text: Well. Here I am in life. I am happy. I realized I am happy. I may not be happy as far as my religion goes but I am happy overall. I am finding my relationship with God. My relationship with Him is not like the next person and I just realized that. I was constantly holding back who I was. I was not happy because I gave into temptation everyday and I felt like I was a disappointment when in reality, I was changing who I was not for Him, but for those who follow Him. Aside from God, I was changing for my family. I knew who I was all along on the inside however I wanted to be different on the outside. I am not saying I have everything figured out. I am still confused on alot of things however I will discuss that later. I am finally free. Free of sadness, free of guilt (for the most part), free of the chains. God did not put those chains on me. I put them on and the devil had the key. I was going about life all wrong. Who knows, maybe I am wrong for what I am doing but it feels right to me. We will have to wait and see. If anyone is reading this, be happy. Do not worry what others will think. It will only drag you down and make you feel guilty about who you are. I want you to feel this freedom I feel because it truly is amazing.


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BizKid$ Wins National Emmy Award
Biz Kid$ has won a national Emmy Award, television¹s highest honor. The award for Outstanding Achievement in Single Camera Editing was presented to Biz Kid$ in a gala celebration in Los Angeles, Calif. on Friday, June 14, 2013. Biz Kid$ is the credit union funded public television series that teaches kids about money management and entrepreneurship. This is the second Emmy win for the youth financial literacy show.
The 40th annual Daytime Entertainment Creative Arts Emmy Awards are hosted by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The Emmy Awards recognize creative leadership for artistic, educational and technical achievements within the television industry. The Daytime Emmy Awards recognize outstanding achievement in all creative fields of daytime television production. The series was also nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing.
Biz Kid$ has continually garnered attention in and outside of the credit union industry. In addition to Emmy Award recognition, Biz Kid$ has won the Environmental Media Award for Outstanding Children¹s Television Series, a Silver Telly Award for Outstanding Children's Financial Literacy Programming, and most recently the Parent¹s Choice Gold Award. In 2010, it also earned the credit union industry¹s most prestigious honor, the Herb Wegner Award for Outstanding Program.
The National Credit Union Foundation oversees fundraising, outreach and administrative responsibilities of Biz Kid$. Over the past six years, more than 300 credit unions and affiliated organizations have raised more than $13.8 million that has supported the show's production, website and curriculum. In fact, every Biz Kid$ episode begins and ends with a narrator reminding viewers that, "Production funding for Biz Kid$ is provided by America¹s Credit Unions, where people are worth more than money."
For more information about Biz Kid$, click here.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Friday Feast #153
Describe a toy you remember from your childhood.
OK, so I know most folks are familiar with Barbies – I had a lot of them, but I also had Sindy dolls. I also had the cindy townhouse – which was taller tahn I was when I first got it!
On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being highest) how observant are you?
It really depends on the situation. Sometimes I get in a zone and don't even notice if I walk past friends on teh street. Other times I notice every little detail of things.
Where would you rather be at this very moment?
On an extended vacation in a warm exotic romantic locale with a hot date, getting a foot rub after having been shopping and having found some fabulous treats.
Main Course
When was the last time you learned something new?
Last night – I wasn't aware of how many people had been involved withthe KV Players. I'd gone to theri 25th Anniversary Review show and it was inspiring and fantastic!
Fill in the blank: I have ____________ but I haven't ____________.
I have a craving to go on vacation but I haven't got the savings of vacation time.


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Leah Chong is a lettering artist, muralist and designer based in Singapore.
She is passionate about letters and all things design, and loves working with people from companies both big and small. With an adaptive and consultative problem-solving approach, she serves up purposeful solutions, freshly baked and tastefully tailored to meet the design needs of each valued client.
Known for her versatility in lettering styles, she has created work for clients like Google, Van Cleef & Arpels, Canon Singapore and American Express and has taught classes in partnership with National Library Board, Singapore Press Holdings, Naiise, Singapore Management University, *SCAPE and Smarter Me.
When she's not drawing or trying to find the best hazelnut latte in the world, Leah relishes in creating visual stories over at her not-so-secret secret hideout – @thebackseatview.
To discuss on a project, or just to say hi, reach out via this form or email directly to firstname.lastname@example.com. Let's get crackin'.
Available For:
Branding Identity
Custom Lettering/ Illustration Campaigns
Social Media Graphics
Apparel Graphics
Formalities Addressing
Live on-site Calligraphy & Hand Lettering
Event-based/ Corporate Workshops
Art Licensing
& More


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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday to allow sweeping background checks of JPL scientists and other government contract workers, ruling that privacy rights do not prevent officials from digging into employees' medical, financial and sexual histories.
Research scientist Robert Nelson and 27 other JPL scientists who do not have access to classified material had won an injunction in U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that prevented NASA from implementing the procedures, developed by the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.
"We're very disappointed that the court ruled against us, and as near as we understand it, the ball is in NASA's court to [conduct the controversial background checks or] come up with their own standards for these investigations," Nelson said.
"The one bright light in this finding is that the court made the ruling so narrow that it applies essentially only to us. It was not a broader ruling that citizens have no expectation for informational privacy, so it didn't damage other people's rights," he continued.
In the decision, which holds JPL researchers to the similar standards as government workers with access to classified information, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the justices were not ruling on whether citizens had a constitutional right to informational privacy.
"We reject the argument that the government, when it requests job-related personal information in an employment background check, has a constitutional burden to demonstrate that its questions are 'necessary,'" Alito wrote.
In a separate ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that he believed no such right to informational privacy exists.
Nelson said he and other JPL scientists would release a joint statement later this week.


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Photo Gallery: Youth Rebellion on the Streets of Europe 06/07/2011
Return to article
In recent months, young people in several countries in Europe have taken to the streets to register their displeasure at the economic situation. Demonstrations in Spain have been particularly effective in attracting attention. Many have camped out on Puerta del Sol square in central Madrid for weeks.
Return to article


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I have admired Amy Borrell's whimsical watercolours (aka Cake with Giants) when they grace the pages of Frankie magazine from time to time. Having a little explore on her folio site last night I found this little project which makes me want to lock myself in a room for a week to attempt to replicate it!
