For the next few weeks, I’ll be taking a break here at I Really Should Be Drawing.
I’ll be posting at a new New Yorker Magazine cartooning blog which is slated to start next month. I’ve been invited to be their first “Blog Captain” for the month of January.

Meanwhile I’ve located someone to pinch-hit for me here for the few weeks I’ll be blogging elsewhere:

Some time ago, I collaborated on a book with the excellent Charles Monagan, called “Poodles From Hell”. We had a third collaborator, one Howard Inkley, a prematurely deceased cartoonist who had met his death in a freak accident in a New Haven, Connecticut laundromat. Howard contacted me from the beyond in a series late-night visits and told me previously unknown facts about world history and revealing stories of the afterlife, including the fact that there were a lot of poodles in Hell, which furnished the title of our book. Once the book was finished, my communications with Howard suddenly ceased, in spite of my attempts to re-create the circumstances in which he had previously contacted me. I finally had to assume I would never hear from him again. Recently, however, I was unexpectedly visited again! I was sitting here at my computer late one night when my fingers began to move, seemingly on their own. They typed the following message, then stopped:

“Hello again. Sorry I haven’t communicated recently. Here (Though technically there is no here here) there is no time, so what may have seemed like a long stretch to you means nothing to me. (Or everything, depending on how you look at it). I’ve been following your blog with interest and am hoping you wouldn’t mind if I add my 2 cents-worth from time to time.”

This communication couldn’t have come at a better time. I had found my pinch-hitter.

So for the next few weeks, I’m leaving Howard in charge of “I Really Should Be Drawing”. He’ll be posting from time to time from the Afterlife. I never know what the guy is going to say, though, so I don’t really know what to expect. I just hope he doesn’t leave the place a mess like that panel of celebrity judges did a while back. I just got everything straightened up again.

See you back here in February

-Mick

Oh, no! Christmas again!
This means, for some of us, an unwanted vacation. No batch of funny pictures for a while. No weekly cycle of creation, submission, rejection or acceptance, (or checks in the mail).
Christmas is so cruel!

It’s during this time, surrounded by the constant reminders of the season, that Christmas ideas often come, too late for submission to the magazine, which requires a few weeks lead-time for seasonal cartoons, so these ideas become next year’s Christmas cartoon ideas and get buried in the idea-box for another 10 or 12 months. Ideas tend to lose their potency if they hang around that long, like vitamins or old men. By the time next Christmas comes around, last year’s jolly Santas have grown thin and listless, their beards long and shaggy. They start to smell bad. Take this guy, for example:

It’s just a damned shame we have to suffer through this Christmas thing every year. There’s nothing for it, I suppose, but to just give in and try to enjoy ourselves. Maybe I’ll go shopping or something.
(Only 21 shopping days left before the next art meeting!)

Oh, what the hell…

Merry Christmas to You All!