Year: 2001

Mainly I was thinking of first-person-narrative-type travel comics. Justin came up with F. Andrew Taylor’s On the Bus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine & Safe Area Gorazde, & Tom Hart’s Ramadan. I dusted off Goff, Nieves, & Hayden’s Tales From the Heart and Rich Tommaso’s Let’s Hit the Road. I guess I don’t really mean to be compiling a list, I was just kind of feeling like reading some more comics along those lines. There’s always Paul Theroux I suppose.

Here’s a bunch of email from my Europe trip. I’m still cleaning it up a bit & reformatting.

I picked up a neat comic called Marco Solo #2 today. It’s about the author, Shannon Brady, traveling in Thailand. It starts out with a nice series of anecdotes where he’s heading around Bangkok with a friendly & occasionally trustworthy local; near the end the story gets a more grounded and he kind of sets things up for the next issue. I like the artwork – a little cartoony, busy (but not over-crowded compositions), and a nice clean Chester Brown-ish line.

His webpage.

Other good travel comics: Josh Neufeld’s travel stories in Keyhole, Justin’s unpublished Russia notebook, Peter Kuper’s cheesily named ComicsTrips. Tell me if you know of any others.

There’s no way I was the first person to think of this: What would happen if I T-inated my site, then Jesusified the results.

The blind cod (see 1/30) is alive but not well.

Sign of old age & dementia: Set up cup, measure out some tea leaves, & go off to wait for the kettle to boil. Five to ten minutes later, wonder why the kettle isn’t whistling yet, go back to the kitchen, & realize that you never put the kettle on.

Cats become better hunters if they’re forced to wear bells.

Yesterday I was in a particularly morbid frame of mind & was going to post these links. But Blogger was down again, so here they are now – out of context & such:
My favorite Maakies.
The fish came back.

A Big yellow school bus (once again, what other kind is there?) maneuvers itself at 10th/Broadway & Roy. A girl, sevenish, is seated near the back of the bus, window seat. As the bus pulls away, she turns her head smiling to look at a woman on the corner.

Both the woman & the girl on the bus have purple hair. The hair colors are close enough that they may have come out of the same bottle. I don’t know if:
1) The woman is a stranger to the little girl & the girl is giddy about the matching hair.
2) The woman is the little girl’s mother & the girl is making a “hello” smile.
   A) They’re both on their way home.
       a) The mother’s schedule is regular enough that the daughter’s school bus passes the mother near that spot most days.
       b) The daughter was surprised to see her.
   B) The mother accompanied her daughter to the bus stop. The daughter got on the bus & the mother headed up Broadway. (Not likely since this was 4pm.)
3) The woman is the little girl’s older sister.
   A) The older sister got in trouble for dying her little sister’s hair.

Maybe you thought One-Click was a questionable patent. Maybe you’re angry that US agriculture syndicates are claiming patents on centuries-old wheat strains from India. Well I have strong feelings about the so-called sealed crustless sandwich patent.

The patent holder seems to claim three innovations. They’re paraphrased below & followed by some editorializing:

1. They’ve created a mechanism they use to seal the outer edge of the bread.

Fair enough.

2. “[U]pper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter.” (ie: Put a layer of peanut butter on both slices of bread & a layer of jelly in between the two layers of peanut butter. This way the jelly isn’t touching bread & therefore won’t make the bread soggy before lunchtime arrives.)

Though I have no documentation to prove it, I arrived at the same conclusion at some point early in my PB&J years (which were roughly 1979-1999). This is a forgone conclusion for anyone who has spent a lot of time around peanut butter & jelly.

3. “Many individuals enjoy sandwiches with meat or jelly like fillings between two conventional slices of bread. However, some individuals do not enjoy the outer crust associated with the conventional slices of bread and therefore take the time to tear away the outer crust . . . . Hence there is a need for a convenient sandwich which does not have an outer crust.”

Here is documentation that proves people have been following the un-American practice of cutting the crust off their sandwiches for awhile.

Written in the margins of a copy of the Stranger at Bauhaus in loopy cursive: “unstable uncomfotable unconditionally. ~>unbiased. no strings attached. ~unsuccessful”