There's a new webcomic I'd like to enthusiastically suggest Sheldon readers: On The Rocks. It's a wonderfully crafted strip with a style my eye really responds to: clean, vector art look coupled with a very crafted line. There's a wonderfully goofy joy from the facial expressions as well. Please check it out!

If you're like me and are a fan of ND football, you'll want to check out this fantastically fun and informative blog, Blue Gray Sky.

...if you're not like me, and don't enjoy ND football, may I suggest this site, chosen completely at random.

Still no official date set for the upcoming Sheldon showing at the Storyopolis gallery in LA. Sorry for that...I'll keep you posted as soon as I know.

Back from the 'Con, and lots to report, and precious little time to report it. A longer post will come soon, but here are two quick thoughts:

1.) Short Wired article misquoted me as having said something that the always pithy David Willis had, in fact, made. Hopefully Wired will fix that today. David Willis is the man they were looking for, though I wish it were I.

2.) If you're coming here from that link, I hope you'll check out my daily strip at Sheldoncomics.com. You'll also definitely want to check out BlankLabelComics.com.

Comic-Con News!

I'll be at San Diego Comic-Con this coming Thursday through Sunday...at the revamped and very chic National Cartoonists Society booth, number 1406. Like last year, I'll have Sheldon originals on hand for sale, but the big news is that a few hundred copies of PURE DUCKY GOODNESS will also be available. So drop by and pick up your copy!.

The next gallery show of Sheldon original art is slated for the Storyopolis in LA. The opening night hasn't been set yet, but it looks like it'll be in August. Stay tuned.

Well, the first book is on it's way! Have a look at the cover. I'm pretty happy with it. The revamped store should be up and running in a week or so...and we can start taking orders. But the good news is, the book will definitely be ready in time for Comic-Con.

Little toon I did for @UCSD Magazine. This is the first in a new, ongoing series that they've hired me to do for them. I'm currently tackling #3...and I have to say, they've been fun so far.

Do you live in Norway? Have you spotted the Sheldons that are running in "Tommy Og Tigern" magazine? If so, drop me an e-mail -- I'd love to hear about how it reads in Norwegian.

Likewise, if you live in Seoul and have seen Sheldons there, I'd love to hear how they read in Korean.

A reader in England e-mailed me today saying she had stumbled on my thesis on cartoon propaganda. She wisely put it back in the archives without reading it...and a little part of me died inside. Ah, the wasted energy that is academia!

I was recently invited to write an article for the National Forum on the art and business of cartooning. Now, I know that you currently subscribe to National Forum, but for the one or two silly, silly readers who don't, I'll post the article here:

THE COMIC STRIP
Comic strip cartoonists are often asked why we don't compete more often in professional body-building contests. It's easy to see why, just by looking at us. Being the tall, well tanned, gigantically muscular raconteurs that we are, it's easy for folks to assume that our looks are the central focus of our lives. But we are so much more that that. So much more than our stunningly attractive visage would have you believe.

Oh, who am I kidding. The sad truth is, we comic strip cartoonists are a weird, solitary bunch. Wonderfully warm and effusive in person, true, but weird and solitary nonetheless. This is probably the result of spending too much time alone in a room, hunched over a drafting table in an never-ending race against deadlines. Or perhaps it's the lingering result of our adolescent shyness - a shyness that, frustratingly, kept us from asking anyone out on a date until, oh, let's say, our 32nd birthday.

Hence, the doodling. Lots and lots of time for doodling.

I caught the cartoon bug early, and started creating comic strips almost as soon as I could hold a pencil. Comics, especially Sunday color comic strips, have a magical draw for children, and I was no exception. My earliest memories are of reading the Sunday funnies, belly-flopped on my grandmother's hardwood floor, with my chin in my hand and a gigantic smile on my face. They absolutely captivated me. And with good reason: the way a cartoon simplifies and exaggerates the world makes sense to a child's mind. It's an extension of the way the human brain tries to make sense of the surrounding world. Of course, as a kid, I didn't care about any of that. Comics made me laugh. My own early cartoons were met with some rave critical reviews. The lunch lady called them "bold, innovative, world-changing cartoons from a boy with his finger up his nose." Crudely drawn, and clearly cribbed from tracings of Garfield, they were bad in most every respect. But having started down the path of a cartoonist, it was a passion I could never seem to shake.

