Today, I'm blogging from the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City.

The Goth Scouts like sitting on the beach and chasing the feral cats who dart in and out of the shrubbery. They've made friends with a bunch of cryptozoological beach bums. They brought one of their new buddies back to the hotel today. It cleared out the casino. Bad enough the guy had tentacles, but the smell...yeargh. Did this detritus from an HP Lovecraft story in a hawaiian shirt come from the sea or the sewer? Only a mother would know for sure, I guess.

The Goth Scouts are sometimes too friendly. Take the current series, for example. Lola kisses a frog and thinks that as a result, she's found the one person capable of freeing her friends from the witch. Ha! think again.

Just think of our current president. His past includes drunken driving convictions, going AWOL from The Air National Guard, and the occasional blow. Now that he's president, we expect him to win wars, trounce democrats, and reduce the size of the federal government. Yeah, well, a frog is a frog, even when it talks and wears a crown on its head.

If you've been keeping up with the strip, you'll know that the Goth Scouts are escaping from a life of endless schunkeling. They've eluded their evil camp counselor, Heino, by hiding under a large tin container in a scene reminiscent of "Attack of the Killer Shrews." Now, they've managed to make their way (after changing into normal clothes) to a gingerbread house.

I would like to say a few words about gingerbread houses. They can be political. I remember after researching the Marc Rich pardon, discovering Enron and its connections to most of the Bush administration. I voted for Bush in 2000, but here the line between Clinton and Bush suddenly blurred. Here were the uber wealthy, lobbing spitballs at each other via congressional hearings. How long before these spitballs become actual bombs?

Back then, you could still publicly express doubts about the president. That all ended on 9/11. In one fell swoop, nineteen terrorists lifted the president's poll ratings straight up to heaven. He could keep us safe. He was our gingerbread house. If you say one bad thing about this guy, we bake you in the oven with all the other jerks.

Naturally, then came the bombs. First Afghanistan, then Iraq, but somehow they all missed Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attack and scion of the ultra wealthy bin Laden clan. He got away as scott free as Marc Rich. Or Bill Clinton. Then came New Orleans with nobody to save it. Nobody quite knows how to win the wars we've started either. There's a witch in the Gingerbread House more interested in making candy than doing housework.

The Goth Scouts eventually escape the witch, but I'm not so sure about the rest of us.

This is a picture of yours truly at age eleven, with my two tent mates my first year at St. George's Pathfinders Russian Scout Camp in Broadalbin, New York.

Yeah, it's pretty hideous, mainly because I don't think any of us took anything even remotely like a bath in the entire month we were there. Mind you, we had dirt floors, none of that mamby pamby wooden platform stuff which would happen in future years at the camp.

The year the picture was taken was 1969. It was the year of the big jamboree, so Russian emigre kids were arriving from all over the country to participate in whatever it was Russian Scouts did. We sang around a campfire a lot. There was a lot of sneaking from the boys camp to the girls camp going on. I believe there was a considerable amount of pot smoking, not to mention cigarette smoking, or what was left for us younger kids, smoking pine needles.

Anyhow, whenever I hear mention of the summer of love, or hippies, or whatever, I remember a group of older Russian Scouts, teen age girls, standing in the rain and singing "White Rabbit" at the top of their lungs. I remember thinking how totally cool they were, fully shaped like real women. And then I think of this photo.

Anyhow, this is the origin of the Goth Scouts. Katya, Lena and I proudly holding up our troop's flag during that weird summer of 1969.

Lydia turns 29 on July 24, which means for some odd reason both mother and daughter are exactly the same age! It's a miracle!

Lydia loves to complain about how goofy she looked as a kid, so I figured I'd post a picture proving that any ungoofiness she ascribed to her friends was some kind of optical illusion. They all looked pretty dumb. Lyds is the blond in the picture. She had had her hair recently permed when this picture was taken. Big mistake. It was probably my fault. Everything was my fault. There's sort of an unwritten law between parents and their kids. We take the blame, but they take the embarassment. It all evens out if you think about it hard enough.

I'm very proud of my daughter. Not only did she survive adolescence, but she went on to get her master's in theater directing, and now assistant directs at the Stuttgart Opera.

She's busy moving now. I don't know if she'll have time to look at the blog. But it's here, a little birthday greeting from the mother who loves her and who, after all these years, can still do a pretty good job of embarassing her.

