Tag Archives: fathers

Not So Nice

If you’re still reading this, seek medical and psychiatric attention. Now read on.

On this holy night – the night when I can finish a cartoon and eat some industrial, artery-hardening, DNA-altering chocolate chip cookies as the sun sets gently in the west – I am left with my thoughts,  and numerous mental images and random strings of conscious creations. And those thoughts lead me to the subject of family. The good kind of family, like my brothers-in-law who when they visit are low maintenance and easy-going and actually fix all the crap in my house that I avoid like trash-strewn plague, largely because I’m incompetent with any kind of tools.

Family like that you want around. No, you can’t pick your family anymore than you can pick your family’s noses (not when they are awake, at least). But you can make room for different family, like my best friend, who is like a brother to me. A larger, hairier, gassier brother, but a brother all the same. It’s proof that you can choose your family even if they don’t fit the “marriage/blood” description mandated by society, genetics, lawyers, civil servants and others who would seek to thwart my plans of world domination.

Well, not so much world domination, but maybe domination of my crushing desire to eat anything baked with sugar and chocolate, or made with french fries and gravy, or dumplings with some kind of soy and vinegar sauce.

But I digress. Family is the subject of this episode of the comic once deemed by Guenther Grass and Thomas Mann as “Scheiße, absolut Scheiße!” It continues the introduction of the mother of all characters, namely the mother of our main man. Sure, it would have spared you some sweaty seconds if I had plopped her into to the first frame, thus sparing you from undoubtedly scanning the page for hidden obscenities and signs of the first female character to walk the streets of Stanko & Tibor.

But then I decided that would be too easy. So you’ll have to wait. All I can say, she’s about as nice and full of sweetness as her son. One more episode and you’ll get to see her. She, who would further cheapen and filthify the world of Stanko & Tibor.

Wishing you all many hugs, kisses and inappropriate butt-squeezes,

Herr Doktor Professor Ludwig von Schittenhelm Druker

The Beginning

The BeginningWhen we things start — and I mean things we intentionally start, like fires, rumors, and computer viruses — more often than not, we don’t really care where they will wind up. In fact, I dare say we consciously ignore them not caring what the resulting perils will be. Often we walk away to eat something sugary or fatty or greasy, like a huge pizza, or to catch a TV show on the Web or the 72-inch plasma screen that cost a fortune to buy, install and get all the channels for.

See? I just mentally walked away from my very first creation, that of Stanko & Tibor, the inaugural cartoon of what will hopefully be a dynasty unparalleled in the annals of illustrative history. And if it isn’t a dynasty, then as long as I leave my mark. A good mark, not a stain, which many would allege this comic is. Like grape juice on a white carpet, or like mud on a shag carpet that even the toxic cleaner with the “spring fresh” name you buy at the store from a multinational conglomerate with a record of polluting wading pools in poorer neighborhoods.

No, it shall be a chronicle of the history of humor, of my mind, its myriad turns, twists and potholes. It shall bear witness to the absurdity that is daily life, daily politics, daily mayhem that is a day job. It will be carved into some database’s silicon chip memory like digital stone, never to be erased! Well, unless the CIA gets a hold of it, or maybe a meteor crashes into the data center. Actually, I bet it’ll be a CIA meteor.

So enjoy the musings, stylings and ramblings of a man who needs more sleep.