Saturday, November 19, 2011

THE 6TH CIRCLE

I'm doing a daily strip over at the PORK MAGAZINE site "INTERNET PORK". It's called "The 6th Circle", inspired by Bil Keane's death & my weird feelings about people hating on him on the day of his death. I've never been a fan of The Family Circus, most of the daily comic strips I've been into were published at least 30 years before I was born, with the exception of PEANUTS & GARFIELD when I was a kid, oh, I liked the FAR SIDE also. Anyhow, despite the Family Circus' milquetoast view of life, I feel a weird cartoonist's loyalty to Keane, in that he was a real cartoonist, unlike so many so-called cartoonists of today. So, in a strange way, The 6th Circle is a tribute to the Family Circus, it takes place in the hellish world of my Monsters, Weirdos & Creeps & the jokes are maybe even worse than those in the Family Circus.
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I do the labels for a series of barrel aged craft brews from OAKSHIRE BREWING called HELLSHIRE. It's a collaboration between their Master Brewer Matt Van Wyk & myself. Here's a bunch of the beers at the opening event.
A whole mess of Hellshire II.
And I just knocked out 30+ characters for another card series.
I just knocked out 32 new characters.

3 comments:

Stefan Poag said...

I'll admit to having mixed feelings about the hating on Bil Keane. Sometimes it just made me kind of sick because it was selling the 'Leave it to Beaver' kind of existence --- on the other hand, everyone I knew hated 'The Family Circus' for being pablum. Maybe there is just too much hating going on.
In this post-newspaper part of my life, however, the only Bil Keane comics I encountered were the mockings and pastiches and detournements of 'The Family Circus' which featuresd quotes by Nietzsche or recaptioned to make them obscene... so it's been years since I have actually seen an actual Bil Keane comic presented as Keane intended it. That's just too fucking post modern for me to handle.

I do remember there was some dude who was taking 'The Family Circus' images and recaptioning them with some joke about felching or reach-arounds or other obscene stuff... and he abruptly stopped because Bil Keane wrote him and asked him not to. The wiseguy said that Keane was really nice about it, and apologetic about asking him to stop, but Keane explained that the people in the comics were based on members of his own family, so seeing them used for pedophilia jokes really bothered him (Keane). Which kind of made me feel like a dickbag for laughing at all of the fun I had laughing at the obscene Family Circus.

Human Mollusk said...

I really like the watercolor(-like) coloring. Works great with your style. I think I prefer it to your ususal marker coloring.

SEAN said...

Limpey, yeah, that's similar to how I was feeling about this. Fufu it is watercolors! My first & favorite medium, I like it better than the markers too but the markers have a weird power over my mind.