Sunday, February 13, 2005

Comments from the week of February 6, 2005


We know he's skinny: when faith was pink-circa 2003

Saturday-
The 'tsunami series' is on temporary hiatus while I attend to a few notions and commitments.




I'm sorry to report that Jim Ownbey's Bushcountry has closed shop after a five year presence on the net. Let's hope that Jim returns in similar form as did Wayne Lutz (of the Tocquevillian)
as a revitalized and refanged blogger.

I have a pretty nifty picture of Hugh Hewitt holding a copy of Free Republic's Today's Toons collection, but I'm letting Pookie18 post it as an independent thread with kudos to Hugh and Fraters (thanks 'St. Paul' for the kind regards on Fraters to the original faithmouse. She is a lovely wife.)

I posted an old Rush cartoon (old toon not Rush) at the end of a freeper thread on Wednesday which Pookie repeated on Friday, which I've again reposted here in all it's dated glory. It's from olden days when I referred to faithmouse as 'the cartoon of the Christian Right' a tag line still powerful enough to make cyberleftists implode, although I've relegated this wildly inflammatory tag line to the back shelf of the history arsenal for now. Other tag lines currently in use include 'a Christian editorial cartoon called faithmouse' and 'faithmouse: surreal fantasy of a funky dweeb.'

Hey, St. Valentine's Day cartoon tomorrow, as well as a toon later in the day saluting Craig Parshall.


Thursday-
Welcome to our new toon affiliate Into The Word Magazine.

Loads of fun at the Hugh Hewitt/Peter Beinart debate last night. Chris glassed over a few times during the evening (to her credit, politics isn't her strong suit) but she did get to meet one of her
favorite writers James Lileks, and Mr. Hewitt (one of only two people I met at the event besides St. Paul of Fraters Libertas who knew of the cartoon-nice to be obscure) was good enough to pose with Wednesday's collection of Pookie18's 'Today's Toons' (69 pages!) from Free Republic, which I presented to him as airplane reading material. I'll drop the film at Walgreens later today and post the photos this evening. It's a great day to be a freeper.


The 14 year old George Bush impersonator at our debate table we learned is also a cartoonist and Flash whiz who operates a webtoon called Peabodies. Please don't call Tom an amateur because his work is quite adept (he works with the vector based Adobe Illustrator, while I continue to grind out pixels in Photoshop.)

As you can see I have Chaplain Walsh's cartoon posted, but it obviously needs a little more work. Not a bad start, though....

Wednesday-
Well...there's one. This toon is an addition to an earlier part of the timeline. 'Helo' is navy slang for helicopter. Chris and I will be attending the Hugh Hewitt Peter Beinart debate in Minneapolis tomorrow. Hopefully we'll be able to snap a photo of Hugh with a collection of toons I'm giving him from Pookie18's Today's Toons collection on Free Republic.

There's a story linked on Drudge right now about cable to begin broadcasting The Pentagon Channel..but here in the upper Midwest I've been watching TPN on local Dish Network for the last week or so. Because TPC is categorized as a public interest channel it resides only a few clicks away from the anti-military Free Speech Network. TPN is a great education tool, focusing not only on the who, what, where and why's of the U.S. presence in various parts of the world, but also on the feelings and motivations of our soldiers. Highly recommended! -Dan

Tuesday-
Progress is pretty darn slow on two cartoons I'll have online later today. One of the toons is from photos supplied by Chaplain Steve Walsh of the 42nd Police Brigade in Baghdad, who is pictured below. If you would like to send Chaplain Steve your well wishes, please email me and I'll be happy to pass them along. -Dan

Ramblings for Monday Part Deux-

Not only haven't I finished today's cartoon, I lost in my category at the EU blog awards! The winner is Rantings of a Lord of The Rings Fanatic by Handsome Tom. The adjective which best describes Tom's site is 'goofy.' Also to his credit are nice quotes on his homepage by Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill. To all who took the time to vote for faithmouse-thanks! A list of all of the winner's can be found here.



Ramblings for Monday-

Voting is on now until Tuesday at 5 p.m. at the Blog Awards. You can visit EU to cast your vote or send an email from here directly to Eric with a note which simply says 'faithmouse.'

Please welcome Carla's Reflections of the Times to our blogroll. Carla was a finalist in the same category as faithmouse until the second round. I think she has a great blog - it's certainly worth a visit!

Today's toon is an addition to the storyline already presented. I'm also working on a redo of the 'lamaze' cartoon from a few days ago (part of a set of two.)

A fan of the cartoon who is also a chaplain in Baghdad has sent me a few photos which I'll be using as reference for tomorrow's toon.
-Dan


Ramblings for Sunday-

Faithmouse has made it to Round Two of the EPA, which is a big honor. I don't think I'll win as 'Best Evangelical Blog-Humor' but it's great to be nominated (a lot of the blame can go to Eric at EU who's a fan of the cartoon, but I'll accept the kudos regardless.)

A recap of the current 'Tsunami' series so far...

The South Asian tsunami catches a vacationing Ms. StarMole and her chihuahua Petri off guard as they are vacationing at Khlao Lak, Thailand. Faithmouse, Timothy A. Bear and Augustine
the Cat, hearing of the disaster, head to the area in a Nighthawk helicopter loaded with relief supplies. They pluck Ms. StarMole from the ocean (after she refuses a lift from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln) and fly to Indonesia, where they are shot at by Government soldiers posing as hostile guerrillas, causing them to return to Thailand instead. In the meantime, medical officer Gaybear, having recently earned a certificate in Lamaze coaching, heads to the Indian Ocean aboard the hospital ship U.S.N. Mercy, which will take thirty days to reach the disaster area. A secondary subplot (which is the actual focus of the entire series) should make it's debut this week as well.


Faithmouse became a continuous storyline startling with the widely criticized 'Gaia' cartoon shown at the very end of last year. It's a direction I had considered for some time, after experimenting last year with a few similar series. Previous to this series, faithmouse has been primarily a single issue cartoon with a continuing roster of characters. Faithmouse could continue as a single panel issue cartoon (when I come up with a popular one it's pretty widely circulated) and none of the affiliates would complain...but I felt that it was time for the cartoon to grow. Faithmouse in it's current form can be challenging, and can serve almost as an impetus against gaining new affiliates (um, Dan..if you have a point you're sure taking your sweet time getting there) but, like a good novel I hope it will grow on you in time. Currently I'm working on backtracking and adding to the plot thus presented.

If the story line so far seems cold hearted, please keep in mind that I'm staging the adventure on a very broad pallet and that we haven't even arrived at the heart of the tragedy. In the spirit of the many Christian relief agencies long at work in this and similar theaters of human need, the series keeps a 'chin up' attitude in the face of danger and challenges. Hundreds of thousands have perished in this disaster, but the task of the living is to improve the lives both physically and spiritually of the millions of survivors, most of them children. So, that's what I'm trying to reflect with the cartoon.

If the cartoon is good for anything other than entertainment value it's to help point the way to who Christ is and just as importantly who Christ is not, and to encourage those who aim to do good in Christ to continue in faith. If you don't care for what I'm saying, primarily that I have political viewpoint as well as a theological one and that I put them both on the line, God bless you! If you share my understanding that the Christian experience is a personal and passionate journey, where Christ can make use of every part of our lives (like the root of a plant makes use of every bit of it's pot) then-God double bless you!-Dan

Notice: Regardless of the current claim of the CafePress ad further below on this page, we have no thongs for sale in our faithmouse store.

No comments:

Post a Comment