FuzzyCo

You know. Like an angler fish.

When you’re trying to sneak a MBW in under the wire, sometimes you have to make sacrifices. Like perspective. Is that pumpkin patch sliding off the page?

Sorry about the cartoony naughty bits, but that’s how a succubus roll.

P.S. Last week I made GeorgeGabe play and he won, first time out of the gate. Kid’s gonna get a swelled head, I tell you.

The Fucanglong is a Chinese dragon who normally hides in deep caverns, until called upon to report to the gods in the clouds, when it bursts up from the ground and causes a volcano. If you’re bursting forth like that, you really think it’s just on “elemental magical currents”?

A lot of times a Golem will be created for a specific task. I guess this one is supposed to watch this cat.

Update: I placed third in this week’s judging.

It's been a little while since I've done a MBW. I usually go for cartoony, but someone else had already done a tshirt joke that I was thinking of and so I started doodling with a digital pencil and these Gatormen just ended up looking all sad.

I usually draw funny little guys for Mythical Beast Wars, but the Grindylow just sounds creepy. (But that fish sure is having a good day.)

Chickenfoot isn't really mythical, he's from an episode of Invader Zim. He also wasn't submitted to MBW on time. (I drew him on the plane to New York for Alex and Alyssa's wedding and then forgot to submit him when we landed.) Does the cigarette and the smoke read, or does it look like a weird mustache?

Those Kinder look awfully cheery, considering they're about to be Fressered.

"Gigantic, black, toad-like creature with an impossibly malevolent glare" - check.

This was my first stab with Paper, an iPad drawing app. Why is that poor guy's hand backwards? I'm sure it's a sad story, but he still seems happy.

Thank goodness the Cactus Cat is an affectionate drunk.

I just couldn't figure out how three heads would actually be attached, so this seemed a lot more logical.

I just realized the challenge title this week was plural. Oops.

Update: Hey, third place!

The site is called Mythical Beast Wars, but until now the "wars" have just been between the artists. But this week the challenge is "dragon vs dwarf". I'm sure there's more subtle ways to deal with that inspiration, but I think it'd be pretty straightforward.

So, I'm six days late with this, but I had to do an Oni. Ain't he a cutie?

What's a Mermacorn? What ISN'T a Mermacorn is a worse question.

Update: This week's judge, Chuck Wren (owner of JumpUpRecords) choose mine as the second place winner. I'm a winner!

Mythical Beast Wars seems to be down right now (though, downforeveryoneorjustme.com also seems to be down, so I couldn't check if it was just me) but I already knew that this week's beast was a hobgoblin, so I got mine done tonight. I say that as though I sweated over this for hours. I did not.

This week's MBW is the "Buggane" which is a Celtic creature and the part of the description that stuck out to me was that it was like a giant mole. Hence my attempt to show off my poor lettering and even worse perspective.

The Woodbooger is, I now know, a local West Virginian version of a Bigfoot. It's also the second week's challenge for Mythical Beast Wars. I'm never going to win this thing on detail (check out entry 3, for example) so I've been working on my own sort of spare cartooning style. It's nice to get out the ol' Pitt 'B' pen again and try throwing it a piece of paper.

Don't you love entry 18? Don't you love his duckie?

Have you craved one of Steve's cat drawings, as seen on IWantToDrawACatForYou.com, but thought that $9.95 was too steep? You're in luck, because today there's a Groupon! You can get your very own drawing of a cat doing pretty much anything for just $5. Which, of course, brings it into the price range where IllDrawAnyAnimalYouWant.com already resides, but hey, maybe you like cats for some reason. And, of course, if you prefer owls and politeness, there's always MayIPleaseDrawAnOwlForYou.com.

I used to call my occasional 1 am to 2 am waking periods "insomnia", but now I've read a thing on the internet (so it must be true!) that makes me wonder if I'm just sleeping how people historically normally slept.

Anyhoodle, I got up tonight and remembered an idea for a cartoon I'd had this morning. And then once pen was in hand, I remembered another idea I'd had while throwing up a few months ago and had never drawn out. Turns out, I'm just as bad at layout as ever—just look at that towering column of words.

It was only a few days ago that I discovered Rage Comics as a thing (I mean, I've seen one or two of them, but never realized that it wasn't the work of one artist, but was instead a user-created, distributed meme). And last night Erica and I had an encounter that seemed best described via the Poker Face.

I haven't been cartooning since February when I finished the 366 Cartoons, but thisisrabbit is visiting us and his sitting around on the couch working on his Doodle-a-Days inspired me tonight.

When the weather was warm last week, our three little friends all visited the lake. Yes, Sherman stayed in his bowl. And I've figured out how Latte flies—she floats on her own self-satisfaction.