We're back from Necon. Of course, the Goth Scouts have all kinds of questions. Did you meet Dracula? Did you meet the Mummy? Did you meet the Invisible Man? Did you meet Yog Soggoth and all the unamable ones? Were there any human sacrifices?

I told them to calm down. The most exciting thing I did all weekend was to eat saugies in the quad while the medics attended to one of my fellow revelers. Apparently someone quite literally fell off the rails.

Was there blood? Well, yeah, but it wasn't as good as the blood from Dracula Rises from the Grave. Those girls are so nosy.

I showed them the painting Rod bought me at the NECON art show. Tom Kidd's marsulephants linking trunks in a tree while bathed in early sunlight. I had coveted it, then suddenly it had a sold sign on it, but no one told me Rod had bought it. I was so surprised when I caught Rod trying to sneak it into the car. I must admit, I got all choked up. The Goth Scouts all approve and are now in the process of fighting over whose wall gets the new painting.

I haven't the heart to tell them they can all take a long walk off a short pier. The painting is mine, ALL mine. Bwah hahaha.

I'm blogging from Bristol, Rhode Island as I am attending NECON. I've been doing this for most of the last fifteen years, but this is the first year I haven't been partaking in the quality dormitory accomodations of Roger Williams College...er...University.
Rod and I are instead splitting a hotel suite with Gene Kannenberg and Kate Laity. Gene and Kate got the sleep sofa part of the room, which attaches to the bathroom. Rod demanded the bed, so we control the ability to egress (I don't know why I thought of that word today...perhaps from Fletcher Hanks. Whatever.) Our first morning found Rod and I unable to manage to open the french doors leading to Kate and Gene's part of the room and therefore the toilet. Curse you Laity and Kannenberg! Conversely, Kate and Gene were unable to get the door to open so they might, well, egress towards the continental breakfast. Curse you Steiers! Of couse, it never occurred to the four of us that one simply needed to push the door without turning the handle in order to access the door's functionality.

Oh, THAT's how you do it, all four of us exclaimed in unity as Kate finally got it right.

And if you think that's dumb...I brushed my teeth this morning and rinsed my mouth with my contact lens solution...with the contacts soaking in it. But that is a story for another time. Rod and I have to hop in the kompressor in order to get to the campus in time for the big NECON game show.

Well, I've been learning a lot from Youtube. For one thing, schunkeling seems to be more akin to a group hug set to song rather than an actual dance. There can be a bit of face slapping, but for the most part, it's kind of a happy swaying from side to side while locked arm in arm with other happy schunkelers.

Oh well. I've found from experience that the less you know about a subject, the better the cartoon. Facts can only stand in the way of a successful gag.

For example, on several occasions, it's been pointed out to me that the Goth Scouts are really not Goth at all. They rarely wear black, they are never depressed, and they don't sqeeze hamsters the way that a more famous goth cartoon character, Lenore the dead girl, squeezes hamsters. The truth is, Inasmuch as I deeply appreciate the brilliantly dark humor of Roman Dirge, my heart is forever with Carl Barks.

Huey, Dewey and Louie are the true inspiration for the Goth Scouts. About as far away from Goth as you can get, well yes, but what the heck. If there's one thing I've learned from my cartooning students, is that kids are kids no matter what you call them.

Here comes the first of a series of Schunkel cartoons.

I'm really not sure what shunkeling is exactly. I think it required deirdls and leiderhosen, a lot of slapping, swaying from side to side, and cowbells. It is to the Germans what stepdancing is to the Irish.

Anyhow, the story begins deep in the black forest, with a witch and a henchman by the name of Heino...

This series of strips is dedicated to my daughter Lydia and her boyfriend, Daniel, the Lord and Lady of the Shunkel.

I've been running reruns of old strips...one of my favorites actually...while I've been in DC.

Trips are wonderful opportunities to invent new stories. We drove by The Naval Observatory where Cheney has his residence. I could just imagine what Lola might do, having escaped from the Bunker and finding herself faced with an irate Lynne Cheney in her boudoir.

We visited the Spy Museum today. The first order of business there was to watch a video about lock-picking. What the Goth Scouts wouldn't do with that information...

There seems to be a mystery here in DC about what these poles on the FBI building might be. Channeling ghosts in the interest of US security perchance...

