assumes, how to judge its literary value.

Rod hits on a point I've made before, which is that a good graphic novelist needs to have all the skills of a good writer plus the ability to draw. In any case, Rod then goes on to look at the graphic novels Persepolis, From Hell, Road to Perdition, Blankets, and Houdini the Handcuff King with an eye toward how they might fit into the literary canon. I commented:

That's a nice, insightful essay, thanks for writing it.

I think I'm coming around to the view that the graphic novel's yearning for literary respectability is hardly worth the fight. There's something faintly desperate and pathetic about it, banging on the clubhouse door begging to be let in, and it's an argument that can only really be won by creators doing one excellent job after another for a long time--building, as you suggest, a canon. In this, I think we're sometimes our own worst enemies. I've met comics fans who argue with a straight face that Watchmen is the best work of literature they've ever read. The only possible answer for that is that they need to read a lot more. Too many readers' standards are too low.

In point of fact, I think it's inarguable that graphic novels haven't yet produced anything on par with the best of Dickens/Twain/Joyce/Hemingway/Orwell/Literary Giant of Your Choice. They just haven't. I'd like to think that graphic novels have that potential, but I sometimes wonder if there's something inherently limiting in the medium. In any case, what I'm getting at is that may be the wrong comparison to make. I suggest we worry less about bashing in the door of the other guys' clubhouse than building our own. If, in time, ours becomes interesting and impressive enough, they'll come to us.

It's late at night, that's off the top of my head, and I may change my mind tomorrow....

Well, it's morning and I still feel that way. But it's a topic on which I'm open to argument and willing to be swayed. I look at it like this: let's take a graphic novel that everybody agrees is great: say, Maus by Art Spiegelman. Certainly one of the Top Five graphic novels on almost anyone's list, a Pulitzer Prize winner that crossed over to the mainstream and is taught in college classrooms. (If you don't like Maus, substitute your own favorite.) Great. But is Maus one of the best five books in the library? Not even close. Top 50? Not on most readers' lists. Top 500? Maybe.

Could some hypothetical graphic novel become one of the best five books ever written? As I replied to Rod, I'd like to think so but I'm not certain the medium has it in it. The only way creators and readers will find out is by aiming higher. Even if they fall short, there's a lot of uncharted territory to explore and the results will be interesting.
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Ides of March Eve

Today is a really good day. The evidence:

1. It's "π Day," 3.14. Please notice that I've manipulated the post time to read 1:59 (p.m.), which pointlessly carries the digits of π out three points further. (If I wanted to do it right, I'd calculate that 0.159 of a day equals 3 hours 48 minutes 58 seconds, and reset the post clock to 3:48:58 a.m. But I'm not that big a nerd.)

2. A few days after 20 years ago tomorrow, I was doing this:

Apologies for the picture's stripes.
A new scanner is on order.

My two little pooquita chiquitas celebrate their birthday tomorrow, and Karen and I are taking a cake, gifts, and a couple of their girlfriends to spend the day at their all-grown-up big-girl university. In contrast to 20 years ago, I think today if they ganged up and used some strategy, they'd have a fair chance of taking me. Good thing I instilled all that respect when I had the chance. Right, girls? Right?

3. One other reason.

I hope you have a great weekend, I think I will.

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One Of Those Days....

Below is my impromptu ranking of some artistic media I've used. On top are those with which I have the most practice, can usually achieve the look I intend, and enjoy working. The farther down the list a medium falls, the more likely it is to make me waste many frustrating hours before throwing away the result.

#1. Ink and brush
#2. Watercolor
#3. Acrylic
#4. Pastels
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#10. Oils
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#34. Wacom tablet and computer
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#73. Dog poo and a wiggly twig
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#652. Gouache

Stupid gouache.
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I Can See My House From Here

I find this photo very moving.

That's a picture of the Earth and Moon as seen from the planet Mars. Frankly, I didn't know we had anything in the Martian neighborhood with optics good enough to take a shot like that, and at first suspected it was a fake. But it's real, shot by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently orbiting the red planet. Usually it's pointed down toward the ground. By the way, NASA says that's the west coast of South America in that picture, and in a higher-res version I can just make it out.

What strikes me is that we go to all the trouble of sending these spacecraft out to explore the unknown millions of miles away, yet are moved most powerfully when they point their cameras back at us. It's the same reaction the world had when the Apollo 8 astronauts became the first humans to see the far side of the Moon first-hand* and photographed Earth rising over the lunar horizon as they flew back around. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, everything you know and love, everything that ever happened in all of human history, all the life we have knowledge of anywhere in the universe, is on that fragile little blue sphere.