Troy tweeted:

Crowded 147, but I'm vibing out. May your enemies taste the cold steel of your sarcasm. May your allies raise your battle standard.

(The 147 is the bus Troy takes to work.)

So, as one does, I quickly drew this:

Troy responded with:

Troy, of course, can actually draw. Look at all those serious kitties.

Two days before the end of this year-long project and I'm still drawing little toss-off ones like this.

365 would be a years' worth for most people, but I'm *inclusive*. Anyway, Coyote and Raven were right there at the beginning with their doubts, so only fitting they'll see the year out the same way.

Woo-oo!

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My wife is so great—I just mention shading and boom, she gets me a six-pack of grey pens.

So... I think I need to work on succinctness in my rants.

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Sometimes a euphemism isn't.

I totally misremembered a conversation Erica and I had, so this comic doesn't prove anything.

I went to the opening of a Jay Ryan paintings show at Rotofugi Gallery and ended up staring at this one piece for-ever. This is... similar.

Looks more like a fluke worm to me.

It's Dot!

Even X-Eyes Johnson could Fix It With Eyes!

Your guess is as good as mine.

Alternate title: Why the dinosaurs went extinct.

See, instead of Schmuzzy and Schmerica, it's scuzzy and scare-ica.

I'm not saying every steampunk novel has someone in goggles on the cover. Just all of them.

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Blue lines? Hard to read? Yep, it's a late night already-in-bed cartoon.

A transcript, since it's so hard to decipher: "You're a bad kitty! Bad! You're... aw, so cute."

I was trying to describe the Best Beer Stein in the World (with inset eagle statuette) to Erica (spotted at the Brau Haus) and failing, so I thought I'd just draw it.

So at Joey's Brickhouse they have a big chalkboard and chalk in the bathroom.

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The 2000s really were a banner decade for novelty New Year's glasses manufacturers, and they just weren't quite willing to give up the glory days in 2010.

Erica calls eating black-eyed peas and greens on New Year's Day "your New Year's business". It's a Southern thing.

I wasn't sure if my Will.I.Am was recognizable enough or if I needed to have the line be "My God, Jim, why have you killed Will.I.Am?" I decided to trust my art (ha!).

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As we head into the final stretch of this year-long project, I think I'm going to have to get a bit meta about the project itself.

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Schmerica is a lady.

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I'm way behind on scanning these in and sharing them with y'all. So, here we go:

I guess I don't know -- maybe that *is* how fantasy football works.

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Catfish and catbirds and cat eels? Unlikely, I agree.

My in-laws.

A little-known pair.

So, A) Santa is lying, because olden-timey kids wanted bicycles and ponies and such. And B) I didn't get an HD TV for Christmas -- what I got was colored pens (thanks, sweetie), and I was trying to think of something that would have a lot of color.

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Erica was watching The Breakfast Club tonight for the [redacted] project and I thought it'd be fun to do a take on the poster. And then, I'm lazy, so I just drew heads.

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Sometimes I'm all snuggled up with Erica on the couch and I remember I need to draw a comic and I wondered how hard it would be to to draw with my left hand -- it would double my chances of getting a cartoon drawn.

He's not confused, he's Canadian.

There's a lot of numbers here--I'm drawing a cartoon a day for a year and this is the 309th. And the cartoon is one of John Hodgman's 700 Molemen: #296. Flocculant Dave, a pair of eyes in the dark, nothing more.

And yes, it's the easiest Moleman to draw. I'm not dumb.

S'true -- that's what elves do all January.

And speaking of… it's not ripping someone off if you call it "homage" or "an exercise in style" or "copying", right?

Also, To Catch a Thief and Leverage and…

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The last (for now, anyway) of the "How To Draw" series.

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Gerdes and Pig performed last night at the Belmont Burlesque Revue. To get us into the holiday spirit, I made Pig a Santa hat out of one of the free ones we got at the Santa Shuffle 5k. He really does look very dapper.

Verbatim.

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Catching up from a week with the fam.

Guess what day I drew this one? Guess! Guess!

Credit goes to Disco for singing a lyric (MC Chris?) that inspired this one.

The worst part of The Amazing Race is tuning in early and catching Andy Rooney grumping about the way the world has changed since he was a child in the early Pleistocene.

I found Fang in a box of puppets at my parent's place. Was he mine? The age (from a copyright date on his tag) seems right, but I have such a terrible memory. Anyway, it's good that he's where my sister's kids can play with him.

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From the judges description of a moment during a dance on So You Think You Can Dance?

Parker is totally into vampires.

Parker rides her scooter everyday out to her hot dog stand in Forest Park.