There's something addictive about drawing cartoons. Something in the way the pen feels against the paper. Something about the minimalism of the artform, of creating characters slowly, over years, in 15-second installments. Something about making people - all sorts of people - laugh. It really is a magical artform. It wasn't until my college days that my cartooning began to find it's stride. When I begain my college comic strip, I had the artistic prowess of a three-year old…with clumsy dialogue and one-dimensional characters thrown in for good measure. But you can truly learn by doing, and by the end of my college years, the grind of daily deadlines and the in-your-face campus feedback I received had honed my cartooning skills to a point where the strip became surprisingly popular. In fact, by my senior year I had so many requests for a book collection that I ended up self-publishing a collection of my college strips. Happily, the book sold through three printings, and ended up paying for grad school. It was my first wonderful taste of art as commerce, and I knew without doubt that I wanted to live the rest of my life working as a cartoonist. As I ventured out into the world though, I would come to find out that the professional world of cartooning isn't quite as welcoming as I'd hoped.

THE BUSINESS OF THE COMIC STRIP

For all the joy they bring both to their creators and to readers, comic strips are an incredibly competitive business. The reasons for this are twofold: limited space in newspapers, and a glacially slow turnover rate on the comics page. In terms of space, we are experiencing the long, slow decline of the American newspaper market. Both the number of newspapers, and the space they offer to comic strips, has greatly diminished in the last two decades. Very few cities now have more than one newspaper per town, and those papers that have survived face uncertain advertising revenue, and are sensitive to spikes in newsprint costs. Most papers choose to limit, rather than expand, their comics pages.

Because of such limited space, the business of comic strips is a zero-sum game. For a new comic strip to appear in print, an old one must leave the page. Often, new comic strips have to wait until an older creator retires or dies. And unfortunately, even that doesn't guarantee an available spot. There are some comic strips which, having established their toehold on the comics page during the Taft presidency, are kept on life support by the creator's children and grandchildren, and by the corporations which live off of the strip's licensing. This is, in part, greed, but it is also of a reflection of the love people have for their favorite strips. Once you become attached to your favorite strips, they become friends you never want to part with. As a reader, it's tricky to give up your daily ritual, your conversation with friends, for some new strip you've never "met".

The marketing, promotion, and sale of new strips is handled by one of five major newspaper syndicates. These companies act as agent, manager, and distributor for cartoonists, taking in turn 50% of all income earned. It is a tradeoff that cartoonists have come to live with: the logistics and far-flung geography of the newspaper world means that a creator simply can not sell to and manage the diaspora of newspapers on their client list. In order to make a living as a comic strip creator, a cartoonist must distribute their work to hundreds of papers. In order to do that, a cartoonist must work with a syndicate.

The syndicates each receive between 2000 and 5000 submissions yearly from folks wanting to break into the comic strip business. From these, the combined syndicates generally launches 5 to 15 new strips annually. Most of these new strips will fail in the market within the first few years. Over a three-year period, there might be 3 to 10 strips that survive from the initial 15-45 that were launched. All of this is to demonstrate how tricky it can be to land a career as a comic strip cartoonist. It is a tough, tough career to make for yourself. But if you beat the odds, and your strip is one of the lucky few to survive, then you have found a creative outlet that remains incredibly unique, and incredibly rewarding.

CREATING A COMIC STRIP

In an age where nearly all of our mass media productions are team efforts, or the result of corporate testing and massaging, the comic strip is a wonderful throwback to the solitary arts. No one else but Charles Schulz could have created Charlie Brown. No one else but Bill Watterson could have written for Calvin's imagination. It's that personal touch which makes the comic strip so approachable, and so especially lovable. It's solace for the newspaper reading who, feeling lost among the headlines of major events and catastrophes in the day's news, drops in to visit old friends for a bit of individually crafted joy and laughter.

A comic strip cartoonist wears a lot of hats in their work. In the cinema or the theater, it takes the collected efforts of a writer, casting agent, costumer, choreographer and director in order to bring their art to life. In the comic strip, all those positions are rolled into one. A comic strip is a tiny "play", where the cartoonist gets to act out all roles. The comic strip cartoonist populates their world, give their characters voice, tells them where to stand and what to do, and even adds the special effects when they get hit with an anvil.

Writing a comic strip is as much writing a poem as it is anything else. Each phrase must be whittled down until the meaning has the most potency, and the humor has the most impact. The cartoonist has to be aware that readers see their characters for insanely brief, 15-second durations over the course of decades. The writing has to match those restrictions with the power of a haiku: intense meaning in minimal expression.

