Frog Blog

Early Retirement

A few weeks ago I had an ultrasound to see if anything peculiar was subletting space in my stomach. Nothing was noted, but I learned something important. I can pass for 65.

Technician making small talk: "Are you retired?"

It was early in the morning, I was yawning (in more ways than one, thanks to the gown they provided); the hair on my head is an afterthought, and I stand with the posture of an octopus stuffed in a jar.

"Not at the moment," I said, forgiving her diagnosis. Some of us are born retired.

Spider-Music Man

Mark Anderson has put a bug in my ear. Or a spider. Or a Spider-Man. I can't stop thinking about it.

The only thing that would make it more perfect: have Spider-Man dancing in the sundry styles of the Peanuts characters in the Christmas cartoon. I'd love to see that.

UPDATE: I was showing this to Mary while a song was playing on the computer. She asked if the song and animation were a matched set, and I told her it was a musical coincidence. If you'd like to enjoy some synchronicity, watch the above while listening to Barry White sing Can't Get Enough.

Lampshades and Punchlines

When you work with a deadline, you don't always have time to make that final tweak, the one that brings the punchline front and center, rather than sitting quietly off to the side. Today's strip, for example. I like the joke, but I wonder if it's clear that a frog is under the lampshade, or if it appears that Lumpy brought the lampshade home. If you look closely, you'll see a pair of feet poking out from beneath the shade. But of course you shouldn't need to scrutinize the art to find the joke. In the original rough, I had the frog (in this case, Buddy) say something, alerting the reader to the shade's occupant. When I tried it without the words, I decided that the exposed feet would deliver the punchline. But little details can vanish like wallflowers when the art is shrunk, or put through the wringer and converted to a gif.

I know there are cartoonists who can hit the back of their head and knock out a strip fully formed, but my writing is a Rube Goldbergian sequence of steam kettles and fans and goats nibbling tin cans, burning candles and melting ice. I rarely line them up correctly the first time around. I rewrite most strips half a dozen times, or shelve them for weeks while I think about them.

When the reader sees the strip, it appears complete, as casually tossed as a joke in a coffee shop. More often than not, however, it's the apex of an iceberg, the bulk of it hidden beneath newsprint or monitors. Or lampshades.

Strong Hands

Bud Blake was the creator of the strip Tiger, a marvel of black and white geometry, and kids staying busy.

Arnold Wagner reprints the eulogy offered by Bud Blake's son, Ray. He mentions many things, such as the original intent behind the early Tiger strips (that the characters represented celebrities as kids), and his father's commitment to getting the drawing right (spending a long time at a barber's shop to capture the nuts and bolts of a barber's chair, or a hair cut)...but what caught my eye came at the end:

I was fortunate enough to see my father on Christmas day. We are not a touchy-feely family. In fact a poet friend of mine wrote a Haiku:

Raised by cold parents
He looked forward to haircuts,
Knowing he’d be touched.

I wasn’t raised by cold parents, but was still very surprised when my father asked for my hand and grasped it with surprising
strength.

In a perfect world, a cartoonist's hand is always strong.

Feeling Blue

Lorianne at Hoarded Ordinaries often couples her words with arresting photos, but she's outdone herself with this startling Pantone Blue shot of the sky. It's so blue that it seems simultaneously fake and real, a Platonic ideal of what blue means.

I've been staring into this picture for several minutes. I can feel happy chemicals running like high water through my brain, and I wonder why blue is a synonym for sadness.

And this being the internet, I can tell you, thanks to Origins of Navy Terminology:

If you are sad and describe yourself as "feeling blue," you are using a phrase coined from a custom among many old deepwater sailing ships. If the ship lost the captain or any of the officers during its voyage, she would fly blue flags and have a blue band painted along her entire hull when returning to home port.

Feeling Green, on the other hand, dates back to frogs sailing paper boats, with often the same results.

Big & Small Peanuts

Robot Johnny makes a deft comparison between some early Schulz cartoons. And as a bonus, he throws in some pre-Photoshop history.

Peanuts For Grown-ups

My confession: I love the first two Peanuts cartoons -- Halloween and Christmas -- but I've never been a fan of animated Peanuts. The transition from strip to moving film isn't a comfortable one for me. I like static images. I like panels. I like seeing the artist's hand in every line (something else I like about the first two holiday-themed Peanuts specials -- the animation is drawn largely from a strip's perspective, as if an actual strip were being scrolled before the viewer.) But two of the best-received Peanuts movies are coming to DVD. It's been many years since I've seen them and on the chance that my mind is either sharper or duller (reasonable bets) I'll be checking them out. (via Cartoons For Grown-ups)

Darwin Awards: The Movie

The Darwin Awards document the consequence of people who act like Spot and Buddy, without the safety net of fiction. And now it's a movie.

A Work of Suspense

If you type Spot the Frog into the search box at Amazon, you'll see the listing for the Spot book. There's a price, and sales copy. But now I'm feeling a tad edgy because there isn't actually a book. It's not finished yet. The release date is April.

I hadn't thought of the Spot book as a suspense thriller, but it certainly feels like one. 

Kansas City, Here I Go

From the Kansas City Star:

Several changes in FYI and the Sunday comics take effect Sunday and Monday. We like some, and hope you do, too, and regret others.

Beginning Sunday, the comics section will lose two pages. Paper is a major cost at any newspaper, and The Star has been offsetting rising newsprint prices by cutting some pages. A page of Sunday comics is one of our most expensive because the full-color section is printed by an outside company at a premium price.

But by reducing the size of some strips and moving the Horoscopes to Sunday FYI, we can hold down the number of comics we have to eliminate. We’ve also avoided removing comics with continuing story lines through the week. Still, “Spot the Frog,” which appeared only on Sunday, leaves the paper, and two others, “Mark Trail” and “Zippy,” will not run on Sundays. (They remain in daily FYI.) “Calvin and Hobbes Classics,” which was available for only a limited run, ended Jan. 1.

Having the Spot sunday in The Star was a pleasure. They were printed with fidelity -- not a given when it comes to sundays -- and it inspired some kind readers to say hello.

If any of you happen to be readers of the paper, you might say hello to the paper's editor.