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.
Like many of you, no doubt, I was raised in a reg’lar old ranch style house in what a friend of mine likes to call ‘Sheet Rock Hell’, but I like to recall with nostalgia.
Growing up in the sort of neighborhood filled for a generation or so with houses like that, there are occasionally, but not often, poison ivy plants growing at the backs of flower beds or under hedges. You learn “leaves of three, let it be” and all that.
Then you go on cub scout camping trips and find yourself hiking ankle deep in stuff that you’re suddenly and alarmedly told is poison ivy. (In my part of the U.S., there are rumors that poison oak and poison sumac exist, and we’re warned about them by books and magazines designed to, democratically, go all over the country. We might make fun of yankees, but we pity them for these other poison plants they have to deal with. Also, we pity them for having to live with the New York accents we have to hear on TV. Eek. Wouldn’t want to have to hear that nasal snarl every day of normal life. Better to hear the cottonmouthed slur of our own accents, yeah?) ((But I, as usual, digress))
Out in the woods, you have to look over the plants underfoot more carefully. A lone poison ivy plant next to a holly bush at the edge of a neatly trimmed lawn? Easy to spot. A poison ivy plant standing amongst a riot of other ground cover, or, God help you, trailing up the side of a tree and pretending to be a grapevine ripe for young Tarzans? Trickier to spot and avoid.
Which brings me to my point. Not that you’d snatch any of these plants off the ground and eat them, but here are all the three-leaves-in-a-cluster plant types that I found simply by walking four blocks north of my home. Granted, that took me past a home where the front lawn has been allowed to become a ‘wildflower’ yard (meaning the owner of the property is himself old, can’t pay to have the expensive ceramic roof tiles replaced, or to pay someone to resurrect a yard from which I once found a raccoon had tumbled out into the sidewalk, dead from something I don’t care to guess.) and also takes me along the back edge of the local zoo, where a strip of dirt has until recently been between two chainlink fences and has therefore run wild for as long as anyone cares to remember. The drifts of Fall leaves are, once or twice a year, blown out of there, but otherwise, it’s home to chipmunks, birds, squirrels, the occasional surprising and surprised duck, and sometimes chickens that have released themselves on their own recognizance from the ‘Once Upon A Farm’ coop which is the part of the zoo at its back edge.
Again, I have digressed. You probably expected that by now.
Here’s the leaves:
Not all of them are poison ivy. In fact, there are three sets of leave here that I might handle without gloves. On the other hand, why take chances? Can you reliably tell what’s what? I’m not sure I can, and it worries me.
So here’s the bigger question. What the heck did poison ivy evolve its properties to protect itself FROM?
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:
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