I've seen a few photos like this before. As I recall, one of the Voyager probes photographed the Earth-Moon pair as it soared away from us on its way out of the solar system. We send surrogate eyes out only to look back and see ourselves more clearly. These pictures get me every time.

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* The Soviets took the very first pictures of the far side of the Moon via unmanned probe, which is why most of the craters back there have Russian names.

In Praise of Pioneers

A recent discussion at an Internet watering hole got me thinking about pioneering cartoonists, comic book artists and writers, and the lack of respect they get. The business has always been cruel to its veterans--comic books much more than comic strips, I think, but both find new voices more compelling, new styles more diverting. They eat their old. That's the way of the world, the way of business, and I understand it. I expect a profit-driven publisher (and publishers who aren't profit-driven don't publish long) to put out what sells.

What pains me is that fans go along.

The newspaper comic strip is just over a century old. Comic books have a history almost as long--at first, many of them existed to reprint newspaper strips--but turned a corner when Superman debuted in 1938, 70 years ago this June. Before the invention of television, comic strips were a major mass medium of entertainment and cartoonists were stars. Millions of comic books were sold every month during the "Golden Age" that began with World War II and lasted about a decade after (again, probably not coincidentally ending with the proliferation of TV). Into the 1970s, comics and cartoons were important and popular cultural touchstones in a way that many, including I, believe they haven't been since and probably won't be again.

That wasn't that long ago! A lot of very creative people who did that work are still alive. A few of them would still love to work. Not many of them get the opportunity.

Attending the big San Diego Comic-Con the past three years, I've gotten used to seeing cartooning pioneers sitting ignored in Artist's Alley, their view blocked by a long line waiting to meet the superstar wunderkind sitting at the next table. I dunno.... I've got no business telling people what to like. But to me, being a fan of something means having an appreciation of its history and the contributions of those who came before. To me, those fans lining up at the wrong table are like baseball fans who worship Barry Bonds but have never heard of Willie Mays.

(It's not the same thing, but I remember reading about a convention whose guests included "Star Trek" actors and Apollo astronauts. The actors drew huge crowds while the astronauts sat alone, chuckling to each other that fans would rather meet people who pretended to explore space than those who actually had.)

I can't say that the experienced pioneers deserve work; that's for the market to decide. But they deserve acknowledgement and respect. I've been lucky to meet a few. I never know what to say and I'm sure I always manage to sound like an idiot fanboy. It seems to come down to "thank you for your work, it means a lot to me," which is pretty weak but I think is better than nothing.

I'd take Willie Mays any day.

Top to bottom: Jerry Robinson, Irwin Hasen and Gene Colan,
talented pioneers and gracious gentlemen all. Look 'em up.

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On Cheating

Never draw what you can swipe.

Never swipe what you can trace.

Never trace what you can cut out and paste.

And never do any of that if you can hire somebody to do it for you..

--Wally Wood
Master Cartoonist

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I hate drawing cars. I'm not good at it. There's always a kid in the high school art class who earns minor fame, and maybe even a little pocket change, drawing beautifully rendered hot rods, with giant exhaust pipes roaring, tires squealing off the page, and every chrome reflection perfectly in place. He (invariably a "he" in my experience) is a venerated specialist, and he is not me.

In theory, an artist who understands perspective can draw anything. Establish a horizon line and vanishing points, and build the object out of simple shapes. It works great for a lot of things. The problem (or rather, my problem) with cars is that they're pretty complex objects, with lots of compound curves and subtle angles. Another problem with cars is that everyone is intimately familiar with them; if a drawing doesn't get the proportions just right, readers know it looks "funny" even if they can't say exactly why. Yet another problem is that every car model has dedicated owners and fans who know every bumper and bolt. I'd really like to get 'em right. .

So when I recently had occasion to draw an old car, I knew I needed help. The first resort is reference photos, and indeed you can google hundreds of pictures of old cars in various states of restoration and repair. That helps, but didn't give me the angle I needed. Evidently, no one in automotive history has ever photographed a car from a spot hovering 30 feet above the front left fender. That's a tough angle to extrapolate from a bunch of ground-level front and side shots.

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I needed a model. After combing fruitlessly through dozens of Hot Wheels racks, I found an online vendor of affordable, accurate models of old cars. A couple weeks later, I had a 1939 Chevy coupe ready to pose for me.
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At this point I might've drawn it freehand, but I decided not to do that. Instead, I put the model on a sheet of white poster board and took digital photos of it from several angles.

1939 Chevy coupe, with a smaller-scale 1940 Ford on its tail

I chose the photo above, opened it in Photoshop, and made the Chevy approximately the right size to fill the hole I'd left for it in another drawing several weeks earlier.

