I got interviewed…

Nah, not a radio interview as you might assume from the above image. No, this interview happened last summer and it’s a written 20 Questions interview with cartoonist-interviewer Scott Nickel. He asked me about the strip and stuff but he also asked about me, which is always fun to talk about. Probably nowhere near as fun for you to read, but I did my best to keep the answers entertaining while being 100% honest.

Feeling that what I wrote would largely be outdated by now, I updated some of my answers a couple weeks ago and the whole interview posted today. Good thing I got to Scott in time.

Go here to read about me if you’re at all curious:

http://scottnickel.blogspot.com/2009/12/20-questions-with-justin-thompson.html

Cheers.

Book Update, Dec. 14th, 2009

By mythtickle

Here’s the cover!

I’m turning in the pages today, yes, the book is actually finished.

Man, what an exhausting thing it is to do one of these books by yourself. Except for a wonderful outing to the movie theater to see ‘The Princess and The Frog’ on Saturday, I pretty much neglected my family all weekend. I was working to get this book finished so that I could send the pages to the printer today (Monday). I have put so much time into this, so much more that I would have to do if I were a ‘real‘ and syndicated cartoonist. But at least I get to keep the profits (if there are any), I don’t have to give 90% of everything to freakin’ Andrews McMeel like other cartoonists.

I think you’re going to like this, it’s 160 pages and in full color. It costs a lot to do it this way but would you buy a MythTickle book in black and white after seeing it in color on the web all these years? I don’t think so. Maybe, but I don’t think you’d be as happy with it and I couldn’t stand that.

I’ve also included a thirty page story in the book that you’ve never seen before so that you’re not just buying content you’ve already gone over. I wanted to bring you something new and I really think that if you are a fan of myth and epic poetry like I hope you are, you’re going to love this story.

So that’s the update. The book should be available for sale by mid-January.

Cheers.

Book progress report: Nov. 30, 2009

Man, I’ve been workin’ like a demon on this thing. Up so late on most of these nights, I’m going to bed around 1:30 AM. Thank goodness for this brief holiday break, I might actually be able to get this thing done. What’s slowing me down is trying to rebuild several strips that I lost in the big hard drive debacle earlier this year. It is so tedious and frustrating to try to recreate strips that I’ve already completed. I put a lot into each strip, and frankly I resent doing them over. I gets me kind of pissed. Thankfully there aren’t a ton of them. Jeez Justin, it’s not like you’re digging ditches again. Does anyone else type their inner-monologue? Just curious.

Anyway, out of approximately 148 pages, I have 132 pages completed. Yes, it will not be a HUGE book containing all of the years I have been doing MythTickle, but a nice, small, hand-held book that’ll be easy to carry around. Hey, it’s my first book folks- I’m not rich. But it is in color, and follows the first four or five months of the strip as it has been on Go Comics. Plus there’s a bonus story that you guys have never seen before. It’s an illustrated epic poem that I wrote some years ago that I know you will really like. I can’t just ask you to pay me for a bunch of pages that you’ve already seen, can I? I don’t think that’s entirely fair- especially since, as a subscriber to MythTickle, you can go back in the archive anytime you want to see the old strips for free (something I’m not particularly wild about BTW).

It’s coming folks, and I’m working as fast as I can, just keep those ants in your pants and I hope to make it available to you soon.

Kampai.

Kampai, Peanuts!

IMAGE©United Features Syndicate

So I got back from another successful trip to Japan last weekend, I left Tokyo at 6:30 PM Saturday evening and arrived in San Francisco at 9:00 AM Saturday morning. I didn’t even need a DeLorean! As for the business, I can assure you that Snoopy and Woodstock remain vital and are doing extremely well in Japan. “Genki Desu, Charlie Brown!”