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So Apelad has been doing these versions of the default Twitter avatar, playing around with the outline. I have a little bird character and he's pretty much the same shape, especially if he's had beans for lunch, so I threw this together.

Coyote and Raven are off on an adventure, inspired by Elio's Professor Wellington.

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Detail:

You may notice a similarity to Top Chef.

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One week left to see Amanda Rountree's The Good, The Bad, and The Monkey.

I didn't actually make it, but I offered.

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Since Erica asked and I couldn't remember all the citations, a link to the "turtles all the way down" story.

Some days you push the boulder up the hill, and some days you push the boulder up the hill.

Schmuzzy and Schmerica, in pumpkin form.

She loves it.

We've been going for option A, our neighbors have gone for option B and they've lasted 24 hours so far.

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I get a lot done, putting off doing creative work.

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Did you know that Sam's Wines was bought by Binny's? We didn't realize until the clerk asked us for our discount card and we tried handing him our old Sam's card.

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The little blue lines tell you that this is one of my last minute, just-before-bed cartoons. The cartoon tells you that I'm married to a dinosaur woman.

Samples of what? Creepy.

Poor fireguy.

I was talking to Kate last night about her rhinos, for her upcoming collective noun show. Her rhinos will be likely be 1000x cuter than mine.

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Someday I'll have to learn how to use color -- Hellboy really should be red.

A week's worth of scanning!

When I was doing a photographic self-portrait-a-day last year, a project that required something like 3 seconds of effort a day, it only took 27 days before I missed a day. Drawing a cartoon takes me at least 10 seconds, so I feel pretty good that it took me eight and a half months to miss a day (I drew this the next day).

"This theater" is the La Nuit Theater in New Orleans, LA and the green room is also someone's livingroom who lives over the theater. As does Gravy.

Two faces from the crowd from Bourbon St.

Aha! An Adventure!

I hab a coad.

Ah, don't listen to me, I'm just tired tonight.

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We visited Didier Farms with a baby. They have big pumpkins and babies are small. (And it's not really a Droodle, but I think that style was in my mind.)

There were also plenty of goats at the farm.

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Turbo Snake!

We saw the opening night of Amanda Rountree's "The Good, the Bad, and the Monkey" tonight and it was very, very good. Hilarious and touching. And maybe there's a monkey or two.

Ooooky is like spooky, only ookier.

The caption may not make sense—this is what watching Top Chef looks like to me.

We had dinner at Red Lobster tonight and I got the phrase "The Endless Shrimp" stuck in my head and this is the result. Looking at it now, I guess it's really just The Endless having dinner and there isn't anything particularly shrimpy about it. Maybe I should have done them as shrimp? Anyway, I'm happy about the cartoon Endless at least.

I know I just said I didn't want to do in-jokes from shows, but this is just a sketch of Mr. Bones from Peek-A-Boo, the show that Erica just choreographed two dances for.

So we're watching the new season of The Amazing Race and I have a terrible sense of humor...

See what I mean?

Gummi is for bears.

I've been trying not to do in-jokes from our various theater productions, but this is what popped into my head this evening.

I'm sorry. Fraser. So, yeah, that's my review. FuzzyCo grade: C

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We went to see Animal Crackers at the Goodman. All of the parts of the show that are not a Marx Brothers bit or a dance number could be safely cut, leaving a plot-less, but funny 90 minute show.

The dog's name is Steve.

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I was fighting with a Schrödinger's cat joke for a while, but it just wouldn't come together.

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Funny every time.

And yes, I did just read Jeffrey Brown's Cat Getting Out of a Bag, but I've been doing cat comics since day 8.

Noah wanted a reference photo of Dr Baron Ludwig von Evilschlager, but I was too lazy to get out all the costume pieces. Hopefully this will do.

Both Jeffrey Brown and the Windy City Comicon could be discribed as "very nice". Steven is a jerk.*

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* Steven is not a jerk.

Thanks to Erica and Christopher for letting me mine their childhood for my comics.

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Yeah, I don't know.

And this either. I made it, and I don't know.

This one at least has the structure of a comic. Whee!

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I think I misspelled squirrelcorn there, which is a shame since it's a word I made up.

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Sometimes I miss my little guy, especially his ability to be a whole raft of barnyard animals.

I really went back and forth on the punchline, whether Schmerica would know about the punular frog.

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Thanks, Schmate!

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I was gratified to discover that it's not just that Schmuzzy is crazy and Schmerica puts up with him—she has her moments as well.

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It's true—I was feeling pretty confident about the race, but then everyone asking me if I was nervous started to make me nervous.

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I guess Schmuzzy finished his race as well.

Yep, Schmerica looooves cats.