At this point I might've traced the photo using a light box ... but I decided not to do that. Instead, I converted the color photo into a duotone image, which is like a black-and-white photo except you substitute shades of some other color for black and gray, in this case cyan.

Cyan duotone

I printed that picture onto a sheet of the same 2-ply Bristol board I use for all my cartooning. Then, I used a brush and pens to ink directly over the light blue image.

Inked

The tricky thing here is to not get bogged down in detail and draw too tightly, despite the pains I've taken to this point to be as precise as possible. Cartooning is distillation and simplification. It's got to look as loose, relaxed, and hand-drawn as the rest of the artwork that will eventually surround it. I didn't go nuts putting in lots of reflections and spotted black because, again, that wouldn't match the style of the rest of the page.

Next, I scanned the drawing into Photoshop, where I made all the blue disappear (I likewise pencil all of my artwork in light "non-photo" blue so I don't have to erase after I've inked). All that remains is my black line art, ready to copy and paste onto the open road I drew for it elsewhere.

Blue erased, ready to copy and paste

Semi-final (I may add some shadows and such later). The road texture is a charcoal rubbing I did of my concrete front porch.

I ... kinda wish I hadn't had to do that. I'd love to have the skills to dash off any car from any era from any angle, but I don't. I admit I feel a little disappointed in myself--but not much. Over time, I've come to regard both writing and drawing as primarily problem solving. I know what I want to accomplish; now what's the best way to do it? This is the best way I could think of to solve a particular problem and produce the result I wanted.

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I Am Old

My wife, kids and I are all fans of the Indiana Jones films (someday I'll tell you about our bathroom decor), and we all agree that our first look at the online trailer left us pretty happy and eager for May 22. Happy? "Giddy" is more like it. Harrison Ford still cuts a credible figure with the hat and whip, and we're impressed with the look and tone glimpsed in the preview. However, the point of this post isn't to give a bit of much-needed publicity to Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg's obscure little art-house film.

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The point of this post is that I'm old. We were talking about the trailer when one of my girls said, "This'll be our first chance to see Indiana Jones on the big screen!"

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My wife's and my reactions were identical: "What do you mean? Surely that can't be true. Never once seen an Indiana Jones movie in a theater? How is that possible? How could you even become an Indy fan without seeing it as God intended? You obviously forgot!" Even after we spent a few minutes working out the timeline, we couldn't quite comprehend how our kids had reached adulthood only seeing videotapes of Indiana Jones on television.

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Here's how. My twins are nearly 20, born in 1988. The last Indiana Jones movie--which I clearly remember seeing as a full-grown mature adult--came out in 1989. QED.

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Today we all went to the movie theater to see "The Spiderwick Chronicles" (not bad), which was preceded by the same Indiana Jones trailer we'd huddled around my monitor to watch two days before. The first time my kids have seen Indiana Jones on the big screen.

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I was thrilled for them. And a little wistful for myself.

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This movie better be good....

Gus Arriola and the Language of Lines

Cartoonist Gus Arriola died yesterday at age 90. His Associated Press obit is here. Mr. Arriola wrote and drew the comic strip "Gordo" between 1941 and 1985, when he retired. It's fair to say he's not a household name, but when I was a kid trying to figure out how comics worked, his strip was among those I most frequently clipped and saved. I think he's one of the all-time underrated greats.

"Gordo" was set in Mexico and featured an overweight tour guide, his housekeeper, and various human and animal characters--notably a chihuahua, pig, cat and rooster. The strip had swell characters and an easy-going charm, but what really caught my eye was the way Mr. Arriola played with the language and iconography of comics in ways I'd never seen before. His use of graphics was masterful.

Unfortunately, good examples are hard to come by online and I have no idea where to find my 30-year-old clip file (though I suspect I still have it somewhere). The images below were the best I could find, and you'll just have to take my word that I remember several even better.

(click to see larger)

The Sunday strip above, which I scanned from Jerry Robinson's book The Comics (which unfortunately reproduced it in black and white), is a nice piece from 1954. There's a lot of arty goodness going on here: the shapes of panels, the bottom border and negative profile in panel 6, the playful use of lettering guides as a design element in panel 3. Even the cigar smoke in panel 6 is an interesting squiggle. But what sells it is the checkerboard pattern, introduced in panel 4 and finished off in the final panel, where Gordo is not just a checkerboard silhouette, but one that has shattered into surprised shards.

The next Sunday strips are in color and highlight's Mr. Arriola's use of same as well as his incredibly graceful and expressive ink line. I thought he really shined when drawing the animals, particularly in frenetic action accompanied by colorful streaks or lightning bolts. I love the first strip, which is very "meta," in that the cartoonist literally cools off the characters by coloring them in cool colors (and letting in some cross ventilation by cutting two holes through the panel border!).

