Cartoonists With Attitude

Good news folks! CWA friend and colleague Keith Knight will be joining me at The Burren Saturday, August 29th, 4-7PM.

Just two miles away from where Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley infamously became bestest buds, Keef and I will be holding a beer summit of our own. Join us for some drinks, a slideshow, and booksigning in the heart of Davis Square.

The event is free with a cash bar. I’m trying to get a rough head count, so send me an email, leave a comment, or RSVP on Facebook if you’re attending.

I need your help promoting the event. Tell your friends! And here’s a flyer you can print out and post around town.

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The Boston area Fun Stuff for Dum-Dums event will be held on Saturday, August 29th, from 4 to 7pm at The Burren in Davis Square. It’ll be in the Back Room, which, as the name implies, is behind the front room.

The event is totally free, with a cash bar. I’m planning on starting the slideshow around 5 o’clock, and signing books before and after it.

If you’ll be attending, please let me know. I need a rough count so I can plan accordingly. You can also leave a comment on this blog post or RSVP via Facebook.

If you want to help promote the event, here’s a flyer you can print out and put up at work, your laundromat, or your dorm.

In addition to drinking, slideshowing, answering your questions, and selling & signing your books, I might raffle off some original Big Fat Whale art. All proceeds would go to the “Holy Shit! Brian’s About to Turn 30!” Fund.

Would you be interested in that? Or have other suggestions? Now is the time to make this thing AWESOME.

After months of waiting, the Big Fat Whale collection Fun Stuff for Dum-Dums is finally here.

Why now? Well, I screwed up my publishing schedule and the cartoon that plugs the shit out of this book is coming out on Friday, rather than next week as I had planned.

I’d look like a giant dummy if folks came to the site wanting to buy the book but were unable to find it.

So here it is! A week early. Of course with printing and shipping, this weekend at MoCCA (I’ll be at table 426) is still your best bet for getting one of the very first copies. Plus I’ll be there to doodle in it for you!

I’m still scrambling to get things ready for MoCCA, but as soon as I return I’ll begin planning an event/signing in the Boston area. Shoot me an email if you have any tips or suggestions.

My apologies for the following sentence, which you’re going to hear a lot around my little slice of the web: PLEASE BUY MY BOOK! With 150 cartoons, the $15.95 price works out to just over 10 cents per cartoon. And with a conservative estimate of 6 jokes per cartoon, that’s less than 2 cents per joke. Do you want to contribute to an economy where a fart joke isn’t worth at least 2 cents? I hope not.

I’ll leave the last word to The Critic’s Jay Sherman:

Usually you are nothing but that thing I take the Tappan Zee to avoid on my adventures further south, but not June 6th and 7th! I will be emerging from my New England hermit-hole to attend this year’s MoCCA Festival. The event goes from 11am-6pm each day, with admission at $10 for one day, or $15 for both.

I’ll be debuting the long-overdue Big Fat Whale book, “Fun Stuff for Dum-Dums.”

I’ll be tabling right next to fellow CWA‘ers Mikhaela Reid and Masheka Wood, and with the talented illustrator and arteest, Melissa J. Gibson.

And that’s just a tiny sliver of the exhibitors. Check the first link for a full exhibitor list, assuming they get around to posting one before the festival. If you’re a comic nerd in the area, you should come.

If you can’t make it, the book should be available here not long after I get back from NYC. But since I’m doing this one through Lulu, there won’t be too many chances to get a signed copy as cheap as at MoCCA.

My advance apologies for flogging the shit out of this book. But since the newspaper business, including the alt-weeklies, has taken a severe hit during this recession, I need to sell lots of copies of it to make up the difference. If I don’t, I’ll go from the delightfully cranky cartoonist you all know, to that asshole who spit in your order of fries in no time.

Tom the Dancing Bug’s Ruben Bolling took some COCKY SAUCE a couple weeks ago and went after Oprah, Ashton, and whoever-the-hell else I couldn’t give two shits about in order to rack up his Facebook Fan Count. I let it slide, because he is OLD, and society teaches us to respect our elders. We’re talking Helen Hunt OLD folks, not small potatoes old like Jennifer Aniston.

