sunday cover...

what i decided...

because of the loss of a day of production due to thanksgiving, i had to get something done relatively quick...so i had to abandon my initial plans of combining all four images into one and go with something less ambitious...

i like this one because there is a lot that can be done with it when combined with the cover masthead and the flow of title and text around the image.

i'll post a finished cover when printed...thanks for all the input!

cover ideas...maybe...

my newspaper is doing a sunday cover story about me and my two new books out...i wanted to do a cool illustrated cover but i'm at a loss as to which one i want to take to the next level... i might just combine all four... because sometimes it seems as thought there are four of me bopping around... isn't that a scary thought? tell me what you think...

four new t-shirts designs in the bob shop!

get all your holiday shopping done in one convenient location!

holiday card idea for us...

i had to post this because as soon as i finished it, i laughed...not at the snowball hit but because of the little jack russell terrier doing a steve mcqueen over the fence on the left...

on the death of the art of mix tape making...

back in the day, for those of you that were born in the mid-seventies like me...that were on the tail end of 8-tracks, vinyl and in the infancy of cassettes and compact discs... remember fondly the genre of mix tapes.

making a mix tape took hours... especially if you were filling a 90 minute tape (45 minutes on each side). before you could begin, you had to have your music selection somewhat organized... which meant that every single thing you owned that had a song on it wound up on your bedroom floor. everything. all your music, along with borrowed stuff from friends and other mix tapes given to you were on that floor...save for a small walking path you made through everything to get in and out of your room. ah, memories...

once you had all your music together, you had to decide what type of mood you were trying to set... the overall theme of the tape... i can't begin to tell you how many tapes i made for girls i thought i liked---filled with the most starch ridden, syrup covered, lovey-dovey tunes that i wouldn't even think of listening to (mush less admit to owning) in civilian life. stuff like debbie gibson, wilson phillips and (gasp) richard marx were weapons in my hormone driven, wanting a girlfriend, adolescent existence...the tapes never worked...but making them kept my butt off the streets...in fact, i could go so far as to say making mix tapes kept me away from drugs...but i won't. drugs kept me away from drugs... but that's for another blogpost.

the golden age of frank mix tape making began when i got my driver's license. my mother had this rusty 1985 red pontiac something... it was small and slow... but it had a tape deck and a set of great speakers... so when i was deemed responsible enough to drive on my own, i started making theme tapes to drive to. driving fast tapes, thinking tapes, depression tapes... you name it i made it.

around this time, late 80's/early 90's, i began to make the transition to compact discs. having music on cds was so cool because instead of fast forwarding/rewinding a tape to get to a song, all you had to do was punch the number in and press play. that's when the soul began to fade...the tapes began to fluctuate in sound quality... you could always tell which songs were recorded from another cassette and those that came from a disc... the ones from the disc were ALWAYS louder... it would scare you sometimes... you'd be driving and listening, the volume know would be all the way up to hear a tape song--- if you forgot that the next song was from a disc you'd be blown out. those were great times.

when i got to college and had to get a job, i would make tapes to listen to at work... i worked in a university library shelving books... so i was allowed to wear a walkman...it was probably the best job (aside from being a cartoonist) that i ever had... no one bothered me and there were never times of boredom--- there was always a cart of books that needed to be returned. loved it. i had tapes i would listen to while in art class... tapes whose sole purpose was to inspire creativity... i had at least 25-35 cassette tapes... some were so good and so worn out that i had to make copies of them.

kids today don't have this. i say that as my earbud headphones are feeding me a song from my 5000 song laptop library... if you wanted a song on a mix tape you had to go find it...there was bold-faced intent with each selection... now if i want to listen to something, i view by artist and click... if i don;t have it, i go to itunes... as opposed to raiding all your friends music stash, waiting for the music store to open or even still...calling a radio station, requesting your desired track, then sitting by the radio with your fingers on the record and play button ready to snag it... if you were lucky, the dj would be nice enough to not talk through the intro of the song.

today, we point, click, scroll, move and burn. a process that would once take an entire weekend now takes six to ten minutes.

i still have some of my tapes... but most of the cases have been crushed, lost, thrown away or just simply lost to time. hell, i don't even own a tape player anymore... but i do have two ipods, a laptop and a desktop computer that have literally days of music on them...

