Annette

Another idea submitted by my brother Rob. You have to go way back to the 1950s to get this, so you youngsters talk amongst yourselves or google it. For the "Mickey Mouse Club" purist, I have included a black-and-white version of the cartoon because the original version of the show predated color TV. You can check out clips of it on YouTube if you feel like you need a Mousekefix.

Bowling pins

Water we doing?

We Southern Californians are now in the midst of the long stretch of time when we get very little rainfall, so...

My First Caricature

Now for something a little different. I'm studying caricature drawing. Well, let's just say studying caricature drawing is on my agenda, because I'm only one chapter into Tom Richmond's "The Mad Art of Caricature!" I wanted to test my totally untrained skill before I drill too deeply into the subject, just so I have a point of comparison. So, this morning, I drew this. It is a caricature of me attempting to draw a caricature of a stick figure who is rapidly growing weary of posing for the drawing. My drawing is bad, because it just is. But it's dripping with story-telling quality because you can almost picture the stick figure getting even more annoyed, perhaps highly agitated, after he takes a gander at that drawing. Hey, you have to start somewhere. And why not start with the masters? Mr. Richmond just won the Reuben award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, and he does some brilliant work for Mad Magazine. This? This doesn't even deserve to be associated with Tom's work, I admit it.

The poverty lion

If you think a cartoonist's life is sketchy, try living below the poverty lion.

The little-known origin of 1950s doo-wop

Who knew?!

Was this really Nes-cessary?

This is one of the stupidest puns I ever spent too much time with. But I gotta post it sometime, so let's get it out of the way. You have to like puns better than you like breathing if you expect to enjoy this one. You might not even get it. The setting sort of reminds me of Wells Park in El Cajon, because of its basically flat greenery with nondescript, boring apartments and houses in the background. So El Cajon. In an unrelated matter, a check of my blog traffic shows that I have a very, very small handful of page views originating from Russia and Malaysia. Interesting. If you're ever in those countries and you happen to see one of my cartoons in an art bin, on a greeting card or on a T-shirt at some streetside market or some such, it's probably stolen off the Internet. Do me a favor and go up to the vendor, stick your face right in front of his/hers and shout at the top of your lungs in the most sarcastic tone you can muster, "YOU'RE WELCOME!"