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I'm not sure where I'm going astray here. Yesterday I thought I'd like to use the bear again in a Coyote and Raven comic and ended up doing a poop joke. Tonight I started with the idea of making fun of my own propensity for "projects" and ended up with a binge drinking joke. Sorry, folks. Maybe tomorrow I'll start with pie and end up with genocide or something.

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I just made Erica sad with this comic. "He's got to go!"

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Howdy, Steven!

It's a fact!

Oh yeah, it's real. I wish they were paying me.

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I didn't realize that this was going to be the 200th cartoon of this project until after I had drawn and uploaded it. It's probably appropriate that it's a joke about how all my jokes are lame since I draw my comics late at night, half-asleep. It's (un)funny because it's true.

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Mercat, possible. Catbat, sure. But a mercatbat -- very unlikely.

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Schmerica loooves cats and they love her back.

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Party Hard!

I've kinda mangled Yoda's quote, but oh well -- if you noticed, you're a nerd.

Inspired by true events in the Wilkins household.

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Sometimes when I haven't drawn my cartoon until I'm already in bed, I'm drawing it on a little spiral notebook we keep on the nightstand. Usually I ignore the little blue lines, but I thought I'd use them for once. Poor guy -- it's true, he was framed.

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Oh hey, I just realized that 183 was half-way through the year, so we're into the home stretch, folks. Only 181 of these to go!

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Erica likes Pez and Erica likes Claire, so it was an easy double-win to buy Fred from Claire Zulkey's story for Significant Objects.

Many thanks to Dan Telfer for the inspiration for today's cartoon. And, of course, to Discovery Channel for their animal pr0n.

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Get Your Rear in Gear.

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I'm not sure the math works out, but I was certainly not in NYC very long and spent most of it in a small, server-filled room.

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Happy Anniversary, sweetheart.

I have to admit, Maru is cute.

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We packed really light for our weekend getaway to New York, and so instead of all the sketch pads and pencils and pens I've accumulated since I started this project, I took a little moleskine and a couple of pens. This one and the next two were drawn in that little notebook.

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I don't think I even remember the sequence of conversation that led to (the other) Erica uttering the phrase "Fuzzy has unicorn crotch", but say it she did.

New York is great, but when we got stuck there, I just assumed that's what the weather was back in Chicago.

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I was actually really happy to help out. Bear!

It's a reasonable amount of fun!

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Why, yes, I did just get around to watching these two terrible movies.

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I hadn't quite realized that my sketch book is 9x12, until I used the whole page to draw this cartoon and then couldn't scan the whole thing on my letter-sized scanner.

Erica would really like for Large Bear to not be sad, but I'm not sure that's in the cards.

We went to the live taping of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me tonight. The radio show is funny, but the live show is at least 50% funnier -- there's just more of it (it's a two hour taping that gets edited down to an hour radio show) and Peter Sagal's facial expressions are delightful cherries on his comedy sundae.

Thanks to Erica who gave me the joke for today's comic.

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I'm second-guessing that maybe I should have said "reasonably fun", but these guys (as many of my characters do) talk like me, and I talk like that.

You know, a crate of cookies.

Technically, Mary Shelley was 19 when she finished Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. You may remember how I felt about the book, but the same things that drove me crazy about Victor Frankenstein -- his whininess and passivity -- would seem to make it perfect for the modern teen angst treatment vampires are getting.

I don't know if you can tell, but this is Schmuzzy drawing his own Zs. Both the "why I drew it" and "why you might not be able to tell what it is" are because I myself was very sleepy when I drew it.

Man, that Franklin and Bernice, they sure are terrible people.

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This is what happens when I stay up all night.

I know the Crownie exists because Erica brought some home tonight that Mrs. Rebecca Ryder had made.

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I just started these guys by sketching some lines and seeing where it went from there and, unusually for me, I don't know their names yet.

Happy America!

The real Erica and Fuzzy were actually at two different concerts tonight -- Erica saw Gringo Star at Schubas and I was at Buddy Guy's Legends seeing Bryan Lee. We're equally deaf, though. Kids, use hearing protection!

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Schmuzzy and Schmerica are Schm-ed precisely so that their adventures don't have to have anything to do with our real lives. So I'm not saying we ate leftover ribs and catfish and then watched Spike Jonze music videos and Good Eats tonight, instead of going for a run. But I will let you know that we finally cracked open our Crystal Head Vodka tonight and were surprised to discover that it's really not that great of vodka. Thank goodness when we bought it we knew that we were paying half of the inflated price for the packaging alone.

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Friday night I did the MAELSTROM improvised story-telling contest and this was one of the topics I had to tell a story about. This cartoon makes about as much sense as the story I told. And I know, it's "mahogany". I drew the cartoon at the bar after the show.

