He has a nice infographical cartoonything on today’s blog – take a look!

RABBITS AGAINST MAGIC: Trickle Down Development.

hoover the hungry dog and bleeker the rechargeable one

It was great to see Bleeker picked up by GoComics, and a surprise that it didn’t go into full syndication with Universal. Thankfully, my syndicate, King Features, were able to pick it up instead and now Bleeker will be sharing space on Daily Ink and Comics Kingdom (as well as lots of newspapers, we hope!) with Arctic Circle.

New updates start today and JM has worked with Tea at King Features to create a nice little ComicPress site: bleekercomics.com. Check it out!

The first syndicated Arctic Circle strip

I had no idea then that it wasn’t ready.

I picked up a few papers for launch and a few papers more in the following year, but felt like I was bumping along below the radar. Still, I was getting to know the characters and learning how to draw better.

The Arctic Circle strip published one year after launch - drawn a little better and the environmental theme is coming through

So it was a bit of a shock when RC Harvey reviewed Arctic Circle about a year after launch and wrote

Although the clothes-pin penguins in their black tuxes are easy enough on the eyes, the stark simplicity of Hallatt’s style puts the strip’s visuals in the Dilbert school of non-art. Cartoonists who draw in this way doubtless believe they are producing highly stylized contemporary Art. And, of course, they are — the contemporary design of wallpaper, repeated over and over in an endless pattern. Still, penguins are penguins and forever cute. Hallatt’s comedy, however, is neither cute nor very funny. My way of assessing the comedy in a comic strip is to tally the number of strips over, say, three weeks in which the punchline is telegraphed by the setup panels…too many of the [strips] achieve their humor in this way, and because we are almost never surprised, the comedy is only ordinary.

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. It wasn’t that I disagreed, it was that I thought he was right. My syndicate had been wrong, the people who had sent me nice emails and letters had been wrong and RC Harvey was completely, 100% right. I talked to Brendan and he dismissed the rant as being just that, but I was devastated and suffered one of my biggest crises of confidence in my ability as a cartoonist.

I continued to write and draw (those deadlines don’t go away) and the angst mellowed into determination. Determination to work on my areas of weakness. The wallpaper patterns of repeating penguins were to be avoided with more interesting panels. My drawing was gradually improving in any case, but now I gave more thought to how I composed the scenes (something I still do, though nasty deadlines tend to cause more Garfield-type bar set ups…). I did more continuing storylines to provide interest and take away the obvious punchlines.

I tried to vary some of the viewpoints

This was from a series about a tree growing in the warming Arctic

The Arctic Circle cartoon published on its second year anniversary

The strip developed. I’d say it has been in development for 3 years and I’m only ever happy with my most recent work.

I hope this means I’m getting better – I’d like to be doing this for another three years at least.

The 3rd anniversary comic strip for Arctic Circle

This is a bit of an homage to the great Faceache cartoonist, Ken Reid

The carp and Ed discuss before and after weight loss photos

Another diet

How to lose weight

The Asian carp puts on weight despite himself

I got to finish the series with a terrible pun

Fantastic! You couldn't get away with this in the newspapers

The cartoonist nerd in me also enjoys her blog posts about the cartooning process itself. This piece on ink washes (too scary for me, as yet!):

For those of you who may not know what an ink wash is — it’s just water
with a teeny bit of ink in it. When applied with a brush on paper, it appears grey. The more ink in the water, the darker the grey. You can play around with it to give all kinds of nice tones to a line drawing. This is how my webcomic “Velia, Dear” gets it’s tones, which are called “half-tones”.
If you can master the wash –I’m still learning, but I’m a lot more confident with it than I was a year ago — you can use it to create mood in a cartoon or illustration (some cartoonists prefer to use cross-hatching instead) — it’s a preference. However, I should add that newspaper comics rarely have a wash because of how they’re printed. Am I going off on a tangent here?
Anyway, the ink wash is a ton of fun when you get confident with it.

I look forward to her answer on where she gets her ideas from. It’s got to be good, ‘cos she’s sure got a lot of them.

Hector puts in free wi-fi

Hector turns off free wi-fi

I wrote this after noticing the number of laptop users in my local cafe, Presse. They sure know how to eek out a cappuccino.

The one that is about to get away

Do not try this at your local fishing spot

Can nuclear power truly be green (not just the glow in the dark kind)? Is it enough that it is low carbon emission, when you have to deal with nuclear waste? It is almost impossible to dispose of spent fuel rods completely safely for thousands and thousands of years. I was listening to an NPR Environment podcast where they were talking about how you can communicate to future generations that there is a nuclear waste dump in an area, when you can’t guarantee that thousands of years from now those generations will have the same languages, writing or visual symbols.

You can’t. I’d like to see safe nuclear power as an option, but with no means of safe nuclear waste disposal, I can’t. Also, I’d be happy to have a wind turbine, or solar array in my back yard, but nuclear power?

No way.

Howard and Hector talk energy

Hector buys a nuclear power plant from the Russians on eBay

Nuclear waste disposal, Hector style

weird coffee

The nuclear power plant goes AWOL