Maybe CNN.com needs a new editor with sharper eyes.
Larry King’s statement announcing he’s quitting his nightly show:
And right beneath it:
The non-Anglophiles and non-political-junkies among my strip’s fans might not get the full impact of this week’s storyline, so I thought I’d expound upon it a bit.
For those who don’t know, the UK held a general election this past week. No one liked the ruling Labour party, no one completely trusted the opposition Conservative party, and no way was the election system the UK has about to allow an alternative to actually get a number of seats that represented their support among the population.
Wanting to talk about this, but knowing no one would get it, I decided to do something I rarely do. I dipped into the realm of satire and tried to come up with parallels my readers might appreciate. Since I’ve gone meta a lot lately in the strip, it made sense to do it once more.
(Click on the strips to get a larger view.) The seat numbers (at least for the first three) are exactly the same as were tallied by (respectively) the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats (“LibDems”). The number I gave Frog Applause were actually those won by Sinn Fein (who will not swear allegiance to the Queen and thus will never be allowed to sit in Parliament) and the one I gave to In The Sticks represents the first seat won in the UK by the Green Party, mainly because it will piss off that asshole Nathan Cooper to be associated with the Greens.
One pundit I heard basically said that there were no winners in the UK’s election, and that the voters essentially rejected all of the major parties. Even the LibDems, whose poll numbers were soaring after the Leaders’ Debates, wound up losing ground. The Conservatives won the largest percentage of the vote and the largest number of seats, but nowhere near what had been projected and not enough for an effective ruling majority.
Which sets the scene for the second strip in the series:
If you replace “Peanuts” with “The Conservatives,” “Garfield” with “Labour” and “Sparky died” with “Michael Hague stepped down” the statements are still true.
So now the two top vote getters have to fight to form a coalition, giving a lot of power to the guy who came in third. This sets the stage for the next several strips. Enjoy.
Dear Mr. Maloney:
I read with great interest and not a little amusement the letter sent out over your signature (enclosed here for your reference) asking me to swtich our theater’s telephone service to Comcast.
It is true that I, as the person responsible for our telephone service, have been actively looking for an alternative to our current service. It’s also true that your package is considerably less than we are currently paying. (In fact, we have no internet at the theater at all, and pay just under $100.00 a month just for one landline telephone.) Under normal circumstances, coming from just about any other company, your offer might be intriguing enough for me to take to our board of directors.
However, the fact is that I am already an unwilling customer of Comcast at my home. For the past three years I have endured substandard television service (including about half of my digital channels being mysteriously deauthorized at random intervals no less than once a week) and laughably poor internet service which one of your technicians has openly admitted is being throttled. The most recent “service” call was highlighted by one of your “technicians” claiming that there was voltage on one of my lines because his meter was making a noise, even though that same meter was randomly making that same noise even when not connected to any wires.
Your company has also completely fouled up my billing. My most recent bill showed a total of just under $90.00 due, but was threatening disconnection because of a “past due” balance of $180.00. Money is tight at a small, volunteer-run organization like ours and billing mishaps like this can lead to not only headaches, but severe financial distress. I cannot risk that.
I have been trapped with your company, and your company appears to know it. My neighborhood is wired for Fiber Optic, but is not connected to the hub or lit yet. I am a half mile too far south to get DSL in my neighborhood. I have no choice but to deal with your company and it has completely soured me on anything and everything having to do with you.
The final straw came last month with the announcement that your company is co-sponsoring the launch of “RightNet,” yet another right-wing propaganda network. I do not want any of my money to go toward funding projects like this, and will be taking steps to remedy that. Within the next month I intend to install an aerial antenna to retrieve my digital television free over-the-air once again. I will be ending my television service at that time. As soon as the fiber is connected to our neighborhood, I will follow that with the disconnection of my alleged “high speed” internet service as well.
So, I hope you will understand why I cannot accept your offer to move our telephone service to Comcast. We rely on our telephones – indeed, most of our business is done over it – and cannot put our trust in such an unreliable company.