Again, sorry for all of the recent repeats in MythTickle, there are more to come I’m afraid. I had hoped to do a few strips while I was over there but we were so busy with meetings that I was hardly in my room at all, unless to sleep. It was probably the busiest week I’ve had in the 4 years I’ve been going. Lot’s of changes to the licensing business over there but that’s all boring, suit and tie stuff. Mainly, the repeats will continue for a while because I’m actually putting together that MythTickle book I’ve been promising for a while. I’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks now but really ramped-up the progress on the plane and it’s about 1/3rd finished. Being a captive in a plane for all of those hours really helps get things done. I’ll continue to post a new one or two new strips each week but don’t be surprised if some familiar strips keep coming your way.
Anyway, back to Japan: The only day to see anything was that first Sunday so I took a train up to Kyoto to see some stuff. I usually go to a temple but this time it was castles. I toured Nijo castle and then took the train back to Osaka to see Osaka castle again. On the first ‘work’ day, we went to Universal Studios for meetings, Peanuts is a big player there. All is well, and the park is fantastic. Didn’t get to go on any rides but after the meetings we took the bullet train to Tokyo. That’s cool. There were many, many, meetings all week- all about Peanuts. Great dinners with clients too! It’s so amazing to see comics from an international licensing perspective and wonder that if Sparky could have ever foreseen what his drawings would someday do and where they would be seen, how he would react. I remember thinking about this in particular one night at dinner: say it’s 1955, his strip had been going for 5 years and gaining in popularity, and somehow Charles Schulz had a clear vision of the Peanuts future. Movies, Snoopy rides in a theme park, Charlie Brown T-shirts for dogs, and Woodstock bicycle helmets- what would he do? Surely he would have been thrilled and inspired by the promise of ‘Disneyan’ status, what creator wouldn’t want his characters to come alive? But as I slashed away at my third or fourth bottle of sake at the ‘Ninja Restaurant’, I wondered how much the art would be changed. I wondered what it would look like?

I can only wonder from my own perspective as a cartoonist and seeing how licensees use the art, pulling poses from comic strips and placing them in hundreds of wildly divergent contexts, I don’t think he would have gotten anything done. He would have likely obsessed on ever pose, making them look exactly perfect. I would. I’d be so obsessed about every finger on every hand being proportionally accurate, how every body part in motion would not look distorted but immaculately clean and ‘frozen’ in mid-pose, how every smile and eye shape had to be as general as possible, lest they not be usable when placed on a product later, that I would probably spend hours on one panel! I’d craft every line to be so perfect and ordered that the lines would lose all of their immediacy and would become forever bland and sterile. Everything that Schulz’s artwork is not. He never would have been able to produce the volumes of work we now have of his. Knowing that a particular smile on some mid-strip drawing of Snoopy would be seen on the side of a bus a meter wide, he would never have had such a free-flowing and alive stroke of his famous ink pen. The very life and moment of those lines of his strip would surely be compromised by a more careful and artless approach.
The thought of that sends me chills, and should shake any hard core fan of comic art and Charles Schulz’s pen line in particular. So let’s raise one of those tiny sake glasses to Sparky, as I did that night, and toast the ignorance of what is to come in life.

Good thing we all are blind to our own future, lest we be crippled by it.

-Justin

March of the Ancients

Just a heads-up dear readers; you’ll be seeing a few “Ancient MythTickle” strips in the next couple of weeks. I’ve heard from several of you that you’d like to see more strips from my old Comics Sherpa days so here they come. The timing is perfect really, because I’m flying to Osaka on a business trip this Friday the 13^th. Ooh. That actually doesn’t sound overly fortunate, does it? Good thing I’m not superstitious or else my fear of flying would be working double-overtime. I’ve already been paying time-and-a-half just mentally preparing for the flight. I’ll be in Japan for the whole week and won’t be able to do any new strips so the repeats will really help me out. I have a few new ones coming up in the next couple of weeks too, they’re not all repeats. You’ll know which ones the old strips are they’ll be in black and white.

I’ll still be checking in and reading your exceptional comments.

Thanks.

 

Fangs for the Vegetarianism.

So the subject of vegetarianism has come up in the comments, in response to the crazy idea of a vampire facing the dilemma of wanting to be vegetarian as seen in this week’s 4 part poem in MythTickle. I always thought this was a funny idea- well, maybe not always, really just since I became vegetarian myself about 3 and a half years ago. I’m usually kind of cautious about talking about it because this is usually what happens; Instant resentment. For some reason people get really pissed when you say that you’re vegetarian. Maybe they think I’m preaching. I don’t preach about it and I don’t try to convert anyone. What the hell do I care if people eat meat? I’m pro-choice. I’ve merely made a choice that is right for me.

