
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.

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.
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