Gee WIllickers!

Brown shirted rabbit decapitation pseudo-Nazi imagery courtesy of Victor Castillo.  Thanks Tiny Bunny Woman.

The Great Kurtmani

It's hard to tell if the name of this great feature is meant to be pronounced "Aspirin" like the pain killer or a truncated form of "Aspiring" as in "to seek or attain or accomplish a particular goal" but nonetheless we see once again the rabbit-pulling-magician-out-of-hat motif as feature myriad times on this blog although in this case many magicians of a diminutive size.  The feature is some 1949 unsigned work by the great Mad magazine artist Harvy Kurtzman.  Tip o' the magician's hat to the fabulous Cartoon Snap blog.

10:45PM TV time!

Eightball and Weenus make a surprise cameo in today's Dark Side of the Horse.  Wow!  What an honor. I've hawked this great strip a few times on this blog and it just seems to get better and better. You can see Samson's strip at GoComics and he has a Facebook page here.

Two Turtle Doves

The Little King was apparently unimpressed with magic tricks back in this1944 strip.  The great Otto Soglow was actually the co-founder of the National Cartoonists Society and served as president for the 1953-54 term.

Wordle Cloud Footprint Thing

At the Wordle website I entered all the keywords and tags from my comic strip for the past two years and this is what came up.  Obviously I do way too many strips about food and insects.  "Gun" seems kinda big.  I don't think I can recall any strips with firearms at all.

Rabbits Against Centipedes

Mrs. Rabbit:  It’s perfectly wonderful, Mr. Centipede, that you can complete a dozen portraits in one sitting. (1911)
From Life. (New York: Time, Inc.)  via Mark's Scrapbook of Oddities & Treasures.

Rabbits Go Go Gogh

One of the greatest painters of our generation has a show right now at Roq la Rue Gallery in Seattle.  I'm an avid fan of mondo Dutch master Femke Hiemstra's work, especially when she draws rabbits in her Alice in Wonderland meets surreal nightmare low-brow art noir style.  The image above is called "Le Carrefour", probably nothing to do with the French hypermarket chain.

California Sun

Our house is now completely solar powered. We finally got to turn on the system a few days ago, several months after it was installed and it was nice to see the meters immediately start spinning backwards.  Starting January 1st we'll actually be selling electricity back to the grid as long as the sun keeps on shining.  I climbed onto the roof today with a couple of friends who happily posed for photographs.  I will no longer be able to yell at them when they leave the fridge door open.

Radio Radio

Sunday's strip as a lot of fun to draw and featured several vintage radios. The Bakelite model is an actual radio I own.  You can see it in this picture below (with a couple of half-finished strips on the table).

I actually shipped the radio from England when I moved to California.  The dial features lots of long gone European wartime radio stations. I hacked the insides so that I can play my iPod through the speaker. Avid Rabbits Reader "Jo Jo" Left this fascinating information on GoComics:


"For future strip consideration regarding Bakelite: the grandson of the guy who invented Bakelite ran off with his son’s girlfriend; the granddaughter-in-law had intimate relations with the son (her own child) to “cure” him of his gayness; and the son murdered the mother and later attempted to murder his grandmother".

Plushie Rabbits Against Macabre Felt Mounting

Seattle-based media artist,  Zoë Williams creates wonderfully tactile art pieces including this piece called The Fates from 2009.  She uses a lot of rabbits in her artwork, thankfully none of them real.

Hello

If you're in LA during the next few months, check out the Hello Kitty exhibit at the Barker Hangar gallery in Santa Monica.  It's to celebrate Sanrio's 50th anniversary.  I particularly like this Travis Louie interpretation.