250 Words on Art as Therapy

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I’ve written two nonfiction graphic novels about bad things that happened in my life: Mom’s Cancer, about my mother’s experience with metastatic cancer, and A Fire Story, about losing my home and neighborhood to a disastrous firestorm. In both cases readers often ask, “Was writing about it therapeutic for you? Was it cathartic?”

Yes and no.

Writing any sort of memoir requires you to pay attention to what happened as well as how you reacted to it. That demands some self-awareness and introspection. “Why was I angry? Why did I make those choices? What do I regret?” I suppose that’s a deeper sort of analysis than a lot of people do in those situations. 

On the other hand, I still go out and talk to roomfuls of strangers about my mother’s cancer and my home’s conflagration years after they happened. I’m happy to do it—really!—but in some sense it feels like picking at scabs without ever giving them a chance to scar over. “Let me yet again relive for you folks the worst experiences of my life.” 

That doesn’t seem healthy.

I especially reject the ideas of “catharsis” and “closure.” I don't think there’s any such thing. You just keep on because you have no choice. Life is forever divided into “before” and “after,” and over time you accumulate enough days in your “after” ledger, including some good and happy ones, that the pain of losing “before” slowly fades.

Art’s got nothing to do with that. Only time. 

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Too Many Bums

Every Christmas Eve since 2005--20 years now!--I share one of my favorite bits of whimsy from possibly my favorite comic strip, Walt Kelly's "Pogo": the classic carol "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie." You know the tune, sing along!

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,

Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?

Trolley Molly don't love Harold,

Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly
gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

--Brian 

250 Words on Nostalgia

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Author John Koenig coined the word “anemoia”: a sense of nostalgia for a past you never experienced. You might get a tingle of anemoia when you see Currier and Ives prints or Bedford Falls. “I’m homesick even though I was never there.” 

I think anemoia explains the success of Thomas Kinkade, who painted soft-focus pastel landscapes so warm and inviting you want to crawl into them. That golden glowing cottage in an alpine glade feels exactly like my cozy childhood home, except I always lived in a tract house in the suburbs.  

Even as a child I experienced deep nostalgic longing, despite not having lived long enough to feel nostalgia for anything. The song “Those Were The Days” by Mary Hopkin, in which a woman wistfully recalls happy nights singing and dancing in a tavern with her friends, invoked a haunting melancholy in me, and I’d never been inside a tavern. It’s based on a Russian folk song because of course it is. 

I’ve now lived long enough to feel authentic nostalgia that can hit hard, especially for times that are long gone. I’d give anything to be able to knock on my grandparents’ door and be invited in for Sunday dinner, sit and talk with my Mom, or relive a day with my daughters when they were toddlers. 

It keeps me mindful that someday these will be the good old days I would give anything to revisit, and makes me grateful for the people and places I have now.

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When Captain America Throws His Mighty Shield....

I mentioned a while back that I'm cohosting a podcast on the movie "Captain America: The First Avenger," which we analyze at the rate of one minute of movie per episode. We premiered on Dec. 1 and post every M, W and F, so we've got nine up already! 

My pals Jim O'Kane, Hal Bryan and I have had some great guests in the first nine, including Joe Johnston, the film's director (ep. 1); writer Mark Evanier, one-time assistant to Captain America co-creator Jack Kirby (ep. 2); actor Billy Campbell, the Rocketeer himself, who actually guested as an expert on Norway, where this minute of the movie is set and he now lives (ep. 4); and one of my favorites, Judd Winick, a writer and cartoonist who did a Captain America story for the same Marvel kids' anthology I did an Avengers story for (ep. 9). We've had an amazing assortment of quality guests so far, especially considering that there's nothing in it for them but the kindness of doing us a favor. 

Jim and Hal have done many "Movies by Minutes" podcasts together but this is my first as co-host, and I feel like I'm still learning the ropes. We work as far as we can in advance, of course, but record episodes out of order depending on the availability of guests. It's a challenge to remember and not repeat what you said "yesterday," especially when you did yesterday's episode two months ago or haven't done it at all. I hope to get decent at it by the time we finish.

Perhaps my favorite moment of the experience was when I had to reschedule lunch with one of my daughters because, as I explained to her, "I'm doing a podcast with Hitler."

