See this wireframe diagram scrawled on a spiral bound cocktail napin? This drawing is going to change the world. And by world I mean Tacoma World and by drawing I mean the idea it represents: A FULL ON FEED TACOMA SUNDAY COMICS PAGE by your friendly neighborhood cartoonists. A line up of strips including but not limited to:

• MARK MONLUX with The Comic Critic and The Return of Stick Man
• RR Anderson with THE TACOMIC (political cartoon)
• ELECTRIC ELLIOT with Bob the Dog
• STOWE with DADDY’S NUT SHOT OF THE DAY
• Jeff Hawley with LOG JAM!
• MIKE SHAUDIS with Ocryx and Joe
• And MORE YET TO BE ANNOUNCED!

Why is this any different than other local collective comic sites like ALASKA ROBOTICS?  Because we are wedding LOCAL COMICS to a LOCAL NEWS/CLASSIFIED/BLOGGING site feedtacoma.com. At long last there will be absolutely no reason to purchase a newspaper like the TNT.  What is more you’ll have a strong personal connection to every comic strip illustrator.  For example say you’re sitting in a favorite dining establishment. You look over and see one of us at another table eating a sixth avenue dog or something.  You can say “hey man I like your cartoon strip!” or “Hey I thought your last strip was a real stinker! Why don’t you draw something funny like you used to do”  We’ll say Yes! You’re right! and BLAMO! A personal connection has been formed.  Next week you can tell your lover “Look, I told him to be funny again and heck if he didn’t do it! HAR HAR HAR!”  You just can’t do that with national syndicated strips.  You think the creator of GARFIELD gives two halibut craps about your and your problems?  NO SKIPPY!

Not only will our strips collectively be awesome, but you’ll be able to buy the strips.  You’ll be able to interact with the cartoonist instantly through comments. You’ll be able to sponsor a strip through cartoon product placement AND OR banner advertising.  YOU’LL BE ABLE TO DRAW IN THE FRIGGIN COMMENT BOXES!!!!!!!  HOLY CRAP I JUST BLEW MY OWN MIND!!!!!

1. agreed that this Friday will be best to attend Buddy Holly play at TLT. some will be gathering to eat before the show, others will be meeting up at TLT right before the show.  Agreed that we will all wear fez.
2. New pledge Michael ( http://jinxmedicstudios.us/ )  has paid his $70 dollar membership fee. We have assigned him a size 7 fez from the box of props for him to attend the TLT show.  Be prepared for official initiation ceremony next OPEN SWIM. In the meantime please check out his website… the dude is like Leonardo da Vinci. Amazing.
3. Elliot reaffirmed his idea of tacoma needing a CARTOONIST LAUREATE to compliment the POET LAUREATE program. Idea still needs development. How will Cartoonist Laureate interact with the community?
4. talked of taking over all COMICS on feedtacoma.com creating tacoma’s first online-bottom up-anarchy-newspaper comics page in Tacoma as most of us already produce (semi)weekly strips.  RR will follow up with Kevin to see the best way to go about this…  could be as easy as collecting a bunch of RSS feeds together and the cartoonist adding a keyword tag like ‘tacoma’ to their respective blog/webcomic whathaveyou.  Need to check with Mark Monlux though to get his thoughts how he feels about this. My personal thoughts are in an age when traditional newspapers are shrinking their comics pages, this could be a big F.U. to the universe–which makes me happy.
5. [ANONYMOUS TACOMA ACTIVIST] stopped in to share feelings that Tacoma is really hurting for an alternative/underground publication zine that young people would be interested in. Something with lots of comics and a place where alternative music venues can share events.  Perhaps side 2 of CLAW zine?  [ANONYMOUS] expressed that local biz get zip in return for expensive ads in [TITLE(s) REDACTED]…   shared a flier that Sean Alexander (previously of helm gallery) put together where he illustrated all advertising.  Maybe biz could pay cartoonists to illustrate ad in zine…?  Who knows exact details..  But  [ANONYMOUS] wanted to bring to our attention as creative creator types developing a publication that there is a niche market right here in Tacoma that is dying to be tapped into.  to recap:  young people with money aren’t reading local publications because all lame.  Biz owners don’t want to buy ads in publications that young people with money aren’t going to read.  ???
6. report on back room of Urban Xchange as meeting place for CLAW:  owner is super nice, back  room sexy but hot, fez gets sweaty. unsatisfactory table space for drawing.   Next steps?  Check status of Mandolin?  Stowe: Check with Comic Book Ink,  tables in back might be good for open swim.  Anyone check comments here? http://www.cartoonistsleague.org/an-open-swim-teaser/
   looks like a member of the pythian knights lodge invited us to have meetings at pythian temple downtown.  Maybe somebody can follow up with him?
7. Talk of end of the year CLAW awards dinner. Naturally we would need to consume food that had claws..the lobster for example.  We all painted visuals of such an evening with the wacom stylus of the imagination.

