#47 "Herpes or Hairpiece?" December 16, 2011

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My first cartooning teacher, J.P. Crangle used to tell me to always put the date on my drawings. This way, he said, you could go back and look at your old artwork and appreciate how awful it is. Okay, he may not have said it that way, he was a pretty positive guy. He probably said you should date your work so you can go back and see how much you've improved over time. So, I guess this piece above is almost two years old now (according to the date that now gets automatically put on the drawing once it gets scanned) and I can see how awful it really is only now. I remember at the time liking the coloring job of this piece, especially the left hand side with the guy holding the remote control. Now when I look at it, I only see everything that I would like to change, meaning pretty much everything. Mind you, I will not be doing that. Not out of laziness, although that certainly plays a part, but to let this piece stand as a testament of what I was doing at the time. As J.P. would say, it is the kind of art you were doing at the time, and it acts as a place marker in the progression of style and talent. I am sure that I will look back to what I am doing now in two years and say the exact same thing; namely that what I am doing now is terrible (even though I think that it is relatively good now). This is the life of anyone who is creative. As you grow and move along in life, your vision changes. The important stuff of today is yesterday's throwaway idea. This is the main reason I would never want to get a tattoo. I guess it would be the same sort of thing, a place marker on the road of life; but I have scars for that. When I was first considering getting a tattoo, I was probably a teenager, and I did think that my artwork at the time was pretty darn good. Good enough, anyway, to think that it was worth pursuing as a lifelong pursuit. So, I thought it would be a great idea to get one of my own drawings tattooed onto my body somewhere (I always pictured it on my backbone near the base of my neckbone). I am so glad that I never drew the "perfect" drawing that I would take down to the local tattoo artist. I look back to what my style was, what I was interested in, and my overall general attitude toward the world and I am so happy I never went through with it. I would have to constantly make excuses for this weird looking mushroom on my back with the face who looks like he may or may not be tripping after ingesting part of himself. That, or I just would have gotten a big "Steal Your Face" emblem. Either way, it would have been regrettable. Not that I have anything against tattoos (or the Grateful Dead, for that matter). I think a lot of them are extremely well done and fascinating to look at. So, with that regret in mind, I would like to put one of my more recent "Mind on Loup" drawings side by side with this one just to show you the progress, but I also like keeping the timeline continuous, and in the right order. This way, you as the viewer can see first hand, the transformation of style, color, and overall feel of each piece. In fact, you could do it now! We started doing these drawings back in 2009, so you could scroll back two years and see just how bad the original "Mind on Loup" drawings really are! Oh wait, let's stay positive.

#47 "Herpes or Hairpiece?" December 16, 2011

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The title of this piece comes from the website Bacon or Beercan. For a while it was just the "bacon or beer can" guy, then they added the "Hairpiece or Herpes" guy, who, if you go to that website you might know from the nightly news. Or not. I was one of those people who thought the whole thing was hilarious, so I named this piece after it. Mostly, because of the figure who appears in the left-hand side of the picture with the microscopic penis and the spots. Also, the guy holding him up could be wearing a hairpiece on his face. It could also be a merkin, I'm not sure. At any rate, I couldn't originally figure out the point to this one, so I gave it the arbitrary name. It may have something to do with sickness. It could be a fever dream. My fever dreams used to always involve math. I would go to sleep thinking that I wasn't sick, and then spend all night sweating and dreaming of more and more complex math nightmares. A lot of time, the problems weren't in the real world, but looked more like the code from The Matrix moving along in different plains in varying forms of difficulty. I was never able to solve these problems and would wake up sweaty and sick. It was so common when I was sick, that I could tell in the dream that I was getting sick just from the math problems showing up in the dream. I have never missed a shift at the restaurant for being sick. Sure, I have been sick at work before; I'm sure everyone has been at some point, but I have never actually missed a shift on account of sickness. That includes hangovers. Are there times when I should have taken off? Heck Yes! I have been in rough shape for work plenty of times, but I always pushed through it. Knock on wood, in my adult life, I have only been sick enough to miss work a couple of times, and those times all magically fell on my days off. Then, when I had to work again, I would pop some Dayquil and show up and wait those darn tables, by golly. I think if waiters had some sort of Union, you wouldn't have to do that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it's not even right to do that. Showing up to work with the flu is just mean to your co-workers and customers. But then, if you go into an office building with the flu, you are just as likely to infect the same amount of people or more, what with the central air and ventilation systems and what not. So what's a person to do? You can't miss that much work even if you DO have sick days. So you go to work and say, "Well, I hope these people all took their flu shots." You suck it up and work. People have been doing it for as long as there has been work. I'm just glad I don't have to work with Scarlet Fever or The Plague. That would've been difficult, although I'm sure people have done it. I mean, of course people have done it! Think of those poor dudes who had to dispose of the bodies! They probably had the same sickness and just worked until they climbed in the wheelbarrow themselves and had someone take over for them.