I spent a while today whipping up quick loose doodles of one of my characters for my WIP, and ended up with one that was so "sloppy" that I got the shape of the head all wrong….

The first issue of The Mundane Adventures of Dishman was released in August 1985.



Since then, it has had a modest and very spotty publication history, and yet is still remembered in an obscure corner of comics readership. Big thank you to everyone who has been on his side all this time!

pencil doodles which are studies of shoes from Ponytail, an early-60s comic strip panel by Lee Holley. Not sure I can explain why, but I really dig the way Holley drew shoes in his strip then. [Among cartoonists, there are a lot of Jack Davis shoe fans, but for me Lee Holley is my Shoe Guy®!]

Long ago I read that the only truly American artforms are jazz, comic books, and rock-and-roll. [The accuracy of all of those claims is easily disputed, but let's leave that aside for the time being so I can make my wanky statement about them]:

I got thinking about this and realized that all these artforms share a common element. Even if we break down jazz into its three major waves [Dixieland, swing, and bebop], the same process always took place.

When these artforms first emerged, all of them were originally dismissed as garbage for kids, the poor, and the ignorant. It took years for each of them to achieve some measure of artistic credibility, i.e., acceptance by well-to-do whites. I just find the consistency of this sort of reaction to creativity to be kinda intriguing.

I autographed 115 copies of my new book for people who ordered signed ones.

For the past few days, I've been devoting my drawing time to doing studies of Dik Browne's work on Hi & Lois. And, as so often happens when I spend any time studying Browne, I come away with renewed awe at his genius. The only reason I rank Bill Watterson higher as a cartoonist is because of Watterson's peerless writing, so that he is The Total Package of cartoonists. But if we are just talking cartoon art, then no one beats Dik Browne.



Before he began working in syndicated comic strips, Browne had a thriving career in advertising art [he designed the classic 50s overhaul of the Campbell's Kids]. But Mort Walker hired Browne to tackle the art for Hi & Lois, where he very deliberately modelled his work on Walker's style, a unique and groundbreaking style that would take its classic shape in early-60s Beetle Bailey. Walker's style was extremely simple and open, meaning that it could still look good when significantly shrunk [a prime consideration in newspaper strips]. It was also cute and expressive and appealing, easy to read and easy to grasp.

Browne essentially perfected this style by adding a sense of grace and beauty to pristine immaculate economical linework, along with his mastery of cute. (Off the top of my head, the only cartoonists I can think of whose kids can equal his in cuteness would be Warren Kremer and Gene Hazelton.) His H&L work captures the formica ideal of postwar suburban America like no one else.

getting it right

Today I was working on upcoming strips of my new comic strip “series” Not That Magic: Tales of Vernor Magus... and I drew a couple of panels that really worked for me, I mean uncommonly well. So much so, that I want to post them here and brag about them.



When I look at these drawings, I see characters who are natural and alive and convincing, despite the stripped-down cartooniness of how they are rendered. Not saying they are perfect, but they are Plenty Good Enough®. I am grateful for times like this, few and far between, when I feel Plenty Good Enough®.

Although I am best known for creating comic books, and my love affair with them goes back decades, comic strips [the ones that appeared daily in newspapers] have also been important to me just as long. Before I started buying comic books with any regularity, I was reading the funnies every day. And it was while I was reading a comic strip that I had my epiphany and realized that I wanted to be a cartoonist.

( my history with comic strips )