Titled 'A brief account of a life lived so far', Amy has gathered her photos, letters and favourite things, ordered them from A-Z and then hand sewn the whole lot into a glorious bundle of a book.
& aren't her other illustrations adorable too. One clever lady, oui?!
(available to buy here & here)
A book of memories // Amy Borrell
Monday, 16 April 2012
Categories Books. illustration. Prints/Posters. projects
3 comments:
wow, the rainbow spine of this book is art in it's self! Very cool project - i have always admired her illustrations as well :)ReplyDelete
Oo I've never heard of her before ... but I'm really liking her work, thanks for posting!!:)ReplyDelete
I know - the spine is my favorite bit I think too!ReplyDelete
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There is always something going on at Tropical Sports Club; visit our Events page to see upcoming opportunities to support our organization.
1943 South Hairston Road
Stone Mountain, GA 30088
Tropical Sports Club continues to make worthwhile contributions to our community through our Scholarship program as well as our relationship with Phoenix Pass.
Our rich history as an organization, with deep roots in the Caribbean plus our involvement in the community and various sports, sets us apart from any other social club in Atlanta and even in the United States.


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Boston Haiku Times at Figment Boston
The Boston Haiku Times is a long (15" x 120') letterpressed horizontal scroll composed of haiku written by attendees (along with images) printed on site.
Come write haiku news, to be printed live on a long fabric scroll stretching out through the park.
Haiku Submitted to Boston Haiku Times - Figment 2018
Asterisked haiku were printed on the scroll.
Ping pong balls fly up
Making beautiful music
Soon they reach the ground
Leo, Nina, and
Papa went to the Art Fair
and made this poem
Raya Schulman
Trees sway in the wind
Flowers blossom, apples grow
all trees are pretty
Marta Gredler
12 Long Unknown miles
water and 8 measly fries
could expect no more
In Boston today
people play on lots of art
and have lots of fun
Friends and Family
Always Fun to Spend Time With
Lots of Joy and Love
Out on a Sunday
Off for a nice morning walk
Now for something new
Agatha Shortie
Together up in the sky
We'll see you again
O, Veganism
A cleaner planet for us
A gentler heart, too
I'm on the Greenway
and enjoying the beauty
of the great green day
Our dog Agatha
Gallbladder ruptured with pus
She died peacefully
Sunday at the camp
Delaney is delightful
Here's to you my friend
Leo Schulman
My morning glories
What do the do in the evening
I wish that I knew
Vanessa Love
August 18 will
Come soon. We'll be wed that day
Husband and wife.
What defines freedom
I do not know it for sure
maybe you can guess!
Explore the Greenway
On a warm sunny Sunday
Finding art and play
* Gordo King
Visiting from Spain
Jessica is exploring
Don't get a sunburn
Marilyn Lamkin
Wind blowing through hair
Beans of sunshine on my face
Mother nature's gift
Michelle Quinones
Fiona is sweet
She is my silly doggie
Fiona likes sleep
Tommy Love
Everyone standing
Here counting on their fingers
This is a haiku
Susan Andrews
A Beautiful Day
A Lifelong friendship renewed
Light outside inside
Charissa Anistrom
Sewing clothes for all
Planning meals for days to come
Happy Birthday Mom
* Damien
Today is Sunday
Tomorrow will be Monday
Yesterday is gone
Gian Sepulveda
On this day the sun
Hides its crown from us in the clouds
yet its light shines bright
Welcome to Boston
Where you can always dream of
Lots of Lobster rolls
Senior citizens
Retirement is wonderful
Dream and go for it
Before we sink too
Low - Give a little loving
To your neighbor's cat
Tate's Pickles
They were delicious and green
You should try them
Maheeh Sadlineine
Big Blue
Sky Is
I really like pink
Pink is my favorite shade
Pink makes me happy
Madalyn Seward
Summer Vacation
Beaches Boston New Hampshire
Art Swimming Food Fun
Hannah Crozier
I can't think of a
Haiku to write this is so
difficult for me
Ranom Jani Smith
Moon, Owl, Little Me
Yummy Milk, Please, no sleeping
Black Ink, More Color!
Susan Paino
Blue Bikes hard to find
in Boston on the weekend
Walk on till you ride
Michael Hanau
Back from recent trip
We took many photographs
Wish you were still here
I was having fun
then I heard about your dog
it ruined my day
Mom loves Mattea
Mattea is a good girl
Dad loves Mattea
I am Cecilia
Unicorns are the best pet
I love them so much
Megan L
Colorado zoom
new mountains I will explore
Go west young lass soon
Coming on the train
City relax breezy fun
No business today
Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Jessica Lee Skary
Today is purple
Tomorrow will be Purple
My world is purple
Andrew Prentice
Reduce your Plastics
Once made they never degrade
Slowly strangling all
Floating on the waves
I fell into a dream state
My life is a beach
* Spencer Kornhaber
I'm not worried, but
Maybe that rash was a sign
What did I ingest
* Adam Thielker
Summer came and stayed
Nights grew shorter and shorter
New England Melted
Breastmilk is not free
If women's time is valued
I've pumped 13 days
Molly Petrier
Like children, we play
Together again at last
Like no time has passed
Elle Chu
Waiting for our friend
To meet us at the greenway
Spring girls came to play
Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains.
Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains.
Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains. Brains.
Hope Marion
I will give you crabs
I will draw a crab on you
Welcome to the cult
Steve Reilly
Is this happening?
It's certainly not my fault
I'll still clean it up
Megan Luce
Met on a mountain
He chased me all the way down
Right into my heart
Leigh Hall
Depressive's Lament:
Today I WILL stay awake,
go outdoors and LIVE!
Leigh Hall
Trump hears from Putin
"an incredible offer"
Grill ex-diplomat
Leigh Hall
Daily reports of
California burning
This is climate change
What am I doing?
Quite frankly, I do not know.
Oh well, I'll wing it.
Andrew Prentice
Have you had water?
If you're thirsty it's too late
Victims! Heil Hydrate
* Greg Caplan
Grass soaks up sunlight
Ink smell rises into air
Printing is fun
* Chloe
I am only nine
But my imagination
Is way way older
Ellery Plesur
Adventures are great.
Anything can happen, true
once upon a time . . .
