Vacations for cartoonists?

Yes, and I actually wanted to get back to work.

I’ve just spent a week in part of the Maritimes (for those not familiar with Canadian geography, these include the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island.)

The bus tour began in Halifax, Nova Scotia and ended in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. We flew in a prop plane, escorted by three terrifying looking thunderheads that drenched most of the tour area during our stay. There were a few perfect days, and more that weren’t. I found myself falling in love with Charlottetown. More about that some time in the future. This is not a travelogue.

I got some great story references from a young man who was playing with a small puppy and one of his teenage daughters, in a tourist trap that we stopped at for lunch. I was so happy that we did…that puppy showed me that I wasn’t making Sirius the puppy active enough. He has to never stop moving, have a permanent case of the wiggles. Future strips will hopefully reflect this.

I redid the entire character lineup to reflect the design changes that have occurred since the start of the year. Kate, in particular, is younger and considerably more appealing now. Sirius has had minor changes, while Shawm and Stella are unchanged. Floof had her big re-design in January.

January lineup.

August lineup.

I’m enjoying the strip and still not sure if the readers are. Many people don’t comment on the daily strips, and those that do seem to express a strong preference for the cute animals. They are less fond of the ones that feature Kate.

Kate has gone back to school, and that story line wraps in a few days when she completes a science project after the first two tries are ‘helped’ by Sirius and Floof. She has problems with some of the other classmates. She is very bored in class.

In other words, Kate is a normal kid. Not mischievous, not, as one person keeps insisting, a victim of attention deficit disorder. It’s amazing to see how people psychoanalyze a comic character (I would hate to see what they think of Lucy and Linus Van Pelt in PEANUTS, or Petey from CUL DE SAC.)

They aren’t real, even if they sometimes are like members of the family. And like family members, I don’t always control what they do. The characters react ‘in character’.

But people will say what they say. They can comment on the comic strips, in real time. I wonder how the older cartoonists would react to that. Some, like Russel Myers (who has been drawing Broom-Hilda for 53 years) have worked in the print and the digital world. Myers has seen a lot of changes. So have the Walkers, and the Hart family, who continue ‘legacy’ strips started by their relatives 60 or 70 years ago.

News just broke that all Australian newspapers have eliminated the comics pages. This movement was led by the Murdoch-owned papers last year. That small rockslide is now a landslide.

Comics are still popular. Aren’t they?

If so, why are they being dropped from the print media? Maybe we will all be digital cartoons from now on.