[ click'n'big | © King Features, scanned from Fantagraphics' Popeye vol 4 ]

This made me laugh aloud while I was pooping. I guess it’s just that funny to me to see a really tiny guy bopped with so little effort by a really big guy. Because I’m a bully at heart. The action’s counter to the reading flow (right to left, not left to right), and somehow that may have made it funnier to me. Something about how in the third panel, he’s just completely disappeared, with an X marking the spot where he was (we are on a pirate ship, after all). And then, it just seems like he’s been suspended in the air forever. He’s traveled so far that Popeye didn’t even see him get punched out. But Castor Oyl* being Castor Oyl, he’ll crack wise even as he flies over the deck with a black eye. I just can’t stop gushing. I think the action lines against the stark black somehow made it funner to me. And now that I’m looking again, do you think maybe he’s been sailing through the air so long that he’s unconscious in the fourth panel, and then come to again by the fifth?

I love Thimble Theater.**

*That’s Olive’s brother, and the erstwhile star of the strip.

**That was the name of the strip at the time.

H’lo folks. Sorry I’ve been such a bad blogger. Here’s some cartoons with which I’ve been learning how to use a dip pen, and especially the mythical G nib. Forged by samurai metallurgists obsessed with manga, the G nib is the only pen designed specifically with cartooning in mind. I’m not sure that it can lure me away from my Rapidographs, though.

First, a one-panel gag. I made two others, but one is pretty dumb and the other has been deemed by some to be too much for the internet to handle.

Next, a dear diary dream comic. (Trying to work looser, more cartoony, faster, but not exactly getting great results yet.)

And finally some autobio-ish strips in the style of EC Segar (you can click em to see em).

I’ve got more stuff to show you, and I promise to throughout the week.