CSotD: Happy 3,000th

This is not only a funny comic, but the 3,000th Sheldon strip. Dave Kellett has been doing this very literate, very funny web comic since 1999 and has built it up to the point where he makes a living from his work, which is, after all, the material goal of spending all that time at the drawing board.

I say "material goal" because there are plenty of cartoonists — syndicated and web — who haven't been able to quit their day jobs but who soldier on because cartooning is what they do, and the measure of an artist is not how well the work pays.

But it's nice when someone whose work you like manages to pull off that little trick. And I like Dave's work in large part because it appears to be aimed at a niche audience of people who know the derivation of "salad days" and perhaps have gotten through Melville only reluctantly.

Dave Kellett is very well educated, a claim I have no reluctance to make, since he and I went to school together at different times.

At my 20th reunion, I met some undergrads who were very curious about how the place had been during those Sixties they'd heard so much about, and I ended up doing a sort of historical column de-mystifying the era. This meant that, for a year, I had a subscription to the school paper, in which Dave had a cartoon strip, "The Four Food Groups of the Apocalypse," which rose well above the norm for college strips.

Here's an example of what came before he graduated and launched Sheldon: