"Baked Alaska" #17-20

Time to harvest another strain from the series of carefully cultivated cartoons for the Alaska Cannabist magazine (follow them on Facebook here).
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At a local dispensary I initially caught a budtender's artistic creation on a holiday poster she was making with a similar idea on it, and, not having heard the term before, thought it was the funniest thing ever, and went home to see if it had been done before.

So afterwards I put it in the ol' mental grinder to "make it Alaskan" - the requisite Google Image Search uncovered thousands of different takes... but none with our official state bird. Add in a couple other cheap cheep shots highlighting the silent "p" and we got a real turkey.

Since I seem to have lost the original doodle for the upcoming panel, gotta take this opportunity to plug a product here on behalf of many years of satisfied four-legged customers: Matanuska brand ThunderStruck catnip is the shit. Old-timer sourdoughs will get the reference to the legendary strain which is the namesake of of Alaskan herbaculture.

Of course the cabin is littered with a multitude of different methods and means of delivery systems from cigars to mice to balls, to bags of the straight stuff safely stashed. But when the sound of opening the special cookie jar triggers the predictable Pavlovian response, it's time to cue up the tunage and dim the lights.

This particular breed of animal isn't quite as common as the basic Malemute, especially since the general trend in professional dogs these days has more to do with sniffing things out instead. I seriously need to start the official AKC pedigree paperwork ASAP, and start training my teams.

And if you ever doubt the power of an image to become forever indelibly associated with a character over time, the fact that all the barrel stereotypes stem from the creation of one artist, well here you go: exhibit "A" in making up the myth.

For this piece, an unusual multipanel arrangement more like a Sunday funny layout, I deliberately reset the usual stereotype of Native American/Alaskan saying as not only derogatory in a condescending sense, but also derivative, and more than a little dumb. Not like we have enough of that around here. Discerning readers will have noted the bonus design snuck into the last set of stickers for the annual exhibit, which I felt summed up not just a cartoon, but encapsulated an entire philosophical perspective on the meaning of life itself. Whoah man, heavy.