Author: andertoons

I (Heart) Comic Strips

andertoons

Cartoonist Mark Heath wrote a really nice blog the other day entitled “Love and Obsession” about the last freelance cartoon he sold and his ensuing obsession with the then unpublished Spot the Frog.

Mark explains how he immersed himself in Spot for several months, although, as with all submissions, the chances of it being picked up by a syndicate were small.

“It was crazy to spend so much time on a strip that contributed nothing to the bills, and would eventually be thrown into the blades of a syndicate’s submission shredder (or so I supposed, based on my previous 12 submissions.) But I couldn’t stop thinking about Spot and Karl and the rest.”

I’ve recently been working on a new strip of my own, but had shelved it as of late. There’s an awful lot of gloom and doom out there among cartoonists (myself included) about the current state of the comics and syndication, and it’s easy to think ‘why should I even bother?!’ But Mark’s post helped me rally, and I’m really excited about this strip again.

OK, it probably hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of actually being picked up, but there’s real joy in just making the attempt too, and it’s nice to be reminded of that.

Elektra – Review

andertoons2 Comments

Elektra

I was actually kind of hoping Elektra would be bad, but it was worse than bad, it was boring.

As I sat down I remarked to my wife “wish me luck” and wait for this to be another Catwoman. But after about a half hour I found myself wondering if it was too late for a Mountain Dew.

Elektra, who seems to have lost her last name since Daredevil, returns from the dead and works as a Frederick’s of Hollywood clad assassin until she’s hired to kill Mark Miller and his thieving yet supposedly likable daughter.

Of course she’s conflicted after meeting each of them for roughly ten combined minutes and forming some sort of deep instantaneous bond, and ends up protecting them instead from the murderous Hand organization.

Blah blah blah ninjas blah blah fighting blah blah blah mystical warriors blah blah green smoke blah blah blah meaningless flashback blah blah blah blah blah…

The few good parts mostly revolve around Jennifer Garner in a skimpy red corset, a weird lesbian death kiss from a character named Typhoid, and the poorly named Tattoo villain (I couldn’t help yelling “The plane! The plane!” at the TV) whose inky coverings come alive and leave his body.

(For those of you looking to check this out for the corset factor alone, don’t waste your time. There’s a little bit at the beginning, but it’s lit rather darkly, and then you don’t see it again until an hour and eleven minutes in.)

When compared to other recent Marvel movies, this is somewhere between The Punisher and Hulk. You don’t have Travolta dragging it down, but there’s no giant green guy either.

Darn it, I was really really looking forward to writing this review. I’d gone looking for pictures of both Garner and Berry and started creating little charts to compare Elektra and Catwoman. I’d begun working on a great graphic involving the two of them duking it out too. This was going to be fun! But sadly, Elektra is so uninteresting it isn’t even worthy of mockery.

So, unbelievable as it sounds, I still like Catwoman better. Sure, Berry’s performance is laughable, but at least it was so bad it was watchable.

(BTW, for those of you who remember the Catwoman review, on the Margie “You’ve got to be kidding me!” scale, this rated only seven outbursts in 96 minutes.)

My Day At School

andertoons3 Comments

On Monday I had the pleasure of sitting in on my wife’s first grade classroom. She’s getting her masters degree and needed an observer for later comment on a specific lesson.

Here’s an excerpt from her paper on the lesson…

I asked my husband, Mark, to come in to observe me teach the first day back after spring break. He visited my classroom not infrequently in my first years of teaching because he was still in college and would stop in when he was on a break. Mark really hasn’t been in since we got married, though, once his own work schedule infringed on that free time. This observation was nice timing for us. Mark is a stay-at-home dad who also works as a cartoonist. Spring break was a good time for me to better realize why he is so tired at the end of the day; our son is easygoing, but he is twenty-one months old, which means he talks all day long, tries out the word no rather vehemently at times, and is on the go for most of the day. Since I had just had the opportunity to understand Mark’s typical day better, it was nice for him to have a similar opportunity.

I read this Thursday morning while printing it out for her evening class and was sort of touched. It’s always interesting to get such a clear look inside another person’s head, especially when it’s someone you know as well as my wife and I know each other.

She hadn’t necessarily intended me to read it, so I was very pleased to read about her observations on my stay-at-home dad/cartoonist role, and it prompted this blog.

Often I think I take my wife for granted. Let me tell you, I’m not always the easiest to get along with; sure I have a good sense of humor, but it’s often balanced by severe fits of spontaneous unprovoked grumpiness.

In addition to putting up with me, she takes care of all of the household finances, laundry, keeping track of important family dates, a fair amount of cooking and probably a hundred or so other things that I’m not going to remember here.

She’s also a great teacher. She teaches a bilingual first-grade class and cares deeply about her students, often visiting each of their families at home at the beginning of the school year to introduce herself and make everyone feel comfortable.

There’s really no significant cartoon content in this post, but I just thought it was important for everyone to know how great my wife is. She’s not just a brilliant mother and teacher, but the best partner a guy could imagine in just about every way.

My wife sums it up nicely at the end of her paper:

While it was interesting for me to see my classroom and teaching through Mark’s eyes, I think he also found it interesting to come back into my classroom instead of just relying on my descriptions of my days. I think it has been a good week for Mark and me to better appreciate what the other one does.

I love you, honey!