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The good and the bad. And, oops, I'm full of inaccuracies - I called it a harbor seal, but I think it's a gray seal.

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In case you are not aware of all internet traditions, that's a Neil Gaiman-Three Wolf Moon-LOLCat laser-etched on beef jerky.

Bacon!

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It's another wedding guestbook cartoon. Congrats Agnes and Kenner.

We had our Unflattering Portrait drawn by Reverend Aitor on Saturday in the window of Uncle Fun and it was a delightful afternoon with a delightful result. (Sunday afternoon, Becky Johnson was in the window working hard on her Security Envelope Button Project.)

Itza Fumetti!

I know, I know, swimming is the first leg. Believe me, it bugs me just as much as you when my cartoons are factually inaccurate.

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I drew this one in the guest book at Rebecca Hanson and Tim Ryder's wedding on Friday night-- a major component of the reception buffet was a mashed potato bar. Among other things, that means that this is, I think, the first one of the series that I don't have. I'm such an archivist/pack-rat, that's a hard thing for me to let go of.

It was, in fact, Miss Teen South Carolina on Tosh.0 who said "outer body experience," but since she was on for Tosh's "Web Redemption" feature, I thought it best not to kick her when she was down, so I made the villain of the comic a generic "he". Those sorts of malapropisms do bug me, though. Stabby!

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This comic is, unfortunately, two-thirds true. And then, in some sort of dramatic irony, the comic about the day ended up requiring the most post-production work of any comic so far, trying to get all that dialogue to fit. I really should look into how people layout their words and word bubbles, instead of forcing both of you faithful readers to decipher my chicken scratch.

(You're definitely going to need the large size of this one, if you want to read any of it. Unless your eyes are reeely good.)

It's a wedding-filled year and we've got two in the next two weeks. And, actually, I don't really like cake.

"I'm the pig of failure," I scrawled and tossed the notebook back on the nightstand. "It's not a real failure," Erica said, "it'd be a real failure if you didn't draw anything." So that's what the cat is saying. I'm a winner, indeed.

I mean, wouldn't you leave the banana suit on for a walk through Wrigleyville on a Saturday night?

Two days in a row, reality-based.

Zombies. That's all.

You'll probably need to see the large size to read my self-pity.

And on this one you might need the large size to read the brilliant dialogue.

It is, in fact, unseasonably cold here in Chicago.

I know, I know. I've got two "fifth string" tuning pegs and neither are in the right place. That's what makes it so eeeevil.

Topical!

I guess the default mode of comedy for me is bickering.

Pretty, pretty ponies.

Once again I've gotten behind on scanning.

For some reason, jokes that rely on the audience being familiar with another joke are hilarious to me. Here's one of my favorite jokes: "You know what happens when you assume... you're often wrong."

Not that you care at all -- it's my dumb self-challenge art project -- but here's your proof that I really am doing one of these a day. Because if I was drawing them in batches every couple of days, would I include a hastily drawn burping pig, drawn in a tiny spiral notebook that Erica keeps on the nightstand for late-night note taking?

I was just doodling around creating some characters, but I may come back to these guys to see what they have to say.

Latte is named Latte because she's coffee colored, more or less. Brownish, to be sure.

You'll probably need to see the large size to read the dialog, because I didn't plan the layout very well. Also, sharks!

It's a Blewt inside joke, but I think farts are universal in their appeal.

I had Erica sign this one as well because the concept was 100% hers.

I've been on a massive roadtrip with Erica for the last week and a half, so I've been drawing my daily cartoons but haven't had a scanner nor steady internet to post them. So here's a catch-up.

Erica is actually a lot more supportive than Schmerica about me getting one of these done each day. And Erica wrote a couple of new jingles for the above-pictured hotel.

As soon as we get just a hair south of Chicago, boom, Waffle Houses everywhere. There were two in a mile in Biloxi.

I hope you can tell that that's a shared air line, since that's kinda the crux of the joke.

For this one, I actually did some photo research, as opposed to the from-memory look the day before.

I'm not sure this one makes any sense.

The Change Raise scam.

We got to meet Christopher and Katie's bees. Pictures soon.

Oh, good. One hundred cartoons is a nice milestone, so I'm glad it was a really good one that day.

This is just what it was like, walking around Washington, DC.

If you can't read any of those, click on the cartoon to go to Flickr and you should have the "all sizes" button and then you can embiggen it. Sorry to make you do the work -- it's late.

It's funny because it's true. It's also sad because it's true.

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The line is Erica's longtime favorite, real Lawrence Welk quote.

Really. We sat on the beach at Virginia Beach watching an ACO Tournament (oh god, there are competing organizations!) and wiling away the time with obscene cornhole humor. We never ran out of jokes.

