Oops!

Yesterday's cartoon, which would have been titled "Today's Cartoon" when it was sent to email subscribers, didn't get uploaded two days ago, so Today's Cartoon for yesterday never got emailed yesterday. I'd hoped to email it today, so the cartoon that was supposed to be Today's
Cartoon yesterday would have effectively been mailed tomorrow, relative to when it was supposed to go out. Confused?

All it means is that the system doesn't provide a way to manually email the daily cartoon. If I miss the deadline, it ain't gonna happen. Of course, once the strip is in newspapers, I'll be providing them three to four weeks in advance, so no little glitches like this will occur. Imagine if cartoonists were only a day ahead on providing cartoons to papers: there might be days when there'd be blank spaces on the comics page, then other days when there'd be extra pages. Wouldn't work.

That's a big reason the strip isn't in any newspapers yet. The time spent on getting the calendar ready, drawing the strip, and doing the other stuff that fills up my daily life makes it hard to get four to six weeks ahead. I also tend to do more coloring and adding textures, photos, and other background stuff to the cartoons to make them interesting--and to entertain myself.

My big "gimmick" that I'd planned from the start for this strip was to use words as textures in the background. For example, the "Kathy" strip on 5/18/09 featured grass along the bottom that was made from the words GRASSGRASSGRASS running along the bottom. Today's strip (meaning today's, on October 22nd) has the words WOODWOODWOOD as a texture on the bar top. I was going to use a photo of real wood grain, but I've done that before, and the words, while a little time-consuming, are fun to use. I worry that they won't be legible on small monitors, but they're there for some people at least, and it amuses me.

That reminds me: I have an old Beatles cartoon that I drew years ago that I should've used on 9/9/09. It's kind of outdated, except when the Beatles are in the news--as they were that day with the release on all their CDs, remastered. I could've used 99999999 as a texture! (If you don't get the reference, it's to Revolution 9 on the White Album.)

Once the site is opened up to your comments--that's coming on a future update of the site--we can see how many people, if any, are noticing the worded textures. In the meantime, feel free to comment here on the blog. Of course, the blog will get a makeover at some point, too, to make it more interesting to look at. But for now, I'm concentrating on the calendar, website changes, the play for which I'm in rehearsals, the house I'm designing, and trying to get ahead on the daily cartoons...so we don't have another yesterday/today/tomorrow occurrence.

Hey, the Beatles released an album in the US years ago called "Yesterday..and Today", and did songs called "Yesterday" and "Tomorrow Never Knows"--so this rambling blog actually all ties together!