We try to keep each episode around 25 or 30 minutes--as Jim says, a Peloton workout's worth of time--but some have topped 45 because the guests were so fascinating. I hope that comes across to listeners and they feel the same. I'm having fun. 

Twins Day 2025!

It nearly slipped past me! I was just reminded that today is National Twins Day, which I get to celebrate because I raised my own pair of 'em. HA HA, girls, you thought I'd forgotten! 

I may enjoy being a dad of twins more than they actually enjoy being twins. Of course, none of us really thinks about it very often, but when it comes to my attention I smile, whereas when it's brought to their attention they just roll their eyes.

Happy Twins Day, Chiquitas! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to make you squirm in embarrassment. You were a lot of work, so I earned it.

250 Words on Starhopping

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Two weeks ago I wrote about one of the perks of being an amateur astronomer, which is sensing when I’m seeing something unusual in the sky before my conscious mind really registers it—a tingle that tells me “That ain’t right!”

Much of my familiarity with the heavens came from starhopping, which is a traditional method of finding things you can’t see by following a trail of things you can. You typically start with a prominent constellation or bright star and then, using your finderscope or telescope, pick out a path among dimmer stars that leads you to your target. 

The beauty of starhopping is that patterns of stars become familiar milestones connected to other milestones that form a network of trails across the sky. It also isn’t unusual to stumble across a cluster, nebula or galaxy you weren’t even looking for, which always provides an exciting jolt of discovery.

These days, I’m afraid that starhopping is becoming a lost art. Modern mid-range telescopes come with digital keypads or apps. You just tell the computer what you want to see and the telescope dials it up. You don’t need to learn the pathways or even look through the eyepiece. 

It’s the difference between reading a map and plugging a destination into a GPS. Sure, the GPS will get you there, probably faster and more accurately. What you sacrifice is the experience of meandering, discovering, mastering, feeling it in your bones. 

The journey is as important as the destination. Or more.

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It's Real

Maybe the most magical moment of making a book is when the abstract thing you've been working on for a long time--until now a jumble of ink on paper, Word files, Photoshop files, PDFs, proofs, and many many emails--becomes a solid object. Editor Charlie just sent me the first copy of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Mom's Cancer, still warm from the printing press (metaphorically), and it's a beauty.  

Y'all will get to see it in a few months, and I hope you'll take a look. We added 32 pages of all-new content, including 22 pages of comics, a new foreword from my graphic medicine pal, MK Czerwiec (thanks again, MK), and a long afterword by me on What It All Means. It's the definitive edition that you definitely need on your shelf!

Schroeder

In 1884, sculptor Frederic Bartholdi and engineer Gustave Eiffel built the Statue of Liberty in the middle of Paris before disassembling it for shipment to the United States. It's weird to see such a famous icon in a totally unfamiliar setting.

I've been thinking of that as I wrap up my work refurbishing and painting a (smaller) statue of the "Peanuts" character Schroeder that is destined for a local park. My wife, Karen, is part of a non-profit that purchased an acre of land to save it from becoming a monstrous apartment complex, way too big for the property and neighborhood, and develop it as a community playground instead. Before our 2017 fire it had been a pre-school; since, it has been an empty lot.

Another member of the non-profit contacted someone with the Charles M. Schulz Museum, which is a few miles from the park, to ask if they had any "Peanuts" statues. This being Mr. Schulz's adopted hometown, dozens of similar statues are all over the region, sponsored and painted by various businesses and service organizations as works of public art. They had one: a Schroeder statue that had been returned when a bank back east went out of business.

It had been exposed to the elements and so needed patching, caulking and sanding, then priming and painting. I just finished putting roughly a hundred coats of polyurethane on it, so I hope it will last a while. 

Sometime in the spring, when the park is done, Schroeder will be installed in his new home (situated to be as kid-proof as possible). With luck, decades from now these photos of Schroeder in my backyard will look as weird as those of Lady Liberty looming over Paris.

Cthulhu Chiffonade

Once a week, Karen and I volunteer to distribute food for the food bank, which is not the point. The point is that today I pulled a carrot out of a 50-pound bag that looked like a monstrous ancient cosmic god from another dimension, and I didn't know whether I should burn it or offer sacrifices to it. It's possible I have found a new religion.