Electric Elliot

• http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug
• http://www.smbc-comics.com/

RR Anderson

• Dr. McNinja
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
• The Pain: When Will it End?
• Red Planet
• David Horsey
• MS Paint Adventures, (was really into Problem Sleuth – like obsessed)
• the TACOMIC
• The Comic Critic
• Log Jam
• Bob the Dog
• Return of Stickman
• Space Moose

Mark Monlux

• http://www.unshelved.com
• http://www.littledee.net
• http://www.overcompensating.com
• http://thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com
• http://www.jump-leads.com
• http://www.theaterhopper.com
• http://www.questionablecontent.net
• http://www.ellieconnelly.com
• http://www.octopuspie.com
• http://www.mylifeinacube.com
• http://blog.wpmorse.com
• http://hijinksensue.com
• http://cad-comic.com
• http://blog.krisstraub.com
• http://www.bobwhitecomics.com
• http://riphaywire.com
• http://www.erichobbsonline.com/awakenings
• http://www.pvponline.com
• http://www.evil-comic.com
• http://logjamcomic.blogspot.com Jeff Hawley’s Comic!
  
• http://www.girlgeniusonline.com
• http://lifeofronnie.com
• http://www.jeffschuetze.com

Stowe

• DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary — http://darcomic.org
• Diesel Sweeties — dieselsweeties.com
• Girls With Slingshots — daniellecorsetto.com/gws.html
• Good Ship Chronicles — goodshipchronicles.com/
• Misery Loves Sherman — miserylovessherman.com/
• Penny Arcade — penny-arcade.com
• Pvp — pvponline.com
• Questionable Content — questionablecontent.net
• The System — notquitewrong.com/rosscottinc/
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (thanks RXR) — smbc-comics,com
• Sheldon — sheldoncomics.com
• Shortpacked! — shortpacked.com
• Starslip (previously Starslip Crisis) — starslip.com
• xkcd — xkcd.com

Jeff Hawley (neo-member!)

• I like receiving comics automatically via email, e.g., I get the weekly Tom the Dancing Bug, by Ruben Bolling, and receive daily comics from Comics.com.   Pretty cool site, that.   They will email you a daily bunch of comics of your choice.

Stanley Shaw (false-member)

• Man! You guys have TIME to read online comics? Hey, remember how in the Olden Tymes the sunday pages featured  huge pages of comixs? CLAW could do an online comic like that and charge for small ads. A nominal fee of course. Set up as an additional page to the website, static. Content could change weekly with set sizes to make said changes easy. Is that easy, or I could be wrong.Stan ”He Who Has Not Joined” or ” Notonavus”By the way, I’m still a a fan of Stowe’s bio comic from a few weeks ago!

Adam Botsford (cadet)

• Hmm. The only daily cartoon I read is Mutts.
  I’m more of an artblog follower myself.

Tim Kreider* was born and educated in Baltimore, Maryland. His cartoon, The Pain – When Will It End?, has run in the Baltimore City Paper since 1997 and has also appeared in the Jackson Planet Weekly, The New York Press, The Stranger, and Philadelphia Weekly. Fantagraphics Books has published two collections of his cartoons, The Pain–When Will It End? (2004) and Why Do They Kill Me? (2005), and he was included in Ted Rall’s anthology Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists (2004). His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Film Quarterly, The Comics Journal, Jump Cut, and Lip.  He divides his time between New York City and an undisclosed location on the Chesapeake Bay. *official bio text

C.L.A.W.  was intensely pleased to sit down with Tim Kreider to talk with  him about his glorious craft.

C.L.A.W. How do you make your cartoons? Do you pencil then ink/scan or do you draw them into photoshop with a wacom tablet?

T.K. I draw with pens on pieces of paper and then scan them in at unnecessarily high resolution. Wacom tablets are very handy for jiffying up mistakes in Photoshop, but I imagine it would be about as easy to draw a fine, controlled, expressive line with one as with a wood-burner or a garden hose.

C.L.A.W. Have any of your cartoons been censored and does it hurt your feelings?

