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.
My brother and I (he gets mentioned a lot in these posts. I wish my life was more like his. You do, too, and the more you read these posts and his own, the more you’ll see why.) went mountain biking outside of Moab on my last birthday. It was very cool. You know those trips you make and then you get home and you think “I need to think of a way to move there. That place is great!” Moab is definitely on that list. Not as high as, maybe, Jackson Hole, but high on the list.
Anyhow, as usual, I wish I had pushed myself when we were riding. I had fun, but I didn’t go out there and leave it all on the slickrock, you know? I slowed down, and I got nervous, and I thought to myself “I better be careful. I could break a leg out here.” I never even went over the handlebars, which I do around home a lot more than I should. Heck, I did it yesterday.
So here’s your advice for the day. When you do something new or in an out-of-the-usual place, throw a little more of yourself in there. Cut loose a bit. Later, you’ll look back and be glad. Like the Tshirt says, “Bones knit, scabs heal, and chicks dig scars.” I’m not saying you should crack your head for a souvenir of a good adventure, but you might take home some road rash to remember it by.
I will doubtless never be forgiven by people who know how to treat trees properly, but here it is:
When I first moved into the house I’m in now, I was mighty impressed by the big ol’ pecan tree out back. It’s lowest limbs were too high for good climbing, but it’s a fine tree nonetheless. If you poison all the squirrels (Now I’m in trouble with the people who know how to treat squirrels properly) then you and your family can actually have pecans to eat. It provides wonderful shade, thus keeping down the utility bills.
On the downside, pecan trees are brittle things and it drops limbs without provocation. In a high wind, it’s downright murderous, and I worry that one day, it’ll come visit me in the studio personally, taking a lot of roof and things with it.
But then, it provided me with a lot of fun, too. I put handholds on it. Y’know, those climbing holds you’re supposed to use on climbing walls? Those. I scraped some smooth places in the poor ol’ tree and mounted these holds. It then wasn’t just a tree, it was a boulder. (for those of you who don’t do crazy stuff with handholds- it’s climbing if you’re going up, it’s ‘bouldering’ if you’re more or less going sideways) So I had much fun for a while going round and round my tree. I found clever little ways of doing it that I was fond of. My brother, who really IS a climber, showed me a couple of even cooler things (Like pretty much starting from a lying-down position and going up and around. Tough, it was) and I got to the point where I could circle the tree maybe three times before I had to give up with wobbly arms.
I never did do what I wanted to- start a daily regime of circling the tree first thing in the morning to keep in shape. Ah, well, the best laid plans of mice and men gang oft aglée… or something like that.
Eventually, the tree started healing and the holds are no longer even remotely safe to use. I took a few of them off so the kids wouldn’t come crashing off the tree.
So one day, maybe I’ll set up something else, but you know what was the best part of handholds on the tree? Most people that saw them assumed they were for climbing up the tree. and so they’d go up a few feet and then look down and say “I can’t get any farther. What do I do?” And you’d tell them “Go around.” and they would, then they’d say “I’m back where I started. Now what?” to which the answer was, of course, “Go around again.” Then they’d get upset and quit. I don’t know what the hell they thought was up in the tree that they’d rather keep going up, but that’s people for you.
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P.S. See, it’s always worth the time to check out the comments. James Riendeau posted a link to this video:
#3 in the visit to his origins- Hubris does what is probably a really old gag to Fly Fishermen. I’m sorry. I bought a book about Fly Fishing. I even know a guy who was a fly-fishing guide. Did I avail myself of the good references? Nah. I was cranking out stuff to show the syndicate how versatile Hubris could be. Look! Look! It’s not all about skateboards and kayaks! Sometimes it’s about the kind of sports that newspaper readers fancy for themselves, too!
Bah.
Anyhow, at least I skipped over doing gags about fishing FOR flies, or some of the other truly rudimentary things that other beginners might toss in. I like the fact that Doug the Dog is busy tying flies. I’ve always liked to have little gags within gags like that, when possible.
#2 in our Dig Through The Archive. Pretentiousness reigns here at HubrisComics. I’ve only been at this for a year, and I’m subjecting you to a retrospective. Feel free to look down on me. Pah. I’m at the Skatepark right now, ‘Collecting’ new material. Look down ALL YOU LIKE. I’m probably lying in a heap, and looking down on me is all that’s possible.
