"Nature Show"

What's sometimes amazing is how much stuff falls through the cracks: found out damn well almost two years after making this piece that it had neither been sent off for publication nor uploaded anywhere. That's as far as I know, which after excavating past posts I still couldn't find it anywhere. Yet again I'm kinda grateful I don't have to deal with the insane logistics of managing a daily feature, or else I'd be helplessly overwhelmed with the abysmal record-keeping system I've limping along with for all these years.

Incidentally while backtracking this cartoon I also inadvertently discovered how many old posts now have the dreaded "image not found" default icon in place of a picture: I suspect that this is on account of Blogger and Google abandoning the Picasa platform, which housed many images which one could just link to. As far as this panel specifically though, I think it may have been slotted aside as a submission to a poster competition and so was temporarily mothballed until it was rejected, and consequently languished in cartoon purgatory.

There's an interesting mid-course correction contained here that one can see in the initial pencil sketch above: evidently I wasn't paying attention to depicting reality, at least when it came to the architecture of the wall of the cabin where the bookshelf and a doorway to another room was sketched out. That was digitally fixed, but we'll leave alone the additional detail on the missing stove which one might logically think would follow from the chimney on the roof. Two things to consider though: one is that if I tip my head up from where I sit typing this post, and look directly up, there's an old stovepipe protruding from the ceiling, so hey - that's just the way it is. And two, animals don't watch television anyways, so there's that.