Now, I’m about to write why I made this choice. If you think that an explanation is “preaching” then read no further. I’m not trying to convert you, I’m just explaining. I’ll preach at the very end and I’ll warn you again when it’s coming, OK? Great.

It came on gradually for me. I grew up on a horse ranch kind of place in the Arizona desert and we had chickens, ducks, a goat, a dog, cats, horses, all kinds of stuff running around. The neighbor lady used to butcher chickens right in front of me when I was little and I always felt a little bad about that. I loved chicken but was always aware of what part of the living creature I was eating. I’d kind of mentally piece together that part of flesh with the image of the chicken running and flailing about helpless in the orchard, squirting blood all over me, my dog, and he ground. Talking about eating the fruit of knowledge! This piecing-together began to occur with beef eventually and in high school I began getting really freaked at eating chicken on a bone. I was getting increasingly disturbed to be rending animal muscle from bones and I just couldn’t do it any more. Meat had to be completely removed from its natural setting before I could eat it. Hamburgers, chicken fillets, even boneless steak were fine and I ate one of those every day from then on. No problem.

That is to say ‘no problem’ until about 5 years ago when it started to become more and more difficult to do that ‘creative disassociation’ of meat and flesh. I began to start finding disturbing things in the hamburgers and chicken filets I was eating, like weird yellowy heart ventricles and bone chips that kept finding their way in between my teeth. One day while eating a taco from Jack-In-The-Box, I bit down on a little screw! I guess it came off of the fryer or something, who knows. Maybe it came from the factory, but that was it for Jack-In-The-Box. I quit my favorite fast-food restaurant cold turkey. (That was amazingly hard because I really grew up on that place. It was always my favorite fast food joint and when I was living back in New York, I knew exactly where the closest Jack-In-The-Box was so that when I drove home to Arizona each year I’d drive right to it in one marathon day of driving. It was in East St. Louis by the way.)

I was starting to get really shkeeved by meat in general, and when I discovered my corn allergy (as droned-on about in an earlier blog entry) I started reading how cows and chickens are fed corn in massive amounts now. All that meat is now laden with corn. I began thinking, ‘NOW what do, I do I can’t give up meat. I grew up in “cowboy-ville”, how could I possibly survive not eating anything with corn in it AND meat?’ I was really wondering what to do.

Then one day outside the Charles Schulz museum I had a great conversation with Dan Piraro, the genius who does the comic Bizarro. He had come by for a visit and we sat down and talked about my ‘issues’ for a good long while and he put my mind at ease. Dan is a die-hard vegan and activist, and while I couldn’t see the practicality of going full vegan at this time, I decided to quit being a wuss, suck it up, and take charge and do what I felt was right for myself. Since that day I haven’t eaten any meat or anything with meat protein in it- at least not on purpose. Sometimes a little meat grease will get on something and I get sick as a dog for about half a day. That’s just something you have to deal with sometimes. Ya’ try to be as careful as you can to avid that. I don’t make my wife go vegetarian, she’s happy to help me with it and makes whatever I want. My kids are not vegetarian, they eat meat every night at the table and it doesn’t bother me at all. As I said, I’m pro-choice like that.

I must point out here that technically I am not full vegetarian, but a pescetarian since I eat fish. I have to. I know, I know, there’s mercury in that. But I have to eat fish and seafood occasionally because I go to Japan every year for business (I’m going again next week in fact) and if I don’t eat fish there,… I don’t eat. I have to maintain. I know this is probably just more ‘creative disassociation’, but I have no moral nausea at eating fish because I just don’t feel like they are that close to me as a creature on the Earth. At least not close enough to feel grossed-out about eating an air-breathing brother like dolphin, canary, or cow.

So finally, here’s the tiny bit of preaching. You’ve been warned. Don’t say vegetarians are a-holes who want to tell me stuff I don’t want to hear because I told you this was coming.

Here goes:

It is better for the Earth and everyone who lives here if you eat a salad in a Hum-vee, than a cheeseburger in a Prius. What? Why? What does one thing have to do with another? Emissions. Meat farms and stockyards inject much more methane gas into the atmosphere than chloroflourocarbons do.

