Help for the Haunti-capped...

'Scare-Lift'

Skeleton Bob

The Skeleton that had 'no body to go with' finds a solution to his problems...

A cartoon by my brother...

The short-lived songwriting duo of Rodgers & Hammer...

I promise this will be my second and last Rodgers & Hammerstein joke (there's a dynamite cartoon involving a skeleton for you tomorrow), but my brother saw the 'Rodgers & Hammerhead' joke as I was drawing it the other day and said, 'You should do a Rodgers & Hammer Time' cartoon. I liked that joke, so I did it. Think how different 'The Sound of Music' would've been if MC Hammer had written the music... In fact, dear Mr. Hammer, please write your own version of 'The Sound of Music'. I'd watch it.

And on the theme of Hammer, did anyone see his cartoon in the 9os, Hammerman? I remember watching it as a kid. Makes 'Ben 10' look like Shakespeare...

Green Giant

I could have filled this one in with digital colour, but I didn't because sometimes it's just nice to sit down with a box of pencils and do some colouring in. It's a lot more satisfying than shading using a mouse or graphics tablet, and while the result isn't as polished, it still has a certain charm, as though it's something you could have scribbled in the back of your notebook during a boring maths lesson at school. Well, that's the kind of thing I used to do, and probably explains why I'm so bad at maths.

Hammerheads live in the South Pacific, maybe that's where they got the title from...

The famous songwriting duo Rodgers & Hammerhead, at work...

It was March when I last did a 'Too Close For Comfort' cartoon, the reason being I've been hard at work on Grandpa T-Rex. But as well as daily Grandpa T-Rex cartoons there'll be more 'Too Close For Comfort' cartoons from now on too. It is the name of the blog after all, and more cartoons can't be a bad thing.

As for this one, it came from the BBC Proms 'Rodgers & Hammerstein' concert to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Oscar Hammerstein. Though I'm not much of a Rodgers & Hammerstein fan, it was a pretty good show. I don't usually work in pencils, but I was away from my computer and I needed the practice with my Crayolas.

"If I only had a..."

Nowadays men and women have boob jobs and nose jobs and all manner of bodily enhancements and adjustments, so it seems logical to me that the Tin Man might, if he went to a plastic surgeon, want a bigger funnel. No, wait, hang on, it wouldn't be a plastic surgeon. It would have to be some sort of metal-worker. An ironsmith. But then the joke wouldn't really work...

Life in the Fridge...

It was always a common question when I was a kid and it's one that's been asked since the dawn of fridgedom - 'does the light in the fridge go off when I shut the door?'. Of course, the answer is yes, or how else would the food get any sleep? But think about it, if you were a refridgerated item, wouldn't you wonder if the lights outside your chilly box went off when the door was closed? No? Oh, just me then...

And on the 8th Day...

God's first attempt at creating a Unicorn...

The Miller's Tale...

What's black, white and red all over? A Frank Miller film.

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I have to admit I'm not a Frank Miller fan, and while his earlier, 80s works had merit (he did help set Batman on the 'dark' path after all) his later projects have shown a self-indulgence that leaves many cold. I had the misfortune of bumping into his version of 'The Spirit' the other night. I say without any hyperbole that it's an awful film (I think it's worse than 'Batman and Robin', but I realise that's a hotly contested title), because it takes everything that makes 'The Spirit' a fun and exciting read and forces it through Miller's grim, noirish 'Sin City colour scheme sieve'. And while that works for gritty source material like his 'Sin City', it doesn't for the more light-hearted Spirit. It's weirdly dark when it shouldn't be, in terms of tone and visuals and most of the time makes no sense (why does Samuel L. Jackson's character The Octopus dress up as a Nazi at one point?). Above all, it made me wonder if that's how Frank Miller sees everything - harsh, noir-ish and gritty monochrome with dashes of blood red here and there. If so, the world must be a terrifying place when seen through his eyes...

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As an aside, if anyone should have had a hand in the making of a Spirit movie it should have been (my perennial favourite, as Chris will certainly attest to) Darwyn Cooke, whose 12 issue run on 'The Spirit' really is a must read. Not only are each of the self-contained stories well-crafted, fun and often satirical, but the artwork is superb (see here, here, here, here and here to feast your eyes on it). No black and white weirdness there.

One for the Wildlife Documentary fans...

In which Rob is about as in touch with Internet-speak as these Cavemen...

