It's a bit ironic, if not completely fitting, that as I was prepping for today's colonoscopy, I was also drawing the Goth Scout strip that has the girls deciding to go on a recruiting trip to the darkest pit of hell.

Other than the obvious analogy of exploring utter darkness, there's also a second, less obvious parallel. Like the demons in the darkest pit of hell, I'm not in a very good mood. I haven't eaten in twenty-four hours, I've been taking medicines which have resulted in soreness in a very sensitive spot, I'm thirsty, and I have a splitting headache.

Fortunately, there's the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. As I recall from my last procedure three years ago, the time in the recovery room is colored by a wonderful happy feeling, washing away all prior anguish. I'm looking forward to that. I mean really looking forward. You won't believe how anxious I am to get there.

Putting together the newest Goth Scout anthology kept me busy while my cartoons were not airing on televsion as was scheduled. My own little agony of defeat mollified by the happy put together a book feeling. So the cartoons weren't broadcast out to millions. I've achieved something better. A book.

However...lo and behold, my brother called to say the cartoons aired during third quarter, while I was busy getting the latest strip ready to put up on the web. How about that?

Endless Halloween collects the Goth Scout cartoons from June of 2007 to the present. I also included the four page Christmas comic book from last year or whenever and some earlier Goth Scout material, strips from 2001 where the girls were bug eyed, and the two full color comic pages which ran in the West Hartford magazine.

I put a link to the book on this page. I published it through Lulu, which is why it's so pricey. Those guys really don't leave much room for publishers to make money, that's for sure. Ah, the joys of being self-published.

Thanks to three of my four kids being home, the Thanksgiving holiday turned out to be a four day party. However, the all nighters I was pulling came thanks to Disney and the folks at ESPN who now have yet another two football cartoons on their hands which with any luck will air during the Monday Night Football pre-game. In the past, they've aired about a half hour before game time. I expect this time won't be any different.

Today, the new Goth Scout story arc begins which will hopefully takes us right up to Christmas. A few years ago, I wrote and drew an online comic book about the girls turning into vampires and having to go to the deepest pit of hell in order to undo the damage. This time, they will be back in the pit of hell, looking for a new lacrosse goalie. It's kind of tricky. The darkest pit of hell gets very busy for the solstice celebrations. It's like a feeding frenzy. All the demons fighting each other for scarce commodities, like Nintendo Wii-ja Systems and Tickle me to death Elmos. Very ugly.

I've just finished the latest batch of Goth Scout cartoons which takes the current storyline to its end this Friday, and I thought I might let everyone in on a secret. The words to the Goth Scout spells are all lyrics to popular songs. I take the words and break them up into as many syllables as possible.

I've decided to post old Goth Scout cartoons on the weekends. There have been dozens of variations on the Goth Scouts over the years. I think it might be fun to put the old stuff up. Therefore, sometimes the weekend will be in black and white. I've been doing the strips in color because I feel that the web likes color. It's more time consuming, which is why the Goths is such a spare strip. I remember Mad Magazine editor Sam Viviano once telling me that color wasn't funny. I disagree. I think color can be very funny.

The entire Steier clan is coming here the day after Thanksgiving so we can all follow up the usual post Thanksgiving indigestion with post post Thanksgiving indigestion. Plus my brother's family will be coming in from Boston. I'm going a little crazy now trying to figure out how this is all going to work out, but one thing's for sure, it won't be dull.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I realized a few days ago that I hit sort of the Goth Scout doldrums. It's hard to explain, but doldrums are a good analogy. No wind to carry the strip forward. It was like the gags I was writing were all stale and the characters all fuzzy.

I've been doing this long enough that this is all part and parcel of doing creative work. The solution for me most of the time is simply to read. I sat down with a volume of my enormo Calvin and Hobbes anthology. I wasn't finding what I was looking for there, so I switched to the pile of Harvey comic books I bought off of ebay a month ago. Now here was something. It was pretty easy to see why the Calvin and Hobbes wasn't doing it for me. Excellent as the strip is, Calvin only fantasizes his world. In the Harvey comics, the kids are all ghosts and witches and devils. I had what you can call an aha moment.

Once I disposed of the real world, the gags started rolling in like some huge thunderstorm. The Goths live in a tree house with their tabloid loving flying monkey. They have no parents. They attend classes at the school for bad spellers with the other kids who live in tree houses with their flying monkeys. They go on field trips to discover new species. When they lose the goalie on their lacrosse team, they go on a hike to the deepest pit of hell to find a new one. And so forth and so on.

Once I felt secure in the reaffirmation of the Goth Scout environment, I returned to the Goth Scouts with renewed vigor.

It just goes to show you, the solutions to nebulous problems exist somewhere, it's only a matter of finding the right book...or comic book...to lead the way there.

I'm posting a Christmas cartoon I did for the December issue of the Great South Bay Magazine. The cartoon editor is a good friend of mine. He's written a lot of books and articles about comics and loves the strip genre. Once in a while, he'll come up with a gag and ask if I'll do it. This time around, he came up with a very current topic: the poisoned toys being manufactured in China.

This is what he wrote me: "The image shows one of the Scouts on a department store Santa's lap and the others standing in line waiting their turn. The Scout with santa says, "I want one of those lead poisoned Chinese made dolls so my other dolls can nurse her back to health."

