I don’t know about your city, but here in the tonier ‘hoods of DC, the Little Free Libraries are a big thing. Sounds really sweet and noble and grassrootsy mutual-aidy n’shit until you get a load of what’s actually in the goddamn things. It’s basically the kind of instantly-obsolete stuff you used to see stacked on the sidewalk in front of the fence in front of the house with a little post-it note reading “FREE” — old college textbooks, trendy disposable political tomes, pseudo-academic shartage by “public intellectuals”, cute trendy late ’00s millennial YA novels, trendy child-rearing stuff, trendy self-helpy shit, people unloading all the John Grisham and James Patterson novels they bought to read on the plane… Sure as hell didn’t see anyone giving away their copies of On The Road or To Have And Have Not or Sirens Of Titan or Ché Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries or anything, y’know…?

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Continue reading "Little Twee Library" »

…in which the spirit of Vincent visits my 19 year-old self, turns away even more utterly demoralized, and shoots himself again.

The technical part — learning the UI, how it integrated the Pencil, all that theory-of-operation stuff — was the easy part; I pretty much had the software down cold in 2 or 3 nights. Now the real work is starting, which actually learning how to freakin’ paint.

Since I “officially” retired from the design biz, Mrs. F has had to listen to me occasionally mumbling all dreamy about taking another whack at learning how to paint — y’know, like a proper painter — some 35, 40 years after leaving school.

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Continue reading "Sloppy Still Life" »

Setting up the new Mini and sorting out the Great Monitor Mystery was actually the fun, easy part; the real work started when it came time to start learning the software that would be replacing Adobe Creative Suite after 30+ years as an Illustrator and Photoshop ninja. I managed to faceplant a time or two on those proverbial stumbling blocks, but things ended up working out quite well, and I’m closer to getting back to producing cartoons than I thought I’d be at this point.

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Continue reading "It’s Martini Time!" »

A few weeks ago my “baby sister” (now 51) finally finished straightening out our late mother’s estate and got the house sold. The Sunday after we signed off on the sale, Sis and I met up out at Mom’s house to grab a last few things we wanted to save before the Salvation Army guys cleared the place out.

It turns out my sister had found and put aside for me a couple of boxes filled with old reprints of my high school and college newspaper cartoons and old studio class sketchbooks from my senior year of college. Among the sketchbooks was one nearly half full of old comic strips and cartoons I’d done for Outlaws, the old DC Yippie ‘zine, the summer after the notorious 1978 White House Smoke-In — work I thought had been lost forever.

I was surprised at how little I winced as I flipped through the sketchbooks. Granted, the gags are rather obscure and unarguably dated, but technically the work itself still actually holds up rather well.

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Continue reading "Blast From My Past: summer ‘78" »