This cartoon was basically dictated to me by
Dave Israel over cheese steaks and beer at Cox's Pub on Thursday afternoon,
in the middle of a days-long event called simply "The Cruise," about
which the less you know the better. Everything funny in it, including the
Foghorn Leghorn tattoo, was Dave's idea. The original conception for my character
was that I would be in a tight black tank top with moussed hair, but somehow,
detail by detail, it metamorphosed into what you see here. It's not exactly
clear what's happened to me in the intervening year, actually--I appear to
have become a decadent Eastern European count. Dave suggests I have moved
into elegant and foppish circles of the fine art world. He describes my look
as a cross between Salvador Dali and David Niven. Worse things could happen,
I suppose.
I note, with rueful satisfaction, that my friend and colleague Emily Flake
and I have both independently taken as our New Year's theme an amused pessimism
at the notion that human beings are capable of change. (Although Emily herself
would apear to give lie to this pose--when I saw her New Year's Eve she semed
happier and more self-assured than I have ever seen her, and I hereby express
my happiness for her, only slightly tained by self-pity and envy.) I really
do give this speech to Boyd around Christmas every year. The Turn of the Tide
speech, we call it. For the first couple of years I didn't realize I had given
exactly the same speech the year before, and when Boyd finally pointed this
out to me I fell into a deep despair. Sometimes I still give it as a melancholy
holiday tradition, but more often we just say "Our lives suck,"
and drink whiskey. Recently Boyd and I made a bet, stacking Boyd's book collection
against everything I've ever drawn, over which of our lives, in the end, would
be worse.