"Watch Your Step"

I know, I know, we need to express gratitude and support for the most important renewable resource driving the economic engine of Alaska. Please enjoy your stay!

Update: As it happened, I was idly flipping through an old moldy hardcover collection of ancient New Yorker cartoons, and this panel by Charles Addams - one of the all-time greatest single-panel cartoonists in history - caught my eye. Having never seen it before, though honestly it might have been subconsciously buried from exposure as a child (it has happened before with Kliban panel), it serves as a good example of great minds flowing through the same gutter (ie multiple discovery). 

The direct inspiration for mine came from all the attention being paid locally to recent and ongoing work being done on an iconic section of the single road into Denali National Park, that has been closed on account of landslides and necessitating extensive repairs. Anyone who's ever been on a vehicle and looked out the window while traversing this particular stretch of Polychrome Pass will immediately recognize the scene. Similarly, I can see how anybody familiar with Addams' piece would be forgiven if they would find it familiar as well - maybe he once vacationed in Alaska?  

UPDATE: After this was posted I just-so-happened to be flipping through another old, moldy book (2007's "Nuggets" compilation) for another reason and stumbled across this panel. So guess it's even worse than it looks: I plagiarized my own damn work. If things are getting that bad that I'm repeating myself maybe it's time to put the pen down and back away slowly from the sketchbook? At the very least I am reminded of how long overdue it is to release a decades-worth of backlogged material in book form. I started doing that maybe five years back, but as with everything else it gets subsumed by the semesterly workload. But I  envisioned (still do) a hardcover coffee-table caliber book, with most of the material in color. Even designed the cover! Added that to the list: a book of edits, another one of 24-Hour comics, another of comics poems, and last but not least a few children's books and a couple graphic novels. Now one can begin to see why I'm suspending any more public gigs for a while - in theory that's where some time + energy can be shunted. After the newspaper stuff. And teaching. Note to self: and no way not blogging or anything...

(cue King Crimson lyrics from "Indiscipline" 2016)