It’s been a while since you’ve seen some Tom Foolery, or even more Tom Foolery… Well, we can fix that.
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Archive for Non-Hubris comics
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I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before… more than ten times… but I occasionally do some fun covers for the local Free Paper. Here’s the latest:
I may have mentioned before that an editor for one of the sections of the LA Times (Outdoor lifestyle? Sports? I can’t recall what his section was now) wanted to run a cartoon in his section just for the kind of reader they suspected they had.
I was eager to show him Hubris, which I was still calling “Because It’s There”, but by no means was I locked into that. The idea of doing a weekly color cartoon for the LA Times was very exciting.
Mike Ramirez was the guy that put the editor and I in touch. He was their editorial cartoonist at the time. If you’re young enough not to know about editorial cartoons in newspapers, I’m sorry. They were pretty cool. You’d have liked them. There are still some in the papers now. Do you know how to get a newspaper? Ask an older person. We remember.
Anyhow, I showed them several different styles and concepts, but the concept itself didn’t get farther than a step or two higher up the ladder than the editor. Bob Sipchen was his name. I hope he doesn’t mind me mentioning him. We haven’t talked since the cartoon attempt.
So HERE is one of the cartoons I showed. I thought there was another one I posted already, but no. Now I know what you’re getting for your Off-Hubris cartoon on Tuesday.
And this is the cartoon I’m showing today:
When the average person hears ‘The Terminator’, I suppose that person, being average, thinks of Arnold Schwarzeneggar playing a robot. I think Arnold was best at playing a robot, myself. Some other people, being average but also being electricians, might think of an item involved in an electrical circuit. Some schoolchildren around Memphis might also think of a guy in an MLGW suit who explains all about working for a utilities company. And hands out activity/coloring books while doing it. Yow.
The point is, here’s the cover of the book the student receive when The Terminator comes to their class- I drew it. It might not be the best off-Hubris post I’ve ever made, but I’m in the middle of Jury Duty (Huh huh huh, he said ‘doody’) and I’m not getting enough sleep currently to write the next installment of Grand Canyon Diaries the way I’d intended.
Here’s a book I did, and it’s English counterpart. I like seeing translations of the stuff I’ve done. I’ve got a few Spanish versions, a couple of Japanese, and most fun, a couple of Hindi versions of books I did. Those are different-looking enough to local eyes that they’re wonderful conversation starters. I’ll post them one day, I guess. Until then, get Ducky.
Some of you know that I do another comic strip called The Buckets. Some of you that read these blog posts that pop up on Non-Comic days know that I also do a thing called MoreOnTV. Well, the writer of said cartoon is sick and tired of emailing sales pitches and asked me to update the old website (set up back in 2008, when the internet was a lawless place and men were men or something like that)
Finally, I got off my butt long enough to start. HERE’s the link to the thing so far. It’s going to take me a good long time to get stuff put where I want it, so if it looks wonky, well, check back. It’s liable to get worse! That should keep you entertained.
Did this for the local tabloid free-press paper. The article it goes to asks several writers to say what they’d do if it were their last day in town.
So. What would YOU do with your last day in town before you moved on?
Advertising agencies need illustrations now and again. I like the work. A couple of years ago, a very fine agency asked me to work with them on the area 9-1-1 account. It was all about educating the populace about using cell phones to contact 9-1-1. Contrary to what all conspiracy people and most average folk will tell you, 9-1-1 cannot locate your cell signal through some rapidly-becoming-commonplace technique of triangulating. I will not speculate if there are any agencies outside of an action movie that can click computer buttons and find your cell phone, but in the real world? 9-1-1 is pretty helpless to find you because of the way cell towers shuffle signals around just to keep the whole mess working on a day-to-day basis.
Wow. That got off onto a tangent. Back to the point: I have fun doing the initial sketches for advertising projects. They didn’t have any idea what sort of characters they wanted, only that they wanted to do a comic book and it would have to have characters in it. Fun. I drew a few dozen for them to start from. Here are a few:
Lots of fun, being given a parameter like “It’s about cell phone callers and 9-1-1. Other than that, we have no idea” Your imagination can go off in any and all directions, because you never know what’s going to strike the client as appropriate or fun or just happens to dovetail with some other idea they forgot to mention to you in the meeting.
I left out the sketches that led up to the actual characters. Honestly, I left out a LOT of sketches that didn’t lead to anything. Yet. That’s the other fun part. There’s a pirate character I’d love to trot out for something else another day. I wouldn’t mind using a couple of the sketches here to do something fun one day.
But there’s no time for that now- Now is when you get the characters as they were (are) used:
So there’s this thing I do for a local paper. It’s cartoon illustration, but it’s not what people expect out of me after seeing my comic strips, I guess.
Anyway, what the paper does, you see, is to put their print articles online, then allow comment sections beneath them, then they take comments that people make to their online version, and use those comments to make up a neat little sidebar in the print version every week. It’s what one calls ‘a vicious circle’.
As you might expect, the comments are often sarcastic, inflammatory, absurd, overwrought, and (I suspect) are often written in the wee hours by people who enjoy getting up a good rage listening to overnight call-in radio.
The difficulty (for me) is trying to tell people who don’t already read it about this particular feature. I mean, I’ve been doing it for years, but I’ve never worked out exactly how to show it off. You see the problem- literally. Without the absurd, self-satistfied, lunatic comment to go along with my nicely editorialized illustration, the reader is left scratching his head and wondering if I myself haven’t been up late under less-than-ideal conditions, and doing stuff in photoshop that might better be left to a more sober mind.
Some weeks, the editor contacts me and says curt and frankly actionable things about the commenters of the week, and has a lower opinion of their comments than he has of the commenters. The commenters, for their part, mostly have jolly pirate nicknames. Putting your real name on your own opinions these days is a no-no. We live in an age where spouting your own opinion can get you fired, especially if you’re a politician. If you’re a politician spouting your own opinion, they call it “going off-script.”
The commenters on the Memphis Flyer don’t have scripts. They have conviction, though (possibly multiple convictions) and they’re not afraid to call names, put people in their places and offer up the sort of quick fixes for What’s Wrong With the World that are usually only heard around campfires after the campers have had enough beer for rational World Saving and can’t, for whatever reason, get themselves onto Overnight Call-In Radio.
To step back and be fair to the commenters, the Flyer is just asking for it. I mean, there’s the comment section right there asking for comments after all, and the paper is getting all this valuable free content out of the deal. Right? Some of these commenters, at least the couple of them that I’ve personally met, are thoughtful and concerned about their community. On the other hand, as with any collection of humans upon the Earth, a pecking order and a little bureaucracy evolves over time. It had become more difficult for New Voices to involve themselves. Partly because the Old Voices have given up discussing articles in favor of shouting down other commenters who aren’t observing the pecking order and acknowledging the obviously superior blather of the Alpha loonies.
So the editor’s weekly emails to me have become slightly more glum, miffed and baffled as the years have rolled by. He’s forced to discuss commenters by name (jolly pirate nickname) and say that we’re doing something by that really arrogant guy again as it’s the least meaningless thing in an outrageous din of name-calling and back-biting. Some of the latest comments I’ve illustrated have been entertaining, but not exactly related to the article. At all. Doesn’t matter. The visuals are crazy, man. Crazy.
