Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: A couple of short takes, and two long ones

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Mike Peterson Published: July 16, 2013 1 minute 2 comments

After yesterday's conceptual extravaganza, I'm resting my brain, with the help of this silly "The Flying McCoys" panel.

One of the questions anyone in the arts faces is "Where do you get your ideas?"

There's no real answer to that, because the really complex ideas start and build and grow … but the dumb ones, at least in my experience, just pop in there and the real question isn't where they come from but how do you get in the habit of writing them down?

I'm a freaking genius in the shower or when I'm walking the dog. I don't turn into a moron until I'm within a few inches of a keyboard. 

Which could readily lead to the crack "Jerry Scott has forgotten more gags than you'll ever come up with," and I'm sure that's true but the point is, so have I.

Jerry is the writer for both Baby Blues and Zits and he's also a very funny interview and I don't know where this gag came from, but I was just saying to someone that the cicadas seem to be a bigger deal south of here, because I haven't been aware of them but other folks appear to be swarmed, literally.

Hilary Price of Rhymes with Orange only lives about an hour and a half south of me and can't be that bedeviled by the little bugs and yet here is a cicada joke. She must have been doing some traveling.

Oddly enough, that song was first recorded by the Kingston Trio for their "Goin' Places" album in 1961, which was not a cicada year, but the next year, which was, I spent the summer in a cabin at camp with a counselor obsessed with the Trio and so I had eight weeks of daily "rest hours" featuring their music, including "Goin' Places." 

Okay, that wasn't an "oddly enough" connection. That was an "utterly irrelevant" one.

But I can save it: When Hilary is out walking her dog and comes up with an idea, she writes it on her hand. 

There — that's the sort of insider knowledge about cartooning you won't get just anywhere!

Meanwhile, back at the frankenpine

Next month, I'll be going to reunion weekend at my old high school in the Adirondacks, and, if you swap the cacti for pine trees and the sand for underbrush, today's Non Sequitur is a pretty good picture of the last stop before the Adirondacks, or, it was until last week.

Going home used to not only be a break from traffic and noise and all that, but also a loosening of the electronic leash. No cell phone coverage and what Internet access you could find involved dial-up. 

This made for very restful vacations but every once in a while, a tourist would die on the roadside and so the Adirondack Park Agency unclenched. Last fall, residents finally got cable access and last week they flipped the switch on a cell tower in my home town.

No 2G, 3G or 4G within 40 or 50 miles though. If you go, you'd still better be prepared to rough it!

At greater length:

Sarah Laing has posted one of her multi-panel reflections of which this is only the opening volley, so go here and read the rest.

I won't mention resting my poor brain after yesterday's post in front of her, because she's resting her brain after publishing a novel, and it's pretty clear from this cartoon that her brain at rest is still churning pretty well.

I will mention that I remember little bookstores in which you could ask people for help and they would actually be able to provide some. The Chinook Bookshop in Colorado Springs had a small but specialized staff, and you knew that, for kids books, you'd ask Judy, for poetry and drama, Mark, and, if you were completely lost, you asked Monica, whose combination of knowledge and memory was such that you could say, "I forget the name, but it's about this guy … " and within a few words — whether the book had been published last week, six months ago or in the previous century — she'd lead you to the spot on the shelf.

I would note parenthetically that most of those places were killed by the chains, not by the Internet. And my experience at the chains is that asking someone there to track down a book whose title you've forgotten is about as fruitful as telling the person at McDonald's you'd like it medium-rare.

Which in turn leads me to note parenthetically that Auckland sounds like a pretty groovy place. I'd like to go have a look, but the impracticality of that is probably what keeps it special.

In other news of talented women whose work you need to go read because I'm only featuring the first piece in something longer, Jen Sorensen has been awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for editorial cartooning, based in part on this longer-than-her-usual piece which you should go read the rest of.

When she announced this on Facebook yesterday, I joked that she should start a Kickstarter campaign to publish a book and offer the bust of RFK as a prize for one of the high contributions.

I was only kidding about her giving away the bust, but I'd fer shure support a Jen Sorensen Kickstarter.

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.