I can’t help but mention here a few artists whose work I’ve been viewing while coughing like crazy on the couch.
Fellow Canuck and National Film Board booster (he works there — I just admire their work) Matt Forsythe has been noticed by more than one group of award-bestowing folk of late. His book Ojingogo (about a girl and her squid, printed by Drawn and Quarterly) is under consideration for a Reuben (not the sandwich), as well as a Doug Wright Awards’ Pigskin Peters Award. Kate Beaton’s extraordinary History Comics is up for the DWA’s Best Emerging Talent.
I’ve just started enjoying Anders Loves Maria (by Swedish illustrator Rene Engström) and am blown away by her brushwork, not to mention her characters. Warning: may contain nudity and coarse language. Does contain excellent writing and drawing. A precis and character bios are found here.
The expressive (but probably NSFW) pin-up work of Ramón Pérez is worth a look, if you’re not at work.
I’m not yet familiar with the Walrus’s David Parker and Jason Sherman, but they’ve done up a fine send-up of Conrad Black here.
Science Takes 13 Years to Suck all the Fun out of Checkers. (Nature)
. . .
Hyperspace Studios is having a Scratch Art competition for tattoo artists. If you ink skin and know your way around a scratchboard, hop to it; the contest’s deadline is August 15.
Penny and Aggie, a well-written and well-drawn comic by Gisèle Lagacé and T. Campbell, is absolutely worth a look should you never have surfed by their vicinity, before. There’s a forum on the site where Campbell and Lagacé address their fans’ concerns and questions.
Yeah, it’s soap opera, but so’s Strangers in Paradise.
There are two others, but I’m uncertain what the interest level is. For now, this is the last cartoon reprint from hennhaus:
Somalia Cover-up
This information appeared on this cartoon when it was originally reprinted on hennhaus in 1997:
Copyright (c) 1996 John Rudzinski, all rights reserved. Petawawa Messenger, v1#51, April 25, 1996.
(The duck sez, “Y’know, shredded documents make great nests!”)
The Somalia Affair involved a Somali teen, two members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment who beat him to death in 1993, and a Canadian military that tried to cover it up.
More on the ‘Somalia Affair’:
More from the ex-hennhaus.com.
Bankrupt
In the mid-1990s, bankruptcies in Canada had hit an all-time high. I have a sneaking suspicion that the record numbers then have since been surpassed. There was that Tech bubble, f’rinstance . . .
Bre-X Screensaver
Much like the ‘Tech bubble’ in microcosm, the Bre-X fiasco caught a lot of well-heeled investors in their pocketbooks. People got the correct impression that something was wrong when a Bre-X geologist face-planted from a helicopter prior to its landing, and Indonesian gold mysteriously vanished from core samples. There’s a great write-up here
if you’re not into the CBC’s video archives.
This was the biggest gold fraud ever. It made millionaires from paupers, and — when the other shoe (and geologist) fell — turned millionaires into paupers.
. . .
And, if gold wasn’t your bag, there was always oil:
Will Lube for Food
(The duck sez, ‘Crude.’)
The cartoon above was in reference to the UN Security Council Food for Oil resolution after the first US-Iraq war.
A few posts ago, I noted that my son had dug up an old sketchbook containing political cartoons I’d drawn awhile back. I had sporadic use of a scanner back then, so hennhaus.com — a site I started in the late ’90s to replace the Necropolis Bodybag & Smoke Shoppe (don’t ask) — displayed only a few of my cartoons.
I drew an homage to Sir John Tenneil’s caterpillar
. . . after exams in ‘94. I initially used it as the Necropolis Bodybag & Smoke Shoppe’s home page, then later modified it slightly for hennhaus’ home page:
While a certain domain name registrar is still hanging on to ‘hennhaus.com’ (’cause Lord knows, they need the pennies they’re getting from the idiotic search links they’ve pointed the domain to), I recently discovered that I had a backup of the site’s content.
Example:
Rapper Wrapper
This cartoon’s 10 years old, as is most content from the site; I was a heckuva lot more prolific, then. This particular cartoon noted the East coast / West coast rapper rivalry extant in the mid-1990s.
Some other bits:
Dumb & Dumber-er
At different points in 1996, two rapscallions of an unsavory nature actually attempted to hold up a bank and a doughnut shop using wildlife weaponry. The third incident noted in the cartoon didn’t happen, though.
More in a subsequent post.
Well, not really. My son found an old sketchbook I was using a decade ago.
Within were some cartoons the Petawawa Messenger published in ‘96 . . . cartoons I hadn’t shown on my earlier website.
Subsequently, they’re reprinted here with a brief explanation. Really brief, if I can’t remember the stories behind ‘em.
Pieces in our Time
An announced peace plan in ‘96 took a serious blow when the IRA bombed London in February of that year. Subsequent bombings in Manchester in June and Enniskillen (Northern Ireland) in July depressed even the overly-enthused.
One Trick Pony
I couldn’t possibly explain this cartoon better than by sending you to Betty Bower’s page, wherein Mr Helms’ pronouncements are enshrined for posterity.
Glowing Praise for Milk
It turns out the milk in the ’50s and ’60s was a great way to introduce radioactive iodine-131 into growing children. Such was the nuclear age.
These days, of course, it can contain steroids, hormones, antibiotics, herbicides and insecticides — and possibly prions. None of these, however, make your bones glow.
Step Out of the Sleigh, Sir
Rudolph’s nose, here, is the kicker. One day, I intend to colour these.
One of the big deals this past week was the 25th birthday of IBM’s 5150 PC.
This prompted PC World to come up with a list of 25 Greatest PCs. Of course, everyone who had a personal computer in the late ’70s to early ’80s has their own version of that list . . . one which may contain several models which didn’t make PC World’s cut.
The computer that got me into all this was the lowly Sinclair ZX-81, with a glorious 1K of RAM and . . . aw, nevermind; Google it.
Also important to me in the early ’80s was the Commodore VIC-20, and — while I went the Apple II route — many continued with Commodore’s 64.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m writing about, here, have a gander at a Brazilian site which provides a Commodore 64 emulator written in Flash.
Type a few phrases in BASIC, throw a few ?SYNTAX ERRORs, play some Galaga.
This, I wish to point out, was the cat’s buttocks before the Amiga came out.
Better Google that, too. Amiga, not feline hindquarters. 
No . . . nothing smutty.
If you’re into stop-motion animation (an underappreciated art, I think — the creators of same have the patience of Job), Tennessee Reid Norton might appreciate your stopping by at his b(p)log:
Richard Private:The Private Dick
“Richard Private” is an old-school private detective, see? Yeah . . .
. . . but I think I understand this.
(from Criativo de Galochas)
