The Komic: The Funniest Comedian in the Universe

00 Thekomic Logo

One of my back burner projects is The Komic, a graphic novel about the funniest comedian on the planet. I first thought about the idea while listening to a conversation between Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza in Seinfeld’s season five’s episode, The Stock Tip.

Jerry: I think Superman probably has a very good sense of humor.

George: I never heard him say anything really funny. Continue reading

Court Room Bloopers & Lawyer Cartoons

Lederer Richard Disorder In The CourtI drew the book cover and several cartoons for Disorder in the Court: Legal Laughs, Court Jests, and Just Jokes Culled From the Nation’s Justice System published in 1996 by the National Court Reporters Association.

It’s a series of courtroom bloopers culled by court reporters from transcripts, or as they call them, “Transquips.”

Here are a few of them.

FEDERAL JUDGE: This seems like a fairly simple problem. Let’s not make a federal case out of it. Continue reading

Print on Demand Run Amok

Gutenberg Would be Amazed at Printing Today

With Print on Demand (POD) you can cheaply put out your own version of the Bible, although I doubt The McCracken Version, even a red-letter edition, would ever replace King James’s.

Thanks to Cafepress and Zazzle any cartoon on this site can be printed on demand on T-shirts and lots of other merchandise. My online stores are a work in progress, but I’ll set up a link for you if you email me which cartoon you want on a shirt, poster, or whatever–they even print things on thongs. I’ve yet to have a request for these yet, but you never know. Continue reading

Heceta Head’s Ghost Story

When I was a naturalist for the Forest Service in the 1990s one of the more peculiar “other duties as assigned” I was assigned was to help restore Heceta Head Lighthouse Keeper’s House. I can tell you stories about all the keepers and their families who lived and worked at Heceta, I can explain how a Fresnel lens works, and I can list every fact, figure, and date that has any relevance to Heceta, but the only thing people ever ask me about is the ghost story. So here it is. Continue reading

Recreational Vehicles: The Bane of Coastal Summer Life

It used to be that if you needed to make room at the adult table you put grandma and grandpa on an ice floe.

Now with global warming, there aren’t that many ice floes anymore and what ones there are, are reserved for polar bears.

Instead, we set Grandma and Grandpa adrift in humongous recreational vehicles on Highway 101, RVs the size of the USS Enterprise. Continue reading

Excerpts from a Fire Fighter’s Journal

Fire season is upon us and that got me thinking about my days as a forest firefighter.

It was one of my “other duties as assigned” when I was Siuslaw National Forest’s head naturalist at Cape Perpetua. These are excerpts from a journal I kept over the years. They first appeared in Backpacker Magazine.

“Concerned crew boss: ‘If you get hurt, be sure to tell me immediately so I can start the paperwork.’” Continue reading

Flying Refrigerators

In a blog I posted a few days ago I mentioned that most everything in my house is going kaput.

One thing that’s going strong is my refrigerator. This is really amazing when you read a letter I wrote about it to  Montgomery Ward in January 30, 1994. At the time I was building a cabin while living in a leaky trailer without electricity or running water.

Dear Appliance Gurus:

Did you know that you can advertise that your refrigerators fly … although they do crash land? Continue reading

Happy Fourth of July

A few American history cartoons to celebrate Independence Day and the reasons why we celebrate it.

WHEN in the Course of human events,

it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. Continue reading

Hackers May Take Over Our Toilets

We now have to worry about computer hackers taking over our toilets.

Seriously. When I heard this this morning I thought for a moment that I was listening to the Onion’s Radio News, but no, I was tuned to NPR’s real news show, Here and Now.

Smart Toilets? They exist. How did I miss this trend? Even more important, how can a cartoonist make a living when real life is now more absurd than anything I can dream up? Continue reading