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. 

250 Words on Less is More

[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 am sorry this letter is so long, I did not have time to make it short.” –Blaise Pascal*

When I lecture about comics, I often show that quote and talk about how the real art of cartooning is distillation. A cartoon isn’t an accurate rendering of reality; it’s not a high-definition video or a stenographer’s transcript. Comics may start with reality but then they amplify and simplify, polishing away everything unnecessary until they arrive at one gleaming gem of an idea. 

Whenever I rewrite or redraw a piece I’m not happy with, I always remove details, never add them. If I could ever draw a single black dot that conveyed exactly the message I intended, I’d die a very satisfied cartoonist. 

To be fair, there are others approaches to comics. There are artists who never use one line when a thousand would do, rendering elaborately cross-hatched minutia, and some of them are all-time greats! But temperamentally and philosophically, I lean the opposite way. 

I often end my comics talks with another quote, this one from cartoonist Larry Gonick: “Our brains represent things in some stripped-down, abstracted way. We don’t remember things as photographs or movies. We remember them as cartoons.”

I think that’s exactly right. When a cartoon is firing on all cylinders, it can feel less like reading and more like telepathy between writer and reader because a comic’s combination of words and images is speaking our brains' native language. That’s the goal: direct, instant, clear, intimate communication.

*Also attributed to many others, including Cicero, Pliny, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw.

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