Number one cartoon ebook!

Who's got the number one cartoon ebook on Amazon? providing you type in the right search word: cartoons. Or Humor and cartoons. 

Finally getting something done...

Yours Mayan and Ours

Obit of fun

I heard Kim Jong died. I didn't even know he was -Il!

HDR in Photoshop

Here is an HDR combining of 7 bracketed shots of the stairwell. New with PS 5.5. Just upgraded to CS5.5 Design Premo. Mostly for the epublishing suite but this is cool too.

Easy Chair Party

New project

I told you about a project I was getting involved with recently and today it is going public so it's OK to mention it now. It's headed up by Bill Kellogg who is the man in charge of getting the strip Tundra into 500 papers without the need for the big syndicates. No small feat there and the reason why I have more than a better hope of something developing positively with this. It's a franchise based cartoon paper with opportunities for anyone here who needs a job and wants to be their own boss. You can get all the details about it using the link. There is also a pdf download of the first edition mock up. You can see my strip on page four. I am very happy to be working on the strip again. It's the most fun of anything I have ever done regardless of whether it brought in any money or not. I love the landscape format after having been forced to jam a whole scene into a portrait aspect for 35 years for magazines. It's a strip a week so there isn't that 6 days a week crazy schedule of 'real' strips. We'll see how it goes. Check it out!

Turns out it was all set up to make other people money, not us creators. What a waste of time again.

http://www.funnies-extra.com/

Run for the Eggzit

Merry Christmas

From all of us here at the Collins house we wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. Or your preferred type of holiday celebrations (fill in blank). It's not been an easy season for us; however, having all of you to share in the warm feelings of this holiday makes it seem so much nicer. God bless.

Nuther colored strip...

This recolor was a little more problematic; I had a ton of zipatone dots on this one which were not going to add anything except a muddying effect when combined with the colors. They worked for pure black and white but not color. And I wanted to avoid any possible moire effect when printed. The real zipatone film was permanently stuck to the art so it was necessary to paint the dots out by hand in Photoshop. I think it was worth the effort. What do you think?

Pencil toon

Sad to say, this cartoon won't be used since the news of the Godfather's "suspension" of his campaign to be the black Geo Bush. By not actually quitting he can still suckle from his base to raise funds to pay any bills he has. And the milk always flows. On the bright side we dodged some kind of bullet didn't we?

Jerks Are Free

...if you ever want to be a master baiter.

New color, old strip

For the new project.

New Gig In the Works

Colored a Funny Paper strip for an exciting new project. Can't say much as yet but hopefully I will be doing more of these in the future.

Color Version

Ebook exerp

Another cartoon from the ebook "Cartoons That Will Send Me Straight To Hell". It's a gas!

Amazon Author page

I am a bona fide eauthor!

A Bumpy Ride

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy life.

Lawrence of a labia

Cartoon RAW

Squatch watch

Senior sex

I realize this could be a sticky subject with some. Others may find it more lubricating.

Jobs In Color

I know it's behind the curve but this was done in line art the next morning after and just done in color today to go into the magazine. That's the sticky part about doing topical stuff for a magazine that takes 2 to 3 months to get itself on the stands.

Mid Ohio Comic Con!

If you are attending, stop by my table # 1111. Goy lotsa crap to buy! Shake hands with me. Wash first.

My ebook is on sale now!

Amazon has it up on their site! Go to http://www.amazon.com/Cartoons-That-Will-Straight-ebook/dp/B005UQS3A8/ to get the first solo collection of my cartoons from 34 years of drawing! Don't worry, more will be coming out soon. Got lots of time to make up for! Only $2.99. Cheap!

The Wonderful Wizard of Balls

RIP Steve Jobs

Loved the guy. Hope this doesn't offend anyone. Sorry, I couldn't resist the gag.If someone wants to make fun of me when I go, please feel free.I can take it.

A lesson to all you youngsters

Biker chick

A greeting card.

More flies

Crapbaggers

There are endless cartoons to be had about flies and poop. Don't ask me why, even though by last count (and that is not a final tally) I have done at least 130 of them. There is an elemental connection between flies and what we would leave in the loo. It is their food, their nursery, their social network/gathering place. All their world it would appear is tied to that stinky stuff. Sounds like the perfect situation to mine cartoon gold while commenting on our own connections to the crap in our lives, hunh? That's a bunch of cartoons on such a seemingly tasteless subject. Enough for a book, Eh? Accent on the E.
This was drawn just this morning. Still in pencil, yet even after all these (34) years, still they come.

Buttface

Friday funnies. Have a good weekend!

Last cover for H Humor?

