any chance you know where/how to dig up a cartoon diagrammy-thing of a dog standing up, crossing its legs with a really worried expression on its face cuz it's gotta pee?

Can I have a super power that's already taken, or does mine have to be a unique one? And if it has to be unique, has Credit Card Woman been taken yet? Can make a balance disappear in a single swipe. Will fling credit cards at the troglodytes in the accounting dept, who dare say I owe them $2,000.00, and the cards will go whirring through the air, spinning round and round and chop their weasley little trog heads off. Grrr.

OK, so I was driving to Ohio on Christmas day and spun out on the highway, winding up in the proverbial "ditch by the side of the road." That was unlucky. Many people stopped to see if I was OK, and in a short time a tow truck winched me out. That was lucky. My car was undrivable, because of a bent control rod. That was unlucky. The tow truck waited to see if I could drive (I couldn't) and then towed me to the garage and the owner stopped by and was willing to take a look at it right then and there on Christmas day no less, and had me back on the road a half hour or so later. That was beyond lucky.

Somehow, whenever my car hits things (or vice versa), it seems to put me in the mind of Spaceman Spiff, from Calvin and Hobbes (see The Last Voyage of the Frankmobile (Mark I)). Fortunately, this was NOT the last voyage of the Frankmobile Mark III. But enough happened that I had to make 3 strips (well, 4 actually, then I combined two together to form strip II). The wormhole effects made me want to use some sort of graphics program rather than doing it all by hand, and so while I was doing that, I figured I'd try my hand at drawing in color (I've ventured there before, but not very often). The frames were not done in order, so if the style changes from frame to frame, that's because I was learning about how to do stuff in Photoshop. It's still primative, but I'm still learning. (01/03)

Timothy Weber and I decided to create a comic strip together. It took a lot of time, but was a lot of fun. I did the pencils and inks, he did the colors and lettering, and we both did the story. It's on his site, and there's a long discussion about it afterwards (including how exactly Frank draws an ass, complete with Action Photos). With luck, the first of many collaborative projects. Enjoy. (9/03)
Addendum: Link updated to archive.org 9/24.

Anyway, while wearing these huge shoes, I was put in the mood of what it must be like for a clown to go shoe shopping. Only his requirements would be kind of different than mine. Note that one of the tricky parts of drawing this was to create a clown that was not Milkey the Clown, as I was not going for that effect. Once again, I'm playing with Illustrator and Photoshop for the coloring. I'm learning.... (8/04)

I was playing a little with some simple gray backgrounds to add a little texture/color and I still can't draw an anatomically correct hand (this remains true two years after I drew this). I think it was also a move towards a more cartoon-y, yet simple, sort of form. (9/05)

Of course, this idea was done in a Saturday night Live skit in the early '90s, with various passengers and even the captain making beeping sounds just so a woman would have to remove yet another article of clothing ("SLOWLY!") and walk through the metal detector one more time. And yes, that IS a circuit diagram, but no it's just nonesense I threw together. Hand penciled and inked, then minorly cleaned up and colored with Photoshop (no shading this time) and lettered with Illustrator. I finally figured out how to create balloons and tails with Illustrator instead of using generic ones. (10/07)

Hand penciled and inked, then minorly cleaned up and colored with Photoshop and lettered with Illustrator. I'm still getting the hang of creating balloons and tails with Illustrator. (2/08)

This was another experiment, a scan at 1200dpi, which in the end practically choked Photoshop and Illustrator. Eventually, I shrunk them down, and am trying a variation based on a suggestion by Timothy having one frame per screen. I know, they're all mis-aligned a few pixels left/right. Too much hassle to fix this time around. (2/08)

In this experiement, I scanned the original at 1200dpi, but then quickly chopped it into 6 frames. Photoshop and Illustrator were much happier about dealing with something of that size rather than the full size version. I also made sure all images are a uniform 600 pixels wide this time. Finally, Timothy requested the "THUD" from The Impenetrable Wall of Chocolate be more of a "THOOM" which I liked, but didn't feel like regenerating, and it was not an appropriate sound effect for One Day At The Border, so it had to wait until now. (3/08)

A return to low-tech. This was completely hand-drawn, inked, and lettered. I used Photoshop to scan it in, clean up a few stray marks (I scanned it in in greyscale rather than B&W, at 1200dpi), and scaled it down to the appropriate size. The whole process was remarkably fast. Under a day from initial start (initial idea) to finish (posting). That's close to a land-speed record for me for a 6 panel drawing. Maybe not as clean as a computer font, but the balloon in frame 3 would've taken me hours to create. (10/08)

I, more or less, just put a frame around this story, but since I don't really know either of the people involved (I don't even know their real names), I just used Sarah and Bill.

