Misc. Meta Mullings + Meme Dump

It seems all I’m good for is making stupid silly little pictures when war is raging, while the planet is being poisoned & plundered, I’m not helping, and everything can feel so helpless. Maybe it’s the buffer zone against reality as it continues to etch away at the edges of awareness, slowly dawning on the buried periphery of the subconscious. More nuggets below the fold.

"Sound Bearier"

This particular panel is an interesting reversal of process with the semi-permeable barrier between image + meme. I think I was inspired upon coming across one of the various takes on this concept by realizing how much more better it could be if rendered differently.

Like drawing it would be so much more funnier. For me it comes down to the dookie expression on the seal. But than, as regular readers will know, there isn't anything on this planet that doesn't look ridiculous like this - at least on the inside where it counts.

"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.

"The Alaskan Facepalm"

This is an outhouse knee-slapper fur shure. I will admit to having done this. Not this early in the spring, mind you. These are the first wave of slow-moving bombers that you can reach out and grasp one-handed from the air mid-flight, as they are large and cumbersome having just crawled out from overwintering under bark.

It's the next assault - the first hatching - that gets ya good up around these here parts. Aside from running across the tundra or hoping for a siff breeze, the only respite is better living through chemicals. The smell of pine tar for me is an olfactory trigger to my youth spent tromping around the woods of Western New York, everything saturated with Ole Time Woodsman bug dope.

But seeing as how I tend to sweat incredible amounts with such activity, any anointing will rapidly prove useless, and so the other tried and true method of gritting your teeth for a couple months works as well.

"The Three Seasons of Alaska" + Meme

This panel arose out of the subconscious stream while in the middle of workflow from a normal session. In other words, I got the idea while drawing something else - as per Edison's theory of inspiration/perspiration. After grabbing some photo reference to sketch from, I inadvertently created a meme version, which does the same damn thing, just in a different way.

Which brings up an interesting consideration, one that I've been mulling over for quite some time. I make my own memes often enough that the process behind creating them is essentially the same as coming up with cartoons (juxtaposition of image + text).

It's just a different skill set, at best for folks who can't draw well enough to effectively communicate their concept. It's quite evident from my perspective that they have largely supplanted cartoons in popular media, in particular on-line culture. One crucial distinction lies in the concept of authorship - one is predicated on anonymity, the other is based on intellectual property. I'll save all this for a future post, wherein I can ruminate at length about this groundbreaking new field of research. For now at least I at long last have an excuse to start a brand-new Label for this post topic.