I've done a lot of covers for the humor magazine Hustler Humor in my career with hustler. This magazine came to life in 1975, do you believe it? It was the brain/love child of notorious cartoon editor/cartoonist Dwaine Beverly Tinsley. It lived off the throw away cartoons from the main magazine. It also used new works the staff cartoonists produced in the form of strips, features and what have you. But the best gig was always the covers. An artist got $500 for the cover job for the entire run until just recently when the executive staff decided they would cut it by $100 for budgetary reasons. (wouldn't you know it would be this cover) The magazine has struggled for years and years with low sales so they told us but never seemed to reach that tipping point where it's survival was mortally threatened. Mostly that could be attributed to poor marketing and distributing as it had a pretty loyal readership and many more who wanted to buy it yet could not find it on any stand. I know because they would write me in droves asking where it could be purchased. I finally put a link on my website with a mail order form which could be found inside it's pages. I would also get fan mail from guys who would tell me, "I've loved your cartoons since I was a kid!" I don't endorse things like kids reading HH cartoons but from what I could tell they seemed for the most part fairly normal and in some cases quite successful people despite their exposure to my drawings. My main motivation is always to be funny; first and foremost. Gratuitous sex or violence is only grudgingly employed when it benefits the gag. Or to get Larry to buy the thing.
For a lot of those years I dealt with Dwaine and had a pretty good number of covers picked. When he passed away things got more problematic. The current executive editor took over not long after and was notoriously difficult to pin down or get an idea past. And then you had to run the gauntlet of Larry himself for the final hurdle! Not an easy task. So all the staff cartoonists started seeing fewer and fewer cover assignments which somehow started going to outsiders. I managed to get a few more in than the others by virtue of my differing styles of cartoon illustration. This cover itself was a new style I was experimenting with using the program Painter 12 to mimic traditional oil painting. The face looks photographic and it was one before I used a cloning process that created a copy with a brushed paint appearance . It's still a tad tight; next time I will make it rougher to fight that overly photo look.
If you scroll down through some past blog entires you will discover that this cover has gone through several iterations. I think I have painted at least four different finished versions of this idea in differing poses and without Sarah in it. I'm glad I kept pushing it till it reached this stage despite getting my pocket picked for a measly 100 bucks right at the very end. You see this probably will be my very last cover either due to the death of HH or because I will soon no longer be a hustler staff cartoonist.
I know there have been many more publications with better credentials than this humble cartoon joke book that have died the print death. But I didn't have a history of doing covers for them. And I can't imagine they were as much fun to do either except for the possible exception you got a hell of a lot more money doing them. They could be anything. A life guard flipping beach sunbathers with a spatula to a caveman carving a stone wheel-shaped toilet seat to name two. Out of God-knows-how-many over 36 years of monthly to bi-monthly to quarterly to bi-annually to whatever. It's been fun but you know, I hate that feeling when you can feel the end of something approaching that you have gotten intimately familiar with. It's a melancholy thing.
Well not a bad cover to end this volume of work. The top text they added was a little weird, not actually making any sense. They changed the title too. Oh well, editors...what can you say? They don't always know how humor works best, they just know they need to change something to justify their existence and or paychecks.
So long HH, I knew you when.

Three Pigmen of the Appocalypse

Remember radical feminists?

No? Then you're not as old as I am. I wonder what happened to them? Maybe they morphed into moms. I miss 'em.

GD Liberals

They're always trying to treat people from all walks of life fairly! I mean, who does that?

Pigs are such pigs!

Send in the drones

Hannity Claus

Beyond the Palin

Bar Flies

If you don't get it, google it.

Pulling a Boehner

Reuben Journal ad

I did the ad for our chapter of the NCS in the Reuben Journal publication for the Reubens awards. It was a fun project. The layout took quite a bit of jockeying the cartoons of the others into a comfy arrangement. Quite a lot to read for your typical Reuben ad. I hope folks liked it. The chapter guys did.

Line art rough for an edit

This is how my cartoons are submitted for each edit. No color or greyscales, just line art. If it gets approved then it will move on to the next stage.

Big Bang In Theory

Pop's logo

Another logo for Pop's. This one for the lounge.

Dorothy Revisited

Old Pals

Weird guy

The other day some weird orange guy on a green flying saucer came by and took a photo of my house. I wonder what he was up to?

Rapture in a nutshell

The Eighth Sign

May I take your goat?

Hi bloggies! I have been neglecting you I know. I've just been so busy. Facebook and Facebook page and twitter and Linked In... It's hard to juggle all these social media and still have a blog these days! I think back to a day when we had so much more time for these things because we didn't do these things which is why we had so much more time. Some day we will have something else we are doing, who knows what that could possibly be. We never imagined Facebook and suddenly here it is. How did we get along without it? Oh well, gotta run, I feel a tweet coming on and you know you shouldn't suppress tweets. They get all bottled up in you and then you start to feel sluggish and bloated. I can't wait for twitter to go the way of chat rooms.

All the better to misinform you!

Palin Pep

Sarah: the cover that wouldn't die. This was done about four ways in four different manners and always got shot down until today. This reincarnation finally, FINALLY has only one hurdle to go. Larry. And you know he's just a big softy. NOT.
The tag I think they will use is "Cheer up America! Things are looking up!" That was my title originally.