Interbike 2018: There is no pain, you are receding

September 18, 2018September 18, 2018 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

OutDoor Demo at the Northstar California resort wrapped yesterday — to rave reviews, if you believe the Fake News — and Interbike Marketweek proper opened today. There’s a Show Daily and everything.

Not everybody makes it from Demo to the show floor, though. This year, as always, a few exhibitors did the Demo and then hit the door running.

Yes, it’s that time of year again.

The Mud Stud usually strives for the doubleheader, if he makes it to the Gathering of the Tribes at all. A guy who lives on SpaghettiOs and PBR is not likely to own a GPS, even at bro-deal pricing.

He has been known to confuse Las Vegas, New Mexico, for Las Vegas, Nevada. The one time he tried to fly, Homeland Security wanted to add him to its museum of curiosities, but the EPA said ixnay.

Another time the Stud found himself in Myanmar in search of Mandalay Bay. Alas, the city of Mandalay is 500km from the nearest bay, and further still from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Sin City, Interbike’s final flop in that neon whorehouse.

You’d think the extended water crossing might have tipped our boy off, since hitchhiking and/or cycling across the Pacific can be damply sketchy. But the Stud spends a lot of time wandering around in his own head and is not always paying close attention to what transpires outside that cavernous, empty, Mohawked space.

In 2003 the Stud made both Demo and Interbike. But it wasn’t pretty. The bike didn’t let him down, but the bottle did.

• Next: Can you show me where it hurts?

Interbike 2018: This is not how I am

September 17, 2018September 17, 2018 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

The Mud Stud is a top-notch wrench, but his periodic forays into entrepreneurship have rarely dollared up on the hoof.

Neither Interbike nor Bicycle Retailer and Industry News is limited to serving as a delivery system for my bullshit. There are various jobs of work being done, products being shifted, and money being made.

Or so it is to be hoped, anyway.

Yes, it’s that time of year again.

But the show is not a cheap date. And as a consequence some penny-pinchers have been known to try to cut a few corners — say, by setting up outside the show and hoping to lure a few rubes away from the big tent and into their little tipis.

The Mud Stud tried that in 1999, when the show was still at the Sands Expo and Convention Center, with predictable results. At top, you’ll find the setup, a “Shop Talk” strip that appeared in the pre-show edition of BRAIN. Below are the subsequent Show Daily strips. Click the images for bigger versions.

And where was I when The Stud and Bobbi were trying to move their respective products? I was on site like a good dog, hawking copies of my first and only book, a collection of VeloNews cartoons titled “The Season Starts When?”

• Next: There is no pain, you are receding.

Interbike 2018: Hello, is there anybody in there?

September 15, 2018September 15, 2018 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

My lodging for Interbike 1999 was a tad spartan.

This morning, when I should have been risking life and limb motoring to Reno via U.S. 550 and U.S. 50, a.k.a. The Loneliest Road in America, I took a little spin down Memory Lane, which is much easier on the kidneys.

Yes, it’s that time of year again.

Back in 1997, the pre-Interbike issue of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News ran a whopping 150 pages, more than three times this year’s 46 (and the pages were bigger back then, too).

It was an embarrassment of riches, so much so that the editors awarded me some extra space to play with, probably because they had run out of actual news to plug the holes between the ads.

Thus, my “Shop Talk” cartoon, ordinarily a simple black-and-white strip at the bottom of the Editorial & Comment page at the back of the book, took over an entire page of the September 1997 issue, and in full color, too.

The resulting CMYK image file was so friggin’ huge that I had to break the sonofabitch into segments to squeeze it through our lo-fi Innertubes outside Weirdcliffe for deposit upon the BRAIN trust in Fanta Se (click the image to see the big picture).

Back then I was drawing cartoons for the Show Daily, too. But that’s another story.

• Next: Just nod if you can hear me.

R.I.P., Steve Ditko

July 7, 2018July 7, 2018 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Without Steve Ditko, this Marvel-origins collection would have been a good deal slimmer.

As a polyglot lot of colorfully clad heroes comes to blows in France, displaying superhuman powers acquired from Stan Lee only knows where, we bid farewell to the co-creator of many another costumed combatant, comic-book artist Steve Ditko.

With Lee and Jack Kirby Ditko had a hand in the debut of, among others, The Amazing Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. The young Ditko dug Will “The Spirit” Eisner, and you can see a bit of Eisner’s noirish style in his work; this admiration clearly filtered down to some of the undergrounds, like Rand “Harold Hedd” Holmes and Dave “Dealer McDope” Sheridan.

Doctor Strange as imagined by Steve Ditko.

Unlike Lee, who had (and maintains) a flair for showmanship, Ditko apparently was a recluse who declined interviews, snubbed comic-book conventions, and spurned invitations to movie premieres.

“We didn’t approach him,” said Scott Derrickson, director of the 2016 movie “Doctor Strange,” a yawner in which Benedict Cumberbatch played the title role. “He’s like J.D. Salinger. He is private and has intentionally stayed out of the spotlight.”

According to Lee, in “Origins of Marvel Comics,” Ditko got the job of drawing Spidey after Kirby’s take on the character proved “too good” to depict the tormented teenage geek Lee had in mind.

“All those years of drawing superheroes must have made it a little difficult to labor so mightily and come forth with a superloser, or if you will, a supershnook,” Lee wrote.

“Steve’s style … was almost diametrically different from Jack’s. Where Jack would exaggerate, Steve would strive zealously for total realism. Where Jack made his featured characters as heroically handsome as possible, Steve’s forte seemed to be depicting the average man in the street. I decided to play a hunch. I asked Steve to draw Spider-Man. And he did. And the rest is history.”

Ditko died alone in his Manhattan home, age 90.

Mister Rogers evicted from neighborhood

June 14, 2018June 15, 2018 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Rob Rogers seems pretty on point to me. | *Rob Rogers/Andrews-McMeel Syndication*

A comrade bites the Big Orange Bullet.

Seems the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette thinks more of the free-press-hating Il Douche than it does of its own editorial cartoonist.

Former editorial cartoonist, that is.

According to The Washington Post, the Pittsburgh paper’s management had begun regularly spiking Rob Rogers’ cartoons, many of which were critical of the country’s management. And as cartoonists tend to want to see their work published, while fascists tend to lack a sense of humor, well, matters came to a head, as they will.

It sucks to see an editorial cartoonist get the heave-ho after a quarter-century for doing his job. There aren’t that many of them left — hell, there aren’t that many newspapers left.

But good on Rob for sticking to his guns and hollering “Bullshit!” when he smelled some. The PP-G editorial page should include a complimentary scratch-and-sniff air freshener henceforth.

• Late update: Rob steps away from the drawing board for a moment to write a short piece for the NYT.