As long as I was enjoying a rain delay, exercise-wise, I decided to see if I still remembered how to draw a cartoon.
I don’t think Gilbert Shelton, Pat Oliphant, or Bill Watterson have anything to worry about. But this doesn’t look too much worse than the stuff I used to get paid for, before the vulture capitalists et up and shat out all the bicycle magazines.
So I guess the ol’ muscle memory hasn’t gone completely senile. Yet.
Mad Blog Media 
Oh, hell yes. Remember them well. Thanks for the chuckle!
Gracias, hombre. I might start posting a ’toon every now and then as a change of pace. Flex the muscle memory a little bit. You don’t use it, you lose it, amirite?
Of course, some folks would say I never had it in the first place. …
It is great to have the stuff of your profession available on the home front. I sometimes wonder if I could still harness a heavy element mass spectrometer like I did the year my lab undressed the rest of the DOE complex and won the three-letter-agency award. But that was almost 20 years ago when I still had a brain.
My so-called career didn’t dollar up on the hoof all that well over 45 years. Unless you were really, really good, gigs like mine were for suckers who considered it a calling, like the priesthood; we’d do it for free if nobody would pay. The publishers knew this. (See Tom Waits, “Nighthawk Postcards (from Easystreet.”)
The good news is, a fella could pack up and move along pretty easily. Take the show on the road, see if anyone’s buying what you’re selling.
Editing was simplest. Regular hours, company supplies all the equipment; bad hours, but if you’re a night owl, hey, getting off at 1 a.m. ain’t no thang. Mornings free to ride the ol’ bikey bikey.
Writing may be best, especially if you’ve fled the reservation and don’t object to being your own editor. Go rogue, scribble on a legal pad and nail the pages to a telephone pole somewhere. Or tech it up a bit with a refurbed iPad or a real big iPhone and a free WordPress blog, maybe a Substack, take donations, if anyone’s willing to spare-change you.
Cartooning? Definitely something different altogether. Some heavy lifting involved there, especially for someone who devoured other people’s work the way I did. Early on I was not as good as I thought I was, and later I was not as good as I wanted to be.
Drawing is not as easily revised as writing, which is why I still draw everything in pencil first (and why God made erasers). Save a lot of paper that way (Strathmore Bristol is like $12 a pad).
Coloring on the computer is another paper-saver. Use ink pens or watercolor pencils to color the originals and you’re back to square one if you screw the pooch. Do it on the Mac and you can undo what you done did.
But yeah, best of all? When you retire, you can take it all home with you and do it for fun, on the cheap. Everybody needs a hobby. And the wife might have a few pointed questions if you set up a heavy element mass spectrometer in the garage.
A joy from the reverie! Thank you.
You’re welcome, señor. It does take a little doing, since I’m a cheapskate and something of a technophobe.
I draw the original in pencil, on Bristol board. Then I ink it using Pigma Micro pens in various calibers and erase the pencil work.
Next I boot up the 1999 G4 AGP Graphics “Sawtooth” Power Mac because it (a) has a flatbed scanner attached, and (2) has a copy of Adobe Photoshop 4 — yes, 4 — which I think I got for free waaaaay Back in the Day™ when I bought a SCSI flatbed scanner for an ever older Mac. To run this version of P-shop I have to use the G4 in “Classic Mode,” a.k.a. OS 9.
So I scan the ink drawing into the G4 as a 300-dpi CMYK TIFF, add color using my ancient copy of Photoshop, then downsize the ’toon to a 150-dpi RGB JPEG for the web and email it to myself, because the G4 doesn’t support AirDrop.
And then I slap the sumbitch onto this WordPress blog using a slightly more modern Mac, an M4 MacBook Pro from 2024. Easy peasy lemon-squeezy. Or not. …
Back when I was was a “pro” bike wrench, I always loved your cartoons. Thanks for the memories.
Blast from the past, hey? Next we’ll be doing drive-time AM radio here. Thanks for enjoying my little flashback.
Ah, WWPD broadcasting from the roof of Rancho Perro Loco in the Sandia foothills. Our next program, right after the news, will be Radio Free Dogpatch.
We just watched the Falcon 9 launch from Vanderburg fly over. Quite a sight. Will E
mail you some pix.
Book, Book!!!!! Do a book! You have enough for 3 volumes, just do !!!!!1
Och, ye divvil, get thee behind me so!
Been there, done that, no book there! Besides, I kept getting knocked down by all the people rushing up to you wanting to know if you had done a book yet…………………..
Hey, there they are! You have most of the old clan back together, or at least the important ones. I always enjoyed reading BRAIN, and your characterizations of customers that were visiting The Mud Stud’s shop, back in the day, while eating a 5-minute lunch on one of the workbenches, while also answering phones and trying not to actually work in those 5 minutes. And also that other column that you penned that the higher-ups decided wasn’t in their best interest to include anymore. Hey, we have this blog, still! Happy New Year!
Ah, the column. Yeah, that was a fun discussion with Management. Like the old gangster movies:
“Where do you want it, Rocco?”
“I don’t want it at all … but if you have to kill something, kill the column.”
I surely recognize them boys alright. When cracking BRAIN open (in print form no less!!) one could tell the art work had your signature style 20 feet away. Once examined ,I almost always got the punchline too. Which led to savoring your columns that sometimes bit the hand that fed ya. Oh how I loved that. Which led to this blog where you can really cut loose off the leash. And others can join in howling at the moon as well.
“Style?” Moi? You been into the sidewalk softener this early into the New Year?
Those columns for BRAIN, and their dopplegängers on VN.com, were loads of laughs. For me, anyway. I wandered into bicycle journalism at just the right time, when any ol’ loon could grab an oar and row the velo-boat in circles, or start shooting holes in the bottom just ’cause.
And now, a word from President Trump and his Cabinet.