(click either to see larger)

Next, another black-and-white Sunday strip I found online, this one capturing the dark festivities of Dia de los Muertos. Note that these aren't just pretty pictures, but pretty pictures that tell a story. But mostly, it's just Grade-A cartooning.


In his imaginative use of the entire cartoonist's toolbox, I always thought of Arriola as a natural heir to Cliff Sterrett, the best cartoonist you've never heard of. Mr. Sterrett did "Polly and Her Pals" in the 1910s through '30s, when he created innovative, abstract work that was both of its time and far ahead of it. Below are a couple of good examples.

(click either to see larger)

Here's a close-up of that sixth panel, which I think shows just how far comics allows you to push the boundaries of literal representation to communicate an idea--in this case, a spooked cat in the middle of the night--that couldn't be shown any other way. This is just beautiful stuff.



The Language of Lines
Coincidentally, I learned of Mr. Arriola's death after coming home last night from the opening of a new exhibition at the Charles Schulz Museum titled "The Language of Lines." The show pretty much covers what I've been writing about: the unique symbolism of comics that instantly communicates an idea, from the antique "light bulb of inspiration" and "sawing log of slumber" to increasingly sophisticated techniques that continue to emerge. Originals in the show date from the early 20th century (including Sterrett) to today, as represented by "Pearls Before Swine" and "Stone Soup," among others. Good examples from "Peanuts," "Pogo," "Doonesbury," "Calvin and Hobbes" and many others illustrate the thesis. When you see Snoopy dance on Schroeder's musical notes, Calvin melt into a puddle of snot, or George W. Bush depicted as an asterisk wearing a Roman soldier's helmet, that's the language of lines.

(An "inside baseball" note: I don't think I've ever seen "Calvin and Hobbes" originals before and was astonished by how small Bill Watterson drew them--particularly his Sundays, which looked even smaller than published size to me. Most cartoonists draw originals at least 1.5 to 2 times the size at which they'll be printed, and often larger. For example, "Peanuts" originals are huge. I guess the tight confines gave Watterson the look and line he wanted, but it really surprised me. Very gutsy.)

The exhibition was curated by Brian Walker, cartoonist Mort Walker's son and part of the Walker-Browne dynasty that continues to produce comic strips such as "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi & Lois." However, Brian may be even better known as a comics historian, author and museum curator, having organized dozens of comic art shows in the U.S. and abroad, including the very high-profile "Masters of American Comics" in 2005 through 2007. He also flew across the country to speak at last night's opening.

I've met Brian twice before. We share a publisher in Abrams and, I discovered just last night, the same editor (look out, Charlie, we compared notes). I also met his wife Abby. Brian grew up immersed in comics and is one of the most knowledgeable experts around, and it was a pleasure to reconnect with him. A bad cold, as well as sadness over not being home to see his beloved New York Giants play the Super Bowl, didn't distract him from giving a nice talk on the language of lines as demonstrated in the pages we then went into the gallery to view. Add some music, wine and snacks, and it was a very memorable evening.

So it was somehow fitting to come home with that exhibition and conversation on my mind, and then read about Mr. Arriola. "Gordo" isn't represented in "The Language of Lines" but it could be--probably should be. It was a very influential strip for me personally. In the bigger picture, I can't help comparing the bold graphic sensibilities of creators like Arriola and Sterrett to the much more pallid, static comic strips of today. If somebody drew comics like that now, it'd be heralded as a cutting-edge creative breakthrough--never mind that Sterrett did it 90 years ago and Arriola 60. This great stuff used to be in the newspaper every day!

Too many contemporary cartoonists and readers don't even remember what they've forgotten.
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Raindrops on Roses, Whiskers on Kittens

This seems like the right time to remember people whose work--and, when I was lucky, friendship--made my life better in 2007:

My friend Mike Lynch, successful magazine cartoonist and fellow Trekkie, whose impromptu calls I'm always delighted to take and whose blog is terrific.

My friend Patricia Storms, whose cartooning and illustrating career really seems to have taken off lately, and it couldn't happen to a nicer person.

My friend Jeff Kinney, whose career as a best-selling author I can actually claim to have witnessed the very start of. It also couldn't happen to a nicer person.

My friend Paul Giambarba, a cartoonist, artist, illustrator, author, art director and much more, with a multi-decade career I can only envy.

My friend Otis Frampton, writer, artist, and creator of Oddly Normal among other great work.

My friend Arnold Wagner, who made my life better until the evening of August 31.

My friend Ronniecat, who started a blog when she suddenly lost her hearing at age 39 and soon branched out to write about anything else that interested her.