Last night, I had dinner with a bunch of young turks as well as Ted Rall and his wife, Judy Chang. She told me about their recent trip to Turkmanistan (yes, pun intended). I imagined the Goth Scouts there, hanging with the goats, climbing mountains, searching for that elusive herb needed for their spellcasting with an elusive herb merit badge...

Last but not least, there was Mike Luckovich's ridiculous story about having his friend pose as the president of the Society of Illustrators during a U.N. sponsored cartooning conference there. Now this is something the Goth Scouts might do at some point...cause an international incident in the spirit of having a good time.

As this trip is winding down, I find myself looking forward to locking myself up in my studio back home to try and tame all these thoughts.

And speaking of the homefront...today, we learned our daughter Julia will be a graduate assistant for the women's lacrosse program at Wilkes University. When we called to tell her brother, Andrew, he let us know that he landed a production assistant job on the TV show Ghost Whisperers. Yes. Yes. YES!

So we're watching the parade, and there's Lola sandwiched between Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin in a golf cart.

How she got there is just going to have to wait for the results of interrogating the other Goth Scouts. I've been threatening to sent them back to the bunker. None of them will talk.

Other than that, it was a pretty cool fourth of July. We had cousin Carly here to watch the fireworks with us. To get us in the mood, we joined with the editorial cartoonists in cashing out our free drinks cards that came with our convention loot bags. I tried to get us hooked up with the Canadian embassy, which I was told has a great view of the mall. But no luck. We actually needed to be vetted like two weeks ago. I was told by other cartoonists who went that Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan were there. Greenspan is old. Really old.

Helen Thomas was the speaker at today's reception at American University. She's small. Really small. And old. Reallly old.

Now back to getting those pesky girls to talk...

Goth Scout Megumi here, taking over the blogging. Elena is too busy shmoozing with all the editorial cartoonists.

Apparently, the Mayflower hotel where we're staying is famous for something, but nobody's telling us what. We don't care about old stinky hotels anyhow. We took off for a tour of the center of power here in Washington. Some guy in a red hoodie told us he'd take us to Cheney's Bunker if we paid him some money. I turned him into a frog and told him I'd turn him back right after the tour.

It's not all you might think it is. First of all, you need to go through an elaborate security check. In order to pass security, you have to turn a bunch of guards into frogs, which I was reluctant to do, since that would make all of the guards look like our tour guide. I turned them into bunnies instead. That's a slightly different spell and I'm not so good at it so I think we had more bunnies after the tour than we began with...anyhow...

The Bunker is done in sort of a retro sixties type of Soviet era decor. If you wonder where the popularity of Shag comes from, I think it's a conspiracy to make this junk seem hip. There's everything you might expect...conference rooms, areas restricted for secret police, a money bin, a dungeon, but there's other stuff...a Starbucks and a video game room...

Oops, Tammy just told me that it's NOT a video game room, but something having to do with missile defense. Oh well. Somehow while we were touring the bunker, we lost Lola. Boy, is Elena going to be mad. We've been able to fool her into thinking Lola has been accidentally transformed into a nearby homeless person, but that ruse is bound to get old quick. If Elena gets a ransom note, we are so dead meat. We've got to figure out how to find Lola...and quick...

Julia and I are major jet lagged. The airplane manufacterers must have a formula for how much space is barely enough for a human being to sit comfortably, and then reduced the formula by half. I can just see one of their engineers crying, "Eureka...we've discovered the maximum possible amount of human flesh which can be compressed into a transatlantic airline cabin before it actually starts oozing between the seats!" And he's given some award for his genius.

Of course, the big headline in the local paper is nonstop service to Amsterdam from our local airport had its inaugural flight just as we were having to fight the traffic at JFK. Argh.

The Goth Scouts are back, too. Something strange happened to them at the jamboree. They don't talk to each other any more. They yodel at each other. It's so annoying.

Tomorrow, we go to Washington, DC for the Association of American Editorial cartoonists jamboree of Secret Handshakes. I used to post my editorial cartoons regularly on the AAEC website, http://editorialcartoonists.com , but not recently. I've been too busy traveling and having fun. My cartoons are all archived there, however, so you can use the search engine to ferret out my work.

At first, I thought I'd leave the Goth Scouts at home, but they keep saying there's a pressing matter there they have to attend to. It's apparently a national emergency.

Well, now to take care of all the little local emergencies, like taking Toto the dog to the vet...