I'll be perfectly honest, I don't really know for sure what 'RT' means in front of a tweet. I've come to the logical conclusion that it means 're-tweet', but it wouldn't surprise me if I was wrong. I'm on shaky ground with Twitter. As I've said before I tried it last year and was on it for all of a week before leaving. It just wasn't for me. It is for others, and I can see it's purpose if you are a celeb or promoting a product, or helping to get news out of a disaster zone/tyrannic dictatorship/core of an event, but I maintain that for the most part Twitter is a vapid and boring medium standing in the way of a good conversation (Captain Patrick Claudius Jean-Luc Xavier Picard agrees). A glance at the live feed last night was proof, when one Tweeter (Tweeter? Twitterer? Twit? Definitely twit in her case) proudly claimed to have eaten an apple. It might have been more interesting if she had informed others of the colour or variety or how juicy it was/was not, but no, she just said she'd eaten an apple, as though somewhere a Doctor was also on Twitter and thinking 'well I'll stay away from her for another day'.
Of course, now I'm engaged in this writing Duel with Chris I do use it (even got an app for it on my iPod and everything) I have to use it. Well I don't have to, but it would be rather pointless to have it if it was just one person tweeting. I use it frequently, but like I said before, Twitter excels at promotion and news headline transference, and that's essentially what we're doing when we tweet about our novels. In it's capacity as an information service, like for our Duel, it's great. For people blabbering on about consuming fruit, it's an annoyance. So on balance, it's still not FTW for me...

By the way what does FTW mean anyway...?

Love & Brain Training...

Don't know who Dr. Kawashima is? Or maybe you've not been doing his brain training exercises? Either way, this will help. A bit.

Obviously I'm not going to tell you what to think about this cartoon, but I don't expect you to find this funny (although it's fanastic if you do). I think you mind find it amusing in a 'bitter-sweet Indie film' sort of way, but really it's meant to give you something to think about. Although do feel free to enjoy the variety of coffees displayed on the board. Cabbageino, anyone? Novacash Coffee is my creative constant; my version of the Slusho. Whenever I draw or write and require a coffee chain, I use Novacash, a thinly-veiled caffeine corporation I invented and first used in my 'read by three people and that's the way I'll keep it' novel 'The How To Take Over The World Club'. I like having something that keeps cropping up in everything I do. It makes it feel like the insanity I churn out shares one little, crazy world.

Death Carries a Tin Opener!

'The Alphabetti Spaghetti Murders'

Table For Two...

'Dinner with Dr. Jekyll'

Trains-Pooh-ting

'The morning after another honey binge...'

Pooh Bear loves honey. Maybe he loves it a little too much. In the books he says he's willing to do anything for it. That sounds like an addiction to me. But depicting him going to a Honey-lovers Anonymous meeting would have been a weak joke. I even toyed with the idea of him losing his foot due to diabetes. In the end I took a more brutal approach. And maybe it's just me extrapolating the joke in my head, but there's something incredibly sad about this cartoon, and all because I put a little son in it. Pooh Bear off his head on honey or recovering from another night's binge while Piglet and Christopher Robin look on disappointedly - that's funny. Having Pooh suffering from a honey-addiction hangover and lying in his own filth while his son tries to rouse him - that's tragic. But comedy and tragedy go hand in hand, and really you get from this cartoon what you want: you can see it as a humorous observation about that bear's love of the runny stuff, or a tragi-comic take on a beloved children's character. I love it either way.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to write a joke about Eeyore's anti-depressants...

'We Could Be Heroes...'

'Guitar Hero: An Illustrated History'

Stranded, perhaps on 'Nomanisan Island'?

'Marooned'

I would fall off my seat in surprise if I learned that this joke hasn't been done before. But that didn't stop me from drawing my own 'Too Close For Comfort' version of it, the way I see it in my head with vivid tropical colours and all.

@mrdarcy

'Pride & Prejudice & Social Networking'

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single Tweeter in possession of suitable technology must be in want of followers with whom to Tweet."

Oh how different - and probably much shorter - Jane Austen novels would be if Twitter or Facebook were around at the time of their writing. Romance was conducted in a more dignified, but glacially slow way, back then. There were rules of courtship to follow and romantic intentions to be analysed and acted upon. Everything was a lot more restrained. Things didn't just happen like this... ...which, I think you'll agree, is probably for the best. Tweets and status updates do not make for classic literature, especially as you'd just get pages and pages of Mrs. Bennet Tweeting about wanting to marry-off her daughters to rich fellas.

Wilde Thing

'A JPEG of Dorian Gray'

It's a rare opportunity, getting to fuse basic IT knowledge with Oscar Wilde to make a joke, which makes it all the more satisfying when one comes along. Oh Dorian, why did you have to open that email attachment!