Mermaid Tears

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by the commercial fishing industry, which would TOTALLY kill mermaids in their drift nets if there was profit in it.

This is one of those cartoons that I hope you don't fully get until you look closely at the picture. I like to devise jokes that aren't completely evident until you look carefully. I enjoy being surprised this way by other people's cartoons, so I figure maybe my readers do, too.

Drawing Tools/Water and Meat

I've gotten a few inquiries about two of my previous posts, so I thought I'd answer them here.

Drawing Tools: I draw my cartoons the old-fashioned way, with brush and ink on bristol board, then scan them into a Mac to do all the repair work and coloring in Photoshop. I have a very cool state-of-the-art screen from Wacom called a Cintiq, on which you can draw with a stylus directly on the screen, which is pressure sensitive. So I can get a thicker line by pushing harder, thinner line by letting up pressure, etc., just like a paintbrush. I could (and have, on rare occasion) draw an entire cartoon on my computer, and no one would be able to tell the difference. This fancy-pants screen is tons o' good in my line of work.

Water and Meat: Many folks all over the place wonder about this "5,000 gallons to raise a pound of beef" (the subject of CHNW's demonstration in Times Square) and how much water it takes to raise plants for vegan/vegetarain diets. The way it works is that most of the crops we grow in this country are fed to animals, not people. So the water it takes to grow them is figured into the amount it takes to raise a pound of meat. Feeding plants directly to humans is 12-to-16 times more efficient than feeding them to animals (the number varies depending on the animal and the crop). In other words, it takes enough food and water to provide 16 meals for humans to create a single serving of meat. If the whole world turned vegetarian (yeah, like that would ever happen), we could feed 12-to-16 times more humans with the crops we currently grow. Simply put, it would solve world hunger.

The next question people ask is what you would do with all those farm animals in this vegetarian utopia. Simple: Stop breeding them. There are nearly a 100 billion "food" animals alive on the planet at any given time. Stop allowing them to breed, and they'd be gone in no time. As would the millions of tons of feces per second that they create, as well as the greenhouse gases they emit, and the pollution resulting from their poo. Contrary to popular belief, you can't use that much poo for fertilizer. Mostly, it just pollutes the air and ground water. We'd also see a HUGE reduction in medical costs, as most cancers, heart disease, diabetes, you name it, would disappear.

Like I say, vegetarianism will never happen worldwide without some kind of devestating plague that makes it too dangerous to eat animals, but all of these facts are part of why I don't subsidize the animal agriculture industry by buying or consuming animal products of any kind.

For more info on this kind of thing, visit Woodstocksanctuary.org. CHNW and I are founding board members and pour a lot of our time, work and money into this project.

Four to Read for Thursday, April 24

* Kerry Callen: The Truth about Superman (via JK Parkin)

* Blog@Newsarama: Another look at the manga-style Wolverine, X-Men

* Progressive Ruin presents...the End of Civilization.

* deviantART: Hank Ketcham's Fantastic Four by ~DocShaner (via Kevin Melrose)

Free Association

This Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by a swarthy guy with poor hygiene and a penchant for argyle.

Rorschach tests have been a favorite topic of cartoonists for a long time – few subjects are more fertile than the idea of "free association." Several months ago, I got to thinking about the concept of Rorschach's parents free-associating about him as an infant (decades before he invented his famous therapy technique, of course) but wasn't sure how to use it. This is one of those ideas that floated around my sketchbook for ages before I came upon a way to make it work.

Like any artist (except really poor ones), I don't love all my ideas. But this is one I'm really happy with. The strange comments in the caption balloons resulting from my own free-assocation about infants, make me giggle. If I can make myself smile, it's usually a good sign.

The Late Shipping Hall of Shame, Part 2: The Readers Strike Back!

There was overwhelming response to my first Late Shipping Hall of Shame post, not only here on this blog but elsewhere as well. As promised, I'm compiling some of your suggestions here, selecting several more comics to be added to the Late Shipping Hall of Shame.

