Post Content

Normally, I don’t use this space to promote comics-related commercial products. But then again, most comics-related commercial products aren’t nearly as cool as Balloonist, and aren’t the creation of my friend Dave Horlick, as Balloonist is. Dave is both a cartoonist himself (anyone who went to Cornell in the mid 1990s remembers the odd genius that was Gerald Gazelle) and a computer programmer, so he’s the perfect guy to create the next great thing in computer-based cartooning.

What is Balloonist, you might ask? Dave (or, technically, this product announcement that he wrote) will be glad to tell you:

Balloonist is cross-platform comics layout software. For busy comics professionals and comics-minded graphics designers, Balloonist represents a big improvement over lettering guides, rulers, and general-purpose illustration software.

Balloonist seeks to accomplish for comics what word processors have done for writing. Using traditional tools, it’s an effort to trace a page full of panels. It’s work to draw or position cut-out word balloons. And lettering the text inside those balloons is tedious.

But the real disadvantage of existing comics workflows is their inflexibility. Want to nudge an overlapping word balloon, or shift a panel? You usually have to start over from scratch. Often, time constraints make us settle for second-class layout.

Not anymore!

With Balloonist, moving and re-sizing the components of a comic is as easy as dragging your mouse. You can even move the gutters between panels! Throw in support for vertically-oriented languages, shape merging, ties, font styles, and multiple levels of Undo, and you have the underpinnings of a comics revolution. Or at least a great new tool.

Anyway, those of you who live to modify and mock the daily funnies might be particularly interested in Balloonist’s Gouache tool, which lets you replace the text in word balloons from somebody else’s comic with your own bon mots. I’ve been pimping this fine piece of software in my adstrip for the past few days, so some of you may have already checked it out. The rest of you can learn more by heading over to the main Balloonist page.

In slightly less meretricious news, my latest Cartoon Violence column is up on Wonkette. (If you want to read my political cartoon commentary but can’t be bothered with the rest of Wonkette’s offerings, you can subscribe to this RSS feed.) And I’ve got another Geek Comic of the Week up on ITworld.com. Since these are weekly occurrences, I won’t be promoting them every time they happen from here on in, but you can see when each has been updated last in the Other comics-related stuff Josh does section of the sidebar.

Post Content

Now and again, some of my readers have suggested that I spend some energy critiquing politically themed comics, either those on the funny pages like Mallard Fillmore or the Boondocks, or the actual political cartoons on the editorial pages. While my personal politics are not a secret (I called for a Red State-Blue State divorce after the 2004 election, and once implied that Dick Cheney likes to eat puppies), you’ll notice that I haven’t done commentary on Doonesbury and its ilk in quite a while. Generally speaking I see this blog as one where all of us, no matter what our political persuasions, can cruelly mock Herb and Jamaal.

But if you really want to see me get political, now you can, albeit not on this site. I’ve been recruited as guest-blogger by Wonkette, which, for those of you unfamiliar with it, essentially does to American government and politics what I do to Rex Morgan, M.D., (i.e., mock it and imply that it’s gay). I’ll be doing weekly installments of a feature called “Cartoon Violence.” This week I assess the good, the bad, and the ugly of cartoons from the editorial pages, but I’ve got some semi-coherent ideas for the future that may involve comics pages strips as well, assuming I’m not cancelled over there.

And for those of you who just wandered over here for the first time from Wonkette, I urge you to stick around for a while. Check out the archives, where can see all my entries on the comic of your choice.

Speaking of politics and this blog, this is as good a time as any to give a shout out to the libertarian types over at Reason magazine’s Hit and Run blog, who managed to find something like three different thin excuses to link to me last week, the best of which was an illumination of the issues surrounding eminent domain law using the current Mark Trail storyline as a jumping-off point.

And, apropos of nothing except that I think it needs to be brought to the attention of those who don’t read the comments on this site: you must, must, must check out The Outbursts of Everett True. This turn-of-the-(last)-century gem is something like They’ll Do It Every Time, in that it chronicles life’s petty ironies; but instead of whining about said ironies, the title character hands out savage beatings. For instance, have you ever tried to get a prescription filled, only to be given a generic drug instead of the one the doctor ordered? Why not assault the pharmacist with an umbrella? Everett also takes on cops, organized religion, perverts, cruelty to animals, and President Roosevelt’s spelling reform. A must read! Thanks to King Dogmeat and James Schend for the head’s up.

Post Content

Yeah, so, it seems that under certain, rarely used operating system/browser combinations (like Internet Explorer on Windows XP), after my redesign users attempting to leave a comment were instead taken to my PayPal donation page. No idea why this happened, but rest assured it was not attempt to extract revenue from my commentors. Should be fixed now. Sorry about that.