I really enjoy comic strips. You can guess, right? And when I was a kid, you could get these trade-paperback collections of the comics for, like, 50 cents. They were in newsstands everywhere. I usually would spend all the time my mother was shopping for groceries in the ‘magazine’ aisle, looking over all the comic strip collection books mixed in with the novels there. You could always count on Peanuts books, and Dennis the Menace. Most of the time, there were BC books, Wizard of Id, Family Circus, Miss Peach, Momma… that kind of thing. And the MAD collections. I’d beg mom to buy me one. Or two. Now, you’re thinking, “50 cents! Why not buy a box of them? Comic strip collection books are, like, twelve to twenty bucks these days!” What you’re forgetting is that fifty cents back in the early 1970s was more than you wanted to pay for much of anything. On the other hand, I wasn’t asking for a bunch of candy. Anyhow, the way I remember it, I got a new book more often than not. I hope mom wasn’t skipping her weekly purchase of, I dunno, eggs or aluminum foil to afford a novel-sized collection of Charlie Brown cartoons on paper so cheap and brittle you’re lucky it didn’t burst into flame from body heat.
Hang on. I had a point…
Oh, yeah, the point is that now I occasionally do stuff like this BC… painting. Painting? Yeah, I guess that’s what you’d call it. It’s watercolor and chalk and conte crayon on rawhide stretched in a huge cedar frame. Weighs a ton. Currently, it’s on display at IONS: a Geek Gallery.
Yeah, there’s an art gallery for comics/comic strip/sci-fi/fantasy/gamer enthusiasts. Here in Memphis. Come visit.
It looks really good, Greg. Nice job!
And, if things go the way I think they might, there could be a possibility of my being able to get to Memphis next year. I’ll see what happens then.
Next year is shaping up pretty good, then! You might come here, and the National Cartoonist Society is coming here on Memorial Day Weekend! If you’re here around at the same time, you get to meet a heaping pile of cartoonists. The trick is to hang around the bars closest to the hotel where the convention is going on.
Bars is good. Love hanging around in the bars. Always a good hanging around place to be hanging around in. Bars.