Remember your first extreme sport? Jumping into what seemed to be huuuuuge piles of leaves in the yard? The kid who did the backflips usually won, til your parents spotted it and said it was too dangerous to keep fooling around like that. Today, there’s probably some company making pads and headgear for jumping into leaf piles.
Okay, I’ve got a couple more of the old originals, but I’ll intersperse them with new stuff. Mostly ’cause even I’m tired of seeing the black and white. So if you missed the bright colors yesterday, click back and check it out. And of course, more brightly colored fun tomorrow.
This cartoon has a weird history. I did a version that went to the syndicates, and then cleaned it up a little and it ran, as has been mentioned before, on Tribune Media’s Comicsedge website for up-and-coming talent. A month and a half later, the words appeared nearly verbatim in a ‘Shoe’ cartoon.
Now, I’m not saying that some unscrupulous freelance comics writer was trolling ComicsEdge, writing down gags and then selling them as his own work to big strips. I’m not saying that at all. If you wanted to go say that, well, that’s up to you. If you’re wondering why I’m not accusing the guys who do ‘Shoe’ directly, it’s because I really respect them. I don’t expect them to grill freelance writers to make sure the gags they’re buying are original.
There’s another point, too, that this is a pretty broad gag. It could have been used in the Burns & Allen comedy show on radio or television for all I know. It’s got the look and the feel of something that anyone could have come up with.
ON THE OTHER HAND… another one of my ‘Because It’s There’ cartoons started off “You rode your mountain board off the roof? What were you thinking?”… And a short time after the club soda gag ran on ‘Shoe’ they ran a gag that started “You rode your skateboard off the roof? What were you thinking?” The proximity and wording makes me suspicious, even though the punchlines didn’t match.
Not that there’s anything to be done, of course. The newspapers and interwebs are FULL of cartoons, and have been for years and years. Multiply any cartoon by the number of times it runs in a year (365 for syndicated strips like The Buckets), then multiply that by the number of cartoons you read, and then multiply again for all the hundreds of cartoons you’ve never seen and never even heard of and you get a number of jokes written and drawn over the past ten decades that is truly (not euphemistically) awesome and staggering to the mind. And more being done every day. Like this one, that rehashes a gag I did on ComicsEdge and then ran in ‘Shoe’ and has been resurrected here on Hubriscomics.
So, if you once saw this gag on M*A*S*H or Leave It To Beaver or The Banana Splits, well… welcome it back to life for a moment. Mark it down. It’ll probably turn up somewhere else in a month or so. Just hope it’s not in ‘Shoe’.
Back to the Nostalgia Run! Er… Climb. I like this one. Maybe I should have resurrected it for new art and color. Maybe I will, years from now, when none of you guys remember having read it. I’m sneaky that way.
I hope some of you are saying “What’s this? An update on a day OTHER than M-W-F! Oh, goody! And I hope some are saying “Hey! It’s new cartoons instead of the Flashback stuff we’ve been getting.”
I hope you guys are saying that because it means you know your way around Hubriscomics.com.
And remember the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s motto: “Share and Enjoy”. Kudos to ya if you know the book I’m referencing there. Now go get you some bacon and play!
Were you sick and tired of Black & White comics? Me, too. This is still one of the old original strips that I’ve trotted out, but I colorized it for us.
I like the humor, but I’ve been told it might be too oblique. I don’t recall why I chose to show a mountainside in each panel- maybe to show that they were stalled out and give the feeling that they needed to get moving. Maybe I was trying to blast through a lot of ideas and this one lent itself to a static image better than others. Maybe I was trying to give an impression of isolation on a rock face.
Or maybe it’s what you’re thinking and I was too young and impatient to do something with exciting visuals. I do remember back then being shocked at how much time and effort went into the communicative elements of every… single… panel. I was probably grateful to just draw one and then cut and paste (real cutting and real pasting… with paste) the next two.
This is one of the early Because It’s There cartoons that I haven’t updated and colored. That’s because the dynamic of the relationship between Hubris and Kara changed as I was writing. Hubris is no longer the sort of character who’d balk at the idea of actually, physically climbing the highest mountain for Kara. More likely, he’d insist on it while she said they didn’t have time to do it, so pick something else to do this weekend, like a movie or… another trail run, I think.
What do you think? Should Hubris be less reckless and more romantic-minded? Feel free to share. There’s a comment section, and there’s always the ‘contact’ and ’email’ buttons.