My friend Mike Peterson, a career journalist and newspaper editor in Maine, and a cartooning connoisseur.

My friend Sherwood Harrington, an astronomer, traveler, and better writer than he lets on.

My friend and editor Charlie Kochman, who grasps ideas immediately, figures out ways to make them better, and would never do anything to disappoint me in any way ever.

Writer, comics creator, and Hollywood insider Mark Evanier, whose blog is a daily stop of mine.

Annie and Jazz Age cartoonist Ted Slampyak, likewise a regular surfing destination.

Between Friends cartoonist Sandra Bell-Lundy, likewise likewise.

Agreeably cranky writer and artist Eddie Campbell, who made my week a couple of months ago.

The many artists, writers, comics and cartooning professionals I've gotten to know online, plus a few I've gotten to know in person, including Guy Gilchrist, Stephan Pastis, Michael Jantze and Terry Moore. Thanks for your time.

Annette Street, Professor of Cancer and Palliative Care Studies, La Trobe University, Australia.

My neighbor Larry, who I just discovered reads my blog. Thanks for helping me fish my eyeglass lens out of the storm drain that time, plus for protecting our country. That was good, too.

Martin Mahoney, Jeremy Clowe, and the staff of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Jennifer Babcock and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in New York City.

People who voted for me in the Eisner Awards in vain.

People who voted for me in the Harvey Awards--not in vain.

Wolfgang Fuchs, who translated my book into German, accepted an award on our behalf, and exchanged some very nice notes with me about it.

Germany.

People who read my book, and maybe even paid money for it. I don't ever, ever take that for granted. Thank you.

People who read my book and then wrote to tell me about it, themselves, their families, and their stories. Thank you especially.

Everyone else I don't want to embarrass by naming in public but who know who they are.

My wife Karen, who didn't think the preceding sentence applied to her.

My girls, who make me proud.

A happy new year to us all!


*I reserve the right to wake up in the middle of the night, slap myself on the forehead crying "How could I have forgotten them?!" and add names to this post at any time. If that's you, I apologize.
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Best Christmas Ever

I won't embarrass my sister by revealing what year this picture of us was taken. Let's just call it an obviously pre-digital era. Possibly pre-transistor. I'm pretty sure we at least had steam engines.

The best Christmases ever experienced in the history of humanity happened in this house, my grandparents' log cabin, on the banks of Rapid Creek west of Rapid City, South Dakota. To call it a "log cabin" conjures images of "Little House on the Prairie" privations and is a bit misleading; it was a full-sized home built in the early 1960s with all the modern conveniences, but the walls were in fact made of stacked and interlocked yellow logs. Plus, "log cabin" sounds way cooler.

This house had the biggest stone fireplace in the world, across the room from which stood the biggest, shiniest, tinseliest Christmas tree in the world (as obviously exemplified above). Although my grandparents had neighbors, their home backed up against pristine Forest Service land. The pine trees of the Black Hills stretched into infinity, the creek was laden with 12-inch trout, and a small pond across the highway froze every winter for us to practice our wobbly skating skills.

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My sister and I with Mom and my grandparents' nippy little dog Salome on the pond across the highway. (See, we had color film, too!)

This was where the family gathered for my first nine or ten Christmas Eves. I'm pretty sure my grandma was the best cook in the world, though later in life Mom tried to convince me that her mother had actually been terrible in the kitchen. I'm dubious. Anyone who can line a fireplace hearth with pans of unbaked cinnamon rolls rising under moist kitchen towels and fill an entire house with that sweet yeasty scent is a five-star chef in my restaurant guide.

On Christmas Eve, the kids were readied for bed at some unjustly early hour while most of the adults steeled themselves to drive to midnight church services in town. Some years, depending on how that day's contest between snow and plow had fared, the trip was harder than others. I remember my sister and I, shivering under electric blankets turned to 9, trying desperately to keep each other awake while simultaneously pretending to sleep. Tough task. I still have an absolutely clear recollection, as real as the keyboard I'm typing on now, of hearing sleigh bells on the roof one of those nights.

What can be said of the big day itself? Anticipation, greed, the unthinking cruelty of adults marching children through the living room to the kitchen with our eyes closed so we'd eat breakfast before laying eyes on a single gift (as if there's ever been a child born who didn't master the trick of peeking sideways through downcast eyelashes). The triumph of a Lionel HO oval or G.I. Joe. And disappointments as well, such as the year my uncle broke my genuine Batman flying batcopter before I laid hands on it. I never let him live that down.

