Tiki Madness #1

I try to start each morning by doing a drawing exercise. This morning, I decided to draw a tiki. I’m pleased with this first effort and it has inspired me to draw some more tiki designs, maybe some tikis with flaming torches or with flaming eyes. Yeah, flaming eyes, that sounds good. You can get merchandise with this design at PooBahSchlock

Pirates of Orange County

While waiting for takeoff on a California tarmac this week, I found myself surrounded by a family that had just visited Disneyland. Their pirate merchandise inspired me to draw this cartoon. Just as I started to respond to their question, “What’s with the cockroaches?” the captain informed us that we were being towed back to the gate—and our flight had been cancelled! Everyone was too distracted to listen to my Disney Magazine cockroach story… Oh, well.

Lurid Paperback Cover of the Week

I got an email today from a fan of a website I took down a few years ago, Mark Monlux’s Lurid Paperback Cover of the Week. You might have seen the inch and a half blurb about it on the second column of page 185 in the November 1999 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. It received a fair amount of attention, which probably had more to do with the subject matter of politically incorrect and morally offensive paperback cover art from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s than my skills as a writer. Back in the early days of paperbacks, there were no PC police to reprimand publishers for using sex to sell their novels.

Each week I posted a cover from either my or another collector’s collections and waxed nostalgic about its artistic or historic merits. As much as I enjoyed maintaining the site, the number of hours in a day is limited and I wanted to pursue creating some webcomics. (see The Comic Critic and The Return of Stickman) Thus, my time in Internet space was reallocated. Still, it was a lot of fun. Here are a few of the covers I’ve posted over the years.

Octopus Remote Shuffle

Here is something I worked on this week. It was kind of hard getting any work done earlier this week since roofers covered the house like ants. Their pounding and the constant racket of air compressors made it very hard to concentrate. Now that they are gone, leaving behind a beautiful roof, the cat and I can calm down.

The Return of Stickman #491

I spent this last week creating a rough draft of what I hope to be one of many The Return of Stickman books. My main problem is that I had a lot of folks contributing strips that were received in a low-resolution format. I need to write to all the contributors and have them sign waivers and send high-resolution images if they want to be included in this edition. Oh, all of this has absolutely nothing to do with today’s strip.

I Review the Movie Head

I was just a toddler when The Monkees first aired on prime time television. I don’t think it was the type of show my parents watched and I can’t claim to have been a fan then. When the show aired as a Saturday morning show a few years later, I did become a fan. Of course, I thought Speed Racer was cool, too. This didn’t stop me from dragging my sweet understanding wife to a reunion concert of The Monkees at The Puyallup Fair years later. We both enjoyed the show a great deal. It made me fairly excited to see “Head.” Like so many fans before me, I left feeling alienated by it. I didn’t want to watch something that deconstructed their phony television personas. I fell in love with their phony television world and watching this movie felt like getting a Dear John letter—30 years late. Go ahead, watch the film if you feel like an excursion into yesteryear to find some odd writing and a couple of surprising cameos, but don’t expect to feel the love like you did when you were a kid.

The Return of Stickman #480

Back in the day, I coveted mood rings, but I never managed to get one. What a bummer. I still remember watching Martin Landau on television, showing off his mood ring to Merv Griffin, when Landau was the star of that very popular science fiction show, Space 1999. The premise of the show was that the moon would leave earth’s orbit and wander around the universe. Who would have guessed that the reverse would happen? Rather than having one less moon, there would be thousands, wandering around everywhere.