Trees sway
in the
Mark and Tricia
Beautiful Summer
With my Love for all seasons
My heart is lucky
Nicole Bowers
Clowns come for my Joy
Terror and tears become me
I want to go home
Daniel Schulman
I had a quick thought
Which slipped between the lips but
Was stuck in the ink
Guilleime Carrean
Dragons enter sleep
Is there a light switch in here
Wake up or wake up
I like penguins, yes
I love their flippers swimming
Why are they not here?
Cindy & Joyce
Feel me I'm hungry
Or I'll eat you piece by piece
And in a slow way!
Juniper Hussey
Puppies are so cute
It would be funny if they
Played a pretty flute
Butterfly dancing
In the brilliant red lilies
green shimmers from heat
Shruthi Raghuraman
I love chocolate
Preferably in milk form
Cheers to a great drink
* Emil Durrant
Sunday at Figment
Interact react and play
Art for everyone
Hanna Bluestone
The Vaca is not
A Chewbacca who knew?
Hans Solo would you?
* Hilary Short
The instructions said
Bring water, sunscreen and hat.
I forgot the hat!
John Palmer
Put the pot to boil
Al dente in eight minutes
Seconds? It's so good
Jeremy Tchin
Irrational boy
Adventures along with
Best friend, nonsense, yes
Seagulls are above
Dog poop is in front of me
It's a beautiful day
* Dave Jonczak
Tongue of dog hangs low
Rays of sunlight magnify
Walk upon green grass
July 29
The Rose Kennedy Greenway
Figment Boston Mass
Happy to be me
on Sunny day at the Park
With dear friends and you!
Hope and Taylor
It's hot in Boston
A breeze flowing thru the trees
Longing for ice tea
Emili Durrant
An "A" left behind
Recovered and kept for weeks
Now returned to you


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'No make-up selfie' trend helps cancer charity raise £1million in 24 hours!.
If only these committed individuals had the trusted Selfie Stick to take their no make-up selfies! It would have given them the perfect selfie shot!
Check out our new product the Selfie Stick!
It allows you to take great selfies and it's also great for group shots and epic videos! It's your iPhone's new best friend!


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The first half of the 20th century: the evolution of the form
The United States
The modern newspaper strip was born in the heat of rivalry between giants of the American press. In January 1894 a comic strip filled for the first time a full-colour page of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper the New York World; in October 1896 the publisher William Randolph Hearst announced in his rival paper, the Morning Journal, the first regular weekly full-colour comic supplement. This supplement ran to eight pages and included the Yellow Kid of Richard Outcault, whom Hearst had enticed away from the New York World. The Yellow Kid, set in a large single scene, not a narrative strip, was the first continuous comic character in the United States. Outcault established earthy, strictly urban farce as the keynote of the early American strip, which thereafter grew in sophistication and sentimentality. The Yellow Kid also standardized the speech balloon, which had largely fallen into disuse since the 17th century and its occasional appearance in the English caricatural strip about 1800. In 1897 Rudolph Dirks, at the instigation of Hearst, who as a child had enjoyed the work of Busch, worked up a strip based on Max and Moritz, called the Katzenjammer Kids, which proved an instant success. It survived in syndication into the 21st century, under its sixth author. The market-driven tendency to continue strips in their formula if not their spirit after the death of the original author(s) has given extraordinary longevity to many strips that should have died a natural death; most decline into prolonged senility before being finally scrapped. Katzenjammer Kids had for the first time the fully developed form of the newspaper strip; i.e., it used word balloons, had a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into small regular panels (dispensing with the full panoramic scenes in which the Yellow Kid had appeared).
The spread of comics to other newspapers was rapid and was aided by the development of newspaper syndication. The aesthetically outstanding strip of the early years was Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–11, 1924–27), which created a dreamworld at once gentle, exciting, and humorous. The strip was executed in fairy-tale illustration style, with a conscious display of colouristic effects. (A musical based on the strip and called Little Nemo was produced in 1908, and an animated cartoon by McCay followed in 1909.)
The daily strip in black and white, indispensable to all major newspapers from 1915, was effectively inaugurated by the San Francisco Chronicle with Bud Fisher's Mr. A. Mutt (later Mutt and Jeff). At first set in a horse-racing milieu, it soon became a general interest comic.
During the years 1907–20 most of the major categories of American comics were established, including the first aviation, ethnic character, and career girl strips. The most important gag strip was George McManus's Bringing Up Father (begun 1913/16), also the first American strip to achieve international fame. Outstanding among the family saga or domestic problem strips that burgeoned during the 1920s was Frank King's Gasoline Alley, which started in 1918. It strove for realism rather than farcical effects and had a strict continuity (as opposed to the daily gag), during which, moreover, characters actually grew older. The first career girl strip was Martin Branner's Winnie Winkle (1920–96), followed by the fashion-conscious Tillie the Toiler (1921–59) by Russ Westover. Another major group of the 1920s was fantastic, satirical, and parodistic. Elzie Crisler Segar's Popeye (first appearance in Thimble Theatre, begun 1929) still depended upon slapstick, but George Herriman's Krazy Kat (1911–44) placed the slapstick in a tender world of poetry, at once surreal and humorous. Drawn with the greatest of graphic economy, it presented the absurd interrelationships of a tiny cast of characters (basically three), using the thinnest imaginable plot line. Krazy Kat was the first newspaper strip anywhere to be aimed at relatively intellectual adults and to claim philosophical significance.
During the 1930s the comics page expanded both in quantity of strips and in range of subject matter. Several of the strips created then survive today. One of them, Chic Young's domestic comedy strip Blondie (begun 1930), has achieved unparalleled international renown, syndicated by the turn of the 21st century to 2,300 newspapers and read by some 250 million people in 55 countries and in more than 33 languages. Twenty-four Blondie films were made between 1930 and 1950.