Although no holiday celebration could possibly rival my old ones, I hope the coming weeks are good for everyone. Just remember: if there are children in your life, you're making lifetime memories for them whether you intend to or not. Might as well make them nice.
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worrA s'emiT

Lying in bed this morning mulling over physics (no, really! I don't know what's wrong with me either!), I had one of the few original ideas I've ever had. By "original" I don't mean no one else has ever thought of it--it's probably one of those ideas real physicists conceive when they're eight years old and realize how stupid it is when they're nine--but I'm pretty sure I've never seen it anywhere else. I'm posting it here not because I think anyone will be interested, but to create a paper trail for future Nobel Committees to follow.

1. The Arrow of Time. One of the fundamental puzzles of the universe is why Time moves the direction it does. Physics calculations work just as well backward as forward, and yet all the Time we see wherever we look seems to be moving the same direction as ours. (I'm not quite sure how the idea that Time could just as easily move back as ahead squares with the thermodynamic law that the entropy (disorder) of a closed system always increases, but I'll assume someone else already solved that and move on.)

In our universe, when I drop a rock, gravity draws it toward the Earth. It also draws the Earth toward the rock, just much much much much much much less. But if I run the film backward, to observers in our timeframe the rock and Earth seem to repel each other (I assume a native of that universe wouldn't notice anything strange at all). It's not really anti-gravity, it's just regular gravity going backward through time.

2. Dark Matter. As I mentioned a few posts ago, astronomers have figured out that the universe has much more mass than we can find. For example, if you add up the mass of all the stars in a galaxy then look at how that galaxy interacts with others, it acts a lot heavier than it looks. That missing stuff got the name "dark matter," though if I understand correctly it's better thought of as "transparent" or "invisible" matter; it's not like chunks of charcoal floating out there, but more like stuff that can't be seen or felt no matter how closely you look, refusing to interact with our regular ol' protons, neutrons, electrons and photons at all except through gravity.

At the same time, astronomers say that the universe seems to be expanding faster than it ought to. Galaxies and the very fabric of space between them are flying apart faster now than they did billions of years ago, even though common sense suggests they should be slowing down as gravity tries to pull everything together. It's almost as if there were some unknown repulsive force--some mysterious anti-gravity--pushing things apart. They call this "dark energy."

(My wife just walked in and, when I told her I was blogging about physics, she said "Ooooooh!" But I'm pretty sure that was sarcasm.)

3. My Hypothesis: Dark matter is nothing but a whole bunch of regular matter moving backward through time. What looks like a repulsive dark energy to us is ordinary gravitational attraction as seen by someone going the other direction. We can't see or touch the dark matter because it's playing by a different set of physical, chemical and electromagnetic rules, but we can feel the gravitational effects of its mass, the one characteristic that doesn't change no matter which direction time goes.

I leave the math as a trivial exercise for future grad students. QED.

We now conclude the wild-eyed crazyman portion of our blog. Have a nice day.

Me, earlier today

UPDATE 15 Minutes Later: Just uncovered a fatal flaw in my reasoning ("Only one?!" I hear you cry). Bad idea. Never mind. Still pretty sure my flux capacitor will work, however. All I need now is a DeLorean.

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Two Newspaper Stories

Tim Kane of the Albany Times Union in Albany, N.Y., wrote a nice piece on the "LitGraphic" exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum, of which several original pages of Mom's Cancer are the least interesting part. The article quotes curator Martin Mahoney (hey, I know him!) and provides a nice historical perspective on graphic novels/comics, tracing them from their 19th-century roots through the underground sixties, Will Eisner, R. Crumb, and the modern move into mainstream films such as Sin City, 300, and V for Vendetta. An excerpt:

Adjacent to the permanent collection of traditional Rockwell illustrations, the bold irreverence and iconoclastic spirit of "LitGraphic" is only magnified. they can be dark and political or mystical and outright humorous; a number of artists have used the form for bracing works of social commentary.... Nothing is out of bounds: Sexual orientation, racism, feminism, fascism, violence, war, famine and health care fuel intricate narratives and stirring graphics.

Guess I'm the "health care."

For yesterday's New York Times, Motoko Rich wrote an interesting story titled "Crossover Dreams: Turning Free Web Work into Real Book Sales," which looks at exactly that. The article features the best-selling children's book Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney (hey, I know him!), quotes Abrams editor Charlie Kochman (hey, I know him!), and cites the recent publication of Shooting War, a new webcomic-to-book success story, by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman (hey, never met 'em!).

I'm not mentioned. Charlie said he told Ms. Rich all about Mom's Cancer and its status as the first webcomic to cross over to mainstream publishing (we think; if anyone has a counter-example, let me know, I'm happy to give credit where due). She didn't take the bait and that's cool. I've been a newspaper reporter and know you can only cram so much into a story, especially a little 1200-word feature. No harm no foul.

