Click the above image to embiggen.

If you like this stuff and want to read the previous strips without going back post by post through the blog, they are easily browsed in THE ARCHIVE here.

In the long time I didn’t update this strip, Soapy made at least one appearance elsewhere… it is likely I may be forgetting others (if you know of any others, please remind me so I can post them here).

Here she is making a guest appearance in my extremely prolific friend Lance Ward’s fantastic Tater Tot Diaper Man strip… click the below image to go and see the full strip.

Lance is among the least predictable cartoonists I am aware of. His strip veers from autobiography to goofy humor to horror to underground smut to whatever tickles or irritates his fancy on a particular day. He draws all of these strips tiny and straight up in ink with no pencils, if you can believe that. I’m working on a guest strip for him that I am required to work in the same format, small and straight in ink… and it is a very fun experiment. I’ll let you know when it is posted.

Lance’s autobiographical stuff I think is particularly outstanding. Lance has had a difficult life including a near-death heart attack, mental illness, and relationship issues (delivered “live” in the strip), so his auto-bio stuff is not just a bunch of navel gazing, to say the least. He’s collecting the entire strip in a book soon, which should be quite a document… don’t miss it.

Time flies, huh? Anyone still reading this thing?

Click the above image to embiggen.

If you like this stuff and want to read the previous strips without going back post by post through the blog, they are easily browsed in THE ARCHIVE here.

It was ridiculous how long he had been in the otherwise-empty waiting room. His tooth hurt like hell.

Nothing to read but an old Cosmo and an issue of Highlights. What child likes the Timbertoes, anyhow?

He felt mild pity for the receptionist as she chased him into the office, but really she was as culpable as anyone in wasting his afternoon. As he went to work on the dentist, he marveled at the array of tools at his disposal. Extraction was easy.

Still, it looked like a doorknob and a piece of string was in his immediate future.

Note: I wrote this today for a contest. The theme is “found in space.” Wish me luck! I’ll need it.

Fallcon, The Twin Cities biggest and best comic convention is this weekend! Come and join me in the “Cartoonist Conspiracy Lounge” to doodle and shoot the breeze.

FALLCON
October 10 & 11, 2009 – 10AM to 5PM Both Days
Minnesota State Fairgrounds
IN THE GRANDSTAND

Guest List

Hope to see you all there!

Comicopolis, a gallery show featuring the work of a number of Minneapolis cartoonists (including me) opens this Friday… hope you can make it!

Please join us Friday, August 28th for food, drinks and music!

Comicopolis:
Low life, high art

Opening reception:
Friday, August 28th from 6-9pm

Location:
FrameUps Minneapolis
4325 Nicollet Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55409
(612) 870-1292

Featuring comic art by:
Kirk Anderson
Ken Avidor
Shannon Brady
Kevin Cannon
Will Dinski
Roger Lootine
Brittney Sabo
Andy Singer
David Steinlicht
Steven Stwalley

Wanna help promote the event? Have a chicklet!

COMICOPOLIS Facebook Page

If you enjoy this site and you live near the Twin Cities, you won’t want to miss the BIG FUNNY show my friends and I have been putting together over the last number of months. It opens this weekend, and it is going to be spectacular.

The show premieres BIG FUNNY, an oversized 48-page newspaper of comics by 45 different artists, inspired by the funnies sections of yesteryear. The gallery show features original art from the publication, numerous antique comic strips (some over 100 years old), a retrospective of unknown cartoonist William Ede, and an old cigarette vending machine rigged up to sell small boxes of little funny mini-comics. Hope to see you there!

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY IS COUGHING blood and gasping on its deathbed. Newspapers lost their relevance a long time ago, and with internet media blossoming they can no longer compete. Readers and advertisers have moved on.

Unfortunately, newspapers are taking their beautiful bastard child, the newspaper comic strip, with them.

Today’s newspaper comics are much-maligned… and deservedly so. Today’s small strips, with mostly predictable, safe themes and bland characters are a pale shadow of what newspaper comics were in their wild and colorful youth.

110-or-so years from their birth, it’s been a good run. Let us not mourn the death of the

newspaper comics… rather, let us have a wake to celebrate what they once were, and to build something new.

The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, Big Time Attic, and Altered Esthetics gallery are collaborating to produce an oversized newspaper comics section like they would do it today if they still did it like they did it in the old days.

It will be called BIG FUNNY, and it will be both.

The paper will premiere at a show at Altered Esthetics in August, featuring some of the original art from the paper, along with historical comics pages from the dawn of the last century.

BIG FUNNY Website.

City Pages A-List Review

Optical Sloth review

Poopsheet Foundation review

Newsarama review

Drawn Review

Amy Crehore’s Little Hokum Rag review

Photo gallery of the little funny sideshow

Can’t make the gallery show? You can buy copies of BIG FUNNY here.

Opening Reception
August 7, 2009 7pm-11pm
ALTERED ESTHETICS
1224 Quincy St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413

SHOW RUNS AUGUST 7-29, 2009

GALLERY HOURS:
TUESDAY & THURSDAY 1pm-7pm, SATURDAY 1pm-5pm

A t-shirt design I made just was accepted to get voted on to possibly become a Threadless t-shirt. Please go vote on it! Click the link below to go look at it and see a little animation I made for it. Thanks much to those of you who take the time to vote!

Zander Cannon, Kevin Cannon, Danno Klonowski and myself were interviewed by Britt Aamodt this evening (December 14th) on KFAI’s Wave Project about cartooning. I do elaborate a bit on Soapy the Chicken, among other things. The show will be online for the next two weeks. You can hear the interview here.

Note: The broadcast mp3 begins with the Somali Oromo radio show that preceded it… it starts at 1:38 in the file.

Here is a big gallery I just posted of images from the previously mentioned Hot Ink: Comic Art show at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, currently showing until January 4th… at which point the Museum’s lease runs out, leaving them with an uncertain future. One can only speculate that this directly had to do with their decision to deface their walls with Soapy the Chicken comic strips. You can read reviews of the show here and here. Click the image to go to the gallery.

The show features the work of:
Big Time Attic
Kevin Cannon
Zander Cannon
Will Dinski
Tom Kaczynski
Reynold Kissling
Lars Martinson
King Mini
Tyler Page
Evan G. Palmer
Brittney Sabo
Zak Sally
Barbara Schulz
Tim Sievert
Andy Singer
Tom Spence
Steven Stwalley

You can visit the gallery here:

Minnesota Museum of American Art
mmaa.org
50 West Kellogg Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55102