A new category of immense significance emerged: the continuous-action adventure strip. This took many forms: domestic and detective drama, science and space fiction, and, by 1938, war and superhero strips. The earliest adventure strip was Tarzan (begun 1929), whose Canadian-born creator Harold Foster broke completely with the prevailing caricatural style, adopted cinematic techniques, and sought picturesque, documentary realism. No less concerned with classic aesthetic effects was Alex Raymond, first master of the exotic space strip (Flash Gordon, begun 1934). An aggressively cinematic adventure strip, meticulously researched, was evolved by Milton Caniff in his Terry and the Pirates (begun 1934). Caricatural simplifications and grim forms of humour were introduced into the genre by Chester Gould's Dick Tracy (begun 1931), the detective strip par excellence, which is laced with science-fiction gadgetry and bizarre eroticism. Truly satirical forms of exaggeration and of social content returned to the strip with Al Capp's Li'l Abner (1934–77).
The demand for adventure stories spawned a new and highly lucrative vehicle for the comic strip: the cheap staple-bound comic book. The first true comic books were marketed in 1933 as giveaway advertising premiums. These had a 7.5- by 10.25-inch (19- by 26-cm) page size, a format that has continued. By 1935 such titles as Famous Funnies, Tip Top Comics, King Comics—at first chiefly reprints of newspaper strips and then with original stories—were selling in large quantities. Specialization soon set in with Detective Comics (begun 1937) and Action Comics (begun 1938). Superman, which appeared first in Action Comics, was the creation of Jerry Siegel (scenario or text) and Joe Shuster (art); it was soon syndicated and transposed to other media. The Superman formula of the hero who transcends all physical and social laws to punish the wicked was widely imitated. The animated cartoon animals of Walt Disney also took root in the comic book.
World War II hastened the development of strips and comic books dealing with war and crime, the latter finding a new and avid readership among American soldiers stationed abroad. Being outside the control of newspaper editors, the comic book became increasingly violent and gruesome. The sadism of the American comic became proverbial; the "comic" became equated by Europeans with the "horror comic," and voices of educators were raised against it on both sides of the Atlantic. The psychiatrist Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (1954) blamed rising juvenile deliquency on the pernicious influence of the comic book, and U.S. congressional investigations confirmed this opinion. The industry responded by instituting systems of self-censorship, administered by several organizations; the more vicious-looking material was restrained, but in Europe some American adventure strips continued to be criticized for their pursuit of violence and for their racist, militarist, and fascist tendencies. Wertham's book had reverberations in many other countries.
Perhaps as a reaction, there was a parallel postwar development in newspaper strips devoted to sentimental soap-opera-like domestic drama—such as Rex Morgan, M.D. (begun 1948), Mary Worth (begun 1938), and The Heart of Juliet Jones (begun 1953)—and simple-looking but subtly conceived gag strips. The latter included Beetle Bailey (begun 1950), featuring an incorrigible army private (though the gags were never tainted by military reality), and Dennis the Menace (begun 1951), a sophisticated Katzenjammer, not to be confused with the much cruder English strip of the same name in the young children's comic The Beano (begun 1938). Pogo (1948–75), by former Disney artist Walt Kelly, was the most cerebral, socially pointed, and self-reflective of all strips in the mid-20th century, without sacrificing humour. Disneyish in style, the Pogo social menagerie transcended Disney's moral simplism, presenting a highly nuanced world populated with an almost Dickensian multitude of characters, all depicted as swamp animals. Pogo exuded a tender, nostalgic air, perpetually ruffled by the breezes of sociopolitical allusion and rendered stormy with the caricature of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Kelly's dialogue, both bizarre and poetic, was admired for its contrast with the generality of strips, which were criticized for their verbal poverty.
The literate strip with philosophical, psychological, and sociological overtones was the principal innovation of the later 1950s. Charles Schulz's Peanuts (1950–2000) featured a small band of young children, a beagle, and a small yellow bird and dispensed entirely with the usual adult foil. The characters' interactions and passions, which were of course easily readable as adult concerns, offered a broad psychological range without ever impinging on the political or controversial. Arguably the most successful and most translated gag strip ever, "Peanuts" entered American folklore and was heavily commercialized. An estimated 400 million Peanuts record albums had been sold by the time of Schulz's death in 2000, and into the 21st century Schulz's estate continued to earn tens of millions of dollars a year in syndication and merchandising fees. Schulz never used help in drawing, inking, or lettering a single design, as was the custom. Such was the repute of Peanuts that no attempt was made to continue it after the author's death, when reruns of old strips began.
Of comparable psychological finesse and imbued with truly satirical flashes was Johnny Hart's B.C. (begun 1958) and his Wizard of Id (begun 1964; in collaboration with Brant Parker), which had prehistoric and medieval settings, respectively. The major strip of political satire, Feiffer by Jules Feiffer (first appearing weekly in The Village Voice, 1956), was run in the more liberal or left-wing papers; as a mainstream newspaper strip, it was consigned to the editorial rather than comics pages. In Feiffer the dialogue was more important than the deliberately repetitive drawings, which never went beyond the human figure; the content played upon the logic-twisting, deceptive rhetoric of politicians and the neurotic relationships between social competitors and lovers. Feiffer created scenes in the manner of absurdist or "noir" drama; indeed, a play based on his strip was mounted in 1961.
The first recurrent British comic characters, after Ally Sloper appeared in the 1870s, were those in Jack Yeats's Conan Doyle burlesque The Adventures of Chubblock Homes (published in Comic Cuts, begun 1893) as well as Tom Browne's tramps Weary Willie and Tired Tim. The latter strip was sponsored in 1896 by the publisher Alfred Harmsworth and was originally intended for the newly literate and semiliterate masses, but it developed into children's fare.
Distinctive British contributions were the magazine of strips designed for preliterate children, such as Tiger Tim's Weekly, which carried Tiger Tim (1904–80), the oldest and longest-lived of British comic heroes and the first British newspaper strip (in the Daily Mirror); the picture paper based on film comedy (Film Fun, Kinema Comic); and the multitude of children's magazines containing both articles and comic strips. The first strip for young children to appear in an adult newspaper was Rupert, the Adventures of a Little Lost Teddy Bear (begun 1921), created by Mary Tourtel for the Daily Express. The text was fitted in below the balloonless pictures in order to facilitate reading aloud by adults.
