CSotD: In the lane, snow is glistening … menacingly …
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I'm guessing the response older people had to today's Ziggy was not the one intended.
There was a time when we were kids that we were told not to eat snow, though, granted, probably not by the Surgeon General, and this was had nothing to do with eating the yellow snow, either.
It was back when we, and the Russians, had not yet agreed to test our atomic weapons underground. Word on the street was that snow flakes picked up fallout and that we therefore ought not to ingest them.
As I said, it wasn't coming from the Surgeon General hissownself, but I don't think it was simply kid-talk.
We had emerged from the "Oh boy! Atomic power is gonna fix everything!" euphoria and had entered what I guess you could call the Pandora phase of "What have we unleashed?"
It was about when we started producing books like "Alas Babylon" and adapting them for TV and the movies, and then building fallout shelters in our backyards which, I would venture to say, more of us talked about than ever actually did.
But the warnings about eating snow were out there before we were hip to the irony of telling your kids not to to eat the fallout while you held a smoldering Winston in your hand.
A generation late, I didn't burden my children with worries about such things. I simply raised them five miles from Cheyenne Mountain, which made fretting over post-nuclear life highly academic.
We weren't gonna just be toast: We'd be Welsh rarebit.
In those more sophisticated and knowledgable days, one of Reagan's experts told us that, in the event of a nuclear attack, we could rig our own fallout shelters by simply laying a door flat and then shoveling some dirt on it and climbing underneath.
Yeah, if it's one of these doors, maybe.
Anyway, you should only eat snow at night, so you can tell if it's glowing.
Randall Monroe swings to the other end of the dietary caution scale, and thereby summons up a much more recent memory.
I remember when "artisan" first became a thing, only people weren't sure of what it meant or how to spell it, so we had a raft of small-scale products claiming to be "artesian."
A form of wellness I wasn't sure I needed.
It was also about the time I was standing in the shower at a friend's house, using their shampoo, and first saw "This product has not been tested on animals" and thought it was a disclaimer so I wouldn't sue the company if my scalp began to blister.
And I've known city people who won't eat the wild berries in the woods because, well, god knows what might have happened to them, out there with no oversight. Bears might have peed on them or something.
But they prefer their eggs from free-range chickens, even though they're more expensive.
Or perhaps "because."
Certainly not because they know what an unsupervised chicken will eagerly put in its mouth.
Looking back
Joe Heller has created a large single-piece poster of his favorite cartoons from the past year. It's a little ungainly, but a fun lookback at a year which is getting a bad rap from most observers.
I suspect you might do better trying to access it from his own page, at least if you want to see them full size. Meanwhile, I'll keep an eye out for other cartoonists doing similar retrospectives.
I used to despise this time of year because we were required to do year end wrap ups, which actually meant "produce something we can run while all our sources are on holiday and we've got a bunch of holiday ads and need copy to surround them with."
It fit in with that familiar pattern of working twice as hard before you go on vacation so you can spend the first half of the break recovering, only I wasn't getting the time off.
(Note that Joe is also producing new material, so this isn't a cop-out on his part, though I hope he does take a little time off.)
Speaking of breaks in the action
Part of GoComics site re-design is that they're changing how they handle Sherpa, the site that hosts cartoons by amateurs.
That linked page is more of a "wait for the explanation" explanation, but the big news appears to be that, while they used to charge people to post their comics there, the service will now be free.
I'm not sure how that will shake out. I know that being on Sherpa is generally looked at like busking outside the theater, but, then, there are some pretty talented buskers and, if you go to Juste Pour Rire, the streets of Montreal are filled with buskers from around the world who I don't think just show up for the nickles and dimes tossed their way.
Which is to say that it's certainly possible to be discovered, and much more likely if you have your material out there than if you go the Emily Dickinson route and keep it for someone to publish after you have eaten snow and died.
Best advice from this corner is something I have heard attributed to Charles Schulz, which is that, if you want to be a cartoonist, you should begin by producing 365 strips over the course of a year.
Then throw them all out and start over, because, by then, you will have both mastered the pace required and also developed and matured both your artistic style and your delivery.
From what I've seen, both on Sherpa and on personally-curated websites, just the showing up every day part — or every MWF or whatever regular schedule you determine — would boost a lot of would-be cartoonists over a large hump many never manage to clear.
And that's just the ones who have gotten past the "sitting around talking about it" part, which is the largest, most insurmountable hump of all.
Here: Make this funny. Then do it again. And again. And again.
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.
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