Okay, okay, maybe I’m not blowing your mind here. Yes, you may have already noticed that women wore gigantic, man-shaping shoulder pads both times they found themselves trying to muscle into the office, in the ’40s and the ’80s. But check this out, I think you can predict what era will be in vogue for a comeback by who is in the White House. Eisenhower and Reagan both hated Commies and glorified the notion of a clean, orderly suburbia with plenty of time-saving gizmos and great new stuff to acquire. Change the Commies to Evildoers and it’s easy to understand how the ’80s were so huge in the ’00s. The Obamas/Kennedys-era fixation with long, sharp silhouettes and solid colors has already been discussed enough.

How about, let’s try for a bit of a stretch. Teddy Roosevelt and LBJ both replaced assassinated presidents. They also both used their executive might to take on too-big corporate interests. What was all the rage with hippies? Cowboy stuff! Fringe, leather, big facial hair. It was positively turn of the century!

Well, aren’t you glad we got through that? Are you just here to look at the pictures anyway? Alright, then. This I drew on the Greyhound some time. It’s Don Rosa (as best I could remember) at a barbecue in Charlotte, thinking about Scrooge McDuck (who looks something like that?) who’s thinking about money. Well anyhow, the point is they have similar hair and glasses and mouths. Gahd, cut to the picture already!!

In the ‘aughts, the diffusion of urban hip fashion switched direction. It all started in the ‘nineties when the internet hit and it became cool to be a bookish nerd with all-too clearly defined tastes. To be a High Fidelity-Williamsburg-Oakland Hipster. The articulate and critical rogue found something delightfully cute about the Victorian era while they* mashed together every  style of the past forty years. This is true in the drum machine-driven folk music, the facial hair, jeans and dresses that we** adore.

The Hipster’s position was solidified under Bush, Jr. It was definitely not cool to like him, and he happened to ideally represent the All American Jock who beat the shit out of us nerds back in school. So the convenient way to rebel against this self-aggrandized popular kid was to further nerd yourself. You could truly hone in on your singular obsessions, learn all there was to know about everything, become active, and make yourself important. It’s just like joining the yearbook and the debate squad and the student government and theater and band.

At the same time, all the jocks, popular kids and soc’s were getting really into hip hop. Black was (and is) finally mainstream. Black had a brief glimpse of being the only cool way to be back in the ’seventies, and now it has really made it. From preppies who give dap to Juggalos*** who didn’t get the note not to sag their jeans and turn their caps anymore, the youths are down!

All of which means it stopped being cool to be just hip hop. The wrong people were appropriating the style for the first time since jazz cats, rock ‘n’ rollers, beats, hippies, disco freaks and post punks. No longer the interesting, pot-smoking, bohemian types were adopting slang, fashion and music. Instead it was the dull, suburban Whities who had wriggled into some token degree of Blackness.

So, big city black kids took up skateboarding. They put on skinny jeans and learned to play guitar. Kanye West, Pharrell, Mos Def, TV on the Radio led the way to aggressively  adapting sci-fi, comics, video games, taste-making blogs, nerdy glasses and outmoded clothes. Now, I know there is still a good heap of inter-mingling, with skinny art school kids getting grills, and library scientists putting on Knicks jersey-dresses. Still, I think its going stronger in the other way.

*Yes, I’m using they as a gender-neutral singular. Ya got somethin ta say about it??

**Yes, we, because there’s nothing more Hipster to do than to say you’re not a Hipster (and therefore I’m not because I’m saying I am, right?).

***Yes, I did look up that spelling. On urbandictionary.com, thank you very much.

Your reward is a cute cat. Cute when she plays with a hair tie, but not so when she shits on the bed.

Glenn Beck and the Tea Party and Patriot movements keep drumming these guys up into a gold-and-gun-slinging frenzy, while Republican congressmen do their best to make sure that nothing happens in government, therefore insuring that government is, as they say, bad, and now we’ve seen an act of right-wing rebellion (with actual IRS casualties), and nobody cares?? But a couple of guys with brown skin that say their prayers to the east each unsuccessfully attempt to hijack planes, and it’s all we see or hear for months, and we’re pushed into more drastic, fortress-like and closed conditions at airports and in cities all over the world? I guess this empire might go out with a bang after all.

Now that you’ve scrolled through my liberal diatribes, here’s something I drew in my sketchbook a while ago while I was warming up to do some inks.

It reminded me of my favorite New Testament story, wherein Jesus finds moneylenders doing business in the Temple at Jerusalem and…

HE SMASHES THE SHIT OUTTA THEIR TABLES!!!

And then I read about how the Teabaggers react to all this stuff and it made me scared of having to fight a civil war with them. But really, if they can all get together in a couple of landlocked states and secede, why stop ‘em?

You know what’s a pain in the ass to maintain? Try maintaining disposable pens! They run out before you’ve done like four drawings, or more likely the tip splits and you haven’t even gotten your money’s worth of ink. Or, try maintaining the ink on a page after you erase it.