250 Words on Disneyland

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

When I was a child in South Dakota, I knew about Disneyland long before I visited it, thanks to an hour-long advertisement called “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” that aired every Sunday night. Growing up modestly in the Midwest, Anaheim seemed as remote as Mars. I had a friend who made the pilgrimage and returned with a mouse-ear cap, which we revered as if it were a holy relic. 

My grandparents took my sister and me to Disneyland during a swing through the Western states when I was 9. It was the era of ticket books and “E ticket” rides. Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion were new and amazing, and both remain favorites to this day. I know how every illusion in the Haunted Mansion works (there are no holograms!), and have even adapted some for my homemade Halloween haunt, but the original is so masterfully done I can only gape and grin.

After my family moved to California, Disneyland trips became more frequent. I remained a fan. Luckily, my wife, Karen, felt likewise, and we’ve indoctrinated our daughters as well. 

I’m not naïve. I understand that Disney is a multinational corporation that manipulates emotions and plays upon nostalgia to maximize shareholder value. Its goal is to part me from as much of my money as possible. 

When I pass through Disneyland’s gates and walk through the tunnels beneath the train track, where even the air feels charged with enchantment, that seems like a fair deal.  

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Time Traveling

Today is "Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day"--really, you can look it up!--and, in remarkable synchronicity, less than 24 hours ago I did some time traveling with no idea that the auspicious occasion was nigh.

My daughters and I went to The Great Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco yesterday. It's like a Renaissance Faire but indoors and 300 years later, recreating the life and times of "A Christmas Carol." They're a little loose with the time period--anything vaguely Victorian fits in, from Sherlock Holmes to an occasional cowboy. It's about equal parts food, shopping and entertainment that is impressively immersive for taking place in a big warehouse. There is also a time machine available for photo ops. We have a good time.

Oh, here's some unsolicited relationship advice from someone who's been married a while. Try to find a partner who, when you announce "Google says that 'Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day' began in 2007," will reply: "Or did it?!" That one is a keeper. 

Anyway, happy "Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day," particularly to any friends who happen to own a DeLorean or an old English police call box.

250 Words on Knowing the Night Sky

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I’ve been an amateur astronomer most of my life, peaking in college when I had access to good telescopes and worked as an astronomy lab teaching assistant. I stargazed a few nights a week and really had it down. 

One of the joys of being very familiar with some aspect of the natural world is recognizing something out of place that others might not. I remember being 12 and watching a crescent Moon rising in the east at sunset. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled. “That ain’t right!” Turns out the Moon was (properly) full and I’d caught a lunar eclipse in progress.

A friend who writes mystery novels let me read a draft. One of his characters stepped outside at 9 o’clock and saw a gibbous Moon in the southwest. “That ain’t right!” I told him that the Moon at that time and place would be a crescent, but if he meant to prove the witness was lying, well done! He changed it to a crescent. 

A star where there should be no star is probably a planet, and its location, brightness and color announce which it is. The International Space Station moves briskly from west to east and, unlike an airplane, has no blinking lights. Comets don’t flash across the firmament like meteors, they appear stationary.

When it comes to the night sky, I have a well-honed sense that knows something is off before my conscious mind registers what it is. Then the fun begins.

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The Captain America Minute Podcast

I may be the last person on Earth who's not doing a podcast, but I rectify that oversight today. 

It's "The Captain America Minute Podcast," in which my cohosts and I talk about the movie "Captain America: The First Avenger" at the rate of one minute of screen time per episode, so that a 124-minute movie like "Cap" yields 124 episodes. It sounds like an odd way to analyze a film, and it is, but it allows for some deep dives, interesting digressions, and great guests. 

I've been Internet friends with my cohosts, Jim O'Kane and Hal Bryan, for a long time--in fact, I introduced them to each other--and Jim and Hal have done many "movies by the minute" podcasts for films such as "The Rocketeer" and "October Sky," which both happened to be directed by "Cap" director Joe Johnston. 

I was an occasional guest on those other podcasts, and when they told me they planned to do "Cap" I said, "Hey, I'd be happy to be your guest if you need a Captain America comic book expert!" since I once had a complete run of every "Avengers" issue ever published. They looked at each other slyly; their trap had been sprung. Next thing I knew I was a cohost and, well, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. 

New episodes drop every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We've already recorded enough to make it into 2026, so I can promise some good conversation and interesting guests, including director Joe Johnston himself, who joined us for this first episode! They'll be available at this link as well as Spotify or wherever podcasts are found.