Nevertheless, the article touches on a topic of great interest to me: the decision to publish stuff in book form that readers can already get free online. The article offers two examples of different approaches and I offer a third.

Wimpy Kid was first posted to the Website funbrain.com and is in fact still there--all 1300 pages of it. For the book and its sequels, Jeff and Charlie are breaking it up into 200-page bites and, I think, doing significant rewriting and editing. Still, if someone wanted, they could read the entire Wimpy Kid saga right now. And yet the print version has spent 33 weeks on the NYT best-seller list. What's up with that? The article quotes Abrams CEO Michael Jacobs (hey, I've met him! and that's the last of those, I promise): "I think books are still things, thank goodness, that people want to own. The package of the book and the way it feels is something apart and separate from being able to read it online." I think that's right and at least part of the answer.

The authors of Shooting War used the Web as a tease, posting the first 11 chapters in a Web magazine while hoping and intending them to lead to a book deal. They rewrote some parts, added 110 pages, and ended up with a book very different from the introduction that's still available online. That strategy worked for them.

I serialized Mom's Cancer online because I didn't know what else to do with it. I never thought of it as a webcomic per se, but as a comic that happened to end up on the Web. It would be disingenuous to claim I wasn't thinking about print; in fact, I hoped it might become a book from the start. I just had no idea how to do that, and in the meantime I wanted to get my story out.

I stumbled into a good synergy. The many people who read it free online caught the attention of the Eisner Award folks, which probably would have opened some publishing doors regardless. However, in fact, the Eisner nomination hadn't yet happened and Editor Charlie wasn't aware of the webcomic when he accepted my proposal. Still, the fact that I could say "Umpity-thousand people have read this story in the past few months and my readership continues to grow" helped Charlie and me make our case to the publishing-house bean-counters that printing my story was a risk worth taking.

He Who Steals My IP Steals What Exactly...?
So why did I take it offline? One reason is that my publisher Abrams requested--not demanded, but requested--that I do. But I'll step up and say I honestly had no qualms about doing it. The way I looked at it, my publisher and I were entering a business partnership to publish and sell a book. It was in our common interest to make the best book possible and sell as many of them as we could. My partner was making a big financial investment and shouldering considerable risk; my personal risk was negligible. Worst case, if we didn't sell a single book, I wouldn't lose a dime. So it seemed to me the very least I could do to minimize my partner's disproportionate risk was not offer a directly competing product--my Web version--free of charge. I thought it was the professional and right thing to do. One of my proudest days as a writer was when my editor told me the book had broken even. That's when I felt I'd fulfilled my obligation.

I also think an important difference between Mom's Cancer and Wimpy Kid is simply length. My story is about 110 pages, Jeff's is 1300. You can read mine in one sitting; Jeff's takes a few days. Reading Wimpy Kid on a monitor is a significantly different experience than reading it as a paperback in bed or on the playground; mine less so. I don't know where to draw the line--200 pages? 600?--but given Wimpy Kid's size and audience, it seems to me that the risk of free competition is much smaller with Jeff's book than mine.

So I took it offline. Some people were disappointed. If anyone wrote and said, "I'm going through the same thing right now and would really like to read it," I gave them access to the Web version, especially before the book was published. Very rarely, if someone writes from a country where the book is otherwise unavailable, I still do. Otherwise, I've got no problem asking potential readers to pay $12.95 for my book. My mother's Afterword alone is worth at least $12.94.

The reaction that surprised me, and I still don't understand, was hostility. A small number of people seemed really angry, and not because they cared so passionately about my work. I think they're consumers used to getting their reading free, their music free, their games and entertainment free, and they somehow assume a profound philosophical right to get everything they want for nothing. Their rallying cry is "Information Should Be Free!" and they seem deeply offended by being asked to pay money for content or respect a creator's right to control what happens to their own work.

But...in an Information Age society--and in a country that doesn't forge steel, sew clothing, or build cars anymore--what do we produce of real value except the creative output of our minds? Indeed, why shouldn't good, creative ideas be the very things we treasure and protect the most? They're certainly rare enough. Honestly, my story is worth $12.95. It contains at least $12.95 worth of writing, drawing and ideas. I think it's worth a movie ticket and box of popcorn. If you don't, don't buy it. But don't tell me my work has no value and I have some social or moral obligation to let you take it and do what you want with it. Nope. My stuff's better than that.

And hey, you know what? If I make a few bucks and my publisher makes a few bucks, maybe we can do something else again. But neither of us can afford to do it for nothing.

