When someone on television uses inappropriate language, it’s ‘bleeped-out‘.  In the world of comics, the offending words are replaced with #%&*@ symbols. It’s a tradition that seems to have been around for about as long as cartoons have been appearing in newspapers… and I’m getting really tired of it.

Some cartoonists feel the need to have characters who swear. Since their comic strips appear in daily newspapers — a medium that tries to cater to everyone from young children to adults to seniors, without offending a single reader — they know they can’t use real profanity, so they resort to using those annoying symbols. It’s not even the newspapers doing the “censoring” — it’s the cartoonists! The idea that innocent young minds are being protected by this silly tradition of “bleeping” the naughty bits with cheesy euphemisms is just naive.

(Caution — possibly offensive language ahead…)

What’s the point of using pretend profanity? Some cartoonists seem to think it makes their work edgy, that they’re part of some kind of crusade to push the envelope. Really? I imagine some readers are titillated and feel very adult when they see %#&* in a comic: Ooh — look! That character said ‘fuck’. At least it probably said that. Well, I think that’s what it meant. Is that kind of readership worth it? Kinda sad.

Or another excuse: “It’s just mirroring the way people talk today”. Wonderful: let’s all do our part to keep dumbing-down America.

If a cartoonist wants characters that swear, then maybe that comic is in the wrong medium: maybe it should be in underground comix or adult magazines, instead of innocuous daily newspapers. Maybe the cartoonist should either have the courage to use the actual words, or else write material that’s appropriate to the medium. How is it edgy to have profanity in comic strips when it’s only pretend swearing? Oooh — really pushing the envelope, there…

Part of the joy of learning to read, when I was a kid, was realizing that those symbols in the comics meant something nasty; I knew about “swear words”, and I had an active imagination! So what, if the words I thought of weren’t the words the cartoonist meant — the effect was the same! Like it’s some kind of secret code that only adults can decipher.  Riiight…

But what really annoys me is the inconsistency of the $#&*@# symbols! I’ll bet this has happened to you: you’re checking out the comics page, reading the word balloons, when suddenly, %@$# happens!  You have to stop reading and try to figure out exactly which swear-word the character is using, for the dialog to make sense!

Just to further complicate things, some cartoonists use four symbols for a four-letter word, while others use five or six… or even three! And every cartoonist seems to have their own secret code to hide their swear-words!  For instance, does the $ symbol mean S… or F… or maybe C? A CIA code-breaker would have trouble deciphering this stuff!

So, are you sure you guessed the word the cartoonist was suggesting ? By the time I’ve re-read the caption, trying out each swear-word I can think of in place of the hieroglyphics, I’ve lost interest in the whole strip! Kinda dulls the enjoyment of reading the comics page, doesn’t it?

You cartoonists who insist on using words that need to be bleeped — please, do us all a favor: get together and develop a standard symbol-code for profanity; one that’s consistent; one that you all agree to use. That — or just make the extra effort to write without having to resort to cheap tricks.

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Since I’ve been guilty of resorting to those cheap tricks, myself, I can’t claim any moral superiority. But I do feel strongly about this, and I’m hoping to get some discussion going. So please — whether you agree or disagree with me — add your comments.

One of the fun things I got to do, working in movie art departments, was to create some fake comic book covers for props.

This is another I created a few years ago for Reefer Madness…

The back cover. Creating the fake ad was a lot of fun.

One of the fun things I got to do, working in movie art departments, was to create some fake comic book covers for props.

This was done a few years ago for Reefer Madness…

The back cover. Creating the fake ad was a lot of fun.

Another fake comic tomorrow.

Just thought I should make it clear… I’m not retired from cartooning — especially not from CAR-tooning!

I still draw for a living, and if you or someone you know needs a cartoon or illustration done — for an advertisement, for a gift, for a book, as a collectible — I hope you’ll think of me.

Here’s a link to my portfolio site — lots of samples there.

Besides cartooning, I do storyboards, illustration for all kinds of books, and just about anything else that involves art and storytelling…

Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand

Pencil drawing of what I think is a '33 Ford Fordor.

Cover art for Cracked

For a fan of Wonder Woman

Art for a promotional brochure for TIME Magazine

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You can contact me by clicking here.
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And if my style isn’t what you’re looking for, I know lots of other very good artists and cartoonists, and I’d be happy to refer you to them.

Huh? “Driving ‘Doggy Style’?”

Driving doggy-style

Oh, wait, yeah — you might be imagining something different than I am…

Here’s what I’m thinking: you know how dogs — as soon as they see another dog — will run up and stick their nose in the other dog’s butt? Well, I’m referring to people who drive that way.

They’re easy spot in traffic: usually a guy, a few cars back, abruptly changing lanes, then tromping the gas pedal to charge ahead, then he hits the brakes with the nose of his car right up to the tail of the car ahead.

If he’s lucky, the car he’s butt-sniffing will be moving a little faster than the car he was previously tailgating, so after a few anxious moments, he finds enough clearance (just barely) to whip back into the other lane and tromp the gas again… and hit the brakes again. Snif-sniff! Arf!

How to drive doggy-style

It amounts to stop-and-go driving — but at 70 mph!

Besides the wear and tear on his car — and the stress he must be under — I always wonder if getting somewhere a couple minutes sooner is worth it. And that’s assuming he’s lucky enough to chose the best lane. Usually, there’s a traffic light or a slow-down, and everyone gets bunched-up. Half the time, the lane mister greyhound is in turns out to be the slow-starting lane, and the rest of the pack — the ones he’s worked so hard to get ahead of, the ones he’s cut off, the ones he’s tail-gated — well, we just roll past  with smug looks on our faces.