In the juvenile market the outstanding British successes in the 1950s were Dandy (begun 1937), with characters Desperate Dan and Keyhole Kate being perennial favourites, and the aforementioned The Beano, both of which offered innocent fun for younger children. For older children there was The Eagle (1950–69), with Dan Dare (begun 1950; strip killed and relaunched a number of times, last in 2007) by Frank Hampson and the Rev. Marcus Morris, based on "healthy" Christian principles and directed against the American horror comic. At its peak Dan Dare reached a circulation of about one million weekly, but that figure had fallen to 20,000 by 1993.
The cultural shift that occurred in the 1980s can be measured by the success of an entirely different kind of comic, such as Viz (begun 1979), which, in a crude Beano-like style and in Beano parody, offered story lines complete with juvenile sex, profanity, and scatology to a market composed chiefly of males ages 18–25. Viz reached a peak audience of 1.25 million a month in 1990, but in the 21st century its circulation was much diminished as its audience aged.
The first British adult newspaper strip—and, after Krazy Kat, the first daily strip anywhere designed exclusively for adults—was the witty Pop (1921–60), by John Millar Watt. Pop, together with Reginald Smythe's Andy Capp (begun 1957), were among the very few European strips to be exported to the United States. For all its satire on the working class, Andy Capp, with its work-shy title character, surprisingly also ran in the Russian daily newspaper Izvestiya. A notably original strip was Norman Pett's Jane (1932–59), published in the Daily Mirror. It used an artful striptease theme and had great popularity with servicemen during World War II. The mildly satirical strip was pioneered in the Daily Express by Flook (begun 1949), a continuing narrative of various kinds of adventure (drawn by Wally Fawkes and written from 1958 by George Melly), and by Frank Dickens's Bristow (begun 1960; books published beginning in 1966), a daily gag strip set in a business office. The outright satirical and political strip flowered in the new satirical magazines such as Private Eye (begun 1961).
In France Jean-Pierre Pinchon's Bécassine (1905–60, with a six-year gap), modeled on Christophe (see above The 19th century), depicted the humorous adventures of a none-too-intelligent but well-intentioned Breton servant; Louis Forton's Les Pieds-Nickelés (begun 1908; The Nickel-Plated-Feet Gang), although ostensibly for children, had political touches and a mocking tone that appealed to adults as well. Les Pieds-Nickelés, with its gang of swindlers, constitutes the oldest still-existing European strip and the second oldest in the world (after the Katzenjammer Kids); it has also been the subject of several plays and movies. The first European strip to be fully developed in the American sense (notably as regards the use of balloons) was Alain de Saint-Ogan's Zig et Puce (1925–late 1960s). France had no daily comic strip until 1934. There and in Italy, even more than in England, the market was smothered in the 1930s and '40s by American imports and imitations.
An outstanding and hardy domestic product was Tintin (1929–83), created by the Belgian Hergé (Georges Rémi), a realistically conceived and relatively didactic adventure strip with a kind of Boy Scout hero. Immaculately designed and researched (with the help of a studio of assistants) and the model of what became known as the ligne claire ("clear line"), the strip narrating Tintin's adventures took him all over the world into all kinds of social and geographical milieux, accompanied by a cast of comic and satirical characters that have become part of French folklore. The moral opposite of Carl Barks's avaricious arch-capitalist Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the selfless and righteous Tintin often found himself in exotic foreign lands engaged, like Scrooge, in what modern readers might regard as imperialist negotiations. Hergé had 23 Tintin albums in print at his death in 1983. His work had been translated into all major languages and extensively merchandised. Into the 21st century Tintin products flourished, especially on the Internet. Tintin's immense popularity was challenged (and no more) from the 1960s on by a warrior of ancient Gaul called Astérix (begun 1959), the work of the writer (and comic strip theorist) René Goscinny and the artist Albert Uderzo. Astérix, besides being simply humorous and adventurous, indulges in sophisticated puns, witty anachronisms, and satirical flashes. Astérix also has been heavily merchandised and is the subject of a theme park near Paris.
The second half of the 20th century and beyond: adolescence and maturation
The most significant innovations since about 1965 have been in the parodistic, satirical, erotic, and surrealistic comics and the graphic novel. The precursors of the great renewal of the medium were Mad magazine, founded in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman, with its parodies of media and commercial visual stereotypes, and the parodistic-erotic acceptable only to the more liberal and vanguard press: Little Annie Fanny by Kurtzman and Will Elder in Playboy magazine (1962–88), followed by The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist by Michael O'Donoghue and Frank Springer in Evergreen Review (1965–66); both, for the first time in the United States, were luxuriously printed in a full-colour process.
About 1965 the so-called "underground" comics were launched in San Francisco. Originally self-published and small-circulation experiments in rendering the new consciousness inflamed by the Vietnam War, they took as their subjects drugs, psychedelia, kinky sex, and mockery of and rage against authority. The underground comics (often spelled "comix"), marketed with titles such as Zap Comix and Snatch, soon attained national and international celebrity among rebellious youth. One of the best-known comics producers was R. Crumb, who worked on a knife-edge between the grotesque and real, sexual extremism and social anxiety, the absurd and the philosophical. The most imaginative and yet the least playful and most introverted creator of underground comics, Crumb often seemed abo"Fritz the Cat, incubated through the 1960s, was in 1972 turned into a full-length X-rated animated film. Other figures from the underground were Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, and Gilbert Shelton, whose sex-and-dope-hungry pseudo-revolutionary Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (begun 1968) circulated widely and has remained in print. The underground comics soon enjoyed aboveground popularity, and their effect was long-lasting, but as a coherent phenomenon they endured only one spectacular decade.
In Europe an entirely different renewal was brewing: the "adult comic strip" (bande dessinée pour adultes), pioneered in France and Italy in handsome booklike albums using good paper and fine colour that privileged the aesthetic (and often erotic) effect over simple comedy. Guy Pellaert (Jodelle), Guido Crepax (Valentina), and Nicolas Devil (Saga de Xam), all dating from 1967–68, employed techniques from Pop, Op, psychedelic, and poster art. The influence worked both ways. American art, particularly the Pop movement with Roy Lichtenstein, was profoundly affected from roughly 1963 by traditional (American) comic strip styles.
