My sweet, brilliant wife is concert pianist and she started a podcast in January called Play It Again, Swig all about getting her chops back after giving birth to our kid. The weekly podcast follows her practicing as she learns the Chopin etudes…which may sound all high-falutin’ but it’s quite accessible, even to a dullard like me. You can find it on itunes too so, download away.
And how does this relate to cartooning, you may ask? I designed her logo.
Yup, you guessed it. Here’s yet another probably-never-seen drop panel. This one is for the Sunday strip rerunning today on Gocomics.com.
Every year, on my wife’s birthday, I would do a strip featuring the Birthday Girl. This an incredibly self-centered woman, who resembles my wife only physically. In other words, this character is an in-joke that only a few people get. But, still, the main gag is written for “civilians.”
The year I did this strip I hadn’t realized that my wife’s birthday was landing on a Sunday, so I had drawn it up as a “daily” (one of the strips that runs Monday through Saturday.) It wasn’t until I was doing a batch of Sunday strips that I discovered my error and had to rearrange the elements to make it work.
Oh, and the house pictured is the one we used to live in.
And since Gocomics.com doesn’t rerun the strips on the date they first appeared, today is not my wife’s actual b-day.
At least I hope it isn’t.*
*hackneyed husband humor
Old Mr. Bench shows up today in the strip rerunning on Gocomics.com. Not the strongest gag – it does show off his cluelessness more than his craziness.
An even more minor character showed up Saturday – The Birthday Girl. She appears on my wife’s birthday and, although she’s modeled on her, TBG’s self-centered personality is nothing like my missus. Of course, since all the Bo strips rerun in an off-calendar way (I think Christmas strips will be showing up soon), Saturday was not my wife’s actual birthday.
I missed my wife’s birthday. It was on Friday.
Well, not her real birthday…let me explain…
Each year on my wife’s special day I would run a strip featuring a character I called “The Birthday Girl, ” a person blissfully self-centered about her birthday. This character looks like my wife but is, in reality, nothing like her. (That’s a joke that plays to a limited audience of people we know.)
Since Gocomics.com is running reruns out of order, the birthday strip did not run on my wife’s actual birthday, so I’m not in any sort of trouble for that.
(If you click on the link you’ll see that a couple of readers were dissing my math skills. Silly readers. Don’t they know that cartoonists don’t have any math skills?)
Kovaleski (the blog of a cartoonist named John) 