More Dark Ages cartoonery: This time you can blame Khal Spencer, who in comments recalled a VeloNews ‘toon I drew back in 2000, which seems like an awfully long time ago, in part because it was. And yet it seems so … timely, for some strange reason.
This may have been the introduction of a nameless recurring character, a reptilian dope fiend who, like the Fat Guy, grew progressively uglier as the years dragged on. Though the Fat Guy, of course, has yet to test positive for anything stronger than gravy.
The 2011 “60 Minutes” interview with Tyler Hamilton causes consternation in the shop.
Opus the Poet asked in comments where my cartoons have been hiding lately, so I thought I’d pop up this one from 2011, following Tyler Hamilton’s revelations about Lance Armstrong on “60 Minutes.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the “Shop Talk” strip, it’s something I’ve been doing since 1992 for the trade magazine Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. It concerns the misadventures of the Mud Stud, a mohawked mountain-biking mechanic with the IQ of an Allen key, and Dude, a roadie who appears to be the boss, though he’s most often depicted wearing the blue shop apron of a wrench.
This is also where the Fat Guy wound up, when he’s not announcing the end of a breakaway for Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey over at Red Kite Prayer.
Speaking of breakaways, it appears that Johan Bruyneel has decided to step down in order to spend more time with his pharmacy … er, family. Naturally, we wish him well in his future endeavors, especially if they involve public humiliation and/or jail time.
I had to skip out on the final 10km of today’s Tour stage, as Herself’s mom was in town and we were off to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo to wallow in critterage.
As a longtime comic-book fan, I look at this and see echoes of Neal Adams’ treatment of The Batman, The Avengers, The X-Men and other caped crusaders. It makes the riders appear superhuman, yet still capable of suffering; a reminder, I suppose, that even when we suspect a rider of breaking the rules, he still has to race the race.
And the zoo? Extra cool. I haven’t been there in years, and while there were a few disappointments — the Amur tiger was in hiding, for example — the otters were a hoot. And the only thing that beats watching a grizzly dog-paddle around in a glass-walled pond on a hot day is watching a pair of lar gibbons — both of them missing left hands after injury and amputation — swinging around their cage as if nothing had ever gone awry.
And there were the meerkats, of course. They look like a bunch of little old men who survived the apocalypse and somehow crossbred with prairie dogs. This little dude looks like Charlton Heston minus the firearm and the Second Amendment attitude.
Seems it wasn’t Chinese pork that tripped up Alberto Contador after all. In what’s sure to give a boost to the Spanish beef industry, El Pendejo — disculpame, El Pistolero — says he tripped the Dope-O-Meter® after dining on a chunk of homegrown carne the team chef ordered up during the Tour ’cause the French hotel’s meat tasted like ass.
I don’t know how they ever caught that steer for butchering, full of clenbuterol as it must have been.
His story brings to mind an old Gilbert Shelton gag, first used in a “Wonder Wart-Hog” strip and then reprised in “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” The initial version involved a motorcycle race; the encore featured a police chase.
Here’s my riff on the joke:
Two cowboys on roundup stagger back to the ranch with their chaps shredded, their hats in tatters and generally looking like they’d been et by a coyote and shit off a cliff.
“What the hell happened to you fellas?” asks the foreman.
“Aw,” replies one, “this cow we was a-chasin’ ran away from us so fast we thought our horses had stopped so we got off to see what was the matter.”
• Late update: Meanwhile, Contador’s homeboys Ezequiel Mosquera and David Garcia Da Peña are also deep in the mierda, but for hydroxyethyl starch. The fiesta never stops.