T.K. I can only think of two times that the City Paper refused to run cartoons of mine. One was the “New Design for the World Trade Center,” which I sent them the week after 9/11. This was actually an uncharacteristically affirmative, boosterish cartoon for me, and not that dissimilar to the photoshopped image of the rebuilt WTC giving the world the finger that circulated on the internet around that time. But the publisher’s feeling–not my editor’s–was that any representation of the World Trade Centers at that time would be inappropriate. His actual words, which I have not forgotten, were that it “would jeopardize our standing in the community.” I was like, Jeez Louise. Nevertheless they ran the same cartoon a week later, after everyone had started to return to sanity. I wasn’t pleased at the time, but I can’t say I was all that hurt or indignant, either. I had more important things on my mind and it was a very weird week–people reacted in all kinds of strange ways and I’m sure everyone was trying to do what what felt right at the time, whether it was volunteering for the Red Cross in Manhattan or censoring cartoons or hiding at airbases in Louisiana.
The other cartoon was “Me, the Freeloadin’ Negro,” which I sent them a week after some other cartoon, which wasn’t actually about race, had inadvertently caused outrage in the letters pages among some African-American readers. Again, the issue was mostly timing.
Come to think of it they never ran “Graveyard Shift at the Pussy Juice Factory,” either, but this is a drawing I would expect no respectable publication ever to run anywhere in the civilized world.

C.L.A.W. Does having an enemies list on your website increase loyalty of your fan base?

T.K. You would have to ask the fans. I don’t think anyone’s reading my cartoons week after week for fear of ending up on my bad side, if that’s what you’re getting at. In truth it’s been a long time since I’ve even looked at the Enemies List–doubtless it’s in need of updating. It did my vindictive heart a lot of good to create it years ago, but now that I am middle-aged  I’m trying to become a less rancorous person before I end up a bitter little old man and I think, from time to time, of eliminating it. I would advise everybody to make up an enemies list for fun and then tear it up.

C.L.A.W. How do you know when a cartoon is a hit?  What are the indicators?

T.K. My only real indication is the number and enthusiasm of emails and letters I receive in response. Of course it’s possible this is an indicator not of a cartoon’s popularity but of its provocativeness. Some of them just provide more fodder for discussion than others. Webmaster Dave keeps a list of the all-time most popular cartoons but I myself don’t know how to measure this. It’s sometimes a mystery to me why people like the cartoons they do–the same way, I’m sure, it’s a mystery to a comedian when one of his lines becomes a national catch-phrase. The most popular of my cartoons don’t necessarily correlate to the ones I think are the best. Sometimes, I’m sure, people like them because of superficial or random reasons. As with any kind of art, all you can do is throw it out there and hope it’ll resonate with somebody.

C.L.A.W. What are elements that you look for in a provocative freethinking cartoon/comic?

T.K. I’m not sure whether you’re talking about my own comics or other people’s, but perhaps my answer is the same in either case. I don’t usually try to reverse-engineer a cartoon that’ll illustrate an abstract idea or argument when I draw; I just try to think up funny things. Similarly, I don’t have any criteria for cartoons that I seek out or like; all I want is not to be bored. I have to confess I don’t have much interest in comics per se and don’t read that many of them. Obviously I like cartoons that are intelligent, artful, and preferably hilarious. I think the best political cartoonists from the last dismal eight years have been Steve Bell and Ruben Bolling. (But bear in mind that I haven’t read two Doonesburys in a row since the Vietnam War ended and I never even bother to look at any daily newspaper editorial cartoons, so it’s not like I know what I’m talking about.) The only one of my colleagues’ work I check in on on a weekly basis is Emily Flake. I would say that Emily and I share what you might call a Baltimorean sensibility (a city where she and I have both spent significant parts of our lives): a certain preoccupation with the sordid and the unwise–with drunkenness, ill-advised sex, poor work habits–and what Frederic Raphael, in speaking of Stanley Kubrick, described as “an amused pessimism at the notion that people are capable of change.”  [not 100% certain of the accuracy of this quote]

C.L.A.W. Thanks Mr. Kreider, god bless!

T.K. You are welcome; we will see.

Extra  Credit Reading – That’s Not Funny: Rage, Laughter, and Political Cartooning After 9/11

Mr. Kreider’s book Why Do They Kill Me? can be purchased locally through Fantagraphics Books.

You can do it in two ways. Print the font generator templates, write in all the letters with your favorite pen, scan & upload to the generator OR do what I did by downloading the template as a gif, bring into photoshop and write in all the boxes with your wacom tablet.  Check out the font I made in about 10 minutes:

So yeah you don’t have to use that lame comic book font you and everybody else has been using in their webcomics; you can afford to be original!

Download the RR Anderson Cartoonist Font AS SEEN ON C.L.A.W.!