I ask that you please cease these mailings to us immediately. No further contact is desired between us and Comcast.
Sincerely,
Paul L. Sungenis
Vice President of Finance
It will be going on two months late, but Meet The Royals will finally be going to the printer. I’m finalizing the back cover, which is an homage to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (since the front cover, not to mention the title. is an homage to Meet The Beatles) and wanted to share the appropriate portion of it with everyone here.
I’m still waiting on the photo for one donor, and might conceivably have room for one or two more (go here for details) before I finish it and send it off to the printers for the proof tomorrow, but as of right now here is the group shot from Her Majesty’s Lonely Hearts Are Better Than None Club Band. Two are donors, a few are friends or people I admire, and most are characters from the strip. Click on the image for an enlarged copy.
No bonuses for identifying the people in it.
Here we go. It took me about four hours total to do this one, so I think this technique isn’t quite feasible for mass production, but it was fun to try.
In this week’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria I had a “guest appearance” from Pogo as Victoria’s local union rep. Not wanting to cut and paste someone else’s artwork, and not having a working scanner at the moment, I took what was (for me) a radical new approach. I loaded a number of different drawings of Pogo (including one I had done myself a year before) and using them as models I actually “drew” with my mouse.
Instead of drawing pixel by pixel, though, I experimented with Corel Photoimpact’s “draw path” tool, which would let me draw freehand, then approximate a path to my mouse strokes. I could then edit those paths, adjusting trajectory and curves, and make them into the nice clean lines I wanted. This allowed me to come up with a better drawing of Pogo than I even could have managed on my own with ink, paper, and scanner.
Inspired by the results, I kept wondering (along the same lines that led me to create TNAOQV back in 2006) if I could put this technique to better use. Would I be able to create an actual, fully drawn comic strip without ever setting pencil to paper or stylus to tablet?
Thus, I decided to revist Hairball Hollow.
Back in late 2007, as Victoria was starting to gain traction at Uclick, I toyed with doing a hand drawn strip once again. The concept I had was another cat strip (since cartoon cats were among the few things I could scribble moderately well) centered around Prince, the Alpha Male, who moved into a new suburban subdivision and had to deal with the bullshit modern suburban dwellers put up with (like the local Homeowners’ Association). Supporting characters included the slacker cat in panel 3 (who I hadn’t gotten around to naming), Murray Tiedelbaum (the head of the Housepets’ Association and master of its rules and regulations), and the White Hooded Woodpecker (a flight supremecist).
As you can see above, I once more realized that I couldn’t draw worth shit.
However, could I take the lessons I’d learned from TNAOQV, and the technique I’d just played around with to “draw” in that strip, and use them to my advantage? In Photoimpact I could do fine linework, rescale images, and even have a perspective tool at my disposal to work around the fact that I have no depth perception in real life, and could never master perspective.
With nine different models at my disposal (including my previous drawings and photos of several of the cats in my life) I commenced to draw. Using the geometric shape path tools in Photoimpact, plus some freehand path editing for the odd shapes, I came up with a basic “walking cat” framework:
Every shape and almost every line in that framework existed as a separate object which I could conceivably manipulate and adapt for different poses.
I then set about cleanup and detailing, and here present a completely digital, no pencil pen or Wacom used, new version of the first panel of that sample strip.
What do you think of the final product? Workable? Of course, doing that panel that way took me the better part of two and a half hours and would not be the most efficient way to do an actual strip, but my speed would improve and (as I said above) I could reuse a lot of the framework from time to time to speed things along.
Worth pursuing? I’m open to your thoughts.
Latest “Eco-Bill” just arrived.
HOW THE FUCK CAN I HAVE A LARGER PAST DUE AMOUNT THAN MY CURRENT ACCOUNT BALANCE?
FiOS can’t make it to my neighborhood soon enough. And as soon as I get back from Chicago the antenna goes up on the roof.
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