Cheesebo

I always see weird things when driving back from funerals. Maybe it’s because I’m in a contemplative state of mind and I’m just looking at the world in a different way, but I don’t think so. People die and I see weird things. The day my father died I had to stop the car because an ostrich was crossing the road.

This isn’t as bad as that, but it did make me just stare in wonderment.

Is that a good plug? Ok, the kids tell me I shouldn’t use the word “stupid”, but the title of the book is BookSmarts. If you’re smart, you’ll click here and immediately plop down 20 bucks before they’re gone.

Tom Racine has put together a collection of his comics and I’m just as excited to have it as any other highly anticipated book. True, I can’t purchase much these days. I have to really weigh what I buy and save my money for the things that are truly keepers.

This is one of the best strips I’ve read all year. I like simple gags as much as anybody, but Tom takes it a step further and actually makes you delve into whatever knowledge you have about fairy tales, movies, literature and more to truly appreciate the joke. In short, it’s smart humor.

I don’t want to give away jokes, but the secret behind Arthur removing the sword from the stone, Alice’s trips to places other than Wonderland, Edgar Allan Poe’s other career attempts, and fairly accurate portrayals of George Lucas’ state of mind literally had me howling with laughter.

I usually don’t howl, folks. No, what I did with these strips was read, pause, laugh, and then reread. The really great comics make me do that.

The only troubling part is that Tom describes himself as a mediocre cartoonist. If that’s true, then I’m in real trouble. In fact, a lot of us are in real trouble. Because it’s rare that great drawings are combined with such funny material. Usually a strip is lacking in one area or the other. This has it all.

If I seem like I’m giving too much praise, it’s because I get frustrated. I feel like it’s my duty to yell from the mountain top about good books. I visit a lot of bookstores, and the lousy quality of many items that manage to find themselves on a shelf for the casual browser can be depressing. Meanwhile, something as clever and well made as BookSmarts can go unnoticed.

Tom’s too busy and has too many diverse skills to make more cartoons, so this may be it for him. The competitive side of me should be happy, because I can’t compete with this, but I’ve never been able to be competitive when it comes to something I love. These are great, smart comics and I hope they stick around forever. I hope Tom’s the Herman Melville of comics and becomes assigned reading in college.

Thank you, Tom. A publisher could make a tidy profit by giving this wider distribution. Publishing something yourself is pretty time consuming and I’m very glad you did this.

Remember the old “Hooked On Phonics” commercial? “People judge you by the words you speak!” Well, I think I judge by adjectives.

Take “humdinger”. Wow, you really don’t hear that one anymore unless you’re watching old Andy Griffith reruns. But I like that word. “Man, you missed a humdinger of a time last night!” You just know the person is talking about an event where people had fun in a family friendly kind of way. It wasn’t the drunk and naked kind of fun. Nobody has a humdinger of a time at the Ozzy Osbourne concert, not even Andy Griffith.

Umptedoo. That doesn’t even show up in a Google search. How do you even spell umptedoo? “We haven’t seen her in umpteedo years!” I made the mistake of using that word in an office setting once. They all stared at me until somebody said, “Wow, you sound like my grandmother!”

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum. There’s the person who did go to the Ozzy Osbourne concert. They have about five adjectives and all of them are curse words. Those words are used to describe anything from a pink dress they’re purchasing for their daughter to the act of getting punched in the stomach.

I have no problem with curse words. Let’s demystify them. No biggie. However, you can immediately judge a person who meets you for the first time and uses a string of cussing. They obviously don’t care who you are. You could be deeply religious, a teacher who avoids cursing, or a person like me who saves the cursing for the people I love the most (kind of funny how that works).

I come from the school of thought that you kind of have to figure out who you’re talking to before you unleash the hounds, but there are many who have no perception of social boundaries. We make “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” signs for them or get them jobs in Hollywood. The Andy Griffith show has been off the air for a long time.

Of course, you can immediately peg a comic book geek by his adjectives. Maybe it depends on the era of the comic book geek. My era was filled with “Super”, “Spectacular”,  “Amazing” and pretty much anything Spider-Man did. Later on, post-Stephen if you will, “Awesome” was used until it was banned in some cities.