And as always, thanks for reading. The nostalgia trip will be over soon enough and we’ll be looking at fatter lines and colors.
For anyone who has stumbled across Hubris lately (feel free to do the StumbleUpon thing there to the right of your screen) I wanted to point out that Hubris usually isn’t Black & White. We’re doing nostalgia time just now. The color returns soon. Just like in The Wizard Of Oz or something.
Early on, y’see, around the ancient year 2000, I was told that at least one syndicate was looking for an outdoor sports comic strip. I was told this because a syndicated cartoonist saw my suburban covered in stickers and filled with bicycles and skateboards, and with kayaks strapped atop.
Turns out he was only partially informed. ‘Outdoor sports’ to many people means huntin’ and fishin’ and that’s what the syndicate apparently had in mind. Oops.
Anyhow, I poured a lot of time and attention into ‘Because It’s There’ and got, as has been stated before, onto Tribune Media’s ‘Here’s the New Guys-whattaya think’ website, and got some little editorial attention from one syndicate. Amy Lago, bless her, gave me a lot of advice about it. I eventually had to put more of my time into earning my living (advertising cartoons and the art for a syndicated strip called The Buckets, y’see) that I had to shelve ‘Because It’s There’.
With the advent and subsequent boom of Webcomics, I thought I might try Hubris out online. Then I put that off for years.
Now we’ve been here for a year, and you’re reading this. Pretty cool. Thanks very much for being here!
Now, if it suits you- please slip over to the right hand side of the screen to VoteHubris, do all that Google+ and twitter to your followers about Hubris and any other social media stuff you can think of.
And if you think it’s time for me to print Hubris Helmet stickers or anything, let me know. There’s comment sections under every article, and there’s an email button and a Contact button somewhere.
Hell, just troll around the site and see what you like. Bound to be something.
So we continue to delve into the old original ‘Because It’s There’ cartoons I didn’t redraw at some time in the past year. This cartoon pre-dates the current Dos Equis commercials where ‘The Most Interesting Man In The World’ is said to bowl overhand. I’m sure it doesn’t pre-date some other very fine humor where bowling overhand is mentioned. I think it’s a fine cartoon, though. And I think midnight neon bowling is a hoot, though I don’t know if it’s still a thing. The bowling alleys probably do something different to attract crowds these days. Nude bowling, for instance. Nude Midget Jell-O Bowling. I’m not saying that’s a good idea, I’m just saying that it might take a special effort to get a new crowd into a bowling alley during the years when it’s not high on the nation’s “This Is Cool” list.
As for any interesting things about the comic strip itself- I’ve already explained the title… The linework is different because at the time I was loving this great new ballpoint pen, and was using it to draw all the Hubris cartoons. It’s weird how much the tool forces the look of the art. Anyhow, they don’t make that pen any more. One more reason I almost always default to using a brush if I think the project is going to last a while. Though I wonder how much longer anyone will be able to get a nice Raphael or Windsor-Newton Kolinsky Sable watercolor brush for drawing with. Since the digital age hit us, real art supplies are slowly disappearing to be replaced in many cases by office supplies. I need a sign that says “SAVE THE KOLINSKY SABLE – FOR BRUSHES”.
Also, Hubris had not yet acquired his chin in this cartoon.
Also also, he’s playing a very, very old gameboy.
So here we are with the original Basic Premise for Hubris. The name of the comic strip and the TV show Hubris hosted was to be ‘Because It’s There’. “Because It’s There” was the famous answer George Lee Mallory gave when asked why the heck he wanted to climb Mount Everest. I thought it was a pretty good excuse to do most anything outdoors. A nice syndicate editor told me to quit fooling around and use the name ‘Hubris’ instead. And who am I to ignore a good editor?
All through the original strips, Hubris’ name was painfully obvious. He was big and blustery and Doug The Dog (or Earl, in a lot of the first strips. Patrick McDowell’s ‘Mutts’ put a stop to me calling the dog ‘Earl’, because who wants to be accused of not being bright enough to avoid naming one of your characters the same as those in hotshot award-winning strips) had to pull his fat out of the fire on lots of occasions. As I wrote more and more strips and added more characters, Hubris’ character smoothed out to something more relatable. Still big and blustery, but not quite so blithely oblivious to his own shortcomings.
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