But then Jen Sorensen of Slowpoke threw down and challenged Bolling. A kerfuffle ensued, and now both of these far more talented and famous cartoonists have WAY more Facebook Fans than Big Fat Whale. This is terrible news for me, as I just commisioned a “PRINCESS OF THE INTERNET” tiara from my local Kay Jewelers.

FIX THIS PEOPLE! I really want to wear this tiara.

If I wasn’t goofing off every couple of hours on Twitter, there would be no release valve for my dumb jokes. They’d clog my brain, preventing me from coming up with better stuff for the strip.

But occasionally one or two will plop out of my brain-hole that is good enough to share beyond my re-tweeting circle jerk. This is one of those times, and you dear blog readers, are the victims of my generosity.

I started off mentioning that all the scrotum jokes surrounding these infernal “tea parties” were beginning to bore me.  That, in turn, threatened to reduce my output of cock n’ balls jokes, which are currently 33% of my total output. Then Dan Tobin, writer of the Urban Blah, requested a pie chart to find out what made up the other two thirds. Naturally, I obliged:

click for pie chart

After looking at that, would you believe the guy who drew it is just a couple months shy of 30?

The AV Club interviews Matt Groening and asks him about the future of alt-weekly comics:

AVC: Speaking of dying media, how do you think comics like Life In Hell are going to adapt?

MG: Speaking as an alternative newsweekly cartoonist, we’re at the bottom of the food chain. We’re hoping that weekly newspapers don’t go the way of dime novels. It may be that the time has come and passed, but I don’t know. I hope not. It seems to me that if you have a publication with a strategy, with some enthusiasm, and some design sense, I think there is a way of keeping it alive.

AVC: Do you think it will become just a web phenomenon?

MG: It’s possible. I personally like the idea of newspapers. It’s a good format. You can read it in whatever order you want. You can glance at it. There is something about a single screen and scrolling through pages that just doesn’t have the same appeal. But I don’t have a Kindle yet, so maybe I’ll change my mind. [Laughs.]

Life in Hell is the reason Big Fat Whale exists. It blazed a trail for all the other alt-weekly comics that followed, and helped shape my sense of humor. It’s also the reason BFW is a giant square instead of a more marketable rectangular strip. When I started the comic, I was clumsily aping Groening’s LiH, but with a whale instead of a rabbit.

Thankfully BFW grew into its own thing, but the square format remains a constant reminder of Groening’s influence.

Ted’s latest column covers the ongoing plight of editorial cartoonists.

As publications shift their focus to their websites, comics should be a part of it. Comics can generate way more pageviews than articles or columns. Even if an op-ed was fantastic, who has the time to plow through an archive of long-ass essays? A reader can (and frequently will) click through a dozen comics in a short amount time if they liked the cartoon. More pageviews equals more advertising revenue and maybe even getting more people to read your paper, which is what editors want, unless they are bad at their job.

Last week Tom Tomorrow covered the long, and oft-ignored, history of alt-weekly comics. It always bugged me that the genre that birthed Matt Groening, Tom, Ruben Bolling, and countless others gets so little attention, while at the same time a few great comedians came out the Groundlings, and the place has been crawling with agents drooling over every improv class hack for the past 30 years.

But I don’t think our genre of comics is on the way out. For decades, people turned to alt-weeklies for left-of-center (i.e. realist) news and culture commentary. Now they’re doing that on TV and online, and in even greater numbers.

The audience is out there and growing. Now if only advertisers would pony up print rates for internet eyeballs, we could sell our comics, instead of a flea market of t-shirts, posters, and branded novelty underwear to make the rent.

Instead of just bitchin’ and moanin’ about weeklies dropping comics like I did, Matt did some work. His interview with Kevin Allman, editor of New Orleans’ The Gambit, provides a lot of insight to what’s happening on the papers’ end of this mess, and their future on the web.