The Intellectual Life #27

A Peek into the Intimate Intellectual Life of a Long-Married Couple, Part 27:

Because we were born in the 20th century, Karen and I still subscribe to magazines. The latest issues are stacked on a table in our living room.

We recently had two houseguests from New York City. Now, I always feel a bit like the Country Mouse when these City Mice come to visit. They have very nice apartments in Manhattan and eat 9 p.m. dinners at fancy restaurants. I have a house in the suburbs, where the only restaurants open that late are In-N-Out and Denny's. To compensate, I try to make a good impression.

One of the magazines I subscribe to is The Atlantic, among the last bastions of long-form journalism and prose. It publishes deep-dive articles on politics and history, profiles of noteworthy people, analysis of current events, etc. Because I wanted my guests to know I read substantial magazines full of big ideas by important writers, I put the latest Atlantic, a double-size issue devoted entirely to the American Revolution (extra pompous!), on top of the stack before their arrival.

Passing through the living room later, I saw that it had been supplanted by the latest issue of Karen's Cuisine at Home magazine, featuring a triple-layer cake topped by gingerbread Christmas trees.

This would not do. I quietly reshuffled the stack to showcase The Atlantic.

Passing through later still, I noticed that Cuisine at Home was back on top.

Now I was stuck. I couldn't just move The Atlantic to the top yet again, nor could I admit to Karen just how neurotic, insecure, immature and pathetic I was in trying to show my cosmopolitan friends that I was a smart and cultured Country Mouse. 

I had only one desperate option: I had to sit down and actually read the magazine, in her presence so she'd see me do it, then casually leave it on top of the stack. Fortunately, I hadn't finished it yet, so I put in a solid half hour and then placed it at the summit, satisfied that my ploy had worked.

An hour later, Cuisine at Home was back on top.

Me: "Ahem. I'm surprised you haven't finished reading that Cuisine at Home magazine."

Karen: "I did."

Me: "Then how does it keep ending up on top of The Atlantic?"

Karen: "It has a prettier cover."

That was the moment I knew I was done, all my shallow pretensions a smoldering ruin. My City Mouse friends stayed two nights and had a fine visit, and if they had any opinion about my evident passion for "Very Merry Cakes," they kept it to themselves. 

This has been a peek into the intimate intellectual life of a long-married couple. 

250 Words on Comedy

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Several months ago, I saw some classic “Popeye” cartoons from the 1930s in a theater with 100 other people. I’ve always respected “Popeye” as a pioneering character but never much cared for him myself. Yet, there was something about sitting in a full house, in the dark, surrounded by laughing adults and children, that instantly recalibrated my opinion. I thought the cartoons were creative and clever. Most importantly, I laughed.

Sometimes I’ll share something I find hilarious with someone, only to have them sit in stony silence. Suddenly I don’t think it’s nearly as funny, either. “Wait, the best part is coming up! Give it another minute!”  When you start explaining the jokes, you’ve lost.

Comedy is such a delicate thing. Comedians will tell you that every audience is different, and material that’s a hit one night can bomb the next. Humor that slays in an intimate club dies in a cavernous auditorium, and vice versa.

It’s a wonder anything manages to be funny at all. 

I’ve also noticed that my sense of humor has evolved. I’ve always been drawn to silliness and pratfalls in addition to “cerebral” humor, but I think I now appreciate gentleness and whimsy more than I used to.

For example: In Laurel and Hardy’s film “Way Out West,” the boys did a famous dance routine that, when I was younger, I would have found insipid and boring. Now? I love it unreservedly and unironically. It’s sweet and funny and makes me smile every time. You?

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250 Words on Double-Deckers

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I’ve had good and bad jobs, but the one that always makes me smile is a job I had in college: driving double-decker buses. 

The University of California, Davis, had (and still has) a student-run bus system called Unitrans. It was centered on campus but served the entire city. What made Unitrans unique was its fleet of authentic 1950s red double-decker London buses. 

They were finicky beasts: hard to learn but rewarding to master, each with its own personality. Drivers sat up front in a separate cab—naturally on the wrong side of the vehicle, but that wasn’t the tricky part. The tricky part was shifting.