Schmuzzy and Schmerica are, of course, characters -- Erica isn't even here in Virginia. But Matt's TV is, indeed, broken -- I've reached for the "rewind" button on the remote a half-dozen times already.

I'm on the road, hence the photo instead of a scan. And I don't think I can draw fire. And oops on the crowded word balloon for the punchline. Here's the large size if you have trouble reading the dialogue.

Thanks to Erica for the conversation about fruit leather and then for reminding me about the conversation about fruit leather when I sat down to do my cartoon tonight.

OK, I think I'm done with Swine Flu stuff. I just remembered that I have a Pig character and all …

Ha ha! Pandemics are funny!

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I'm not sure the real Erica is as easily convinced as Schmerica, even though part of the list comes from her own lips.

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We helped Noah move today. We're helpful!

(The large size to read all that great dialogue.)

Scientificly [sic] validated, is indeed true. (So is us having issues with the proper operation of the thing.)

I didn't know what I was going to draw, so I thought I'd start by drawing Coyote and Raven and see what they had to say. And then I drew the ground line in the wrong place. So I thought I'd add action lines and see where that took me.

No, no, you're right - it doesn't make a lick of sense. But I am full of noodles.

I actually had to stop the chair to draw the cartoon - it was too wiggly.

Ripped from our real lives, this cartoon is. I wish I could draw people, because Erica is a lot prettier than that.

I shouldn't point it out, because you probably haven't noticed (I didn't) but I used to color in Raven by hand and then I switched to doing it in post in Photoshop and then (oh, the horror) I forgot to color him in the last few times. Oops. Here he is restored to his rightful hue.

All I know about Wife Swap is from the clips they show on The Soup, but from that little information, this seems accurate.

When we arrived in Phoenix on Thursday, everyone was apologizing that it was so cold -- it had gotten down to 70° or so. Hahaha. Yeah, it might snow tonight in Chicago. Whee!

This is what we call "topical" if we're feeling generous, or "in-joke" if we're not. I was at the Phoenix Improv Festival all weekend. What the phoenix is saying there is a repeated line from the Mail Order Bride show on Friday. Oh, if you had been there how clever this all would seem.

(You'll probably need to see a larger view to read the scintillating dialogue.)

I just read Adventures in Cartooning and I had all the "no electronic devices" time on the plane to Phoenix so I decided to play around with a narrative and time jumps. Definitely file this one under "experimenting with the form" rather than "trying to entertain you".

That's real life up there on the page, people.

I've been walking a line with these cartoons where I don't want to make excuses ("I'm just learning!" etc) but the point of the exercise is that I am learning as I go, and so I want to be honest about places I feel shaky. So, you know, Pig looks a little sadder in that second panel than I think I meant for him to. And maybe that last word balloon could be a little more interupty somehow. Maybe it should just be "Over Here!"?

I have not been feeling well lately. Good thing I only have two shows in two different states this week.

I'm having fun with these guys.

So Melissa's neighbor keeps accusing Melissa's dog of stealing her shoes off her back porch and I said, "how does she know it's your dog, it might just be a squirrel who wants a charming chapeau." Or, I realized, Coyote.

I had a cartoon first this week - a request, from a certain young relative of mine. This is not that request, but it inspired it. I do believe in Tinkerhooks, I do!

It's a little known fact that before John Hodgman hit upon his popular 700 Hobo Names and 700 Molemen Names lists, he compiled a list of 700 Actuary Names. Over the coming months I shall be illustrating each of these boring men in black suits.

As my reward for hitting 60 cartoons, I got myself a metal pencil box so I can carry my blue pencils and a couple pens in my backpack and feel fancy. So I drew this one over at our friends the Knights while watching the UNC-Michigan game. Go Heels!

So, you know, everyone brings something to the relationship.

Point, counter-point.

I kinda cheated on the cartoon today by just posting one that Parker drew.

It's an in-joke that three people will get and I can't draw humans. Enjoy!

(Large size)

I think I've discovered that mixed case (i.e. my natural handwriting) is best for true stories and all caps is best for comedy.

Large version.

More "me being annoyed at some stand-up" than "funny".

(Large size)

This would just be a "poor sketch", but adding a super-title makes it a "cartoon". See how that works? Buddy Guy's Legends has good food, in case you were wondering.

Sorry if it's a little gross.

(Large size.)

Inspired by true events. Not finding six phone books on our apartment steps -- the alien invasion part.

(Large version)

In case you're worried, this is purely Schmuzzy and Schmerica. Comedy!

Raven can fly!

(The large size.)