Plus, none of them are color-coded for the size, so you have to search out a number on the barrel or the cap every time. On the worst, and most commonly used, technical pens, Microns, the numbers wear off and you have to compare all the tips side-by-side to figure out how big they are. Talk about a pain in the ass!

And then, when they wear out, you go and dump another piece of plastic into a landfill to sit for thousands of years, taking up space amongst decaying poisons. And then! Even worse! You have to get your ass to an art store and buy another one! What a pain in the fucking ass!

That being said, I give you a drawing of my jambox. It’s been with me for seven years or so, and the other night at a raucous good time at my house, I thought I’d lost it to the ages. But it turned out the CDs just got stuck in a space in the tray, and I just needed to open it up, take them out, and put it back together again. Praise Somebody! A month before that happened, I realized it looks like a cute little imp, and I drew it. With a Pentel Pocketbrush. Not Rapidographs.

Anyhow, when I finally got to the Port Authority, I found my cell phone too dead to even let me look up Caitlin’s work number. Typically, I either don’t pack my charger or my underpants. This time I packed my underpants. I went to the Authority’s pay phones to try to 411 the New Yorker, found the first phone emitting a high-pitched tone normally used to torture detainees at Gitmo. The next was simply silent. The third asked for 50 cents, but sent my quarters right down to the coin return slot. The fourth! Took my quarters…and kept demanding 50 cents! Naturally, I banged the shit out of that thing. Then a cop let me know that he probably wouldn’t do that. So I walked the two blocks to the Conde Nast building – why didn’t I do that in the first place? Before long, all was right with the world again. And I started to feel…thankful!

Today I don’t have a drawing to show you guys. Actually, I have a new comic, but not with me. So instead, how about a little schmultz? I give thanks for the Center for Cartoon Studies, for a loving and supportive family, an equally loving and supportive girlfriend, a fluffy cat, all sorts of inspiring, funny friends who aren’t too shy or phony to tell me when and where I’ve missed my mark in my work, and for you, my dear readers, who are almost entirely made up of those people listed!

Anyhow, I wish everybody could go to cartoon camp. We play soccer on Sundays and we draw comics for homework. There are only three bars in town and one is too snooty (but I work at it, which works out well for tips), and another too scary. So there is one bar filled with cartoonists. Even if it wasn’t for it’s Goldilocks just rightness, I think I would love this place. It’s in a basement and it’s named CJ’s. They do turn the lights on pretty bright for a bar though.

In other news, in cartoon studio, the class, we all wrote down an emotion, an animal and a job and then each got one of each. I got ebullient mouse barber. The consensus was that his ears could be rounder, so as to distinguish him from a gerbil or a Guinea pig. Check check:

Don’t you see? I’ve been going at things all wrong! It’s crazy to try to make a freelance illustration career that can support a comics career – I’m going at it bass ackwards! First you write a hit comic and direct it, then you feed yourself by drawing.

Now I know what you’re thinking: OK Pat, why not just draw comics instead of spending all your time building websites and promoting yourself to art directors in dying media? The answer is I’m just too fed up with how things are moving now. I don’t think I can hold out much longer doing what I’m doing, and there isn’t much else that sounds too appealing.

That, and I never got a satisfying critique out of my classmates at Pratt. They’d look at blue pencil lines under black ink and say if I added red, it would be like 3-D glasses. This isn’t to say that my friends haven’t been both supportive and constructive, but I’m yearning for a workshop environment and for classes on literature and writing and the comics medium and guest critiques by real -deal cartoonists. Does this make any sense? I don’t know, but it’s what’s happening now.

And I drew this semi-Phallic, World Snake-ish whale:

Numbers. They ain’t right. Whenever I’m measuring, or reducing, or enlarging, I always end up with .125s and .8625s and I hate it. I remember my middle school geography teacher telling my class that the Maya used a base-six system, which is actually better than base-ten because it divides better. Six divides into halves and thirds and ten divides into halves and fifths, and who the hell measures things in fifths? I think we could go a step further and make our base unit also divisble by quarters.

How about twelve?? Twelve!! The perfect number! It’s actually not all that ridiculous. Think about it! We already have unique words for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Past that, we ad the -teen to the digit in the one place, right? That means we’re already set up for making King Twelve the successor to King Ten. I’ll admit this gets tricky once we get past nineteen, but what’s so bad about tenteen, eleventeen and twelveteen? Or what about twenty-ten, twenty-elven and twenty-twelve? Or even deci-one, eleventy-two and twelfy-three? We could do worse. I mean it. Cause we are doing worse, dudes.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking, how could we ever transition to this insane new system? You’re thinking it! Come on, admit it! But, just ponder a moment, please, about circles. 360 degrees. That divides into twelves. And, uh, hello? Twelve hours? Sixty minutes? Three feet? Twelve inches? Do I even have to go there?

Of course we’ll need new numerals. Don’t worry, everybody, I got it covered. Since twelve is the new ten, it is represented by a one and a zero. And I made up some passable figures for ten and eleven. Check it:

Ookaa, duu yuu get it? Xen get wix it!