Anyhow, if you’ve been reading Hubris at all, and haven’t damaged your short-term memory, then you might just recognize this cartoon. I’ve already looted the concept for an updated version. The reason for that is simple. How the heck was I supposed to know I was going to pull this stunt after only a year? When I first decided to do this site, I figured I had aaaalllmost a year’s worth of material if I ran three cartoons a week, and by that time, I’d have figured out whether or not to keep it up. As it turns out, some of the original strips no longer fitted the mood of the newer ones. I’ve been drawing a lot more new material than I thought I would be. Some of the early cartoons held up, though. And this is one I decided was worth the time and effort to keep. Click on this for the re-drawn version, in case you missed it or if you want to see how my art style has degraded over the years.
Some of you have found your way to Hubris by way of Dave Kellett’s DRIVE strip (it’s great, isn’t it?) because of me entering Dave’s DRIVE poster contest.
For those of you who didn’t see that, here’s the poster design I did and the alternate that I like better. The humor in the alternate is, I think, better suited to the spirit of the strip, but that might be something I’m bringing to it myself. I be likin’ the snark.
Just E-Mail Michael Cavna at comicriffs@washpost.com –something like “I really like Hubris and maybe a couple of others but mostly Hubris at http://hubriscomics.com is the very best. Woo!”
Or you can go HERE and see the article and register/log in and leave comments and all that heavy duty stuff. Either way. I appreciate ya. More than I can say and not get all mushy. You know.
Hey. I’m slacking for a while because this site’s a year old. Happy Birthday. In honor of my li’l experiment going for a year, I’m running the old original black & white strips I did when Hubris was first conceived.
This is the first Hubris cartoon, as they ran on Tribune Media’s Early ‘Here’s-The-New-Guys’ website. It was kinda like GoComics.com’s Comics Sherpa except we didn’t have to pay. In fact, there my have been some small amount of money paid to us- I can’t recall now. Not that or exactly what the name of the site was…It’s one of those maddening things. I thought I’d never forget it, it was so exciting, but now I can’t even find the backup discs that had the name saved. It was only 11 years ago or so. Anyhow. Several of us got space on this site and people could go to it and see what they liked and make comments. It was long before Facebook, but it was all very chummy and we all hoped we were on our way to fame and fortune with our funnies. That was in, I think, 2000. Tribune Media is gone. The web has taken over the world, and the strip then known as ‘Because It’s There’ is now a webcomic called ‘Hubris’.
The local police have to go by the new skatepark and enforce the helmet law. I’m sure the police aren’t thrilled about having to listen to a bunch of teens and twentysomethings swear and moan and wheedle. And I’m sure the teens and twentysomethings would rather not have to moan and wheedle. They seem to like the swearing, though there’s less of that than most people figure there is at a skatepark.
Bottom line? You can’t make someone whose biology is dumping hormones into his bloodstream stand still and do something that’s going to endanger his place in the sociological pecking order. Wearing a helmet is not cool. In other words. Rebelliousness, recklessness and Cool are far more important than whether your Mom is going to sue the city if you crack your skull. Seriously, 99% of skaters aren’t going to crack their skulls, but there will be that one kid who does. And we’re going to have to watch his mom- with tears and dollar signs in her eyes- explain how the city was remiss and now little (20 year old) Darnault (his friends called him ‘Hump’) can’t feed himself and she ain’t gonna do it and who gon’ pay for the nursing home?
On the upside, the last time we were at the skatepark and the cops announced that you couldn’t skate without a helmet, my son got to skate the big bowl for nearly ten minutes solid- him being one of the, I guess, five people who had a helmet on to start with. It took ten whole minutes for the older kids to quit complaining at the cops, go get their helmets, swallow their pride (the hardest part of the ordeal), and put on their helmets to resume skating. Couple of guys had that Laaaaast little bit of rebelliousness they had to fly, so they wore their helmets…gasp… without strapping them on. Means they had to skate with one hand absurdly holding the tops of their heads. Looked dumber than dirt, but at least they didn’t have to strap up the helmets. That would have been… I dunno, something harsh on them.
How much more quickly would they have put on headgear if the headgear itself proclaimed how much they disdained it?
I should have custom helmets made to sell out there. Really.
Hey, I’m gonna run another brand new Hubris cartoon tomorrow, then next week the comic strips are all going to be the original material the syndicates received years ago. I’m using the 1 year anniversary of this website as an excuse to indulge my nostalgia for the beginnin’s of Hubris. I’ll intersperse new strips in the ol’ black and white nostalgia bits, and show off other stuff every day, so remember: Scroll Down, comment, enjoy, VoteHubris, Google+ him, and GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY.