I should probably start working on single panel cartoons that just present the joke, so that I don't have to have the "exaggerated reaction" in the third panel. It's the visual equivalent of a laugh track and I know it and I still can't help myself.

"You're going to use up all of your limited text messages per month" didn't flow as well, so I decided that Gerald's on a mobile device that bills him for data plan minutes.

Apelad invited fans to draw Pip of the Laugh Out Loud Cats, which I did. And that inspired me to draw this homage(?) to the LOL Cats as my daily cartoon. (If you're not a fan, which you should be, Pip likes leaves.)

I'm sure this joke has been done before, but I don't have the heart to go searching and prove to myself how unoriginal I am (and that's not an invitation for you to "help" by doing so for me).

But I did just read this fascinating, even to a non-sports fan like myself, series on traveling (via Kottke). And my alma mater made it through the first round of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament today, so Go Boilers!

Armour, of course, not armor. I read way too much British fantasy when I was a kid.

In fact, it is the cartoonist who is sick as a dog and spent the whole day on the couch coughing and playing video games. So, no time for inking.

No relation.

Based ever so lightly on real life (the lightly, of course, being why they are Schmuzzy and Schmerica).

From some sort of back-to-basics impulse, I've been trying to get these cartoons right on paper with a minimum of post-production work. This one was the first one that I've had to totally assemble in Photoshop from two different pages of drawings.

(The large size.)

Watch out kids, Drinky McBottle wants you to think that he enhances your creativity, but really all he does is make you draw sloppy cartoons and then play Bioshock for 5 hours.

You'll probably need to see the large size to read my handwriting.

The pictures aren't cut out -- that's just clumsy Photoshop levels work to even out the contrast between the light blue pencil and the dark black ink. And I couldn't find a green pencil on short notice, so that's blue pencil hue-shifted on the right.

It's close to Anthropomorphic Cannibalism, but it's not, see?

Hey! Thirty-six cartoons is, with rounding error, 10% of the way through this crazy project.

Creating characters without borders to their faces seems smart, until you want to draw them in front of something. Also, Pig is not higher in the last two frames because he's jumping -- it's because I don't know how to draw him in the same place.

(View larger if you can't read my writing.)

I asked Erica, "What's funny tonight?" and her reply was, "Butts are always funny." So true.

(Here's the large size.)

It's Gerdes and Pig!

(Here's the large version.)

This is comes out of my head while running box office for a midnight show. What is that little guy? Weird.

Oh, nevermind. She's not a vampire, it's just a left-over egg tooth.

If they guys look a little uncomfortable, it's because they're not sure about doing a cross-promotion with Push Butt. "What's next," Coyote asked, "Pepsi product placement?"

Actually, if Coyote looks a little uncomfortable, it's because he's got wiggly lines, because I still haven't mastered this trace-over-your-blue-pencil business. I think it works in the last panel, though.

(Here's the large size for legibility.)

Hey look! Coyote and Raven get word bubbles instead of just little lines pointing at their mouths. Until my lettering improves (or I give up and start using the computer to add dialogue) I should probably provide links to the large version of these cartoons so that you can actually read the (hopefully funny) words.

This is the first one where I was really just staring at a blank page and thinking 'oh crap, I can't go to bed until I draw something.' And really, knowing myself, I think 29 days into this sort of project is not that bad to hit that wall. And hopefully that's just tonight -- we were at a crazy Dada-esque concert tonight (and c'mon Fulcrum Point -- Flash? I'd like to be able to actually link your information about the concert, but nooooo) and then we gave everyone rides home and someone forgot their bag in our car so we had to drive back down to Montrose and wah wah am I still talking?

Also, Erica reminded me as I was scanning this in that I got "What's cool? Nothing. Nothing is cool." from her and Christopher and that they got it from Ron Cameron's classic skateboard design. So, this is very left-handed homage. Am I still up?

Update: Ron Cameron has a Zazzle store. You can get a "Nothing is Cool" coffee mug! A postage stamp!

Please know that I don't intend this as any sort of slam on the cuisine of Chef Puck -- he was just the funniest-named chef I could think of as I was drawing this.

During some crucial hanging out this evening, Noah handed me a piece of paper and said "draw something". So I did, and then Noah copied it. I mean, sure, his looks a hundred times better than mine, but how many people could eff-up their Y so it looks kind of like a K so you're not sure if it's DESTINY or DE-STINK? That's some genius-quality ambiguity there, folks.

Can you tell that it's snowing today in Chicago?

For my 25th cartoon milestone (well, and because it was Friday and Erica was already downtown) we went to Pearl and I treated myself to a few blue pencils and a bigger sketch book (a whole 8.5x11"!).

