Close to Home

The mysterious and confusing skilift cartoon

Well, this cartoon apparently threw a lot of people for a loop.  And now that I look at it again, it is pretty vague.  The idea is that the skiers riding up the chairlift are noticing mangled skiers coming down the lift.
Something horrific is happening at the top, but we can only surmise what
it is.  But in this case, there is clearly just too much left to the imagination.  It's an interesting visual, but it needs more.  Sorry to leave
you all mystified.  It was just one of those days at the drawing table.

John

How I got into cartooning: Part 1

People always want to know how you get into a profession like cartooning.  And for obvious reasons; we get to hang out on tropical beaches while we draw, scan the stuff into our syndicates and then tool around the world in leer jets until the next batch of cartoons is due in a month.  Ah, if only it were so...(jet fuel has become too expensive for me to tool around much anymore).

My cartooning career began by accident in Bayonne NJ sometime around 1993, in a squalid little apt where three of my friends lived.  We were up one Sunday morning (er, afternoon I mean)  and were looking at the comic pages.  We were smart alecky college kids and   generally made fun of the comics at the time, being to foolish to see their true wisdom.  At any rate, one of my friend dared me to draw a cartoon, which I did.  I had no art background, but I scrawled out something inane and he laughed, so thats what counted.   In the weeks that followed, I started tooling around a bit more with cartooning, merely to mail to my friends and entertain them.  (this was back in the days before cable TV, so good entertainment was hard to come by)
As I sat in college classes I started jotting down ideas for single panel cartoons until I had quite a stash of them. 

I got out of school in 1983 with a degree in mechanical engineering, at a time when it was actually hard to find a job as an engineer.  It was really during this period of part time jobs, living with my parents that I truly got into cartooning.  I started drawing up the ideas that I had, keeping them in a little drawing book.  At  the same time, I finally got an engineering job near Albany, NY and settled in the quaint little town of Saratoga Springs.  This was in early 1985.  I sent some of my cartoons off to a little semi-monthly paper called The Glens Falls Chronicle, and oddly enough, the editor there, Mark Frost, liked my cartoons!  He was willing the pay me five buck a cartoon, which meant ten bucks a month for me.  Nothing like cold, hard cash to put a fire under one's feet.  I started drawing more cartoons, this time with an eye on the magazine market, where cartoonists could get paid $35 or $40, and be able to buy socks and groceries and deodorant. 

New Close To Home Book Hits Bookstores!

The Associated Press

SINGAPORE--Thousands of fans mobbed bookstores to get their hands on the latest Close To Home collection, "Everything I Need To Know I Learned on Jerry Springer."  The north wall of a Barnes & Noble in downtown Singapore  collapsed as fans pushed their way into the stores.  Several customers came to blows as they grabbed for books and a store clerk received multiple contusions and had his spleen removed as he tried to quell the frenzied crowd.
   In Bogota, Columbia, drug lords siezed thousands of copies of the book and sold it on the black market for the equivalent of $160 dollars US.  The madness continued throughout much of Asia, Europe and Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Velma Krantz, of West Fort Wayne sad she had never seen such chaos since John Tesh's "Romantic Christmas" CD debuted in 1995 resulting in the hospitalization of  hundreds of Fort Wayneians  and  the burning  in effigy of a local bookstore's assistant manager.  Said 12 year old Jason Veegler about the Close To Home incident  "I was walking home with my book.  Some big kids came along and pushed me into an alley.  They forced me to read cartoons to them while they laughed.  Then they tore out page sixty-seven and ran off.  It was horrible." 
   Rumors continue to swirl about the mysterious "snowmen" cartoon on page sixty-seven, which, if held at
a 37 degree angle to the dome light of a 1972 Mercury Cougar, is purported to reveal the location of the Arc of the Covenant.  Crowds of people have forced their way into bookstores to buy or steal the book, while some have simply ripped the coveted snowman cartoon from the book.  In California, 23 owners of '72 Cougars have been dragged from their vehicles as people clutching the snowman cartoon held it under the cars' domelights. Similar attacks occurred in Chicago, Miami, New York and Tunisia.  While millions of readers were caught up in the "swowman mystery", others seemed to care little about the controversy. Ardent CTH fan Clark Rimnard said "I really could care less about the ark of convenient stores, or whatever it is.  I got the book to get my fix of Close to Home, and this one has it all;  bald guys, people with glasses, weird contraptions, murder, mayhem, adventure, polyunsaturated fats, mollusks...all the things that turned me on to Close TO Home in he first place, only better."

It seems that regardless of poeples' motives for buying the book, the book has been an overnight sensation.  As bookstore manager Reggie Kolinsky of Owl Pellet Books put it, "It's an overnight sensation."