Hitherto disdained as an essentially juvenile medium, the comics (and by extension the late-20th-century graphic novel, a self-contained novel-length treatment that is serious in content and coherent in plot rather than episodic; see below) attained increasing academic respectability from the late 1960s, within a wave of appreciation and concern for popular and youth culture generally. The comics became firmly established as a major evolving aesthetic and communicative medium appealing to the intelligent adult, with many comics shedding their juvenile allure altogether. The boom in comics for adults coincided with a general decline in the enormous juvenile comics industry and with the stagnation of the newspaper strip that continued into the 21st century despite stellar exceptions, such as Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury. Well-established in Europe by the 1970s, before the genre reached the United States, adult comics by the mid 1980s were being hailed in major news media as a maturation, a "growing up." Many comic book anthologies and graphic novels began to carry the critical and intellectual clout associated with the better novels and films of the era and took on some of their modernist or postmodernist formal complexity, moral ambiguity, and philosophical ambition.
The sensationalist aesthetic ambitions of some comic books, in symbiosis with the animated cartoon and the more-advanced special effects in live-action movies, have led to new wine being poured into old wineskins. Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (c. 1986), for instance, relies on graphics so spectacular as to obscure any difference in content from the old Batman; as with the movies, it relies chiefly on technical wizardry.
When not self-published, as was often the case, the better comic book or comic strip compilations and graphic novels were marketed through mainstream bookstores and published by major publishers such as Penguin and Gollancz, as well as by smaller, specialized publishers, such as Fantagraphics and Kitchen Sink Press. Academic conferences since the first held in Lucca, Italy, in 1965, multiplied, as did exhibitions. Museums, libraries, and study centres were set up, the largest being The International City of the Cartoon and the Image in Angoulême, France, with a counterpart in Brussels (The Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art). In addition, a number of Web sites were created that were devoted to the cartoon and the comic strip, including digital encyclopaedias and virtual museums. The art of the comic strip was taught for the first time in major art schools (notably the School of Visual Arts in New York) and entered academic curricula. Critical magazines were launched to encourage quality and experimentation (in France, Phénix [1960–77]; in the United States, Comics Journal [begun 1977], followed by the International Journal of Comic Art [begun 1999]; and in the United Kingdom, European Comic Art [begun 2008]).
Scholarship on comic strips abounded, including historical, aesthetic, ideological, semiological (especially in Europe), and philosophical approaches. The classics were reprinted and sold in boxed sets; guides, dictionaries, indexes, and series appeared with, on occasion, the whole corpus of a comic book artist's personal work and critical oeuvre catalogue in a luxury format such as had once been reserved to the great artists of the world. One of the greatest Disney artists of them all, Carl Barks, sole creator of more than 500 of the best Donald Duck and other stories, was rescued from the oblivion to which the Disney policy of anonymity would consign him to become a cult figure. His Collected Works ran to 30 luxurious folio volumes. Walt Kelly's Pogo was first republished in 11 volumes (1989–2000). Especially in Europe, elite intellectuals such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Alain Resnais have validated the comics; in the United States, major filmmakers—notably George Lucas and Steven Spielberg—have acknowledged their artistic debt to comics, which they have used as both inspiration and source material.
At the turn of the 21st century, there were several hundred comics (and cartoon) sites on the Internet and many dozens of comics available online, offering current and classic strips, with simultaneous opportunity to buy them on merchandise or have them delivered daily by e-mail. Archival links allowed users to access by date and subject any comic previously published in the series. Despite this easy access to the smaller formats, book-length graphic novels and comic strip anthologies sold in increasing numbers. The book format was more attractive to public and university libraries than the slim pamphletlike comic books that continued to be assiduously collected and preserved by private collectors, who paid four-figure sums for single issues at auctions for the classics and early, rare issues.
"Adult" as the character of the new comic book and graphic novel was proclaimed to be, the core market remained among youth and young adults (the 17–25 age bracket), and many of the creators were young, as was the case in popular music and film, to which comics were often linked. The transition from the juvenile to the "young adult" market is exemplified in Britain's 2000 ad, which flourished from 1978 to 1985 (and continues in the 21st century at a lower circulation level), was reprinted in the United States, and at its peak sold 120,000 copies per week. Its chief feature was Judge Dredd; written from a cynical perspective on American culture and the authoritarian state, the strip follows a quasi-fascist law enforcer in a post-nuclear-war world who rules Mega City One (part New York City, part Thatcherite London). Compared with other comics, it was printed on better paper and was flashier in style, and it was made into a book as well as a film. The French equivalent was Métal Hurlant (begun 1975), composed of adventure stories by Jean Giraud (also known as Moebius), which redefined the medium, using openly erotic, stunning visuals with glossy, airbrushed, fully painted effects. This work, together with the highly influential magazine (À Suivre) (begun 1978), reestablished the graphic novel and showcased new, experimental talent. The central figure in the European adult graphic novel was Giraud, a versatile master of the adventure and science fiction genres at their most sophisticated and considered by some to be the world's best in those genres. In popularity and quality, only the Italian comics creator Hugo Pratt, with his Corto Maltese (begun 1970), came close.
The shift of artists and public toward the graphic novel may have been facilitated by a commercial crisis in the later 1990s, when the traditional comic book lost sales and publishers collapsed. Even the mighty Marvel group declared bankruptcy in 1998, though it later revived. Shops were closed and titles canceled. This was connected to competition for the juvenile market from video and then computer games and the Internet. Indeed, every major comics publisher now has an Internet site, and some comics appear only there. But the industry as a whole was much sustained beginning in the 1970s by specialized shops—rather than newsstands—which now form the major outlet for comics.
The fact-based comic: historical, didactic, political, narrative
The comic book format has long been used to retell history, myths and legends, and literary classics; a very precocious example of the latter is Cham's parody of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, published 1862–63 in installments parallel with those of the original novel. In the 20th century, Classics Comics and Classics Illustrated from the Gilberton Company, extracts from which passed into high school texts, were a conscious response to the gruesome excesses of the "horror comics" in mid-century. The didactic-communicative advantages of the text-and-image combination, and not least the humorous format, have been adopted for all kinds of educational, instructional, and even technical materials in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. A "for beginners" series, started in Britain and soon adopted in the United States and elsewhere, explained the life and thought of revolutionary thinkers (Darwin, Marx, Einstein, Freud, etc.), and cartoon "people's histories" (e.g., of the United States, of the universe) proliferated, the specialty of the award-winning Larry Gonick and the Mexican cartoonist Rius (Eduardo del Río). These are at once elementary introductions and sophisticated presentations of sometimes difficult material (Gonick, for instance, has produced "cartoon guides" to physics, genetics, and computer science); they mix line drawings and explanations with asides, political observations, touches of satire, and farcical, silly, and obviously anachronistic elements, and they sometimes use photographic and other kinds of visual documentation. The text naturally tends to become relatively significant without being totally dominant. In these works too the grid system of panel narrative is usually radically loosened or altogether abandoned. Such books have been welcomed into the classroom at all levels, from primary school to university. These graphic techniques have also been employed by the U.S. Department of Defense to demonstrate how to load warheads and by the Central Intelligence Agency to show how to subvert governments.
