Feel good story

I know it's not true but a guy can dream can't he?

The Bank Jobless

It seems the time of the crazy wealthy CEO, hedge fund trader and bank exec is coming to an end. Before long their heads will be on display and their bodies will be sent to jail. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of slime balls.

Naughty Wednesday's cartoon

An old Hustler cartoon that is a new greeting card in my Funny Paper series for Nobleworks. All black and whites with the Little Guy appearing somewhere on the front and an inside cameo.
Those are some saggy boobs, eh?

I know it says Tuesday on the date but where I am, it is Wednesday.

Be careful what you wish for...

I am starting to wonder if Obama is really the liberal we all thought he was. Why is he supporting Bush policies? Why isn't he OKing the arrest of Karl Marx Rove? Why is he so concerned in gaining GOP support that will never come? Wake up Obamalama. Time to step on Boehner's ding dong. Grind them into the dust, run rough shod. Let them see that elections have consequences, then perhaps they will think twice about doing whatever the hell they feel like doing with our country and the world.It's tough love they need, not molly coddling. They don't respond well to niceties after all.

Collinstunes 'The Pickle song'

I always wondered about that pickle.

Sign o' the times

PETA is so going to get on my case for this old cartoon, but hey, I'm sure this has crossed the mind of a starving person out there living in their car. I think puppies are high in cholesterol though. Like I said, this is a very old cartoon, done when I was a young rebellious kid who delighted in making fun of everything.

The Few, the Proud the Elves

Going Back to our Afghanistan Banana stand

Why do we think we can do anything to change the people in this part of the world? They are in the stone age only with Kalashnikovs. The thing you end up doing is encouraging their lust to spill blood. Which they do all too readily. Admit it, there is nothing we can do to influence any part of their culture. Obama, bring the troops home! Period.

Naughty Wednesday's cartoon

It's hump day. We are in mid work week. At times like this we need a stronger jolt to help boost us into the weekend. The same old namby pamby, milquetoast humor we get on the comics page just doesn't do it for us does it? A quick zap to the blood stream can give us a push to get over the hump. (at least I think that's why they call it hump day) My mind always jumped to the conclusion that hump day meant something else entirely.

The Pope of Hope

Another new card.

Collinstunes

Here's the Hot Nashville Club (personal friends) with Tommy Emmanuel on drums doing one of my favorite Chet Atkins tunes titled Cascade. A tough number to play. The initial strain has a finger spread over five frets and one which my short stubby fingers can't play comfortably. Oh well, at least I can enjoy the heck out of it when Richard Smith, Pat Bergeson and friends put their delightful mark on it.

Joe Beer

Here's a card that will be on the stands soon. It seemed like a natural. Don't know why I haven't seen it done elsewhere. Ideas like this are so obvious you wonder why there haven't been a hundred versions done by now. Perhaps there has been someone who has done a similar one, I just haven't seen it yet. Editorial cartoonists are prone to doing very similar cartoons. They have to crank them out daily and work with the same concepts that a hundred other cartoonists are also ruminating upon, so it often happens that the very same light bulbs click on in multiple noggins within a small time frame. That must annoy an editorial cartoonist no end. You come up with a great concept, a 'natural' and then three or four of your fellow artists print the same idea the same week. It just neutralizes your genius moment! This happens on a lesser scale in magazine cartoons. However in that genre it happens in a larger time frame which leads one to consider that the duplication may owe itself to idea theft. Which in some cases of creative desperation it is. Some ideas are so attractive that a starving artist can be seduced into thinking that he can make it his own and hopefully nobody will notice. What they don't realize is that an idea that intriguing spreads virally and is known to many in a short time. But the public is fickle and sometimes don't even remember or even notice the name that appears in the bottom corner of a cartoon. Once they are both in print who is to say which came first. I have had many of my ideas lifted over the years. It is frustrating since the options for recourse are limited and not usually successful monetarily. The only good thing you can take away from it is that the offending person will be branded as such if they continue the behavior and also that if they can't think of their own stuff, they have a limited career prospect. And in a perverse way it is a nod to your own brilliance that someone liked it enough to commit plagiarism. So I'm waiting for the cartoon clones to happen not long after this card spreads through the populace. This business is a fluid one and the sea of ideas is a soup in which our brains commingle with each other like jellyfish on the tides. Hows that for a metaphor? That might make a good cartoon! I hope it hasn't been done before.

Bush Library

Don't forget to stop by the souvenir shop and pick up some plastic Turd Blossoms, waterboarding bobbleheads, Dick Cheney pop guns or W dolls. Pull the string and he lies to you every time.

Correction: make that the 'National Debt Display'.

Back on the air

We had another wind storm Wednesday night that almost rivaled Hurricane Ike that blew through here last year and knocked out the power for all of my little town. Thursday was spent chopping firewood to keep the house warm and also cleaning out the fridge since it was emptied anyway (food put into coolers). The usual (Ohio) hurricane proceedure.