Writer Harlan Ellison has had a reputation for offering strong, loud, controversial opinions on professionalism and creators' rights for about 40 years. The interview below was taken from an upcoming documentary about Ellison and captures some good thoughts much more passionately and (fair warning) profanely than I could. It's a worthwhile 3 minutes and 25 seconds. Although I have to admit I hope I'm never on the other end of a Harlan Ellison phone call.


(Note: there's no irony in my posting a free video clip from a commercial film on a free blog. This clip was released by the film's producers with, I presume, Ellison's OK.)

I'm Here!

Everything's fine, just very heavy on deadlines and light on blogging inspiration.

In an upcoming post I'll recap the two cancer-fighting walk/run events I plugged earlier this month. In short: Great! Thanks again to everyone who read about them here and was inspired to help out somehow.

I saw the new Disney movie "Enchanted" a few days ago and thought it was very good. Many nice references to Disney classics that you'll catch if you've seen them a thousand times (during my raising of two girls we wore out tapes of "Little Mermaid," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," and Disney's "Robin Hood") and know some of their backstory. "Little Mermaid" voice actress Jodi Benson has a good role as Patrick Dempsey's secretary, and I've since read that Paige "Belle" O'Hara and Judi "Pocahontas's singing voice" Kuhn are in it as well, though I didn't catch them at the time. I think the movie's real accomplishment is successfully navigating the fine line between mocking the genre (as with "Shrek") and respecting it (I almost typed "respecting the essential validity of its archetypes" but then pulled the stick out of my rear and thought better of it). And little bits of cartoon at the beginning and end sure made me miss good ol' hand-drawn two-dimensional animation, which I understand John Lasseter has restored to Disney after previous administrations scoured it. Good for him.

Thanksgiving (U.S.) at the in-laws was very nice family time. It occurs to me I haven't often expressed thanks to the people who've bought my book, read my blog, or gone to the time and trouble to send me a note. So ... Thank You. It means a lot. Special appreciation for those few friends who were among the first to find Mom's Cancer online and have stuck with me since.

I expect I'll have more to say soon.
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Congrats to Kid Sis; Curses upon Bill Gates

Congratulations!
Hey, there's a writer in the family! My sister Elisabeth ("Kid Sis") wrote a screenplay that just won first prize in the 2007 Screenwriting Expo Screenplay Competition!

She won in the "Thriller" category for a movie script titled "Pistoleras," which I have read and she hopes to put into production soon--just as soon as she splices together another independent film she just finished shooting. The awards are sponsored by Creative Screenwriting magazine and I'm sure will draw the attention of investors and scouts looking for emerging talent. If anybody wants to back a feminist spaghetti Western set in a Mexican bordello, I can hook you up.

Gosh, if I hadn't let her read my comics and taken her to see "Star Wars" 30 years ago, who knows where she'd be today? That's right, I'm taking the credit.

We're proud of you, kid.

The Gates of Hell
Bill Gates and I are going to have a long talk someday. Sometime yesterday morning, he sat in his Redmond lair stroking his long-haired cat and pushed a button that made two months of my e-mails disappear. It took me most of the afternoon to figure out where they'd gone and how to get them back where they belonged. Grrrrrr.

I don't wanna hear from you smug Mac or Linux cultists. I've used Macs in professional settings and found them just as temperamental and prone to bog down or crash in the middle of The Big Job as PCs. My experience has not convinced me of their superiority. I don't have the time or interest to tackle Linux. When my computer is acting up, I can usually figure out the problem and I like being able to tinker under the hood. The downside of that: sometimes you have to tinker under the hood. Still, I'm considering making my next box a Mac just because I don't want to have anything to do with Vista. Everything Microsoft has done in the past decade seems based on the assumption that they know how I want to use my computer better than I do, and Vista looks like the worst yet.

Bill Gates owes me an afternoon.
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Oddly Ends

Oddly Normal creator Otis Frampton had posted some thoughts in response to my October 22 post in his own blog. While I touched on the idea that too few "mature" comics actually aspire to provide mature characters, plots and themes, Otis comes at it from the other direction: too few comics that should be for kids actually are.

Good point. While some sigh in frustration that comics aren't taken seriously as adult literature, it's worth remembering that they're still a terrific medium for juvenile literature--and there's no shame in that. As I replied to Otis, creating quality juvenile literature is hard and important, and I have great respect for people who do it with integrity and responsibility. Comics are big enough to embrace both--or should be.

Can't Think of a Good Segue to....
Family, friends, and regular readers know of my fondness for "Star Trek." Less frequently mentioned is my affection for Monty Python. I hope I'm forgiven, then, for finding the clip below irresistible. Thanks to my friend, cartoonist Mike Lynch, for the lead.




Sorry. I feel happy....
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