They don’t tell you that, do they? Meat is a huge industry, much bigger than the auto industry and probably as big or bigger than the oil industry.

Think about that at the drive-thru.

So that’s why.

Hitting the Plugometer. *Ding Ding!*

This book, Celebrating Peanuts: 60 Years, just came out. It’s a wonderful book and I recommend it to everyone who loves comics. It’s not like any other Peanuts collection ever put together, it’s beautiful, insightful, and spans 50 years of the very best hand-picked strips in Peanuts history. I know, because I chose all of the ’80s strips and I colored several of the Sunday strips in there.

That’s right, I’m now an official Assistant editor. You can order it or check it out by clicking the link here: http://www.amazon.com/Celebrating-Peanuts-Years-Charles-Schulz/dp/0740785486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256857199&sr=1-1

 

A Dill Meets Pickles.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Brian Crane last Saturday, Brian is the cartoonist who does ‘Pickles’ which is syndicated in over 500 newspapers. And well it should be. It’s the most surprisingly funny and pure classic comic strip I’ve read in a very long time. I admit that I was only aware of ‘Pickles’ before last week, I had never studied or read it much. But after doing so, I’ll tell ya’ honestly- read ‘Pickles’. It’s a real treasure.
So I had set up a meeting with Brian on Saturday, after his talk at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center. I was set to interview him for my podcast and was going to formulate my questions while I listened to his lecture and presentation.
I spent that morning with my son doing ‘Coastal Cleanup’, a state wide day of organized groups walking along the various shorelines of California cleaning up trash. Our area was the north shore of the Carquinez Strait in Benicia. After that, I got cleaned up and drove up to The Schulz Museum.
So I get there and Brian is signing books in the lobby. Wha-?
I saw Jessica, the woman who organizes these events, and asked, “Did he already do his presentation?”
“Yes”, she said almost desperately, “Where were you?”
“I thought the talk was at 3.”
“No, that was when I scheduled the interview, he spoke at 1:00.” She said. I heard the sound of crackers crumbling in my head. What a dope. I had read the email wrong and thought that it started at 3:00.
So I missed it.
But the interview was still on, and with 5 people left in the line it looked like Brian was almost finished signing. I had to hurry. I started scribbling questions as if I was on an IV drip of Red Bull and NOx, just writing as fast as I could, when Jeannie Schulz (Sparky’s widow) walked up and started suggesting that I walk over to the studio with Brian and his wife and she would meet us there. So we wandered over there when Brian was done.

Brian is a wonderfully cheerful and pleasant guy, carrying a balanced air of lightness and dignity with him that is infectious. Putting me right at ease, we chatted as we crossed the baseball field to the Schulz studio where I work. Jeannie arrived and showed them around the studio and I peeled off with Brian to finally do this great interview. We sat in the conference room, Sparky’s old art studio, and I pressed on the digital tape recorder’s play button. ‘FULL’ the display read. I went to a different channel, same thing. I erased everything on it but it still would not record. Again with the crumbling cracker sounds in my head, and this warm soup of failure was getting pretty thick at this point.
No interview today.
Brian was very good about it and promised that he would do a call-in interview very soon. So look for that. He is a very interesting guy and his strip is brilliant. It’s about an elderly couple, Earl and Opal Pickles and I realize that that situation may turn some people off. Particularly many of the people who follow my strip, the subject matter probably couldn’t be farther apart. But if you are fans of comics and like to over-analyze and dissect comics like many of my fans do, you really should read ‘Pickles’. It’s on GoComics, just like Mythtickle, so it’s easy to go back in the archive. What amazes me most about it is how after all of these years, each strip I read still contains a great surprise in the joke, punch-line, payoff, whatever you want to call it. The surprise is the little element in a comic strip that gives you the impulse to laugh. So with this subject matter you might assume that the strip would be tired or predictable. But it never is. It’s clear and so cleverly constructed that it’s always successful, he’s just one of those guys who makes it look so darn easy.
So forgive my typical ineptitude, and go check out a bunch of ‘Pickles’ and I’ll let you know when Brian’s interview is up.

Thanks.

Cornball Country.

