CowboyOrange

Today was one of the most exciting days of my life, and from a political perspective, today was the best day I have ever known or imagined.

I can’t describe it; there is just nothing that can compare to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States of America. I wept today for joy at the birth of an America I never dared to imagine. This is truly a watershed moment in American history.

It saddens me deeply that it took eight years of George W. Bush to come to this moment, and that even now this was (popularly) a narrow election. I hope that I am seeing the end of the darkest years of the 21st century. This has been a hard, painful and despiriting time.

But this is a new era.  Not just for America, but for the world.

For the first time in history, the most powerful man in the world is a Black man, the son of an African. This is important, and this is transformative. This is a great day.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, they shall count themselves accursed that did not vote today.

It’s time for me to rest.  I’ll see you all in the morning, in a new, better world.

Colleen can be found here:

http://www.tragicrelief.blogspot.com

Jon-Mikel was last spotted off the coast of Brazil, mumbling something about finally being able to get a decent cup of coffee.

The Xeric book is out! And it has its own blog.

New banner as well. I need to color that…

Comics are here:
http://www.cowboyorange.com/marya

I know I promised to come kickin’ around my virtual clubhouse more, and give folks more reasons to join me. I haven’t been doing that lately. I kinda got kicked in the teeth by some kinda nasty disease that laid me out for a week. Fever, chills, nausea, a killer cough, and complete exhaustion. Not only was I too mentally tired to draw, I was too tired to watch TV. That’s right - I was too dumb to do the dumbest thing a man can do. Pretty lame, I know.

So, to catch up, I’m giving you a pair of recent comics pages, which I drew for my friend Joe Lambert’s birthday. He’s kind of a genius, so I felt a little dumb giving this to him; but what was I gonna do, spend money? Anyway, I don’t think it’s too bad for drawing it in one night.

A little explanation: during the summer, we play a lot of four-square up here at James Sturm’s School for Cartoonists in Butt-Fuck Nowhere. “Dodgeball” is one of the rules variants, wherein if one catches the ball before the bounce and yells “Dodgeball!” one can throw the ball at an opponent and knock them “out.” Joe is a particularly competitive player.

One other thing occurs to me about this story that I’d like to throw out there: I’m curious about the relationship between style and content. I’ve recently begun taking a more conventional animation/action-cartoon style in my work, and because I have literary pretensions and aspirations, this makes me nervous. I’ve never seen solid literary work pulled off in a conventional visual style; I worry about whether it’s even possible. Part of it, I suppose, is that “style” is to cartooning as “voice” is to writing, and that no literary “voice” characterized by cliché or formal conventionalism has ever been recognized as particularly worthy of critical attention. At the same time, though, I’ve read a lot of strongly literary books - masterpieces, I think - which aren’t deeply experimental in their approach to form, so I’m not convinced that the successful use of convention is a failing.

Anyway, I welcome your thoughts on the subject, or on the piece that prompted it. And I promise, more soon, including that pic of Penina!