[Addendum: another friend familiar with the story suggested I add these two true quotes into the description...it's too late for me to change the drawing, but I can put them here:

1. "I even put the can in the oven for a while to warm it up for him!"
2. "Before going to the checkout line, I threw some cake mix in the basket so no one would be onto my plan!"

I've actually been meaning to draw this for a few months and finally got around to finishing it up. I decided to just draw do it quick, in black and white with hand-lettering, so it wouldn't drag on more than it has. (11/08)

So once again, I let my imagination wander into the Calvin and Hobbes territory and present this Canter Bury Tale. (And just to clarify, the pun is that my head was buried in the dirt, not that I was buried in the I'm-dead sense.) (06/09)

This was just a quick sketch and ink, then scanned greyscale at 1200 dpi, reduced, then into Illustrator for speech balloons, and final cropping back in Photoshop. This time I didn't want to take the time to color it and it should be clear enough what's going on (and there are only three "actors" in the drawings) and I could play with cross-hatching. I was also too lazy to draw backgrounds. I think I'm getting better with the speech baloon tails. I'm kind of mixed about frame 3, as I initially wanted it to have the text breaking out of the balloon, but then thought about having some funky shape to the balloon, but that exceeds my Illustrator abilities. I kind of like the last frame's balloon, as it was mostly luck playing around with some options. I thought about trying for some funky balloon shape, but again, that's time consuming if nothing else. This little project was done in 2 days, one for the quick sketches, blocking, and text, and one to pencil, ink, scan, edit, and upload. (09/09)

Full on color drawing, shading, lettering, and all that stuff. (02/10)

Full on color drawing, lettering, and all that stuff. Inked with Illustrator and with a ton of layers (1 for each color) in Photoshop. Needs shading, but the entire process was fast. (03/10)

Yes, this is the first thing that goes through my mind when I think about the opera. It's quite sad, I know. I thought about casting Bugs as Bess, since he's quite happy to go in drag, but then I realized that Bugs really wouldn't be right playing second banana to Porky's top billing. But Daffy and Porky have a long history together, so I think that works nicely. I also added the little wig to Daffy, almost as an afterthought (when I was inking it, actually), to make it obvious who is who. The idea for the set was stolen from Rabbit of Seville, and models for Porky and Daffy were stolen from various images (the ends of Porky's hands were cut off the frame, so I had to guess a little, especially with his right hand, but think that looks OK.

Full on, 100% computer generated stuff, from the sketch to the final product. A bunch of bouncing back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator. Lots of layers until the last stages. I'm not happy about the shading (thoghh Porky's gloves are OK and I like the streaks on the window), but I wanted to get this out. I didn't realize until late that since Daffy's body is black, any contour lines have to be something other than black. Rather than try to do something fancy with changing the line colors, I offset the color layer by a few pixels, which has the effect of making the lines on his body not-black. Serendipity, luck, or whatever. My first verison of Daffy had a few lines by the mouth and eyes wrong which made him look angry (a common expression for him, to be sure). It amazed me how 2-3 lines that are a little off can change the entire expression. My level of respect for the Warner Brothers artists has increased even more. (10/10)

I made a crappy sketched version in Photoshop. I decided to put that online. Then I wondered how long it would take me to ink it, if I could actually do it quickly. I managed to do it in about 2 hours, starting around 11:30pm, so that's the one I've posted here. It's not perfect, and it's not until the third panel that I've kind of got the feel for things, but it's a start.

Mostly, it's in this section because it's a 3 panel drawing which is too much for the "sketch of the day" section. I also realize I haven't put a "proper" cartoon up for quite a while. Now I have. (5/12)

All computer generated, sketched, inked, lettered, colored, shaded. It took a while to finish and the shading isn't great, but hey, it makes me giggle.

