This is my friend Cheryl posed next to the newly blossoming corpse flower at Eastern Connecticut State University. I am so jealous. I wish I had my picture taken next to a corpse flower. Of course, I can't complain too much. Cheryl snapped a picture of me lying on the very spot where Lizzie Borden's newly axed stepmother died. That was very cool.

Just an idea. Maybe there's money to be had snapping pictures of people standing next to a life size card board cutout of a corpse flower. In Elizabeth park. Near the gazebo.

I've always kind of winged this cartooning stuff. I'm totally hyperactive and it's hard to sit still. As a result, I haven't spent the time and energy needed to get some uniformity in my characters. I'm trying to change that. As the current story arc draws to a close, I'm hoping that it's followed by a more consistent Goth Scouts look.

One thing that's always stymied the look of Goth Scout Lola is that I want her eyes slanty. Finally, I figured out a neat trick guaranteed to give me good looking Lola eyes every time. I took one part Astro-boy, one part Magica de Spell, and voila...just the right amount of slant.

I've got a paying job I need to finish, so I've put my beloved Jane Quiet project on hold for the nonce. This is KILLING me because the next part of the story includes the monster and I can't wait to draw the beast. Ohmigosh, it's awesome.

Anyhow, what I've been doing with Jane Quiet is posting pages on the website of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. I used to post editorial cartoons fairly regularly there. I'm an editorial cartoon addict. However, since Dan and Jerry invited me to join the Humorous Maximus website, I've been spending my free time developing the Goth Scouts strip. It's just as well. Right now politics is like a Bush speech. Just the same old same old. Everyone seems to be biding their time, waiting for Bush to leave, no one really cares who takes over so long as he's gone. Good riddance. Good bye.

Anyhow, here is a recycled Jane Quiet page.

I discovered the secret of Boris' soundtrack. He picks up a toy and then right when the imagination mojo starts working, he starts in with the background song. It sounds something like this: "I want that ant guy toy over there. He's a bad guy. Dit dit dit dit dit. Watch out butthead...da dum de dum...I'm knocking you into the sea...Da da da daaaaaH!"

Lola and Boris slept late this morning. Finally, around 8:30, I could hear the Boris soundtrack. He loves superheroes, and when he plays with them, he always sings a soundtrack. It's great. Comes with crescendoes for the exciting parts and kind of a low level dit dit dit dit dit for the between parts. If anyone tells me cartoons are bad for kids, I point out the importance of a musical soundtrack to a kid's life.

Shortly after the kids took a break from playing to come and have breakfast, my brother called to see how they were doing. I asked him why he and Ann weren't sleeping in. Sleeping? He said the two of them got up at five and were at the beach by six. He hadn't surfed with his wife for five years and they were having a GREAT time.

Day one of Boris and Lola's visit went super well. It helps that my house is about as close to a Toys R Us that a private residence can get. I never threw out my kids' old toys, I never threw out the toys my brother and I played with, plus I have a vast assemblage of new toys. Boris straight away found the collection of Japanese muscle men from the eighties that Ted used to play with. He picked out any stray plastic men which didn't belong, then as far as he was concerned, he'd hit pay dirt. Lola went through an old pile of Barbie dolls, finding a single Little Mermaid doll. For all the other gajillions of things around here, they never strayed from these few toys they picked out straight from the get go. They brought them along when we went to the playscape at the local school, and they bathed with them before watching the Justice League cartoon video Ted gave them.

These kids have pretty much thwarted the evil intentions of an aunt to spoil them. Gives me hope for the future.

Writing these Goth Scouts strips can be very hairy sometimes. My niece, Lola, is coming to stay with me this weekend along with her brother Boris. It's a big adventure. I love them, and Lola loves mermaids so I figured I'd do a Goth Scouts storyline featuring a mermaid in anticipation of their visit.

I decided to start the storyline on a beach with surfers. My brother,Boris and Lola's dad, is a surfer. Also, I'd always kind of had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to add some cryptozoological surfers to the strip. So in walks surfing Cthulu to get things going. What I didn't figure on was Cthulu being far more interesting to me as a writer than Lola the mermaid. I thought the story arc would have something to do with the zany antics of a trio of scouting fish, but try as I might, a voice in my head kept yelling "Noooo...fish are gross." Although, honestly, how gross can fish be in comparison to a large green god with tentacles growing out of his head?

