Parting the curtain

Hello gentle readers, and welcome to my first letter! It is with some trepidation that I finally put “pen” to “paper” (and video to YouTube) - getting started is always a fraught sort of thing.

I figured it was better to begin and figure it out as I go. And so for today what I’ve first got for you is one of my favorite cartoons that speaks to my literary bent:

One of my earlier sales to The Oldie and one that makes me smile.

And speaking of smiling - just how exactly is that done? The whole “making the sausage” cartooning thing? Well, that’s topic number two for today. There’s a whole range of approaches to getting a cartoon out the door and one tried and true method is to steal the idea from someone.

I’m too polite to do that to my colleagues (no - really …) but I have no hesitation about stealing from myself. And so what I’ll often do is look at my old work and ponder it. Ask myself if there’s a better gag or a superior way of telling the same gag. Or, as a consequence of the pondering, I might come up with something completely different. And that’s what the video I’ve got for you shows. It’s a narrated trip through my conscious (I can’t really know what my subconscious was doing, eh?) as I leap from an old cartoon into a brand spanking new one. Just click the link below:

And that, my friends, is enough for now. Au revoir until the next time.