"MOO!!!" (6/12)

All computer generated, sketched, inked, lettered and lettered. Skipped coloring and shading to cut the whole process down to just a day or two. And of course I was cheating with reusing a lot of the images. (7/12)

This was a quick sketch, drawn in Photoshop, then inked in Illustrator. Towards the end I figured out there are built-in Wacom brushes which tend to work much better than the default ones. And I figured out how to save a higher resolution file from Illustrator. And finally, I used Photoshop to put the frames together and add a border. I decided not to color this, partially because I'm lazy but also to see if the characters are recognizable without cheats like colors. Call it an experiment. (7/13)

This was almost a Photoshop-only project. I used Illustrator only to create the speech and thought balloons and then pasted them in Photoshop. I decided I wanted a simple line-only drawing, no coloring. A test to see if characters and things are still recognizable.

Of course, this raises the question of whether my style has changed or improved in 15 years or so since I did dalmation. (8/13)

This was mostly low-tech. I draw lots of pictures on a small notepad using a pen. And then I tool lots of pictures of them. And then managed to put them all together on my computer without making it become comatose out, after reducing the size several times. (11/13)

I drew this one in Illustrator. I tried to color it there but failed miserably, so I put it into Photoshop and then it was easy to color. In the last frame, the two characters originally looked horrible. I redrew it (in Illustrator). I used my little wooden mini-model which helped with proportions and just used very short strokes with the pen, which helped (trying to draw 3 fingers at once with a Bezier curve won't work so well, but looked much more reasonable with shorter strokes that only have one bend in them. All in all this didn't take too long. It's not the greatest thing, and I was too lazy to try to fit a billion labels in at the end, but hopefully the idea is...well, obvious. Note that this isn't the first time I've used Captain Obvious. (10/14)

I did some quick sketching in Photoshop and then used the pen tool in Illustrator to make clean lines. I wanted to do some shading and different sized lines but ran out of time. And there are some parts that aren't terribly good. Though I got the collars working a bit beter than they had been, so that's a plus. Did all the coloring using the Live Paint mode in Illustrator. Didn't take that long. (8/17)

I did a few layout sketches on paper but this was mostly all done in Illustrator. I also took a few quick pictures of my self to use as references for the facial expressions. Inking, coloring, shading, and lettering all in Illustrator. I used Photoshop at the end to cut it into more manageable panels. It was a few days, but there was a week gap while I was traveling before I could finish it. (7/19)

Most of this was done in Illustrator. Because I hand-traced reference images, the 4 charaters are pretty recognizable. The colors on the ones where I did more shading look semi-decent. Backgrounds, which were mostly ripped off, were put together with Photoshop. (12/19)

This was done all in Illustrator. I used some reference drawings as well as modeling a few things myself, but all were free-hand drawn, nothing traced. I used a lot of layers for the different compoents and it seemed to work out decently. (08/21)

One was supposed to be the "not really funny" single panel comic strips. There were fountains by some of the buildings, and at least one had a little duck house with ducks and housing was a topic of conversation back then a well as now. The second strip was probably the first time I ever drew Spaceman Spiff (my next version was 9 months later and the first picture on this page and supposed to represent me causing some generic mischief. As usual, it doesn't really look like me and my boss wasn't a dude and was really nice. I don't know what I used for reference, since this was before the World Wide Web and I didn't own any Calvin and Hobbes books. I might have used one that appeared in a recent newspaper or borrowed a book from someone.

As far as I can tell, this was probably drawn in pencil and then inked with a ball point pen on a quadrille graph spiral notebook. This would have been drawn in August 1989, so it's 32 years old now. (12/21)

This was a quick drawing, done with pencil on paper, scanned in, then inked with Photoshop, and with Illustrator used to make speech balloons. It all went pretty smoothly and quickly. (12/21)

This was a quick drawing, done with Krita using the tablet computer and the pen. All told I think I did it in about 2 hours, including the 30 minute nap when I fell alseep icing my leg. Rough drawings, but I wanted things to be simple and quick. Similar to Duck You, I reused some images adjusting the facial expressions. I did rotate the face for the middle frame. I was only using the most basic features of Krita, but it was enough for doing something quick. It's been a few years(!) since I made a larger-form drawing and put it here instead of the so-called Sketchbook Entry of the Day section. And this one was like warp speed, though it looks ratty as hell. Hurray! (7/24)