Category: Cartooning

12 Days of ’Toonsmas: Day 2

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Never get high on your own supply. Il Fattini relearned
this valuable life lesson in the February 2019 issue of BRAIN.

When that Boulder-based journal of competitive cycling and I parted ways, the Old Guy Who Gets Fat in Winter suddenly found himself out of a job.

This is not good news for a portly fellow with an eating habit. One minute you’re the the star of the show; the next, just another MAMIL taking up space. Lots and lots of space.

Sure, you can hang around the bike shop, surreptitiously noshing on the Clif Bar display when staff is distracted by a paying customer. But this is risky business. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of the dude who adjusts your brakes. The world is full of gravity, and also, comedy.

“Where’s Fatso? Haven’t seen him hanging around lately.”

“Didn’t you hear? He blew through the stop sign at the bottom of Corkscrew Canyon doing sixty and T-boned a food truck. Had to have an emergency hoagiectomy. With fries. The docs think they got it all but they’re holding him for observation. You wanna observe him, a ticket costs $50.”

• And now, this word from our sponsor.

12 Days of ’Toonsmas

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Cash-ing in: Emerald Expositions shot our show in Reno,
just to watch it die.

Most of yis probably don’t see Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, the magazine I’ve freelanced words and cartoons to since 1992.

Bicycle Retailer, better known as BRAIN, is a trade mag, not made available to the general public. And so unless you’ve been caught short while visiting your local shop to pick up some Kool-Stop pads for your Dia-Compe 986es and stumbled into the “reading room” to offload some oatmeal, why, you’ve been missing all the fun.

For years I wrote a column for the mag, “Mad Dog Unleashed,” which was ostensibly about cycling and its supporting industry, but often wandered far afield, like a shop rat at Interbike in search of free beer. It would have been fun to call it “Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog,” but Hunter S. Thompson would have hunted me down and Maced me for that.

The column eventually went away, as they will, but the cartoon remains. “Shop Talk” is likewise in theory about the bike and the biz, but in practice it often has something to say other than “Disc brakes are superior to rim brakes,” “You must have a full-suspension mountain bike to ride the local trails,” and “E-bikes are the Future of the Industry.”

Uh huh. La Velo Nostra has had a lot of futures, which makes me think it should consider hiring quantum mechanics instead of the usual sort.

But we are dealing with the past at the present. And thus I reprint the “Shop Talk” strip from the January 2019 issue of BRAIN. It’s Day One of the 12 Days of ’Toonsmas, and my little gift to you.

R.I.P., Gahan Wilson

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
My lone Gahan Wilson collection.

Gahan Wilson, whose surreal cartoons regularly appeared in National Lampoon, Playboy, and other top-shelf mags, has stepped away from the drawing board.

He died Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz. Complications of dementia, they say. He was 89.

This guy was funny. Bleak, weird, the owner and operator of left field, he kept you off balance like some psychotic judo master. There was nobody else like him working Back in the Day®, and if he has a successor, I’ve not seen him or her yet.

One of my faves? An overstuffed chair absorbing a reader. Eyeglasses and book lie on the floor. All you can see as the reader vanishes is a pair of hands, protruding from the seat.

Another depicts a gardener who has unearthed a skeleton. His employer, a stately, dessicated husk of a woman, says, “I think you would be advised to locate the new delphinium bed elsewhere, Hobbs.”

Yet another shows a soldier covered in gore, muck and God knows what all, knife in one hand and assault rifle in the other. He stands alone in a smoking hellscape that makes the “Terminator” future look like Disneyland. His eyes pop out of the murk like cue balls. And he smiles. “I think I won!” he says.

Dracula with a vampire hand puppet. Dracula with a salt shaker. (Dude liked Dracula, what can I tell you?) A woman who has stuffed her husband into the trash can outside her apartment door (“You don’t get rid of him that easy, Mrs. Jacowsky,” says a man who may be the building superintendent). A writer for “The National Confidential Weekly” who, stuck for a lively bit of the old Fake News®, finally leaves his typewriter for a while and returns to tap out, “It isn’t easy cutting the heart out of a woman with a dull knife. And it takes time. It takes a good fifteen minutes.”

Oh, Gahan Wilson was one of the greats. I hope he and Charles Addams are hoisting a tall cold one in the Beyond.

Just what the e-doctor ordered

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments
I’m shocked, shocked, that some people seem to believe that e-bikes are the modern equivalent of the philosopher’s stone.

This just in: E-bikes cure* Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, erectile dysfunction, post-nasal drip, gout, piles, dandruff, denture breath, and the heartbreak of psoriasis (Christ, you don’t know the meaning of heartbreak, buddy, c’mon, c’mon).

* You will note the caveat buried deep in the piece: “(A)ttaining these health benefits requires tackling the problem of poor street design and infrastructure in America. Everything from high speed limits to wide roads to light timing that prioritizes the flow of vehicles poses a threat to older people walking in their communities … and also creates barriers to people participating in cycling.”