Hubris Comics

First- Happy Birthday to my brother!  His gift, as is traditional with us, will be stupidly late, so it’s important to wish him a Happy Birthday in a timely fashion.  Happy Birthday, Jeff!  He’s written another article for this site (By all means, go back and read the stories and product reviews he’s written.  Most of them are hysterical, and all of them are entertaining.) about a visit to a trampoline place that I haven’t posted yet, and he’s tried to send photos of some kind of skateboard adventure, but I’ve never managed to sort out what’s wrong with my attempts to receive them.

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Second-

This is one of those cartoons that only come along so often.  Walt Kelly, who created POGO comic strips, was supposed to have gotten into a conversation about comic panels that were all, or almost completely, black.  Such a thing was supposed to speed a cartoonist along to hit deadlines when crunch time was REALLY upon them.  What Kelly said was that it actually took longer to write such a cartoon than usual, and thus you didn’t actually save any time at all.

I heard this story when I, as a young aspiring cartoonist, spent all night in the car with a bunch of friends going to a Joe Kubert School seminar at a university seven hours from my home town.  As many of the aspirants in the car worked at the Mall airbrushing T-shirts, we didn’t get on the road until very late at night, and there was a time change between home and the university.  What this amounts to is that we arrived with time to eat breakfast, drink something caffeinated, then go straight into the classes which would last all day. That night, of course, we were expected to stay up and do the homework.

You don’t do your best work when you’ve been up for thirty six or so hours so far. Well, I don’t, at least.  My first year at the seminar, I was in a group doing comic strips, thank heavens.  We had to complete two by classtime the next morning.  One of mine (the final one that night) had three panels.  Two were completely black, except for a word balloon in the final panel, containing the punchline which explained the blackness and the personalities of the two characters very neatly.  I was congratulated by Mr. Kubert himself, who was perfectly aware that I was one of the Memphis crowd who were working on no sleep.  He said it was funny, useful, and he told us the Walt Kelly story.