On the thirteenth day of Newton: The End

So, that's it, boys and girls: another winter solstice/holiday/calendrical-milestone season is behind us. For all intents and purposes, today is just Sunday. And Sunday, of course, means The Funnies:

Inasmuch as tomorrow is Monday, and the first day of winter quarter, and the focus returns to working instead of celebrating, I'll just relax with Wonder Wife today and take a deep breath before returning to what passes for normal around these parts.

See you in the funny pages!

Craptoon

So, here's a thing I made some years ago. It's an unabashed kiping of one of Greg Howard's Sally Forth comic strips, colorized/uglified by me in some lame program and with the words clumsily altered. Ralph and Sally are transformed into me and my assistant and the dialogue reflects the state of affairs at my job at the time.

That's the way it was at the job, and at the time I wouldn't have had it any other way. It's been a heck of a ride since then, barreling into the instructional side of higher ed and moving from writing center administrator to adjunct faculty to full-time faculty to tenured faculty to dean and now back to teaching faculty. I think I have finally learned to have a better best friend than my desk, and I am looking forward to having this summer off (or at least mostly off), and many summers to follow.

I might even make some of my own comics instead of repurposing newspaper strips.

Bonus: the original strip!

We're not talking Pitt here

So, here's a cartoon that will likely strum the heartstrings of more than a few pals, including the Spectacular Sissy:

Credit: Stephan Pastis and Pearls Before Swine

First question: Does anybody send in looseleaf manuscripts held together with brads anymore? For that matter, does anyone send in hardcopy manuscripts anymore? Didn't brad usage peak in the era of Mad Men? I can remember using them for papers in grade school, and in the office when I first began work in the seventies, but I can't recall the last time I saw one anywhere, much less in a work setting. This sounds like a joke that somebody remembered hearing in 1968 and thought it was too good not to use, even though most people reading the strip wouldn't know what the heck it was about.

And speaking of anachronisms, this strip came out in June 2010. (Yes, I have been holding onto it for that long, waiting for the right time to blog it.) The computer that Rat is using appears to be an iMac G4 "desk lamp," the model that I purchased in 2002 and which Apple stopped making in 2004. So when this strip came out, the computer shown was six years old - was it still instantly recognizable as a "real" computer even then? It barely is now.

I'm really not trying to bite The Comics Curmudgeon's style, but I just didn't get this strip.

Oh, for all those who need to ask, this is a brad:

The Oeuvre

Way back in the stone age days of blogging - I'm talking spring of 2005 here - I decided to try my hand at a comic strip. It was going to be one of those slice-of-life observation strips of the kind done so well by Karen Ellis in her Planet Karen comics. (And you could spend a few hours very well reading her entire series.) Of course, since my cartooning skills are, shall we say, underdeveloped at best, I used an online program called Strip Generator from out of, I think, Slovenia. It looks like that site has turned into a thriving little community of creators, but when I stumbled upon it, it was a little no-English-spoken web backwater with fairly rudimentary cut-and-paste tools. Still, the work looked lots better than I could have done freehand, so I made some characters based on myself and my cronies and started distilling some social exchanges down to two-panel gags.

I only lasted about a half-dozen entries before something broke the spell/distracted me/discouraged me/whatever. Recently, I came across the original jpegs of the strips while looking through some old files, so, lucky followers, here's the He is a Thark Achive Edition of The League of Public Domain:

(click to embiggen)

There you have it. Perhaps it's just as well that this is all of it.