Anyhow, after much angst and a few days of writer's block, all the while fighting this feeling that I really hated the idea of a bunch of fish scouts, the other Goth Scouts took matters into their own hands and the strip began writing itself at that point. As I've said before, they aren't really Goth, but on the other hand, they are pretty weird, and I think that in order to write a successful Goth Scouts storyline, I have to stay true to the weird. Lola began voicing displeasure at being a mermaid, Cthulu decided he wanted to make Lola his bride, and the remaining Goth Scouts have to save Lola from the Fish Scouts. Now, of course, I'm being entertained and I can't wait to see how all this turns out, because I really don't have the foggiest idea.

A note on the new style of art. It's only going to be like this for this storyline. I had been trying out a new technique for cutting down the amount of time I spend on every strip and showed it to my son. He hated it as much as I did, but he said what the heck, one of the cool things about doing a web comic is you can do whatever you want. He thought it might be neat to do the story arc in this new style, then when it's over, to go back and draw it as before. What the heck. I'm game for just about anything.

Of course, he's the guy who thought it would be neat to have his driver's license photo taken with his hair all spiked.

Ted is our twenty-seven year old son. He's about the same age as his dad when we first met. I was eighteen. I keep telling Ted to park outside of some local high schools so he, too, can follow in his father's footsteps, and bring home a teen-aged bride.

Good thing Ted never reads my blog or he'd kill me for posting that.

Just kidding. He's never kill his own mom. Ted's great. He babysat our thirteen and a half year old cairn terrier this weekend while Rod and I visited our twenty-one year old daughter in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Ever since graduating from the School of Visual Arts in NYC, Ted's been working as a salesman for his dad's company. He manages to find time not only to work on his comic book projects, but to do stand-up comedy as well. I'm posting his latest comic because like my own current project, he's decided to use the silent treatment. I'm not sure if this is a case of one-upmanship or just great minds thinking alike, but whatever the reason, I really like the way his three pager came out, so I'm posting it here on my blog.

Ah ha! How many of you five out there reading this blog noticed that Jane Quiet has managed to change her clothes?

Kate emailed me after I posted the four pages yesterday and reminded me that the description of Jane specified jeans and a jacket. Somehow after having done all the revisions on the initial draft of the comic, I had given Jane a skirt and what I can only imagine is a Tee from Banana Republic. How embarassing. Especially since, as my children will well attest, I am a person who is fashion challenged. I manage to extend that shortcoming to all my characters if I don't watch out. That's why it's important to work with a partner sometimes. Jane looks far better in jeans and a jacket.

And speaking of looks...I tried to make Jane look like Kate, but not a single person has picked up on that. Then again, her assistant is supposed to look like Roddy McDowall. For the screaming woman, I picked out reference of sixty year old Charlotte Rampling. You can do that with comics. Even though the general reader hasn't got a clue to what people I had in mind while doing the piece because the likenesses aren't even close, I know. It's my secret.

I've been working for the past few days with a physical problem, namely poison ivy. It's on my drawing hand and on my face. What a mess. I should know better than to putter around in the garden.

My husband would probably say I've been working with a mental problem as well, but he's lived with me for thirty years and he's used to it.

Here's the "second chapter" of the Jane Quiet story, written by Kate Laity and illustrated in comic book form by yours truly.

The first six pages are actually backstory, setting the scene for the entrance of our supersleuth of the supernatural, Jane Quiet. One of Kate's descriptions of Jane Quiet was that she wore "sensible shoes". I guess that's in contrast to the Goth boots left on the penultimate panel of page 6. I really don't like drawing shoes, but I find that a good part of my drawing entails drawing them. I think a very good thing for aspiring artists to do would be to spend about a week of drawing nothing but shoes.

The chapter after this one is about seven pages long, so it's going to take a bit longer to get up on the blog. It's also the chapter that introduces the monster. Oboy, I can't wait to draw that.

I think the entire story is something like thirty six pages long. It's amazing the amount of time it's taking to draw something which in the end, a person can pick up and read in about five minutes.

I just finished illustrating the first six pages of a story by Kate Laity, whose Wombat World is one of the links you can find at the right hand side of the pages. I'm posting them so you, my five or so fans, can check it out. With Kate's permission, I'd like to post the comic book as it develops, in serial fashion. It actually breaks down very well into "chapters".

Kate was the one who proposed the idea of doing a comic book together. The idea for Jane Quiet came from my dislike of word balloons coupled with my love of Algernon Blackwood's John Silence stories. In response, Kate whipped up a great supernatural detective yarn as well as the name Jane Quiet. Best of all...no word balloons. All picture. Much fun to draw without the constraint of having to figure out where to put the words.

