"Gangsta Ducks"

The backstory to this particular panel was a summer spent essentially homeless after getting evicted from a cabin by the new owners (such is my lot in the peasant class). Crashing on a couch gave rise to a rather abridged approach to getting the cartoons done: I briefly adopted a series of raw scans directly off the doodles as they were done in ballpoint pen from my sketchbook. Aside from basic cleanup and rudimentary shading they were essentially published as is. It was an interesting lesson in how all the little laborious details obsessed about in the physical creation of a cartoon are completely secondary to the joke. In other words, nobody really cares. But astute readers may notice the occasional "Sketchbook" piece still popping up in print today: I continue to use and firmly endorse the free black-ink ballpoint pens available at Gold Hill Liquor & Gas on the Parks Highway in-between Fairbanks and Ester.
Speaking of which, the Nuggets feature didn't run the last coupla weeks in the Fairbanks paper due to falling through the cracks after the illness of key personnel: thanks to the regular readers of both the print version and the on-line one who emailed me in total panic curiosity. Of course, flooding the editor's virtual desk with irate comments will probably get me fired, even after the big, fat raise from being an award-winning cartoonist and all. And their website Nuggets section is hopelessly outta synch with reality (not like that's a bad thing - works for me) so I have no idea which panel runs when up there anymore - if anybody gets the chance and catches the Sunday edition, shoot me an email on what runs and I'll owe ya something funny.