I really liked the gag, but I'm a firm believer in putting as few words as possible into cartoons. So the result is today's cartoon. I think it's more effective. In fact, it could have worked without the Santa altogether, but I needed to keep it a Christmas cartoon.

A lot of cartooning is simply editing, replacing verbiage with visuals. At least in my honest opinion.

And my editor? This is what he wrote after I sent him the cartoon: "Terrific cartoon! You really improved on my idea. Only the Goth Scouts would want a poisoned doll."

I finally finished the next nine pages of Jane Quiet, which I posted in upside down order on the blog, which itself functions the wrong way so actually the posts are the right way now that I've posted them incorrectly.

I added an extra page of my own material because I felt I wanted to draw the monster a few more times. Kate, you'll notice this, I'm sure. It just seemed to me that the story needed a headless corpse in additions to a corpse with its guts blown out.

Boy, I love this stuff.

I'm also switching up on the Goth Scout cartoon posts. I won't be posting on the weekend any longer, or I'll run past cartoons. It seems not too many people read the cartoons over the weekend, plus it frees up just enough time so I can start attacking my next Vampire Bed and Breakfast story in addition to all the other projects I'm working on.

Just hours after coming home from Nashville, Rod and I were on our way to Boston. Our first stop was Dana Farber, for a visit with Rod's hemotologist/oncologist extraordinaire. We found out that yes, Rod is a mutant as he has the classic mutant V617F allele which characterizes 95 per cent of people with Polycythemia Vera. We'll be coming up for visits every six months just to keep in touch, which is important as Dana Farber is presently doing all kinds of interesting drug trials for the disease. Someday, PV will be as treatable as diabetes.

After, we left the car at the center and took the T to North Station for the cartooinsts lunch, which was pretty sparse, but fun. Clay Bennett just took the editorial cartooning job in Chattanooga, so he'll be leaving our little group permanently in a couple of months. It's sad because he regales us with all kinds of whacked out stories and observations. Most of the conversation centered on Clay's life, past present and future as we cried in our beers. We all decided that at the next lunch, we'll all order Chili without cheese in Clay's honor, as that is his signature meal. The waitress simply looks at him, noting his presence, and writes down the order. She calls him Mr. Chili.

Changes never come by themselves. The buildings down the street from our restaurant had been knocked down since the last time I attended our get together, two months ago, and they had swapped out the traditional paper table cloth (which we drew on) for real cloth table cloth (Just try to draw on these, buster!)

We took the T back with Clay, indubitably our last time on a train together. As a man having just downed a couple of beers, he looked forward to going back to work at the Christian Science Monitor, while we went on to visiting my brother and his kids before driving the two hours it takes to get home.

I'm blogging from Opryland Hotel. It's the Mall of America of Hotels. If you've never been to the Mall of America you don't know what I'm talking about. It's about ginormousness, over the top, humongo bigness. A huge indoor environment which includes trees, plein aire seating, waterfalles, river rides, foot paths through gardens and currently, fast encroaching Christmas decorations.

I'm here to accompany Rod on a business trip. I managed to damage my knee and my ankle a mere three hours prior to flight time in a soccer game. So I'm in Nashville and unable to walk much. Worst of all, we lost our soccer game.

I did bring a long some projects to work on. First, I'm researching the history of editorial cartoons. Tomorrow, I'm going to the Hermitage. I'm really excited. Not only is this my daughter, Julia's, favorite historical figure, but it seems editorial cartooning really got it's kickstart from the Jacksonian era. I'm hoping to delve into that a little more when we go on our field trip.

I've been reading Them Damn Pictures, a book on editorial cartooning by Roger A. Fischer which my good friend Gene so generously let me borrow. It does what a lot of books seem to do. They catapault right from Thomas Nast to Mike Peters, leaving out a hundred years of cartoon history. Not only is this skewed, it's very uninteresting, even though I rather like the book itself. The best part of the book is about Peffer cartoons. Peffer was a populist senator from Kansas who espoused radical, I would even say downright Marxist ideas. Although his tenure was but a blimp on the radar of American political history, the amount of drawing dedicated to his derision bespeaks another agenda, perhaps of a monied elite paranoid at the spread of his ideas. Anyhow, it's all food for thought.

I should have plenty of time for thinking on this trip. I'm not doing much but sitting around, keeping the weight off my poor, suffering knee and ankle.

On November 2, 1985, a resident named Havok presided over the birth of an eight pound eleven ounce baby girl. She was fat and healthy. The name of the doctor was apropos. The kid was a fighter. She would be known as the Steier kid with all the toys in her closet. She took things from her siblings, all older than she, and they were scared, very scared.

Now, she's twenty-two and assistant coaching lacrosse at Wilkes University. That same energy she put into the procurement of toys now goes into the procurement of recruits. She likes to win and she knows her sport.

If you're reading this blog, I wish you all the best on your birthday, sweetheart. And if you're not reading this blog, well, you should, because I really suffered when I pushed you out twenty-two years ago, I was in PAIN, I mean real PAIN, not that oh gosh I've hit a wall because I've been running for five miles stuff. I'm talking primordial suffering. Just remember all those shows we watched together on Discovery Health Channel. Yeah, just like that. Exactly like that.