CSotD: Today’s message is being sent by partial post
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I always hope that people are following at least some of the links here, sometimes because I link to something cool or funny in the way of additional commentary, but first and foremost because I link to the various featured artists and (A) I hope to turn people on to new stuff and (B) it's payback for the fair use of their work here.
I've had a couple of positive comments here lately about the quality of my links, which makes me hopeful, but, by the same token, I've also had some "likes" over at Facebook that suggest that some people think the icons I post there are the entire point and never click through to the actual blog, much less to anything linked here. Which makes me think that you can't win them all.
But you've made it here, so welcome to a day of partial posts in which you have to follow the links or, at best, you will miss out on the fun and, at worst, you will have no idea what's going on.
Let's start with the sublime and work our way through the scale from there. (That was a test.)
I love Sarah Laing's work and was delighted when she recently wrapped up a major project and got back to cartooning on her blog, which she does by creating several of these large-format pieces and putting them together. So this is only a portion of her commentary and you have to hit that link to go read the rest.
Ethnic/Cultural Speculation: I think maybe she's the only Kiwi woman I know, and I only know her through her blog. But I've known quite a few Canadian women, whom I find to have, as a group, a sort of fundamentally sensible nature that makes me very comfortable around them.
So maybe women in New Zealand are like that, too, or maybe Sarah is simply a misplaced Canadian.
Whatever the case, I find stopping by her blog to be a quietly fulfilling pleasure and suspect that you will, too.
However, on the off-chance that quiet, fundamentally sensible pleasure isn't the sensation you're looking for, we also have:
This is from Medium Large, the blog of Francesco Marciuliano, whom I have featured here enough times that I can now spell "Marciuliano," a much under-valued skill.
Ces has turned "Sally Forth" from a rather bland domestic strip into something that, if it ever becomes a movie, will have to star Bryan Cranston as Ted and god knows what winsome, introspective child star will play Hilary but a few years later she'll be drunk and incarcerated and in all the tabloids, poor thing.
His blog, Medium Large, is where he goes to be weird and tasteless, which, if you've been keeping up with his work at Sally Forth, is quite a statement. He's the king of "I really shouldn't be laughing at this" humor, and it's good to be king, because his book of cat poetry has become a best seller, and actually I think his blog is stupid and juvenile but he's now become a good person to suck up to.
The current Medium Large links back to a piece he did for smosh about weird animals, and he captured me with the above example because I've got a Kevin Bacon thing going with the Ringling Brothers unicorn.
I stopped subscribing to "Electric Company" magazine for my kids because they featured this surgical monstrosity as a "real" unicorn back when Ringling Brothers was touting it as such.
I had already noticed that the magazine was basically pimping for moviemakers and, now, circuses, and was annoyed that something I associated with PBS was so intent on turning my kids into trend-following consumers, but when this ostensibly "educational" magazine also became intent on turning them into delusional morons, I decided to let the subscription lapse.
But the game wasn't over, because it turned out a friend of my then-wife's was a friend of the self-described "warlock" who transplanted horn buds from the top corners of baby goats' heads to the middle of their foreheads and thereby created this faux-creature.
And we would go over to their house for dinner and weird conversations about their unicorn-creating warlock chum and about astrology and tarot and Stonehenge and Atlantis and suchlike, because, while he knew the unicorn was fake, he and his wife had a pretty marginal grasp on reality otherwise.
His wife, who was a non-metaphorical witch, was absolutely gorgeous but her eyes didn't seem to quite focus and I was never sure whether the issue was optimetric or parapsychological, but she had stepped over the line that separates Morticia from Vampira and trust me when I tell you that what is diverting when you read it at Medium Large is not really all that amusing when you encounter it in real life.
And the rest of Ces's roundup of fictional animals includes the jackalope, which is a favorite of mine because it reminds me of stopping at a diner in Wyoming with some buddies on the way home from Yellowstone in 1970. There were jackalope heads on plaques for sale and we started talking to the proprietor about them and about midway through this jocular conversation three of us realized our fourth was falling for the whole thing.
So, being his friends, we joined the diner owner in feeding into his gullibility and then made fun of him all the way back to Boulder.
Good times.
Finally, today is Free Comic Book Day, when we all get to go to our local comics store and remember why we never go to the comics store. Your mileage may vary and I hope it does, because our local store was, I think, founded on a business model copied from the comic store guy on the Simpsons, or maybe the gaming store guy from Cloak & Dagger.
Which is to say that I go each year and pick up the samples, but then, if I want any more, I have to buy them on line because, while the store offers all these creative, fascinating free comics once a year, the rest of the time, it only stocks Marvel comics and Magic the Gathering cards and toys.
Given that the Center for Cartoon Studies is less than two miles away, this is a level of not-getting-it that boggles the mind.
And that's the segue to the work of a guy who definitely gets it, including when it comes to Free Comic Book Day. Here's one of several entries on the topic currently on his blog, and it's not even his favorite, so click the link and see the rest.
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