I drew this cartoon yesterday as the hard drive of my Macintosh OS 9.2 here at the office made sickening grinding and whistling sounds throughout the day. The computer crashed 10 or so times and I probably spent an accumulated 2 hours looking at frozen blank screens while praying that things would come unfrozen. Anyway, here's my cartoon, warts and all.

If I had more time on my hands I would've remedied some of the things that will forever bug me about this cartoon. There's a few other details I wanted to put in before the final grind at 4:30 yesterday left me helpless to do anything more to the cartoon. The green toilet seat in the box, for instance, would've had its size increased to be at proper scale to characters in the cartoon. I'm not too happy with the colours and luminocity of the background. I chose yesterday to be experimental in my approach to creating my cartoon, emulating some of the techniques I learned while I was at the AAEC convention in Denver after an interesting presentation by Clay Bennett. He does his background separately from the foreground. Here's my background:

I've used this technique before, and I've found one of the big drawbacks to this method is how the foreground covers a lot of detail I put into the background. It's far more difficult to balance stuff in a cartoon using this technique than actually just drawing in the background after you've put in the foreground. I'm now finding that in using this technique backgrounds made simpler work best. Cartooning is a continuing education... as is trying to make blogs interesting.

Every cartoonist must face the challenge each summer of coming up with stuff without the help of politicians, who hibernate until early Autumn. It forces us to satirize issues and society, which can be refreshing, especially to those who don't pay much attention to the political shenanigans which are the staple for which editorial cartoonists mostly feed on.

One of my first cartoons of Stephen Harper was drawn in August of 2002, after a rare appearance on Parliament Hill some months after assuming the leadership of the Canadian Alliance:

CBC/Globe & Mail talking head Rex Murphy, himself void of ranting on anything of substance in the depths of summer, referred to Harper as "The Invisible Man of Canadian politics". The cartoon was inspired by that kind of talk in the media and of other reports of UFO, so it made for a convenient combo cartoon.

Predictably, UFO stories tend to make their appearance when nothing else is happening in the news. Along with politicians on awol, journalists use the summer to go on extended vacations. Shark attacks, crop circles, and stories on killer bees tend to fill the spots where more substantial local reports are usually read. Something has to fill the void left by the reporters on holidays so when the newsroom 'b' teams can't report on anything locally they serve up the wire stuff.

Even on this second full Summer day, the newsroom might appear to have its normal staff size, but it's easy to see the summertime slide of attitude make its mark all around. Colleagues are taking extra long lunches, and cutting out of work well before 5:00. Many of the guys are wearing their tiresome Bermuda attire, and the gals are wandering around with their noisy flip flops. They may not be on vacation yet but their minds are on vacation mode.

Cartoonists, on the other hand, will need to be on the ball. While we lament the absence of politicians and the fodder they provide, we should embrace the coming of the silly season to draw on the things we often overlook. In the past I've cartooned on the not so significant stuff as depicted here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, with the promise of more to come...if only, to get out of the office early.

For those who don't know, "jumping the shark" is a term to describe a moment when something that was once great has reached a point when it began to decline in quality and popularity. The origin of this phrase comes from a Happy Days episode where the Fonz jumped a shark on waterskis. Thus was labeled the lowest point of the show.

For those who still don't believe me, I refer you to the Jump the Shark website which lists every television program imaginable and when their respective ratings took a nosedive due to bad decision making by studios and directors. It's all based on votes.

Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, "while many report using the term as slang in the 80's, the first verifiable use of the phrase as a direct metaphor was on December 24, 1997, when Jon Hein's website jumptheshark.com was launched. According to the site, the phrase was first coined by Hein's college roommate, Sean J. Connolly, in 1985. This claim is, of course, unverifiable. In print, the term first appeared in the May 29, 1998 Jerusalem Post newspaper article, "It's All Downhill," written by Jeff Abramowitz.

So, it's been a part of pop culture for almost 10 years now, so everyone must know about it, right? Wrong! A straw poll of colleagues in my newsroom found many who had no clue what the term meant. Those who knew tended to have less grey hair compared to those who did. Unfortunately, I only realized this after I finished my cartoon suggesting the entire CBC network had jumped the shark after deciding to bump it's evening news program, The National, to show an American reality show featuring competing singers:

What I thought was a good cartoon may very well end up being one of those obscure cartoons many readers won't get just like that recent one featuring Dog the Bounty Hunter. Perhaps I'm just overly concerned by the reaction of press journalists who pride themselves on watching little or no television.

But you know what? ...and here's my rant... people have to get up to date on things, and that includes dumb useless information like television trivia. And another thing... music writers ought to stop harping on the great music they still think is great 30 or 40 years after they first heard the stuff. And please, humour columnists, no more references to Elvis living... it's old and boring, and your dating yourself. It's hardly the sort of stuff that attracts younger audiences to newspapers.

My cartoon goes out to the younger people out there who still read newspapers.

I tuned into the final period of yesterday's game 6 of the NHL playoffs. My wife and I couldn't decide which challenge was more exciting, the Edmonton Oilers bringing the Stanley Cup back to Canada, or the guy from Holmes on Homes doing a proper installation of a sauna on HGTV. We flicked the channel back and forth for a half hour watching each breathtaking outcome. Thank goodness we could celebrate the satisfaction of a job well done by the guy in the overalls.

Yesterday was one of those days when a cartoonist considers drawing on something that everyone will be talking about the following morning. I weighed the merits of cartooning on the Stanley Cup outcome, or the sentencing of Adscam fraudster Chuck Guite. Do I draw a generic hockey cartoon to accompany the mood of newspaper readers post game, or do I do something on the sentencing of someone involved in a scandal that has been talked to death?

I chose the boring subject. I think it represented the final chapter of a saga that's been going on for close to 3 years. While the names Chuck Guite and Carolina Hurricanes will quickly fade from our collective memories, the impact of the Sponsorship scandal will be with Canada forever. It has set the course for greater accountability in Ottawa, and it has tarnished the image of the Liberal Party at the expense of improving the fortunes of the Conservative party. Students of future history classes will have the Sponsorship Scandal added to their course outline of other notable Canadian low points, including: The Pacific Scandal of 1872, the 1925 King-Byng Affair, and the Gerda Munsinger scandal during the Diefenbaker years, to name a few.

Coming soon, "What to draw, Part II: The summer doldrums".

If anyone was a fan of SCTV the way I was, you probably became aware of how unhip soccer was 25 years ago. SCTV was hosting its pledge week to drum up cash for programming. Guy Caballero, the station owner and President becomes a bit dismayed at the lackluster response, so he shows some footage of what SCTV will air if they don't get the money: soccer. Hours and hours of soccer. The phones start ringing.

Obviously, the huge amount attention being paid to FIFA's World Cup by billions of people worldwide shows that the sport isn't exactly as unhip as Guy Caballero suggested. Of course, he was a fictional station manager speaking to a fictional audience, but the hard truth in what he said was the undeniable disconnect North Americans have always had to professional soccer.

It's funny to see how some of my non-sporty acquaintances, who've never followed soccer outside of this World Cup extravaganza, let alone any team game like hockey, baseball, football or basketball, are all of a sudden huge observers of this international tornament. They sit in front of their tv sets and endure several hours of action packed play before the breathless game ends with a score of one to nil.

Then they drive to work the next day with a flag attached to their car.

That's not the way to do it. Forget about the flags on the cars, and forget about even watching the soccer games altogether. The World Cup is all about getting together with friends on a patio bar and drinking lots of booze. Then repeating it with every game until the World Cup ends. That's the way to do it, and that's why in North America, outside of the urban centres at least, it'll never catch on.