I’m no gearhead so don’t hold me to this, but as I recall they had a manual pre-select pneumatic transmission. This meant that, as you rumbled along preparing to shift from one gear to another, you moved the stick into the next slot without pushing the “gear-change pedal” (not technically a clutch but effectively one), then pumped the pedal to shift gears with a great wheeze of compressed air and, if you knew the temperament of the particular bus you were driving, minimal bucking and lurching. 

Because the driver was in the cab, double-deckers needed a conductor in the back to handle fares and passengers. A good driver-conductor team could wordlessly anticipate each other’s moves. It’s not how I met my future wife, Karen, but it is how we passed many hours together. 

I think it helped seal the deal. Chicks dig red cars. 

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Seventy-Five Essential Peanuts

I had a busy fun weekend.

On Saturday, the Charles M. Schulz Museum launched "The Essential Peanuts," a book-and-more celebrating the 75th anniversary of Schulz's comic strip "Peanuts." 

I had nothing to do with the book itself, but it was published by my publisher, Abrams, edited by my editor, Charles Kochman, written by Mark Evanier, designed by the great Chip Kidd, and it includes essays by a lot of cartoonists and other people I happen to know. 

Karen and I put up Editor Charlie and Chip in our guest rooms for the weekend, and were very happy that "Mutts" cartoonist Patrick McDonnell and his wife, Karen, had time for a quiet dinner with us on Friday night. There's scant opportunity for a real conversation at these events, so we appreciated getting some quality time with them.

The event at the museum was a sold-out success. It opened with a panel moderated by cartoonist and Schulz Studio editor Lex Fajardo, followed by the biggest book signing I've ever seen, involving 13 people who contributed to the project. Everyone left town Sunday morning, headed to a similar event at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco that afternoon. 

Lex Fajardo introducing the panelists in the Schulz Museum's small theater. From left are writer Mark Evanier, cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, Schulz Studio head and cartoonist Paige Braddock, designer Chip Kidd, and museum curator Benjamin Clark. Many other people who worked on the book were in the audience, but I think the museum was smart to limit this panel to these five. In my experience, a panel that gets much larger just doesn't work (too chaotic, nobody gets time to talk). They put together a different panel for the Cartoon Art Museum event on Sunday, so other contributors did get a chance. 

After the panel, the museum lined up all available contributors in its main Great Hall for a mass book signing. From background to foreground are Mark Evanier, Patrick McDonnell, Jean Schulz, Paige Braddock, and Chip Kidd. 

Then you turned to the next table for signatures from Lex Fajardo, Benjamin Clark, Charlie Kochman, "Jump Start" cartoonist Robb Armstrong (my first time meeting him!), and writer Derrick Bang. 

Then the next table held cartoon director Rob Boutilier, composer Jeff Morrow, and "Rhymes with Orange" cartoonist Hilary Price. 

Just a word about the book itself: it's terrific! The meat of it is a comprehensive overview of "Peanuts" organized by decade, built around the conceit of listing 75 "essential" comic strips plus many others that developed those themes or were otherwise especially memorable. Some "essentials" were no-brainers--the first time we can read Snoopy's thoughts, the first appearance of Woodstock, the first mention of the Great Pumpkin--while others were more nuanced. I probably would have come up with a slightly different list myself but can't argue with any of theirs, and that's the fun of it.

In addition, the slipcase includes a pack of extras, including stickers, postcards, and a reprinting of an early "Peanuts" comic book. It's a nifty package that would make a great gift for any "Peanuts" fan.

It was a treat to run into Art Roche, a cartoonist and friend who works for the Schulz Studio. Art used to live in Santa Rosa, Calif., where the studio is located, but a few years ago moved to Georgia, so we haven't touched base in real life in quite a while. Great to catch up! 

Another treat was meeting actor Brinke Stevens, who came as Mark Evanier's guest. Brinke was once the wife of the late Dave Stevens, the great cartoonist who created "The Rocketeer" and died of leukemia at a much-too-young age. I had never met Brinke but I had a heads-up that she would be there, so I made a print of the Rocketeer artwork I drew for the Cartoon Art Museum's recent exhibition and charity auction in tribute to Dave, gave it to her, and had a nice conversation. Dave based the look of the Rocketeer's girlfriend Betty on '50s pin-up model Bettie Page but Brinke was his life model for the character, so it was great fun for me to give her a drawing that had a rendering of herself in it. 