For that reason, a comic strip cartoonist is a writer first, an editor second, and an artist third. The evidence for this can be seen on the comics page. You can have a gorgeously drawn strip that will fail if the writing is sub-par. Yet you can have a horribly drawn cartoon that has a following of millions because the writing is so sharp. It's the idea of the comic strip that drives it - the concept, the punchline - that do the bulk of the work.

Cartooning is a form of writing where you want to express yourself in as few words as possible. And if it can be done, with none at all. Approaching comic strips like a writer, you have to see your characters, your place settings, your icons and props as your vocabularly. And like your text, these are used best when used least. It is an art of potency through simplicity.

Cartoonists are often asked, "Where do you get your ideas?" Fighting the urge to be sarcastic and say "Des Moines", cartoonists usually shuffle the question off with vague pleasantries. The truth is, it's impossible to say with any definitive answer where creativity comes from. The cartoonist is no different from the painter, the musician, the entrepeneur, or the scientist. We get our ideas from everywhere. Once you begin to train your eyes to see them, there are humorous cartoon ideas that pop up from all sorts of places, situations, and personalities around you. My own bad luck as a cartoonist is that I have a horrible memory, so I'm constantly in search of little pieces of paper to write down ideas as they come. I've found that the trick to cartooning lies not so much in finding ideas, but in finding a workable bit of paper in your pocket on which you can jot down a punchline.

It's high time I bought a little notebook, now that I think about it.

But there are times when the ideas won't come. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, writer's block comes to everyone. It's the bane of all artists who are regulated by deadlines. The editor is eagerly awaiting the next installment, and there you sit, staring at a white piece of paper - willing it to spring forth with illuminated genius. And sometimes that works: there are joyous moments when the ideas do pour out of you, and you happily jot them down as fast as you can. But there are also times… when the ideas… parse… themselves… out… like… Oliver Twist's…. porridge. When that happens, the best approach is to put the pen down and walk away. You've flooded the engine that is your brain, and all you can do is go somewhere else, leave it alone, and wait. Because as creative as cartoonists are, the true trick to their work lies not so much in the act of creation as in the act of observation. If a cartoonist doesn't periodically go OUT into the world - to sit and people-watch, to study how the world works, to read up on ancient philosophies and new ideas - then those ideas dry up.

The deadline clock is always ticking, though, and so every cartoonist must have their bag of tricks to stir up new ideas when writer's block hits. Some simply begin doodling until something funny occurs. Others flip open an encyclopedia to a random page and just start reading. Still others turn to their "idea" file, or try random combinations of concepts until one stirs an joke. The methods are as different as the cartoonists. But we all have our tricks. Daily deadlines require you to have tricks.

Because the nature of the comic strip business requires an unceasing stream of daily strips, a curious thing starts to happen in the mind of the cartoonist. Not able to rest on their laurels, comic strip cartoonists often judge themselves to be only as good as their last completed cartoon. If the one drawn on Tuesday was brilliant, then Wednesday is the happiest day of your life. If Thursday's cartoon stunk to high heaven, you want to crawl under a rock and never draw again. Never mind that you won the Pulitzer last week: if the toon you penned yesterday stunk, you're miserable. Cartoonists can't look back on the strip that we did on May 23rd, 1999, and says "Aha! That was a brilliant strip! What an unmitigated genius I am!" We just don't have time: we're worried about producing tomorrow's strip. And it's due in 25 minutes.

And that's the rub: the deadlines for the comic strip cartoonist never go away. Never. Not when you're sick, or your new baby is teething, or when a spouse dies, or when you break your leg, or even to allow for vacation. The deadlines are always there, regardless of your physical or emotional state. That ceaseless deadline means there is never that sense of completion or accomplishment that comes when you finish a project. The daily deadlines are always there. So the cartoonist finds joy in the process, in the love for sitting down and producing this little work - this wonderful mix of words and art - every day, for the rest of their life. Looked at this way, you start to see the true genius of a man like Charles Schulz, who produced a new Peanuts cartoon every day for over five decades.

And joy is really what it comes down to. Joy is the product the comic strip is selling, the end goal of what we do. And what a fantastic business that is. To be given the opportunity to sit and talk with hundreds of thousands of people every day. To tell them a little story, a little insight, a little joke that brightens their day…there isn't a better job in the world.

Dave Kellett is a Southern California native who grew up laughing at Bloom County, The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes. He creates the daily comic strip, "Sheldon", which can be read online at sheldoncomics.com. He's also stunningly attractive and not at all putting on weight as he moves into his 30's. Not at all.