Fighting Words: 12/29/08 Cartoon...

"The American Dick-tionary"...

Animation FYI

So you may have noticed that the little animated additions to my weekly cartoons have disappeared. They've been a casualty of an increase in my side freelance work... (Money is good. I like money.)

Not sure how much excitement there was for those little animations anyway, since they were sort of crude. However, some of the other stuff I'm working on involves that damn Flash computer program, so my skills with this should be getting more gooder...

In other words, when I get back to doing regular animations, maybe I'll be able do something worth looking at!

Yes... I still hate the Yankees...

I was a little worried after last season, when the Yankees failed to make the playoffs for the first time since 1993, that I would have to stop hating them... that they might become, like, the underdogs now or something.

Nuh-uh. Nope.

With today's signing of Mark Teixeira, their off-season spending spree is now up to $423.5 million. ESPN news just ran a graphic showing some other things that could be bought with that kind of money, including something like 25% of the entire General Motors Company. But an even more galling figure is $1.3 billion -- the price tag for their brand new stadium opening up in April:

The new stadium on the north side of 161st Street is 63 percent larger than the old, with four merchandise stores instead of one, and 13 restaurants, lounges and food courts for the public, including a martini bar and a steak house that figure to become a destination for Wall Street's elite. There are 51 available luxury suites priced from $600,000 to $850,000 each, up from 19 at the old ballpark.

I say every other team in baseball should slash their ticket prices in half for games against the Yankees next year, so everybody who's struggling through our new Great Depression can go "explain" to them exactly how we feel about this.

Fighting Words: 12/22/08 Cartoon...

"Wild Planet, #6"...

Yeah, I'm pretty sick of the snow now.

A typical Seattle winter day of about 40 and rain actually sounds pretty nice right now...

Dog In Snow

Can't really get out to get much work done right now, here in the Great Northwest Snowstorm of '08!!, so I took the opportunity to play with my dog in the snow a bit...

Fighting Words: 12/15/08 Cartoon...

"A Christmas Carol"...

Fighting Words / Art News

Been a while since I did one of these posts, so let's catch up shall we?

• I did a workshop this morning at an elementary school in Kingston, WA, where I talked to some teachers about how to show kids how to do comics.  You know what they say: those who can't do, teach.  Those who can't teach... um... try to show other people how to teach.
  
  I have a decent little presentation put together, so if any other schools in the Puget Sound area want to bring me in to give a talk, send me an email at nomind (at) fightingwordscomics.com. And if you want to pay me to do it... well, I know how all you teachers here in Washington state are rolling in dough these days!
  
  Someone also sent me a great link recently for a group called "The Comic Book Project," which seeks "to help children forge an alternative pathway to literacy by writing, designing, and publishing original comic books." Check it out...
  


• I've updated the "Commercial Art" post to include a finished logo and sign design that I did for a local restaurant that's opening up soon, and I also put up a link to some Flash slideshows that I'm doing for clients of my dad, a wedding photographer.  The slideshows are probably the classiest thing I've done as a designer (they include great music by a local musician)... if you're a freelance photographer looking to add a new product or promotional tool, send me an email at nomind (at) fightingwordscomics.com.


• I've also started taking website design and construction jobs (links coming soon), and I'm even doing a tattoo design for a friend of mine. Someday, I'll do a page on my site with all of the non-Fighting Words projects that I've been working on...
  

Fighting Words: 12/8/08 Cartoon...

"The Reign of Big Beta"...

I had to do a little cultural research on this one... the Betamax/VHS format war was a bit before my time. For most of my life, "VCR" just meant "VHS."

Of course, if you got the point I was really driving at here, you know the cartoon itself has very little to do with videotapes...

Mark Fiore already did a great 'toon a few weeks ago on the lack of innovation in the auto industry, but I thought I'd go ahead and follow through with this take on the issue that I had been planning.


UPDATE: Hey, how about that... Ford actually did come out with a car they called the "Futura"...

Note to self

I was up very late the other night examining a masterpiece... an unparalleled example of human creativity at it's highest levels.

Here is a note that I scribbled to myself, verbatim:

Take relatively simple idea and present it with the utmost imagination, holding the audience's attention at every moment. The genius here is in the minutia, the subtle ideas of movement, timing, atmosphere, sound, music, and the perfect mix of obvious and unexpected, usually with a deeper literary or allegorical meaning that is only slightly alluded to.

Was I watching an experimental dance of some kind? A ballet? A beautiful foreign film?

Hell no:



Chuck Jones = super-genius.

Fighting Words: 12/1/08 Cartoon...

"Change Has Come"...

Meh... take a week off and it's like I haven't done one for a year...

By the way, it's sort of a sequel to this one: