Awards Season

I feel a few awards are in order.

The Optic Nerve Award goes to jnie for a 3/6 comment on my India cartoon.  She noted the appearance of suitcases next to President Bush that were not present when she saw the the same cartoon published in the Chicago Tribune. It's true. I've taken to updating text and cartoons on the blog.  Now I can obsess 24/7.

Each day I do an old fashioned pen and ink drawing, scan it, and add color on the computer.  That version appears  in the Akron Beacon Journal the next morning.  Since most newspapers use black and white I have to create another version for the syndicate.  I convert the color layers to grayscale and convert the grayscale to bitmap.  That gives me the little dots  you see in newspaper pictures.  Then I lay the original solid line drawing down on top of that. The last thing I do is convert the color cartoon to a low resolution version for the web.  By that time the deadline pressure is off and sometimes I notice things that could be improved.  I thought the suitcases made the image of Bush physically traveling to the world's biggest call center a little stronger.

The It's Not Polite to Correct Other People's Grammar Award goes to Menken who scolded me for using the non-word, "uncurious", instead of "incurious" in the 3/10 post Too Big for His Breaches. 

How  incouth.

Menken also took Augie to task when he asked if people who read my cartoons are "uniformed" when he meant uninformed.  I like to imagine they are indeed uniformed.  Apparently, Menken does too because he suggested I draw a Bok Brigade uniform.  I'm considering it.  As for Augie, I say a steady diet of cartoons beats New York Times editorials any day.

By the way, I'm updating uncurious.