I tell you, I am going to get a generator. I am tired of sitting in the dark and listening to someone else's generator run all night. It seems if Mother Nature so much as farts anymore the power goes out. During Ike we went several days without electricity. As God is my witness I'll never be power hungry again! (me channeling Scarlet O'Hara). Oh Ashley! Damn that terrible wowah. (war)

This cartoon has no connection to any of this.

Coming Due

I don't think we will have to wait for our children to start paying for the Bush years. The bills are coming due right now. But if you still can afford the cable bill at least you can watch the coming trials of all the Boosh cronies who will be going to jail when the truth commission brings their crimes to light. Or at the very least watch as they spill their guts in order to keep from going to the slammer. This should bring W's legacy into a pretty clear focus in less time than he thought. I think we have just lived through the reign of the absolute worst leader this country has ever had. But don't take my word for it. Ask any unemployed person.

Valentine's Day is coming...

Pencil me in

Some cartoons I just do in pencil for an edit when time is short. This one is the tried and true fart joke. They never miss and seem to be gaining quite a bit of traction in the greeting card market if you've scanned the shelves in the last couple of years. The card companies are falling over themselves to put out fart cards, butt cards, cards that say 'ass'. I even had a big seller in my Schitt Family Tree card. Hottest selling card in the US and Canada last summer quarter in it's initial run. The world is gradually sinking down to my level it would seem. Or maybe they're just loosening up a bit which they needed to do anyway after 50 years of suffocating propriety. When faced with sinking revenues a card company will do just about anything to move those units. Works for me! Check your local American Greeting display and look for the Collins brand. Your best bet in humorous cellulose salutations!

Straight Lines

A new item for the blog: in these posts I will be putting up simple line drawings which I do for edits. If and when they are accepted by a magazine then they get the greyscale or color treatment for publishing. Over the 30+ years I have been drawing professionally I have accumulated over 10,000 of these things which are stored in dozens of cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid containers. So I should have plenty for posting here at the Chronicle. "The Chronicle". That sounds like I work at a real newspaper or something. I wonder if there is some kind of CD you can get with the sounds of a newsroom in full production mode. That would make a great addition to the muzak in newsrooms where most of the reporting staffs have been cut loose, for the benefit of the few who remain or just out of a sense of nostalgia. I used to be able to hang around the newsroom at the Delaware Gazette when I was their editorial cartoonist in the 90's. It was fun! Then the paper sold and they had no use for cartoons or the people who had been working there for years. Maybe this cartoon has something to say about what this country has gone through this decade. We should all be thinking a little further down the road as to what our own legacies will be.

Super Fam- The Dysfunctionals

Here is a brand new greeting card I just whipped out yesterday. I have been doing goofy super heroes for a series called From Zero to Hero for Nobleworks and hopefully for American Greetings too if they choose to pick it up. This is the first family group in the series.

Unreasoning fear

When you have been under a dark cloud for so long, as we have been here in America, you tend to develop a fatalistic mindset that it will just keep getting worse. Every day brings the threat of more bad news with good news nearing extinction. So it is easy to understand why we might start to think that something has to go wrong with the feeling of hope we all felt (except Lord Emperor Cheney) on January 20th. I mean, something's got to come along and just blow it out of the water; it always does! Just when we start to see some light on the horizon we also think, maybe it's the glow of an asteroid entering the atmosphere prior to impact. We've just gotten used to it. We try to soften the blow by anticipating it and rolling with it. It's a natural tendency.

I hope we can grow out of this soon. It will take some time. A puppy will still flinch at the site of a rolled up newspaper long after he's had his last swat. It's a reflex action. It will just take a lot of newspapers with Obama's face on them in place of that last assteroid.

I still can't quite believe it.

I still haven't gotten used to the idea that Booshy is finally no longer in control of the government. It's like when you wake up from a bad dream and that feeling of dread still clings to your brain. I suspect that there are a lot of folks who will not let loose of their hatred of the man for quite some time, which is the inspiration for this cartoon. The lawyers at Hustler said 'No way' to publishing this cartoon. Larry however said 'Yes', so in it goes. Do you think I have crossed some kind of line with this? Do you think I am putting the idea into the mind of a crazy out there who might actually make this a reality?
I don't feel I would be responsible for any attempts on his life. I'm just the artist, giving life to those subconscious thoughts that are out there already. I am putting them in the sunlight where we can confront and deal with emotions that sometimes we would rather avoid. It is a healthy process, although an uncomfortable one at times. Especially for moron ex-presidents.

Priorities

In these troubling times we must make the hard decisions, we have to decide between what is necessary and what is luxury. What is it that we need to survive and what is it that we can do without. Of course what that encompasses, all too frequently is divided along the lines of gender.

Collinstunes

Not Chet playing but a very good rendition of a Chet tune that I also play. One of my faves of his. Wobegon (the way things used to be).