my how times have changed. may you rest in peace mix tape... thanks for keeping me off drugs.

more tales from the moleskine...

this is a sketch for a page in my first semester MFA project...

i've decided, after hours of soul searching and self-hate that i'm going to abandon painting for the temporary future... my heart is in ink...can't be helped...

so i'm going to concentrate on telling a story...without using any words... or at least the bare minimum...i tend to use a lot of words in my comic strip so taking that tool away from myself is going to be a challenge...

company holiday card...

inked sketch--love my moleskine...

sketches for a project...

two new bob the squirrel collections

ah yes, the moment you've all been waiting for... not one bob book.. but TWO! available now for your squirrel viewing pleasure...


if mistakes are learning experiences...
is a collection of 2007 bob the squirrel strips. this one covers the end of frank's marriage, meeting lezley and moving in with his grandmother. there was definitely a lot of growth from january to december...



they're fun to watch, aren't they?
collects the 2008 strips up to the end of october. frank and bob buy a house, frank gets serious with lezley, he gets into grad school and then a funky little jack russell terrier named lucy gets introduced into the mix.

both books can be purchased by clicking on the lulu.com link at the right.

anyone have a dime?

hope...

many of you may not know that i've rather recently become an avid gormand of american history. for some reason i can't get enough of it...my dvr is chock full of history channel programs i have yet to watch and my bookshelves are literally overflowing onto the floor with books that i have read and are on my list to be read. mostly, i just like trivia. i'm not terribly concerned about exact names and dates...

i want to know the little stuff...

like for instance, i was tickled to read that andrew jackson, the 7th president of the US, was the first president to have an assassination attempt be made upon him. the dude that was going to shoot him had two pistols... he walked up to jackson only to have both pistols misfire. so, jackson, being the stone cold badass that he was, proceeded to beat the hell out of this guy with his cane... people had to come to pull the president off this guy! that's the stuff i dig.

today, we rise from our beds to the dawn of a new era in american politics. the first african-american us president. damn. i honestly thought i would never see this moment. i just assumed that america was going to stick to what i knows... white males. thank goodness there was a change.

i'm a very cynical sort of guy. i always think the absolute worst, that way when the outcomes roll around i'm never completely disappointed. i've been swimming through the stories of this presidential campaign for two years...he's up, she's down... blah, blah, blah... i became so jaded witht he whole process that i stopped doing editorial cartoons... i had been doing them for almost ten years without a break. this election just burned me out. i couldn;t do it. didn;t help that i have a daily comic strip, a new house that always seems to need fixing and added graduate school on top of all that. i just was stretched too thin. i had to focus my energy on my strengths...and, frankly, my heart was just blackened by it all...nothing ever changed, no one ever learned from their mistakes...ever. what was one more cartoon that would be forgotten minutes after it was seen do to change that? not much.

as the campaign wore on, obama grew on me. i'm always a sucker for a well delivered speech. having the ability to speak effectively before a group of people is one of the most invaluable tools a person, not just a politician, can possess. the dude's speeches moved me. he's good. very good. and that's what won me over. he made me, for the first time in my adult life, have faith is something.

now, i'm not getting all mushy on you. i'm also a devout realist. if history has taught me anything it's that saying and doing are two different animals. you say what you need to say to get where you want to go. politics has, and will always be at its core, pure theatre. if when you get there you do some of the things you said... awesome. if you try and can't because of immovable objects in your way... that's fine too... it's the machine. it's theatre.

will obama, accomplish everything he says he wants to... maybe. will his ideas turn the country around? who knows. are we hurting enough right now to listen? sure. is he the right person, right now for this monumental task? possibly.

it's all theatre. today begins the first act of the new production. we've all had a chance to choose the playbill and the main characters. take your seats and hope someone taller than you doesn't sit in front of you.

now we just have to see if it'll be a comedy or a tragedy.

bobbing in the rain...

i would also like to thank everyone who responded to my lengthy post about jeremy... i could have written much, much more...

he was a good kid that was taken way before he should have been... he will be missed.

thank you for all your prayers...i'm not one to necessarily believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, i'm sure jeremy is up there hanging out with will eisner and charles schulz having a huge peanut butter and chocolate latte...