See?! Seeeeee?!!!! Corn is the devil!

Isn’t Tom Meyer great. He’s the editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle and I just had to post this because it’s an issue so close to me. People who know me well, know that I have a big issue with corn. I didn’t used to, I grew up shucking the ears that my parents bought at the store and loved doing it. What a fresh aroma that was. My parents, being good midwesterners, had corn on the table all the time. Corn used to be such a wonderful food. Now corn is so polluted with chemical and genetic manipulation, that it actually causes me physical problems and I can’t go near it. Again, my friends have to hear this from me all the time and I’m sure they’ve probably all stopped reading by now. But for those of you who are still curious, allow me to preach and give you my testimony.

About 9 or 10 years ago, I noticed that I was getting these red splotches on my skin just under my eyes, on either side of my nose. I never knew why, I thought it was probably some kind of metal in my wire frames. Nickel perhaps. But  they weren’t there all of the time. They only showed up occasionally and I couldn’t figure out why. After it started getting bigger with each ‘breakout’, I decided to get new glasses. It was starting to get kind of painful. Only cortizone 10 would clear it up and it started to even burn when I put it on. Well, new glasses didn’t do the trick, I was still getting these terrible rashes and they were starting to spread with each outbreak. My wife suggested that maybe it was something I was eating so I started eliminating foods. This went on for many months, I tried, dairy, sugar, wheat, everything I could think of. The splotches just seemed to be getting worse. Over the years, and during this process my son was born with severe food allergies to dairy, soy, and in a very lethal way- peanuts. My daughter was born three years later with her own food allergies, that were different than William’s. It’s a nightmare.

So it was while I was in the process of eliminating wheat and gluten from my diet for a few weeks when I took in a SF Giants game with my brother in law. This was about three years ago. We were at the baseball game, and let me tell you; being at a ball park and not being able to have a hot dog and a beer was close to torture. I couldn’t tell who the Giants were playing that day but I do remember having a Coke, some Cracker Jacks, a taco, and a Baby Ruth. When I got home, my wife said, “Oh my God, what happened to your face?” I looked in the mirror and my face was bright red from my forehead to my cheeks and only on either side of my nose. Of course she asked me if I had anything with wheat in it and frustrated, I said that I had not even had any beer! She asked what I did have and we realized, probably because of the taco, that I had taken in a whole lot of corn. The other things had corn syrup among their main ingredients. So we thought we had finally narrowed it down. I began eliminating anything and everything with corn syrup, corn starch, just anything with corn in the ingredients. After two weeks I did not have a single blemish or outbreak. We had  nailed it. I tested it a couple of times after that and sure enough. If I had anything with corn, the next day I would have that redness on my face. So I stopped right there and I’ve been OK. I still get the rashes every once in a while because corn product is so freaking pervasive in our food now that it can’t always be helped. If it is in my power, if I can see it on a label, I won’t eat it. But if I go to a restaurant, I can’t always know. So that’s when it sneaks in an gets me. So because our poultry and beef are fed this mutated corn every day, along with bizarre growth hormones, I don’t eat meat anymore either. Maybe that alone is why I rarely get sick anymore. Who knows? All I know is I’m doing much better now than I ever have.

Mutated corn you ask? Oh yes. The two major chemical companies, Monsanto and Dupont are now distributing all of the corn seeds in America and have genetically alterd these seeds to have more yield and to have a built-in pesticide. Isn’t that nice? We’re all eating super grownth-seeds and organic pesticides now. Was this stuff tested before it was put into our food supply. Nah. Of course not. The survival of the American farm is much more important, and we’ll just see what happens to people. It probably won’t do anything. This was the same thinking when bovine growth hormone was injecting into dairy cows and beef. Gee, I wonder why Americans are so overweight. Hmm. I couldn’t be the growth hormone in the food, could it?

So, back to my experiments and discoveries: Here are the benefits of doing this corn abstinence aside from the clear skin. I don’t snore anymore. I used to snore so badly that I would wake myself up. My wife couldn’t sleep and sometimes had to sleep on the couch. Now I only snore if corn sneaks into my food. Looking at the red mask pattern I generate when I eat corn, I assume that it attacks my sinuses in some way. Another benefit is that I very rarely get sick anymore. I used to get sick with a flu or a cold at least once every other month. Now, maybe once a year. It is amazing.

