inklings: 2011

My Little God Particle

Rats race; hamsters are into spinning.
God’s in the details.

Religion: No Pain, No Game

Avowed hippy atheist mesmerizes masses

A new religion was born last March in New Mexico. Its Messiah, a slender redhead with two sons named after a random license plate and Scrabble tiles revealed the new religion to an elated gathering of pilgrims who collectively experienced transcendent conversion. The new acolytes are oracles of human potential and longing, visionaries of doom and salvation, they’re apostles of the future; they’re game programmers.
     Scoff at your peril— these people don’t merely control billions of dollars, they control billions of minds. With hypnotic, addictive, even deadly power.
     Fortunately, there is but one talisman record of the new religion—a thumb-sized covenant—and nobody outside the gaming geek universe has the slightest idea wtf it is about. Alarmingly, its rapidly evolving mystical power has already caused shame, outrage, banishment and persecution. Volcanoes are involved.
     It’s uncertain where this is heading; check back in 2,000 years.

Evolution is So Gay

Ms. Bachmann holds some odd beliefs,
but I think we both agree God works
in mysterious ways.

But You’d Buy It, Right?

This is pure gadget envy,
there’s no other excuse for it.

Mr. Jobs, you had a cosmic run—RIP.

Swampman Stops Smoking

Swampman and I go back to 7th grade where we played ball, skipped school and stole his daddy’s liquor. I’d do caricatures of him that pissed him off. These days he calls from the west coast a few times a year and we share some laughs... recently he told me the true story of how he stopped smoking.

Life, Liberty and the Cheroot of Happiness

(A continuing history of a comic strip for a small universe)

Filed under “we have the leaders we deserve,” these smoke
out the difference between an optimist and a pessimist...
The optimist smiles beatifically, says “this is the best of all
possible worlds”— the pessimist reflects a minute, grimaces
and replies, “yeah, you’re right.”

News flash: “one man, one vote” is history— welcome to “one corporation, all the votes you can buy!”

Wikileaks?—it’s not so much selective memory as selective amnesia...

Id, ego, super-ego — and putzes

(a continuing look back at a comic strip for a small universe)

Stuff constantly goes over our heads that we mistake for routine air traffic

Occasional unforeseen events intrude...

but perseverance and character strength get us through.

Sheen and Shinola

(A continuing history of a comic strip for a small universe)

We interrupt our usual chronology because the strip we printed in the club’s February 2011 newsletter coincided with a breaking news story... namely, the front page of Saturday, January 21st shown at left.
Art allegedly imitates life or vice-versa, but it’s not often life so obviously imitates the funny pages. Take a good look at that photo of Charlie though. Is that honestly a face you'd expect to find anywhere else?

Doorks

(Continuing a look back at a comic strip for a small universe)

Somebody painted the Club’s door black a few years ago.
Although it had been red for at least 60 years, somebody didn’t care, didn’t notice, or decided that black was a preferable comedic color.
Suspicion thus falls on an aesthetically impaired amnesiac who wets himself laughing over Poe and Kafka.

The act perhaps arose from a personal depression. Possibly a youthful trauma brought on by a drunken department store Santa or a rogue firetruck. Heavens. Get therapy, give us back the red door.

Black is funereal; the color of tragedy and self-doubt. Black is the choice of petite bourgeois, Huguenots, gentry. These are precisely the posturing, effete nobs the Comedy Club was founded to escape from.

Some misinformed, flatulent toads think that red doesn’t go with brick. Thus, red does not go with red. Those imbeciles may apply to the Blue Hair Troupe, the Anais Nin Lesbian Thesbians or a Frank Campbell embalming course— wherever their penchant for melancholy and dignified pretension calls them— but give us back our red door.

Why We Can’t Just Get Along

While opinions differ, people universally agree their own opinion is right. The pathetic incapacity of others to recognize the truth and righteousness of our viewpoints forces cartoons to happen.
Alternatively, there are resorts of forceful coercion, hostilities or feeble attempts to make rules.

Deconstructing cartoons is stupid and unfunny

...but not as stupid as believing politics will resolve anything.

Only cartoons reliably advance sanity. You’re stupid if you disagree.

Guy Talk

(a continuing look back at a comic strip for a small universe)

The club’s Green Room has one of those Oxford Dictionaries the size of a footstool with type so small it comes with a magnifying glass.
Some of the conversations at the club might lead you to believe a few members knew that book practically by heart. It’s a tough house for repartee.

There’s no point in cartooning if you don’t take a shot at the desert island gag...

...but even for this audience, it might be a reach using the word “perspicacity.”

Goin’ To the Chapel

The club’s a successful model of adapted diversity. What started as an excuse for some Murray Hill swells to ditch their wives and put on plays was a heck of a good formula in the 1880s, but it still needed new blood.
Over the years since, bluebloods, blue collars and the occasional brigand joined forces on and off stage, and ever have categories of bachelors, newly-married, “daddy-track” and indeterminate old farts been in evidence. There was a spate of guys tying the knot in the oughties; this strip commemorated a future president’s pre-nup festivities:

Really Should Get Out More

The cartoon wasn’t a regular thing in the club’s newsletter because the cartoonist was pretty lazy. Or distracted. Or depressed. Probably all three.

’01 through ’03 saw little over a dozen strips, this one a product of renting too many VCR movies, which features the final appearance of a little dog that was lost in his divorce: