Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, June 25, 2007

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Family magazine, June 2007

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, June 18, 2007

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, June 11, 2007

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, June 4, 2007

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, May 29, 2007

You might get the impression that this week’s comic was intended to make you feel bad about yourself. Or at the very least, defensive. It wasn’t. That’d be preachy, and I try to avoid preachy comics because, well, they’re preachy.

No, this week’s comic was entirely built around my own guilt. We live next to a cemetery, and we attend or hear the Memorial Day service every year. I knew this was coming up, and I knew we had a full Memorial Day weekend of driving hither and yon for various activities, and I just sort of connected the dots. Some say the United States has a dysfunctional relationship with petroleum. I’d say it’s pretty dang efficiently functional at the moment….

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Family magazine, May 2007

 Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, May 21, 2007

I’m pretty sure this is the only editorial comic in the last week that made a rhyme with “Mephistopheles.” Proud moments…

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, May 14, 2007

I went to Michigan Tech, so the whole University of Michigan vs. Michigan State rivalry is a bit lost on me. I mean, when you live in Michigan you can’t help to be aware of blue versus green, but I don’t feel it, ya know? Michigan Tech is a smaller school and the only sport we play against U of M and State is hockey, but we’re not even in the same conference. There is the annual holiday tournament played at Joe Louis in Detroit where Tech plays those two plus another school that gets rotated in. We nearly always get spanked and spanked bad. So there’s some resentment, but nothing stronger than that.

The closest thing we had was with Northern Michigan University. Northern is a public college in the UP, Marquette, which is 99 miles from Houghton (Tech). Northern was/is kind of a general college college — basic degrees, nothing that it’s particularly known for. Tech was/is a smarty pants engineering school. Animosity was pretty low level, but I did my best to agitate. When I was cartoonist for the school newspaper, I drew a comic where an engineering student at Tech was attempting to interface a Tech student directly with a computer. Unfortunately, the experiment went wrong and the student lost most of his brain function. The instructor was horrified, “Is he all right?” The engineering student wasn’t bothered, “Oh he’s fine — he transferringto Northern.”

It turns out that editorial cartoonists aren’t necessarily just a bunch of self-absorbed fountains of curmudgeonly cynicism, we are actually trying to have a positive influence on the world, too. Right, still a long way from sainthood, but the “Cartoons for the Classroom” project is definitely a step in the right direction.

You can read more about the program here. If you’d like to help, you can go to the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists home page and click this button: