August 31 2008 For Better or for Worse

We here at the home office of "Cerebus the Aartvark" would like to commemorate the end of the 29 year comic saga created by Lynn Johnston: the daily comic strip called "For Better or for Worse."

Unlike any other strip (correct me if I am wrong), the characters in the FBOFW story have aged in roughly real time as the years have gone on. Characters born, characters die, lives change and become more complex, etc. Johnston ended up with quite a palette of characters and ideas, and she was not afraid to take on the diversity of human experience - or prejudice... all mainly in the small ways that people encounter it on a daily basis. I've quite enjoyed this strip over the years, just to watch someone handle this.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Canadian writer-artist... 20-something years of a 'real-time' story... takes on issues...

A while ago, she announced that she was ending the continuous saga in favor of freezing the characters in time and integrating some of the strip work from the early days in order to help alleviate the workload. After all, real time for her has continued to march forward. This did not quite take place. The story did continue to move, and the old work ended up being more like flashbacks. A few weeks ago, the most recent story arc, a wedding, began to feel like the last scene of a film. All the characters were coming together and we were getting something of an update about their stories. OK, so here it comes: this strip is going to end and the last words are going to be "For Better or for Worse." You could just see it. At least the main characters would not grow old, jump off their bed after their children (with a dagger) and break their necks. Although, as I think about it, that would be a damned funny cartoon to draw.

I think there are as many anti-fans as fans of FBOFW... people who still could not wait to read it every day just to bring on the hate.

What the hell is it with these Canadians, anyhow?

As it turns out, thanks to Johnston's need to restart her own life after a recent divorce, she's not going to follow that original plan. Instead, she's decided to follow in the footsteps of many comics and certain science fiction series: a reboot of the series, including a return to the simpler, sketchy drawing style of her youth.

Congrats to FBOFW.

August 27 2008

eBay item no. 200246328614
Seller: DVS (via ctowner1gmailcom)
Buyer: barryburton
Price: $132.50

August 19 2008

eBay item no. 160271405958
Seller: earlshaw.net
Buyer: faulkners*2
Price: $27.55

3 bidders and 3 bids



And don't forget to watch this one. It ought to be interesting.

eBay item no. 200246328614

August 16 2008

As it turns out, I don't give a whit about sports, in general (except the under-your-skin infection called Big Ten Football, for some reason) and am particularly meh about the Olympics when they come around. I was happy to be out of China for August, that's for sure. I've also been happily on a trip since Aug 2, and so as is my habit when I travel, I've not seen a television playing for over two weeks now... so the only news I get is from cnn.com, where the only thing happening at the Olympics, apparently, is Michael Phelps (who, I'd have to say, I've not seen over on the parts of campus where I am at ... when I am there).

All of which is a set-up for this: I saw the cutest retort in one of the AICN talkbacks earlier today:

"I'll bet Aquaman is now wearing Michael Phelps underoos."

Bwah hah hah - I think that is soooo funny.

August 14 2008 Apropos of Nothing

A month or so ago, a colleague and sometimes co-author buddy of mine from Cornell sent me a draft of an article/essay he and a couple of other people were writing for the German journal, Angewandte Chemie. It was something of a provocative opinion piece on... well, does it really matter? No, not really. The reason I am even telling you this story in the first place is that he asked me if I'd like to draw a cartoon to accompany the article, and he would advocate for it with the editors if he liked it.

Alrighty then.

This buddy of mine shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981, so his advocacy tends to carry a little weight in some circles, including journal editors and, let me tell you, people he asks to draw a cartoon for him.

The bottom line is that these guys want to interject some proper language to replace the sloppy term "stable," which is about as precise as saying that something is warm, or tall, or heavy. The question is, relative to what? So they are trying to resolve a constant battle between the theoreticians and the experimentalists over the question of whether chemical entities that have short lifetimes under extreme conditions can be called stable.

Hey, are you still reading this? I cannot imagine why. I'm only writing this entry so I can show off my cartoon, which was just published along with the article.

So their proposal is to define the words "fleeting" and "viable," and that is what part of the article is about, and that is the part that spurred me on to an idea.

I love the old editorial cartoons of Frederick Burr Opper and the other nineteenth century cartoonists. I don't have as many originals as I would like, yet, however, but I have a couple or three. So I imagined what Opper would have done if faced with this cartoon challenge, and I co-opted one of his designs to my purpose.

Voila!

August 8 2008

Well, the fire sale is over. If any of you know who ended up with these, let me know. As I mentioned in that previous post and in a comment, I sat all of these out.

It's nice to see that the complete book went for an appropriate price, if you include the "buyer's premium" (auction tax) you end up at $610/page which is remarkably in line with the usual per page price for early pages. In my December 2007 market report, the pre-100 Dave-only issues were $596, on average, and the average price for all pages sold in 2007 was, get this, $610. Of course, I do not include tax in the annual report, so these 22 pages going for $500 each is going to ding the average a bit later this year.

Now... we're pretty sure that these newer pieces came directly from Dave, since we know they've not otherwise appeared and were listed at the Aardvark-Vanaheim (www.cerebusart.com) site. But what about the complete contents of issue #6? Who had that, anyhow? I know for sure it was not in the A-V vault.

And (dare I say it?) the color (um, colour) pieces all came in a little on the low side, historically speaking. A total of $3025 for the 5 of them.



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price: $11,000
2 bids


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August 1 2008

eBay item no. 190239780834
Seller: sheltone
Buyer: alchemist57
Price: $271.66