"Hipster Beaver"

 
If I live long enough it might soon be time to put out a book just of beaver cartoons. There’s a couplefew other ones in the works beforehand: a catch-up compilation (since I’ve slacked off for years now and have accumulated quite the back-catalog, which means this next one will have an unusually high ratio of “good ones”); and a book of edits. Oh and a children’s book, and a graphic novel too.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes dilemma that resulted in a prudent edit between the sketchbook doodle and the printed version: A real hipster would be smoking a clove (as I did all through the aforementioned highschool years), which is graphically indistinguishable from a joint, so that didn’t make the cut for the family-friendly readership.

It’s actually amazing how much you can get away with under the guise of “doing research.” But seriously, that beret is the single item of my dad’s clothing I still have, stolen way back in high-school. It was legit French-Canadian, from Quebec, and he used to lecture me on the proper angle of the stem or stalk on top and that it must match the correct slope off to the right. And don’t even get me started on shaping it and shaving it.

Elsewhere I posted about the overlapping center on the Venn diagram of memes and single-panel gag cartoons that occupies a shared relationship between the juxtaposition of image + text.

I’m still absorbing the many meta-lessons in that phenomenal book about Nancy. So much in strips goes back to Ernie Bushmiller, in the pantheon alongside Shultz and Herriman.