Knight & Dragon (and sometimes Princess) is a pretty classic cartoon combination. I saw a tweet from Cory Doctorow this morning about a new cartooning book for kids with a knight and dragon on the cover and this popped into my head in the shower. It took a number of iterations before I was happy that the dragon didn't just look like a lumpy alligator. And I kept drawing the knight with his helmet down, until I realized that that was dumb (also, crusader robes -- much easier to draw than armor)*.

I filled the page in my lil' sketchbook with the drawing, so originally this was the first of my cartoons that I hadn't hand-lettered -- I used a font that I made of my own handwriting via the YourFonts website (it's free!). But the font isn't tweaked at all and the more I looked at the longer words like "availability" the more I didn't like it, so I wrote out the dialogue and scanned it in.

* Oh snap -- that's the way the knight is drawn on the cover of that book. I guess I was trying to get away from that inspiration with all the armoured knights I drew (badly). Then I did a Google image search for knight and I was all like "aha -- crusader robes would be easy to draw. I must be a genius for thinking of that!" Sigh.

It is, in fact, raining like the dickens here in Chicago. And this hilights why I've been mostly doing talking heads so far -- the joke here, such as it is, relies on you recognizing that that's a puddle in the 3 panel and not, say, a piece of abstract art left lying under falling ants. Or something. But practice is, I suppose, the only way to get better and that's the whole point of this exercise. Sorry about the ants.

I mean, there's the reunion show next week, so it's topical for a whole seven more days. Take that Can O' Soup.

Erica laughed, but she's tipsy too.

I'm trying out a new Schmerica head. I'm also trying out the four panel model (oh, wait I have done that already). I'm also using the silent penultimate panel.

I think we're learning that Schmuzzy is kind of a jerk.

That's not too obscure, is it?

I can't find her stash, but you know it's true…

I think that should be "is harder" in the second panel there, but I don't know if I'm going to bother going back to fix it. In fact… I'm not.

I got a great email yesterday, inviting me to participate in an qualifying match of Layer Tennis this Friday before the main match (noonish, I believe). I instantly accepted and then went and asked my boss if I could have the afternoon off. And then... well, why don't I let my cartoon of the day tell you about my mental state:

I'm pretty firmly in stage two right now. I mean, I've talked a lot of smack about Layer Tennis competitors over the last two seasons and now it's my turn to face the criticism. And my opponent is a real designer and all and what am I? I'm an actor/video editor/server admin who dabbles. I dabble! And FuzzyCo is a mess! I should have cleaned up if I knew I was going to be having company!

Whew. Gotta talk myself down. You'll be fine, Fuzzy. You'll be fine.

There are many ways Erica and I are just alike, and sleepiness is one of them. Zzzzzzz.

Yes, we do watch a lot of reality TV. (Also, in fairness, I think it was season 2 of RoL that "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" was overplayed. Whatevs.)

Yessss… I did just watch some Dimitri Martin. Why do you ask?

My day went better than the ninja's, as far as romance at least.

Or... I'll draw a hasty cartoon and then live the joke.

This is, unfortunately, not something I dreamed up, it's just a thing that's actually sitting beside the TV. The devil wasn't that intimidating to begin with, and now that he's sitting in a bowl, he's even cuter.

Pretty big hair in the first frame there. I did actually clean up some layout stuff in Photoshop (the title was way above the cartoon, for example) but I decided that we all needed to see just how big Schmuzzy's hair could be.

This is probably funnier if you know our cats. See, Parker is bigger than Latte. A lot bigger.

Oh, I exaggerate for comedic effect. I watch the The City voluntarily. I mean, it's the stupidest show ever. But, yes, voluntarily.

I was inspired by Shauna's versions of Erica and myself and spent some time doodling up these guys. I should probably just copy Shauna's drawings and be done with it.

My birthday party was a ton of fun. I probably can't do that sort of thing more than once a year, now that I'm an old, old man, because I was definitely dragging the next day.

At my party birthday, I set out a pile of paper and pens and asked people to draw a cartoon of me. To set the bar low, I drew this one. (I'll post the cartoons in a second here.)

Coyote and Raven return.

Coyote and Raven are two little characters I've been drawing for years. Not with any consistency, as these four panels show. And I've already gone meta, just two days in.

So now that I'm done with taking a year's worth of photos of myself, I thought I'd stretch a different artistic muscle for the next year. I love cartooning, but I'm pretty terrible at drawing, so drawing at least a cartoon a day for a year… well, I can't get any worse at least.

And so what a delightful coincidence this morning to read an invite from Lore Sjöberg to add characters to the Jug Sauce Elite. Done and done -- day one is checked off. This cartooning train is off to the races. (Do trains race? Who cares -- that'll be day two!)