Okay, here we go:


Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do - Kevin Smith is always high in demand as one of the first big-name movie writers to dabble in comics, with his work on Daredevil & Green Arrow breathing new life into second-string characters that many had thought past their prime. So teaming him with fan-favorite artists Terry & Rachel Dodson on a Spider-Man project seemed like a great idea. Sure, the project might run a little late; while both the writer and artists didn't have a sterling track record, up to that point they hadn't seen some of the obscene delays that had plagued others. But putting them on a mini-series meant that Marvel could be a bit more tolerant of delays. Heck, Smith even went on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to plug the book! But did anyone foresee a delay of over three years between issues three and four? I wonder if Smith wishes he'd kept on comics instead of shooting Jersey Girl? At least Smith came back to finish it, even if he set a record for a gap in a mini-series; a record that is in danger of being broken by:



Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk - A tale as old as time: Hollywood writer with a love of comics gets a chance to write a mini-series featuring his favorite super-heroes. He gets started, then better-paying Hollywood gigs get in the way and the next thing you know your comic is over two years late... and counting. Marvel and Lost impressario Damon Lindelof swear that the series will eventually be completed, and we believe them. Really...



The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Yeah, we forgive Moore for Watchmen, as it wasn't nearly as late as our collective memory thinks it was. But LXG, after three monthly issues, took another another sixteen months to finish up its final three issues. Many people still admire Moore as a writer, but with the delays on this comic and others in the America's Best Comics line, Moore's ability to sell floppies has atrophied, with fans preferring to wait for the trade instead of dealing with long delays in the middle of his intricate plots.



Rising Stars - J. Michael Straczynski's super-powered magnum opus for Top Cow suffered a nearly two-year delay near the end, between issues #21 & 22, but it wasn't the same old Hollywood writer story. Instead, JMS was protesting being cut out of film-rights negotiations for his property and delayed his scripts. Communications broke down between the parties, but once Top Cow issued an apology (along with a transfer of some minor intellectual property) the final three issues of the series were completed.



Astro City - Kurt Busiek & Brent Anderson's fan-favorite street-level view of super-heroes never maintained a perfect monthly record, but one of the more unusual episodes in the annals of late shipping books occured when writer Busiek came down with mercury poisoning and book was delayed for nearly a year as he was unable to concentrate enough to write the intricate scripts. Thankfully Busiek recovered, and DC have enough confidence in him to give him the job writing the lead story in their upcoming weekly Trinity series. But Astro City never really recovered, and after transitioning to a series of mini-series and one-shots its sales have never recovered.



Ministry of Space - Artist Chris Weston showed up in the comments of the original Hall of Shame post to nominate his and Warren Ellis's retro-future space series for the long delay between its second and final issues. We forgive you, Chris!



No, this isn't the end of the Late Shipping Hall of Shame; there's still plenty more to come. Look for part three at some point probably next week. In the meantime, please keep your nominations coming!

CNN Scrapes The Barrel's Bottom

For Earth Day, King Features asked its cartoonists to do a cartoon on the environment. CNN did a story on those of us who complied and since I live in NYC, I was lucky enough to get tapped for an on-screen interview. Of the couple of hours of footage they got while making my house look like a crime scene with blazing bright lights and equipment trucks, they used only a couple of quick sound bites, of course. I'm happy they used the one about animal agriculture being more damaging to the environment than all transportation. (See link beneath video for more info.)

Here is a picture of me mesmerized by my own image, and a video clip of my interview, which I taped right off the TV with my digital camera. Most of my family missed the original airing of the show, so I'm hoping the CNN police will let me keep this on here for a while.

For the record, I don't normally look as much like a serial killer nerd as I do in this clip. Sitting five feet from a bank of 1900 watt bulbs on stilts will do that to a guy.


combined.http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772&Cr=global&Cr1=environment

Four to Read for Tuesday, April 22

* The Comics Reporter: 50 Observations And Notes From The Floor Of The New York Comic-Con, 2008

* Dave's Long Box: Closing Time

* Space Chimps Trailer

* w craghead: petals, a spell (via Dirk)