Sunday morning I dropped Charlie and Chip off at the museum to rendezvous with Patrick and his wife Karen (who took this photo) for their trip to San Francisco. An unforgettable weekend! 

250 Words on Mom's Home Cooking

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I was an adult before I realized my dear mother was not always a terrific cook. 

When I was young, she was a single working woman in her twenties with a full-time job, two feral children, and little money. I can't imagine the crushing responsibility, and have enormous admiration for what she accomplished in those days. However, haute cuisine was not among her accomplishments.

Typical fare: a bologna roll—a tube of pink meat goo tied into a ring—that Mom boiled in water, sliced, and served with catsup. Canned spinach on the side, sprinkled with vinegar. That was dinner. 

Another regular meal was frozen cheese pizza doctored up with a tin of anchovies. I can’t explain the anchovies except that Mom always loved them. They were a great treat! To this day, my sisters and I are the only people I know who like anchovies on pizza. 

We ate breakfast for dinner: pancakes, eggs, cereal. A lot of fast food: McDonald’s, A&W, Dairy Queen, Pronto Pup corn dogs.

We loved all of it, but now I wonder if Mom felt bad because that was the best she could do for us. More likely, she was grateful to fill our bellies so cheaply and easily.

When I was a teenager, around the time my much younger second sister was born, Mom took cooking classes and got legitimately good. Her sauce-stained recipes remain in the family and bring back many happy culinary memories. But occasionally I miss eating pancakes for dinner. 

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250 Words on Analog Art

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Some cave paintings in Spain may be 64,000 years old. The earliest decorated pottery was made in China and Japan around 18,000 BC.

Meanwhile, somewhere right now, an artist is desperately failing to recover a digital image they stored on a balky computer drive in 2007.

I treasure original art—both cartoons, which are my professional interest, and more generally all of it. It was in the artist’s studio. They touched it. You can see their preliminary layers, study their decisions, grasp their process and mind. I’ve seen fingerprints in 2000-year-old paint. It makes an intimate connection that crosses centuries.

More and more of my cartooning colleagues have transitioned to digital art. They compose on a Cintiq or iPad using programs like Clip Studio or Procreate. I understand. The ease and speed are seductive; so is the “Undo” button. 

I’ll always cartoon with ink on paper. Not that I’m right and they’re wrong. Whatever gets the job done. But I mourn what’s lost.

It’s a broader issue. Historians can research the American Revolution or Civil War by reading period diaries and newspapers. Old ads and posters are a treasure trove. Those media are nearing extinction. In a hundred years, nobody will be able to decode a PDF or JPG. Future historians will see the art and culture of the early 21st century vanish into a black hole. 

Even if digital copies survive, the tangible connection between artist and audience will be gone. No fingerprints. It will be a profound shame. 

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250 Words on Space Time Capsules

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Following up my recent piece on time capsules, the most audacious time capsules ever are those attached to four spacecraft that have left our Solar System and are headed to the stars.

The mission of Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2, was to explore the outer planets. Launched in the 1970s, each was a historic triumph. Until they flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, our only views of those distant worlds were blurry photos through Earth-bound telescopes. 

Astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to put messages in those far-flung bottles. Each Pioneer has a gold-coated plaque illustrating where the spacecraft came from and what humans look like. The Voyagers carry a gold-plated record (and stylus!) which, if aliens figure out how to use it, will play images and sounds from Earth.

Each could soar for billions of years, surely long after humanity and perhaps Earth itself are gone, before anyone recovers them—assuming there’s anyone out there at all. Our civilization’s last artifacts. 

I love and admire the effort, but I might have taken a different approach.

Keeping in mind that weight on a spacecraft is at a premium, I’d have sent two specimens: a fruit fly and a sesame seed, perfectly preserved in the frozen vacuum of space. Their chemical composition, cellular structure, genes and DNA would tell aliens nearly everything about life on Earth, because we are certainly more closely related to fruit flies and sesame seeds than we are to whatever would find them. 

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The East Wing

The colonnade at right attached the East Wing to the main White House structure, center. The grass and bushes at left were part of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, now also gone.

Karen and I vacationed in Washington, DC in March 2024. She had been there before but I never had, and I joked that I'd better see it before MAGA Republicans tore it all down. 

I didn't mean it literally.