Left-wing American activists have made particular use of comics, from Kurtzman's narrative antiwar Korean War histories in Mad magazine to Leonard Rifas's informational comics opposing atomic and nuclear weapons and Joel Andreas's Addicted to War (1993). The comic book format has been used as investigative journalism critical of U.S. foreign policy in a way that the newspaper strips generally have not. Brought to Light (1989), published by the now-defunct nonprofit law firm Christic Institute, is a docudrama investigating the Iran-Contra Affair and the related La Penca bombing in a highly polished classic adventure-story manner. Using the graphic novel format, comics journalist Joe Sacco denounced Serb and NATO war crimes in the former Yugoslavia in Safe Area Goražde (2000), and he examined the Palestinian viewpoint in Palestine (published in a single volume, 2001; winner of an American Book Award in 1996). Jack Jackson, author of Comanche Moon: A Picture Narrative About Cynthia Ann Parker (1979) and Los Tejanos (c. 1982; "The Texans"), offered a revisionist view of the history of the American Southwest. In France Jacques Tardi's C'était la guerre des tranchées: 1914–1918 (1993; "It Was the War of the Trenches: 1914–1918") brought an antimilitarist perspective to his treatment of World War I, and Nakazawa Keiji dealt with the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Hadashi no Gen (begun 1973, originally published monthly in serial form; Barefoot Gen).
One of the earliest and most noteworthy cartoonists to offer opinions on controversial topics was the American cartoonist Garry Trudeau, whose Doonesbury (begun 1970) in the early 21st century ran in more than 1,400 newspapers throughout the world. Making clear through his strips his sympathy for liberal social movements such as feminism and the antiwar movement and his hostility toward several conservative U.S. administrations, Trudeau placed his characters in the midst of such events as the Watergate Scandal and the Iraq War to denounce those who were responsible. One of the most influential editorial cartoonists, he was regularly censored by newspaper editors. Nevertheless, he won a Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1975. Following a group of college classmates from adulthood through middle age, Trudeau alternated gag strips with episodes that continued over an extended period. His drawing style, though in itself unremarkable at best, is quite successful when combined with his acute and eloquent dialogue. Somewhat similar is the work of the British socialist cartoonist Steve Bell, whose caustic strip If… (begun 1981) appeared daily in The Guardian. His start in children's comics is evident in his crude, chaotic linear style and composition.
Compared with Doonesbury and If…, Scott Adams's Dilbert takes office politics far more seriously than national politics. Set in a stereotypical business office, "Dilbert" takes a narrow, amused look at the bureaucratic excesses of the business world. It is extraordinarily successful, being printed in some 2,000 newspapers in more than 65 countries. Time magazine placed Dilbert among the most influential Americans of 1997 (he was the only fictional character to make the list), and Adams's The Dilbert Principle (1997) became the top-selling management book of that year.
The autobiographical graphic novel
In the 21st century the graphic novel came to occupy an entire section in major bookstores. The term graphic novel was first successfully claimed by Will Eisner for his semi-autobiographical A Contract with God (1978), which offers a melancholy perspective on the author's Depression-era youth. Harvey Pekar's American Splendor (1986) series, set in the 1970s, illustrates the quotidian working-class life in Cleveland, Ohio. One of the most celebrated graphic novels is Art Spiegelman's Maus, a long tale of the Holocaust told (first in the pioneering Raw magazine anthology) in an austere style and complex narrative layers, featuring the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice. In its sobriety it was about as far as one can imagine from the world of Disney or just about any other ostensible animal comic. Maus was the first comic book or graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism (1992), and the book won universal acclaim from critics who would not normally consider reviewing comic books. Maus and American Splendor are autobiographical (Maus incorporating the experience of the author's father), as have been many of the best adult comics, notably in the feminist domain. Marisa Acocella's snazzily drawn Just Who the Hell Is SHE, Anyway? (1993) was the first strip to be featured in a monthly fashion magazine (Mirabella). Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoirs Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004)—both combining two volumes first published in French (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003)—are moving manga-influenced accounts of her childhood in Tehrān and her adolescence and young adulthood in Europe. Also noteworthy is African American Mat Johnson's Incognegro (2008), with art by Warren Pleece. Set in the 1930s, this graphic novel shows a black journalist who passes as white, using his light skin as a mask in order to solve a crime.
Chris Ware's ironically titled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), a long, drawn-out, formally innovative, eerily desperate autobiographical mosaic, is designed in a haunting rhythm of differently sized and related panel clusters, with Proustian memorial parentheses. It presents a bleak vision of childhood suffering, the pain of which the rigidly calligraphic drawing and deliberately restrictive camera angles attempt, as it were, to suppress. In 2001 it became the first comic book to win a Guardian First Book Award.
Comics in Latin America
The enormous popularity of the comic book in Mexico, where in one of its staples—the romance-domestic drama—it has a rival in the fotonovela, is noteworthy largely for the work of Rius. In his best-known series, starting in the 1960s, Los supermachos ("The Supermales"), followed by Los agachados (1968–81; "The Crouching"), which was very popular also in English translation, Rius was critical, controversial, and censored. He mocked social inequity and bourgeois values with an instinctive comic exuberance that occasionally lapsed into didacticism. He appealed primarily to students and the professional classes. Most other Mexicans were more attracted to Kalimán, an asexual superhero known throughout Latin America. The story of Kalimán started in 1963 as a radio serial, and two years later it was made into a comic book, reaching 1.5 to 3.5 million copies, or 3 to 7 percent of the Mexican public, and thus exceeding any U.S. equivalent (Captain Marvel at its peak reached 2 million). The Mexican comic book is generally poorly made, predominantly black and white, and ubiquitous and vulgar, but it maintains its hold even on the educated. In 1990, 8 of Mexico's 10 best-selling periodicals were comic books. There have been, in Mexico as elsewhere, more or less government-connected campaigns against the sex, violence, and luridness of their content.
