Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The Editors Return!

Hey folks, let's dig something out of the vault! In my last post, I talked about the two editors, Mike and Al, who used to appear in "No Exit Nearby" quite a bit before mysteriously vanishing. For awhile this story arc was their final appearance, and the only time they ever met Jim and Jillian.

Part 1:


Part 2:

Part 3:
Damn, now that I look these strips again, they're actually pretty funny. I have no idea why I dropped the characters.

By the way, the above strips were done exclusively for my Facebook profile (friend me!), as a way of keeping my drawing skills fresh during the summer of 2008. It was a fun experiment that produced some of my favorites. Keep tuning in and maybe I'll show you some more.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

More Cartoons For You

Hey, here are some more "No Exit Nearby" cartoons. Both of these ran last week.

The CNN guys are two characters that used to appear in the strip a lot. They usually fulfilled whatever pointlessly bureaucratic role that needed filling. They've been the editors of "Time" magazine, Newscorp execs, ABC execs, sitcom writers, and now CNN editors.

Originally, Jillian was going to name the celebrity in the final panel (i.e. "I bet it's Tom Berenger; there's something weird about him"), but I doubted that my editors would find the allegation that a celebrity was responsible for 9/11 all that amusing (at least not their legal department). So I changed it to "one of those "Little House on the Prairie Kids,"" making it less specific and a little funnier.
I like this one because it's so weirdly mean. I think I wanted to do a cartoon about Steven Soderbergh's "Che," and through the process it fell into this particular take on it. From there I decided to include as many ridiculous stereotypes as I could, so I could offend the UW campus socialists and conservatives at the same time.

Originally the cartoon began with an Editor's Note. My editor told me to make it "Cartoonist's note" instead, somehow fearing (I think) that people would believe The Daily endorsed this cartoon. I thought it was pretty silly, but the fact that my editor let this ridiculous cartoon run at all convinced me to play nice.

Both cartoons can be found at The Daily's website, in the Opinion Section.

Monday, January 11, 2010

No Exit Returns

Sorry for not blogging recently. Life got busy again, and blogs have a tendency to fall by the wayside.
"The Daily" started publishing again last week, so I've been drawing a new batch of cartoons. The above is a sequel to one a did a year or two ago, which also gave (hopefully) practical advice to freshmen. Assuming they still read newspapers.
This one was fun to do, because it involved: aliens, monsters, zombies, and Stephen Lang. How times will I get to do that in a student newspaper? (answer: not enough)

It's a minor detail, but I really get a kick out of the tiny Navi's exclamation of horror. It's so goofy.