Yeah, so 2021 was a pretty bleh year in all the ways, including blogging at this here blog. I’m going to try to make 2022 a more active, proactive, and positive year in as many ways as I can, including getting behind the keyboard– that includes both writing and blogging.

Popular wisdom among the teaching fraternity is that the first two to three years are the toughest, because you’re still learning all the practical habits of the trade while having to sort through the reams of available resources to find the ones that work for your teaching style. I’ve done my three years. Hopefully its true. Either way, I need more than just that particular way of meeting rent to give my life some joy and fulfillment. When in doubt, go back to first principles, and first principles say: I’m an author. I’m an artist. I’m a rock and roll tyrannosaurus sex god from the planet Yeeha. Let’s start with those simple truths and see where I can go from there.

To whit, the first thumbnail of the final year of Thumbnail Thursday. How prophetic, how timely, how okay, yeah, for once I chose this one instead of letting the random number generator do the job. Sue me.

Here’s to a better 2022, everyone, no matter where you are.

Mythology: great for life lessons, boring your kids, and cartoons. Plus, you know, thinking about the sheer physical how of the thing….. (shudders)……

“Leda, honey, is there something you think you aught to tell me?”

if my maths is correct — and if it isn’t, I’ll just draw another one when the time is right — I don’t have quite enough thumbnails left to run this feature through to next Christmas. After 200+ thumbnails covering the extent of my occasionally semi-serious, several-times-aborted, never-good-enough-to-really-consider-it attempts at fashioning something in the cartooning realm, I’m going to run out of thumbnails sometime in the coming year, and that will be that. Thanks for reading, and all that.

However, I still have four Christmas-themed cartoons left on my list, so rather than do anything clever with them, I’m just going to shove them all up here at once and wish you, from the point of view of this feature anyway, a final merry Christmas all at once.

May your stocking be full and your egg particularly noggy.

The random number generator has absolutely nailed it again. Today, on the last day of the school year, when any number of my senior school students are out there, dressed in itchy shirts, trying not to scratch where the razor has taken the heads off the pimples on their necks (okay, my year twelves left at the end of last term, and my elevens four weeks ago, but you know what I mean!) it throws up this delightful little reminder of just how stupid and irritating job interviews can be. (Smiles at the memory of asking the last interviewer who asked me this one, “How long have you been in the position?”. I didn’t get the job…).

Five years. Way to know nothing about the employment market for the last twenty years, dude.

“Where do I see myself in five years? What is that, some kind of sick joke?”

I remember exactly when I drew this. It would be to the surprise of nobody to learn that it was when I was working for the Department of Staff Bullying at the City or Rockingham, and that I was at a management meeting regards some art and culture stuff I should have been left alone to do but, well… we all know how it ended. So, a little double-meta going on, here: a comment on some of those community artist types* that I worked with, and a pretty decent dollop of self-knowledge about mine own abilities in any artistic direction. Except for the expression on the dog’s face.

For some reason I’m always satisfied with the expressions I manage to get on dog’s faces…

(*There are two types of community artist types: those who love art, practice art, develop art, and whether they pursue it as a hobby or something more, respect and love the process. And those who think wearing dungarees and tying things into their hair means they’ve done all the hard work. Guess which type ended up running the arts groups I was dealing with at the time…)

“I just paint what I see.”

Someehow it seems appropriate that on the 46th anniversary of leaving England, the random number generator throws up a cartoon that pitches me right back to my short, pre-Australian childhood.

Even as a kid, Punch and Judy was horrific. Indeed, that’s part of its… I don’t know if charm is the right word, but certainly fascination.

It’s a grotesque, of course, a deliberate soft spot between what is acceptable and the dark mirror world where all is allowed and nothing is forbidden. As a tiny person on the cold, windy, pebble-coated beaches of — well, I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. The scratchy super 8 films in my possession don’t really make it clear, and both my parents are dead so they can’t tell me. Call it Bournemouth, or Brighton, or more likely as we were in Nottingham, Blackpool — the Punch and Judy show was right up there with riding donkeys and eating fairy floss as the maddest of mad shit my four year old brain could cope with. But holy hot damn, when you look at it objectively… depending on the professor, and the time, and just how closely parents and the authorities are watching, Punch is a coyote, a joker, an agent of chaos, or an outright monster from the same level of Hell that ‘gifts’ us Jimmy Savile and Denis Nilsen.