My son’s allergies are still severe, we have to travel everywhere with an Epipen, but his dairy allergy is mellowing. My daughter’s only allergy now is corn syrup. Her rashes appear all over her arms if she has corn syrup. My brother in law started to develop the same splotches on his skin last year and now it is so bad that if he has corn it goes all over his skin. Arms, chest, face, and neck. So it’s not something in my family, I’m not related to my brother in law.

Maybe someone reading this knows someone who has problems like this, I don’t know. If you do I’d like to hear from you. But if you’ve been told that you have a snoring problem, try cutting out corn for a week or so and see if anything changes. It could save your relationship.

Here are a couple of sources where you can find out what Monsanto and Dupont have done to American corn,

Full Documentary.

The Omnivore’s Dilema

When Corn Is King.

Good luck, and watch what you eat.

Cali’s fine but it ain’t home. New York’s home but it ain’t mine no more.

Sorry I didn’t post a blog on Monday but I was in the late 16th century and couldn’t find a computer ANYWHERE.

Here’s why; to celebrate a milestone wedding anniversary, my wife and I brought the kids with us to the revered grounds where we met. A small carved-out shire in Sterling Forest in Southern New York state, that still retains some of the magic it generated when it was a botanical garden in the ‘60s and ‘70s. A little spot where we got engaged and married, and that’s where we were on Sunday and Monday- the New York Renaissance Festival. For ten summers I sweat and bled there in those nearly unbreathably muggy hot summers between 1993 and 2002. That long story is for another day, but in the summer of 2003 my wife and then 13 month old son left that place and moved out to the San Francisco Bay area. Our lives are so different now, with two kids and only a few friends whom we see not nearly often enough. Which may be how people in this century actually do it, I don’t know. But back in the day, when we lived in Queens and later New Jersey, we would see our ‘Fair-Friends’ all the time. Even in the snow-slippery sidewalks of Hell’s Kitchen, you found a way to get to them in a warm pub. We needed each other, maybe it was the bonding of what we went through in the summers or the general harshness of New York City I don’t know, maybe both, but for better and worse we were a family. We watched out for one another. Of course when you’re in the middle of all of this you take it somewhat for granted, it just becomes your way of life. But when you don’t have it, when you migrate into new places and phases of your life, suddenly you’re in a very different routine and you look up and go, “Wait. Why don’t I have friends anymore?” I must reiterate here that we do have a few friends here in Cali, all of whom we met when we were in New York! They moved out to our area either before or after us. Michael is here now, he’s the guy who taught me how to joust and, by picking me to teach out of dozens of others, truly saved my life. Robin and Anna whom my wife went to acting school with in Manhattan are here now too. Sadly, they all live pretty far from us so getting together with them is sometimes months apart.

Value your friends while you are among them because sometimes you’re not as lucky to have gone through what Kim and I did this past weekend. Returning to the Faire to see the grounds that engendered what we now call ‘us’, Kim and I saw our friends turn up in droves. Labor Day weekend usually brings out a large collection of ‘vets’ so we came on the right days to see old friends. There was so much love thrown our way by so many people, hugs, tears, laughs, and more hugs, it was intoxicating. I don’t know why we can’t make new friends in California maybe  it’s just a different way of life. We’ve never clicked with people out here. But it was all fluttering hearts and raucous laughter that weekend and it was as if we had never left. We stepped into everything as if 6 years were just a hiccup of time, a swift dream dispelled and suddenly all was well. The jousters even put me in the tournament show on Labor Day and I was up on the back of my old horse Oso. We did the tournament obstacle course, ring-jousting, quintaine, spear-throwing, flag-tossing, the whole bit in front of a huge crowd. A crowd as large as the one in front of which I proposed to Kim in my armor, atop Oso, all those years ago.
The greatest regret that I’ve always held was that my kids could never have seen me joust. After the show, when my costume and the horses were stowed backstage I walked across the joustfield where Kim and I were married and there were my kids, running toward me with arms outstretched. I’ll remember that as one of the greatest moments of my life.
A circle now completed.