One morning we toured the White House, which was a big deal for me. It's a sacred civic space, like a secular church or museum. The People's House. Tourists entered through the East Wing Visitors' Center, which isn't there anymore. 

A sign inside the colonnade explained what you were looking at through the windows.

Karen and other visitors inside the colonnade leading to the White House. This was a visitor's introduction to the history of the place, setting the context for the more structured self-guided tour to follow.

I took a few photos; wish I'd taken more, but at the time I had no inkling it would all be gone a year and a half later, illegally bulldozed to satisfy a stupid president's petty ego. Trump has committed worse crimes, but this one hurts. 

250 Words on Old-Time Radio

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

I spent most of my teenage years immersed in a radical outsider artform: AM radio. 

Every weeknight from 8 to 11 p.m., San Francisco station KSFO played one hour of radio dramas, one hour of vintage comedy shows, and one hour of tracks from comedy albums. The Shadow, Suspense, Dragnet; Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen; Tom Lehrer, Firesign Theater, Bob Newhart.

My gosh, it was wonderful! 

And my gosh, what a nerd I was.

In addition to being tremendously entertaining, the programs gave me great respect for creative artists of the past. Radio performers were toying with their medium—breaking the fourth wall, directly addressing the audience, parodying commercials and newscasts, doing callbacks that rewarded long-time listeners who paid close attention—in very clever ways. The “theater of imagination” conjured more comedy and terror than film could ever depict. 

In my field of comics, too many cartoonists don’t know their own medium’s history. Creators such as Winsor McCay, Cliff Sterrett, and George Herriman were doing work a century ago that would be heralded as graphic and storytelling genius if it were published as new today. It holds up. They still have much to teach anyone willing to learn.

“Everything old is new again.”

Disc jockey John Gilliland hosted KSFO’s programs and did a lovely job cultivating a community of listeners in the night. We were all out there, in our bedrooms or cars or with a transistor radio earpiece in our ear, thrilling and laughing, alone but together. 

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Juanita's Recipe

Anyone need cookies for 600?

My late mother-in-law, Juanita, spent her career as a lunch lady for a middle school (lunch ladies don't have to be ladies, but that's what she called her job and the alliteration is too good to pass up). Yesterday my wife, Karen, and her sister, Cathy, unpacked their mom's recipe notebook, which Cathy saved from being trashed. 

I love this recipe for three reasons: first is the absurdity of scale, which starts with 7.5 pounds of butter and 30 eggs, and only escalates. Second is that it is written in her hand and stained with the residue of years of honest cooking. Third is that it hearkens to a time when school cafeterias actually cooked for students instead of reheating prepackaged glop and nuggets. 

Anyway, if you want to make 600 oatmeal cookies and have two gallons of oatmeal on hand, please enjoy, courtesy of Juanita.

Juanita!

Grandmother with my girls, quite a while ago.

No Kings 2025

Gathered in the grass of Doyle Park at the end of the route.

Made a little good trouble today. Karen, our daughters, our niece Claire and I marched a couple of miles in Santa Rosa, Calif. with a lot of other people in support of freedom, democracy, rule of law, American ideals, and basic human decency. 

There were two marches that began in different places and then converged to continue as one toward a large park. Crowd size is impossible to estimate when you're in it, but I've been in local demonstrations that had 5000 to 6000 and this felt larger. Indivisible Sonoma County, which helped organize the event, claims 10,000. All I know is that we overheard stunned local cops saying that it was WAY more people than they expected.

Shark and Penguin showed up. I complimented the Penguin because whoever was in there could only walk in a very small shuffle and kept it up for a couple of miles.

I took this photo of our march as we rounded a corner. This march was soon joined by another one just about as large.

Participants were in great spirits, volunteers in yellow vests kept everything orderly, cops were smiling and managed traffic in our favor. We ran into many friends, whom I won't name in case they'd rather I didn't.

Speaking of which: I've seen advice online and in print about not letting the authorities identify you at events like this. Wear a mask, don't carry your phone, don't drive your car, don't post on social media. I disagree completely. 

I want them to know who I am. Read my posts, put me on the enemies list. I'd be proud.  Any time wasted on a white, male, middle-class, squeaky-clean citizen means less time for hassling someone who isn’t all those things.

A video that captures some, but not all, of the extent of our march. That's a lot of good people.

