Cartoon Scholarship

This is a real good deal for college students who want to be cartoonists. The National Cartoonists Society gives out a scholarship each year and you get to come to our annual convention and meet all the famous guys and stuff.

Click on the image for a closer view.

Deviled Eggs

Bizarro is brought to you today by Purveyors of Magic.

This is one of my personal favorites of late. Something about the goose/gorilla/teacher's matter-of-fact attitude about her "suspicions" makes me smile. Drawing her was a kick. (Random note: the character at left unintentionally ended up looking a lot like my cousin,
Steve, in Kansas City.)

I grew up in Oklahoma alongside people who actually believed in black magic. They were "born again" Christians and didn't practice BM themselves, of course, but believed it existed, would not allow their children to play with Ouija boards or dress as anything "evil" on Halloween. They sincerely believed these kinds of activities attracted the attention of Satan and would lead to no good. They were also completely convinced that Satanic cults were responsible for the majority of missing children in the U.S. as a result of their need to make regular human sacrifices.

I know there are still plenty of people in first-world nations who believe in black magic even today. Perhaps some of you readers do. You're welcome to your beliefs, of course, who am I to judge? (Other than a rational, thinking human being who can say with reasonable certainty that all magic is illusion and/or suggestion.)

Whether you believe in invisible forces or not, hope you got a smile from this cartoon.

A Year of Comics Reading

Well, 11 months actually. Here's a chart showing how many comics I got each week, and how many I read each day, from February to December of 2009:



(Click to make it legible size...)

I've mentioned before on this blog the fact that I have a fairly sizable comic book backlog; I estimate that it's somewhere around 1000 unread comics. This chart was part of my plan to try to reduce the size of the backlog.

Studies show that people who track calories by writing them down and monitor their weight weekly do a better job at losing weight and keeping it off. So early last year I decided to do the equivalent to see if I could slim down my comics backlog.

It seems to have been successful; by the end of the year the backlog was down 102 comics from where it was at the start of the year.

I averaged reading 31 comics each week. The biggest day for reading comics was Saturday; the lightest were Tuesday & Wednesday.

I began my 'week' on Thursday, since that's the day my DCBS shipment usually arrives. Any other comics acquired during the week also got added in.

I counted each item acquired and each item read as one comic, whether it was a 24-page pamphlet or a 720-page tome (I'm looking at you, Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button!)