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Your comments are welcome — and wanted! I’m working on an easier way, but for now, if you click on the little “word balloon” icon in the upper-left of the page, that should open a ‘comments’ window.

So far today, I’ve seen 2,329 advertisements.
Well, okay — that’s just an estimate of the TV, newspaper, radio, magazine, and internet ads that surround me — and probably you, too. I try to ignore most of them. But because advertising has made itself such a big part of my life (not by choice) I can’t help but notice when it’s something outrageous, questionable, or just plain dumb.
So when I see something I think is outrageous or questionable or annoying — or stupid — I add it to my collection of Bad Ads.

Today’s example appeared on the back cover of a national magazine in May, 2005. I had it filed in the ‘Stupid’ category.My first thought was, Oh, it’s a public service ad suggesting people who get their SUVs into awkward situations are not very intelligent.  No intelligent life out here, dummy, and that means you! I can’t see a driver in the picture, so I’m thinking we’re seeing the situation from his point of view, as he stands there, scratching his head, wondering, Is my brand new SUV about to roll into a very big hole in the middle of the desert?
(Footnote — I once got my own SUV into a situation that looked as dodgy as this — and I really felt… stupid.)

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an attempt (a failed attempt) to be clever: There’s no other humans around — just you, who was brilliant enough to buy one of our SUVs with the built-in satellite navigation system.
Am I missing something? Or is this about an advertising agency getting hooked on a clever catch-phrase and not seeing that it could be taken in a very derogatory way by its audience?

No intelligent life… including you,  the potential customer.
What were they thinking?

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As usual, I hope you’ll click over to  CARzy and see today’s WebCARtoon…

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Your comments are welcome — and wanted! I’m working on an easier way, but for now, if you click on the little “word balloon” icon in the upper-left of the page, that should open a ‘comments’ window.

When we first moved to Canada, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my car was suddenly getting 20 percent better gas mileage!  Maybe it had something to do with the foreign air:  was it colder; did it have more oxygen…?

Eventually someone pointed out to me that Canada went by a slightly different system: Imperial measurement.

Miles were the same as we were used to in the US, but Imperial gallons had 160 fluid ounces, compared to the 128-ounce US gallon: 20 percent more gas. I quit bragging to my friends back in California.

Then, in 1970, Canada went Metric. We now buy gas by the litre (liter for my friends in the US), meat by the kilogram, and drive at 80 km/h (kilometres per hour) instead of 50 mph.

This was all supposedly done to bring the Canada in line with the enlightened countries of the world: at last, our scientists would be able to talk with other scientists!

Sometimes it got a little weird, though. Translations from US measurements into metric would be taken literally. A US news story about “…a hundred-foot fall” would be converted to “…a 30.48 metre fall…” in the Canadian story. Took some getting used to.

Personally, I suspected the oil companies had something to do with the change. I mean, back then, if gas was selling for maybe 50 cents a gallon, didn’t it somehow seem cheaper if the price sign at the gas station read: 11.9¢ (per litre)? That way, when gas prices went up, 90.9¢ (per litre) doesn’t seem quite as bad as $4.54 (per gallon).  Just sayin’…

Then there’s groceries. Even after nearly 40 years of Metric in Canada, grocery stores are still advertising prices for things like meat and produce in pounds! Yeah, they also show the prices for metric… but they’ve done a reverse switch on the oil companies; the price per pound gets the large print and the price per kilogram (metric) gets the small print. It’s easy to see why: there’re 2.2 pounds in a kilogram; the price per pound is less  than half the kilogram price!

But I’m okay with that. I grew up with pounds and gallons and miles, and even after 40 years, I still tend to think that way. Which is why it really annoys me that when gas mileage — or, rather “fuel economy” — is advertised in Canada, it’s almost always litres per 100 kilometres. “My Malibu gets 14.8 litres per hundred kilometres in the city.” What does that mean?  Well, it’s the equivalent of 19 mpg. I had to look it up… on a Canadian government fuel consumption website. There’s an option there for listing in miles per gallon; even the government seems to accept that the conversion to metric hasn’t been terribly successful.

My suspicion is that some bureaucrat in the government –  some guy who thought he’d somehow been cheated when he bought gas in the US and was sold 25 gallons to fill his tank, instead of the usual 20 gallons it took back home in Canada — saw a chance to thumb his nose at Americans. “Miles per gallon? Hah! Try to make sense of this, Yankee!”

A recent story in the automotive section of our local paper the other day reminded me just how confusing Metric still is. It was about how there’s skepticism about the new Chevrolet Volt claiming 230 miles per gallon. Okay, I could wrap my head around that. But then the article suddenly switched from miles per gallon to litres per 100 kilometres, with lots of comparisons between different driving scenarios.
They lost me a third of the way into the story. Maybe there was a point, but I didn’t get it, didn’t care any more.
And I can’t convince the paper to insert miles-per-gallon figures — even though they run local dealer ads that use MPG, and grocery ads that use pounds!

I just realized… I’ve become a curmudgeon. Or more accurately, a carmudgeon.

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Your comments are welcome — and wanted! I’m working on an easier way, but for now, if you click on the little “word balloon” icon in the upper-left of the page, that should open a ‘comments’ window.

What’s the WebCARtoon for today? check out CARzy