EDITED TO ADD some aerial photos taken by our local Indivisible group. My family is down there somewhere!

250 Words on Time Capsules

[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]

Somewhere in a backyard in Rapid City, South Dakota is a jelly jar I buried when I was 7 years old. I don’t remember what’s in it, but I bet I could put a shovel in the ground within a foot of it.

I love time capsules. There’s something deeply romantic about leaving a message to the future. A note in a bottle. A nibble of immortality, the hope that anyone will care. “We were here, this was important to us.” 

In reality, most time capsules turn out to be disappointments. Those that haven’t been destroyed by water leaks are filled with the most boring antiques imaginable. Coins, proclamations, minutes from a board meeting. Never a singing frog. You could find half the artifacts in better condition at a flea market.

Two famous ones are the Westinghouse Time Capsule, entombed during the 1939 World’s Fair to be opened in the year 6939, and the Crypt of Civilization, sealed inside a former swimming pool at Oglethorpe University in 1940, to be opened in 8113. Both are worth a Web search. I appreciate their creators’ cockeyed optimism. 

Hidden in my rebuilt house, inaccessible but protected from the elements, is a signed copy of A Fire Story with a little note and drawing. I like to imagine that whoever finds it, whenever they find it, will take the time to read it and reflect on the life and times of the guy who stashed it. I was here. This was important to me.

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Unhappy Anniversary

The last photo we took of the wall of flame coming over the hills toward us as we evacuated. 

Tonight is a grim anniversary for my family and neighbors: eight years ago (!) in the middle of the night, the Tubbs Fire destroyed about 5600 structures, including ours. It also killed 22 people, and was only one of more than a dozen fires that broke out all over northern California during a freakishly intense and dry easterly wind.

My graphic novel, A Fire Story, says about all I have to say about it. I would only add that, at the time, I thought our fire was one of those once-a-century random disasters that happens sometimes. In the years since, as I've watched the western half of North America erupt into flames and our record of "Most Destructive Wildfire in California History" has been eclipsed again and again and again, I've realized that we were victims of climate change, and my book is an early entry into a growing body of work on what living in a climate-changed world is like. 

The street into my neighborhood. This is the exact spot I wrote about in the book, where I realized the scope of what had happened and uttered several "fucks."

Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago; other times, like yesterday. Karen and I still look at each other blankly, trying to figure out if we had some item--a bowl, a tool, a piece of clothing--before or after the fire. Random stimuli raise the hairs on the backs of our necks. It changes you forever, I think. Or at least for eight years plus.

It's cool and cloudy in northern California tonight. We expect a little rain tomorrow. There is nothing we appreciate more than rain in early October. 

Our home shortly after sunrise the next morning.

Captain LOL

My pal Craig Yoe offered to send me a copy of his new kids book, Captain LOL + Rubber Chicken: Har Har!, if I'd consider mentioning it on social media. I replied with two caveats: I have scant social media influence (quality over quantity!), and I'd only say nice things if I meant them.

Luckily, it's easy to say nice things because Captain LOL is great fun and delightfully drawn. Superficially, it's a collection of dad jokes, dumb riddles and corny puns, with a little green fart cloud emitting from Captain LOL's tights on nearly every page. If that's all it was, I don't know if I could recommend it (although fart jokes are always funny).

 
But on top of that foundation, Craig has layered every page with richly detailed absurdity and metatextual silliness. I particularly enjoyed Easter eggs that the 7- to 10-year-olds the book is aimed at would never get but that someone who knows what comics were like in 1968 would love. Every page has a lot going on. It's dense in a way that would make it fun to read more than once.

My favorite feature is a little die-cut hole, passing entirely through the book, that gives every page its own hole-based gag. I know enough about publishing to know that punching that hole wasn't cheap, and a lesser writer or publisher wouldn't have bothered. It was worth it.

Craig is a writer, cartoonist, and publisher whose backlist shows a keen interest in comics history. He was the long-time creative director for the Muppets, after which he started his own company, Yoe Studio, with clients like Kellogg's, Disney, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. As a publisher, he's put out dozens of books reprinting obscure comics that deserved new attention. And, in my experience, he's a good person who approaches comics with deep knowledge, respect and love. 

I had fun with Captain LOL. Depending on your kid's affinity for Dad jokes and fart gags, they may, too.