But more than the obvious hyperbole, I think comic book readers have better adjectives all around. They’re just more descriptive people. I could say the same about people who regularly read books, but comics go the extra mile to punch up language.

That’s why I firmly believe that if you’re quick enough you can think of a good insult without using average, everyday, “No Shirt, No Service” curse words. One of my favorites casts me in a bad light, but I’ll let it be known.

Years ago, my long-time girlfriend Candy (not my wife) was doing something that I thought was disgusting. It’s not worth mentioning what it was, because it might seem stupid to you and it was just a way she was eating her food. I blurted out that she was a “feces-eating dog”.

Her response was classic. “What??? What am I??” I, of course, backpedaled right through the wall. It quickly became a funny joke between us. So when we were dining with a group of people we didn’t know that well, she decided to tell the charming story of how Stephen called her a feces-eating dog.

The happy table was immediately soundless. Their heads just kind of fell into a shocked, blank slate and they turned to me at the same time. Candy was laughing. We never really hung out with them after that.

I guess that means that you can come up with insults without using curse words that are still impolite to use unless you know the people you’re around. Personally, I consider that a challenge.

I love ink on paper. I love putting ink on paper. I love looking at ink on paper. I even love zooming up very close to ink on paper that’s been scanned into Photoshop. There’s something about it that’s satisfying on a primitive, artistic level.

Also, throughout my life, I have loved doodling on styrofoam cups. The texture of ink on styrofoam just makes it cool for me. Plus, hey, it’s something to do while you’re sitting around with a cup of coffee. But what happens to the cup? It’s thrown away, leaving no record of its existence.

Well lo and behold, I made friends with Darrel Troxel and he started posting pictures of his styrofoam cup drawings. I thought “My god, there’s another person out there who recognizes the unique canvas of styrofoam cups!”

OK, so it’s goofy. It’s nerdy. It’s what I do.

When Darrel posted a pic of Claremont on a cup I was so excited that it didn’t even make sense. But my wife thought it was great, so she’s another one. That’s why we married. We’re alike in weird things.

I’ve suggested to Darrel that he start a styrofoam cup artwork website. I want to see what people are capable of drawing on a cup. Sure, it won’t be “People Of Walmart” successful, but some of us would appreciate it more.

My fondest hope is that when the aliens are excavating the remains of human existence, they will find the non-degradable cup in some landfill and think “Well, they couldn’t have been completely stupid, look at this cute drawing on the little cup!”

Follow Darrel @raydred on Twitter. Listen to his podcast (along with Thomas Clemmons): The Art Zen, which can be found at www.artzenpodcast.com and enjoy life.

Click on the Image To Enlarge

I’ve never asked for guest strips or have really understood them. I’ve always said, as a reader, that if a creator needs a break I will wait practically forever for them to get back to it (I’ve read a lot of independent comics, after all).

Anthony Naylor, of Tone Cartoons at www.tonecartoons.co.uk took the time to surprise me with a guest comic without any pleading on my part. I was a bit overwhelmed by this and had a goofy smile on my face for the rest of the night.

Now I get it, at least as a creator. There’s nothing more flattering than a cartoonist you respect drawing something you’ve created. My education is in animation, so I’ve drawn a lot from model sheets, but this is an entirely different experience.

Enjoy this, but, uh, don’t enjoy it so much that you don’t want me to do the strip anymore. And check out Anthony’s cartoons. There’s more than a few that I have permanently etched in my brain.

This is what happens when my daughter and stepdaughter are on Spring Break together. I really think Myah should go to film school.

I found these while clearing junk off my computer. Imagine the above drawings eight feet high and on the side of a building. They were used in some commercials, too.

Now, the reality behind those drawings is that I was given no time to make them. They were needed immediately and all I had was copy paper, a felt tip pen, a scanner and Photoshop.

It will never cease to amaze me that the stuff of mine that I spend a lot of time on never gets seen and the stuff I make very quickly winds up on the sides of buildings or in the paper. I think when I have a load of time to work on something, the mental blocks that sabotage a project have time to kick in.