The most challenging part of approaching a project like this is pacing. This is one of the reasons I'd like to post the story on the blog. I'm sure if the pacing doesn't work, ONE of you five or so fans will mention something...nicht wahr?

Lydia emailed me while I was in Atlantic City. Hey, Ma, here are some references. I need caricatures in like, twenty four hours. So instead of hanging around on the boardwalk drawing pictures of the freaks walking by, I ended up with my computer under an umbrella working sketches out from the references. What a mother won't do for her kids, eh? I tell you, working with a laptop in sunlight is a no go, so I found a starbucks in the hotel. This all was superior to the ice cooler we called our hotel room. When we got home on Wednesday, I used painter then photoshop for the finished colors. Nicht Schlecht, I think.

I guess this is for the sister of Lydia's boyfriend. She's getting married and she and her husband to be like bicycles. I did a few tricky things. First, it looks like he's bending to maneuver the bike. Notice, the handle bars are straight. Also note who is in charge of the brakes in this relationship. The bike itself is a little odd, not a typical two seater. However, the reference I used showed a couple of guys of equal importance, no one in front, no one in back. It is, dear reader (or two or three), a commentary on marriage as well as a caricature.

I know, I know....who cares, really...

The old editorial cartooning mojo was at it again. You'll have to click on the picture to see it in its full, ie, readable glory. Of course, it's really not a finished cartoon, just a sketch, but you have to admit, a POWERFUL sketch. Or so I like to think.

Beware of editorial cartooning. It's a trap. At the time you sit down with your all consuming idea, the righteous indignation overwhelms the brain with a single thought: The entire world will bow down before my brilliant point of view. It's such a high, that any other kind of cartooning never quite measures up. It almost always has to be mollified by another thought: Nobody reads your stinking political cartoons. Or in my case, you'll never make any money doing this.

I figure, if I allow myself the same amount of time every day to draw an editorial cartoon as I do to work on the blog, then perhaps I can get my editorial cartooning fix with a minimum of disruption to the rest of my day. But addiction has a way of swallowing its victim unawares. I should just end this fixation on political cartoons cold turkey.

Nah. Just give me one half hour...well, forty five minutes if you include scanning and uploading...an hour, tops...

I'd been an editorial cartoonist for about fifteen some odd years (really odd years...) and sometimes the old commenting on politics via funny pictures mojo still comes over me. Yesterday, I came across something I'd jotted on a piece of paper a few weeks ago. It was the words: Gonzales as Pepe le Pew. I thought it was pretty funny, considering the length of time between thought and cartoon. He's still attorney general, and he still stinks. Torture, illegal wiretapping, the politically motivated firing of nine republican states attorneys...he has a hand in all of this, though according to his testimony, he can't quite remember, or he cites a non-existent constitutional right to presidential privilege.

Kids, if you want to know what I mean, tell your teacher at school that you favor wiretapping and torture, and that you'd gladly rat out your terrorist friends. Afterwards, march into the cafeteria and demand a change of menu. If the principal asks you why you're acting so strangely, cite pediatric privilege. You are, after all, a foot soldier in the war on terror, even though the closest thing to war you've ever come to is playing Call of Duty on the PS 3, a game systen which I might point out, appeared in your bedroom after a lengthy and well rehearsed temper tantrum.

We're home from Atlantic City. This weekend, we deposit Julia into her Wilkes Barre apartment, and then we have a glorious monthlong respite from travel.

I managed to spend a good deal of whatever time I had at home last week getting the Goth Scouts ahead of Schedule. The Heino gags were all done the same day they appeared, which is a lousy way to keep up the strip. Now I've got the frog prince series all done through next week.

For all potential strippers out there, the Frog series might be of some interest. I really had no idea how to get the Goth Scouts out of their Heino predicament, so I went ferreting through old fairy tales to come up with something, anything. As soon as Lola kissed the prince, I knew I had a winner. It's a pretty simple set up from there on in. For the next few days, this frog comes up with really stupid ways to save the Goth Scouts. I don't know about you, but I've had a lifetime of good advice from well meaning people which never pans out. After coming up with about four of these gags, I ended the story arc, but then I went back and thought up more Frog has Stupid Unworkable ways to Save the Goth Scouts. It just seemed a shame not to milk the frog for all he was worth. He might not be able to save the Goth Scouts from the Witch, but he could sure as heck save me from trying to think of a new story line while I was still recuperating from all this traveling.