The Sad-Faced Man is a character who has shown up in a lot of my doodles over the years, and appeared a few times in Pre-Structuralist Funnies.
I’ve also frequently doodled anthropomorphic spatulas and coffee cups. Don’t know why.
Everyone always asks about the opera… so I’m doing a little autobio run about how we wrote the thing.
here’s the first of a new series. It’ll be nice drawing too much coffee man again.
Tomorrow morning 6-9AM I’ll be on AM Northwest here in Portland. Hopefully Stacey will take the lions share of the screen time. He does a better job selling the thing than I do.
There’s a lot of people who support Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are getting mad at people who support Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for saying that if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama aren’t the Democratic Party nominee then they’ll vote for John McCain. And the only thing that surprises me about that is that people are surprised by that.
The John Adams miniseries on HBO is doing a good job providing some historical context for this- America is pretty much founded on a platform of fear, bitterness, petty rivalry, and self-righteous indignation over the idea that someone might have a better idea about something than you. I’ve written many times that Hillary Clinton had a unique advantage of inspiring Democrats to vote for her out of spite- just to piss off Repubicans. There’s no doubt in my mind a lot of Hillary supporters (and vice-versa, I’m just using the analogy here because reality currently has an anti-Hillary bias) are willing to invoke that grand trait of spite passed on by our Founding Fathers to us if (aka when) they don’t get their way. There is not a single instance of political discourse in the history of this nation in which the participants did not want to simply kick their opponent in the balls.
There’s a lot of people who support Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are getting mad at people who support Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for saying that if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama aren’t the Democratic Party nominee then they’ll vote for John McCain. And the only thing that surprises me about that is that people are surprised by that.
The John Adams miniseries on HBO is doing a good job providing some historical context for this- America is pretty much founded on a platform of fear, bitterness, petty rivalry, and self-righteous indignation over the idea that someone might have a better idea about something than you. I’ve written many times that Hillary Clinton had a unique advantage of inspiring Democrats to vote for her out of spite- just to piss off Repubicans. There’s no doubt in my mind a lot of Hillary supporters (and vice-versa, I’m just using the analogy here because reality currently has an anti-Hillary bias) are willing to invoke that grand trait of spite passed on by our Founding Fathers to us if (aka when) they don’t get their way. There is not a single instance of political discourse in the history of this nation in which the participants did not want to simply kick their opponent in the balls.
There’s an inverse proportion of doing stuff and blogging about it. I’m so busy I don’t have time to write about it. When I have time to write a lot it means I don’t have a lot going on…. there should be a Wheeler’s Blog Law of inverse doing-stuff.
We spent another day at Saturday Market promoting the opera. As soon as I’m someplace with wifi I’ll post the Martian doing the Capitalist Song. The day rocked. My personal highlight came when I stood next to two middle-aged women. One of them was explaining to the other about Too Much Coffee Man “he’s a web comic superhero but he doesn’t do much. It’s weird but really really funny. The latest cartoon was a woman asking a bunch of dumb questions about opera then he sings and knocks her off the page.” What? How did she know that? A random woman at Saturday Market follows my comic online? Crazy.
Monday, some of us go on the morning show here in Portland. I did a tiny spot when I did Wordstock. Now they’re spending the whole morning with us. 6am-9am. We’ll be filming at the Backspace Coffee shop. If anyone is up and around, come on by.
http://www.kptv.com/index.html
The Perry Bible Fellowship hit the best seller list. He did it by pushing heavy with Amazon pre-sales. Barnes & Nobles, Book People and the other biggies tracked the sales and rushed to catch up. They all bought heavy. Once sales looked big it started getting an advertising push from the publisher. The advertising helped sales… It was a snowball of great marketing. Doesn’t hurt that it’s a great comic.
DHorse recommended I start pushing pre-sales of my book which they’re lumping into the PBF category. 
The NY Times Arts & Leisure section has a wonderful profile of Al Jaffee, the cartoonist behind MAD Magazine’s long-running “fold-in” gag and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” series.
Among the many great MAD cartoonists, the most influential for me as a young, budding toonster were Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker, George Woodbridge, and Jaffee. Drucker had spot-on caricatures, and Woodbridge had such a biting style. But Jaffee and Aragones drew what I considered proper “cartoons” by proper “cartoonists”: they wrote and drew their own stuff in a less realistic, more funny style. And they hit on a wide variety of subjects, from current events, politics, fashion and pop culture, to more sinister aspects of modern American society. I love this fold-out as described in the NY Times profile:
July 1968: “What is the one thing most school dropouts are sure to become?? A picture of teenagers at an employment center folds into a piece of artillery with a kid stuffed in it, and the answer: “Cannon fodder.?
Jesus, that’s brilliant. Bitter, angry, caustic – yet funny. It’s something I aspire to with every In Contempt strip I draw. Glad to see Jaffee continues to put out his stuff, despite cancer and advanced age, with a technique I am still too timid to take up: water color and gouache. Photoshop has made things too damn easy.
Our dog Buddy has made a permanent indentation in the back cushions of our chairs. This is a very typical pose.
Rendered with a Pentel brush pen Friday night 3/28/2008.
Cartoon for March 29
To see the full artwork for this cartoon, you will need to refer to the print editions of newspapers that publish my work–assuming that there are any with the guts to do so. Due to its almost certainly controversial content, my syndicate declined to post it online.
My editors have always been exceptionally understanding. (They’d have to be!) They respect free speech and give me a lot of freedom. Given the content and the risks involved, I understand why they didn’t want to distribute this cartoon. If given the choice, however, I would have sent it out because, well, it’s a great cartoon.
Those who want to see it in its full glory should catch me at one of my upcoming public appearances.
I’m rehashing the comment I left at Yglesias’ blog here, but based on the current political climate, I can’t imagine how Obama’s running mate won’t be one of two choices. Neither of them are my first choice personally, but every sense of logic indicates how necessary either of them would be.
Given that carrying Virginia will be a necessity for Obama, you have to go down all the available options there for one of Obama’s possible running mates. His first is Mark Warner, who is soundly a better choice for Obama than the equally-new Jim Webb or the “who the flying blue hell is Tim Kaine” Tim Kaine. The “problem” is Warner’s running for the open Virginia senate seat, to which I say, so what? Warner’s going to win that seat by a hoopatajillion points, and like Joe Lieberman in 2000 it’s so guaranteed for him that he can easily run for Veep at the same time and not lose a lot of face for it. Plus, if he wins, then Tim Kaine can appoint his Democratic replacement… given Kaine can’t run for a second term as governor, he’ll most likely appoint himself. Everyone wins, and we get a Vice-President in the guy who everyone expected two years ago to be the nominee in the first place.
The second choice is Joe Biden. And I’m honestly struggling to figure out why he wouldn’t be a perfect fit. Biden ties all the loose ends that hinder Obama’s campaign: he’s white. He’s a DC insider. He has more foreign policy experience than almost anyone in Washington. And fulfilling the standard role of the running mate, he’s the nasty attack dog who can levy attacks on the opposing ticket while Saint Barack stays high and dry.
But even more important, there’s another old issue at hand here. Biden, as you may recall, was the guy who got into a lot of trouble earlier on in the campaign for what were considered racially disparaging remarks about Obama. In what would almost be serendipitous irony, this is actually a major advantage on the PR level. Obama asking a man who previously took flak for offensive statements, and declaring that he is willing to see past that and work with him- I don’t think the significance of that needs to be explained at this point.