Argentina has produced at least three internationally recognized cartoon figures. The first, created by Quino (Joaquín Salvador Lavado), was the title character in Mafalda (1964–73), a little girl drawn somewhat in the vein of Schulz's Peanuts characters, though more topical and more politically astute than they; also like Peanuts, the strip was much commercialized. Roberto Fontanarrosa created the other two famous comics in Las aventuras de Inodoro Pereyra (1970), a parody of the gaucho stereotype, and Boogie el aceitoso (1972; "Boogie [a reference to Bogie, nickname of the actor Humphrey Bogart] the Oily"), a hired assassin for the CIA whose only redeeming quality is his pithy wit. The most radical of this group of Latin American cartoonists was the Argentine journalist and writer Héctor Oesterheld, who provided the stories for a number of artists, including Alberto Breccia and his son Enrique. The government destroyed all copies it could find of Oesterheld's Che (1968), a tragic life of Che Guevara, and in the mid-1970s Oesterheld became one of the desaparecidos ("disappeared persons"), missing and presumed murdered.
A model of political comic geared toward socialist transformation, still unsurpassed, appeared as La Firme (1970–73; "Steadfast"), in Salvador Allende's Chile. It presented a graphic explanation of Chileans' need for socialist transformation, and as a result it was banned and existing copies were destroyed as soon as Augusto Pinochet wrested power in 1973. While La Firme was taking root, another publication appeared, Para leer al Pato Donald (1971; How to Read Donald Duck) by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. This was a highly critical Marxist examination of the ubiquitous Disney comic (in the English-language edition of 1975, the subtitle Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was added). This book was a rare example of comics criticism reaching the wider audience; it became a best seller and was translated into more than a dozen languages. After Pinochet's accession to power, José Palomo, one of the principal artists involved in La Firme, went into exile in Mexico. There he became known for a strip titled El Cuarto Reich (begun 1977; "The Fourth Reich") in the newspaper Uno Más Uno. It featured a tiny Wizard-of-Id-like dictator backed by U.S.-trained death squads and notable for his contempt for and exploitation of his people. This gag strip may be the only one of its kind to reflect the miserable lives of many Latin Americans. It was, however, little exported.
Asia and the manga
A local comics industry in native languages has flourished wherever the United States and Great Britain have held sway—notably in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and India (where the often cartoonlike Bollywood, centred in Mumbai [Bombay], is dominant). Even some Islamic countries, where for centuries figural representation was problematic, by the 21st century had more or less government-supported comics. China, after the 1949 revolution, gave official support to lianhuanhua (literally, "connected images") to retell the classics and opera-based histories, as well as uplifting revolutionary stories, in a highly refined, classically derived style. The late 20th century brought a freeing up of styles and subject matter.
Japan had by far the largest comics industry in the world—selling by 1984 1.4 billion and by 1995 2.3 billion copies of manga (Japanese comics; literally, "aimless pictures") books and magazines per annum—and in the early 21st century comics constituted 37 percent of the overall publishing market by volume and 23 percent by value. In 2002 there were 278 different manga magazines. In that year the first-edition print run of a single volume from the manga series One Piece was 2.6 million. Thirteen of Japan's periodicals that made more than 17 million yen ($160,000) a year were manga, which together employed 3,000 artists; one magazine, Shonen Jump, had a circulation that peaked in 1995 at 6.5 million, with multiple readership reaching an estimated 20 million, or one in six Japanese. By 2000, manga had generated 5.4 billion yen ($43 million) per annum in sales (having doubled in the decade from the early 1980s to the '90s), 75 percent of which was concentrated in the hands of only four companies. Nevertheless, by 2008 the market for manga magazines was clearly in decline. Still, comic books are a major cultural force in Japan, a fact of life. In translation and in the original, they have penetrated the American market ($110 million per year), where there is a considerable cult following; they have also inspired many film animations.
The manga style, with all the term's connotations of the whimsical and risqué, can be considered to have originated with ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai in 1814. It reflects a long tradition in humorous art. As a narrative mass medium with serialized characters, manga started as early as 1902 under American influence. In the 1920s and '30s manga were exclusively juvenile fare, but, in the economic boom after World War II and under renewed American influence, they soon broadened to encompass all ages and social sectors, with a wide variety of subject matter. The emphasis, however, remained on sports, large-eyed adolescents, and the adventures of samurai and gangsters, with much sex and violence often shading into the pornographic. Most manga titles contain an English word, and, as in the West, manga, animated cartoons (anime), and video games often exist in symbiosis.
At 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm), manga are much thicker than the American single comics. They typically range from 150 to 350 pages and are printed on poor-quality paper in black and white, with a few pages of colour. They usually contain about 15 stories and are very inexpensive. They are designed to be speed-read (at an average rate of 3.75 seconds per page), much faster than the text of a novel, and quickly discarded. They accordingly depend more on visuals than on text, and they use more minimal and abbreviated drawings than most Western comics. Manga stories are longer and their action is depicted at a slower pace than that of Western comic books; it is not unusual for a single sword fight to last over 30 pages. Some stories achieved extraordinary length: Kozure Okami, a samurai series by Kojima Gōseki, has run to 8,400 pages and 28 volumes. It was introduced to English readers under the title Lone Wolf and Cub in 1987 and was made into a television series in 2002.
Like comic strips in the West, manga have played a socially critical as well as an escapist role, the critical diminishing since the 1970s. Since the late 20th century there have been more manga by and for women, some showing feminist concerns. After a long period of depreciation and much serious opposition, again as in the West, the manga rose in social status. In 1989, when Tezuka Osamu—the inventor of the big-eyed look, who was known as "the God of Manga"—died, having drawn 150,000 pages in 40 years and sold some 100 million books in his lifetime, Japan mourned.
In 1987, 69 percent of Japanese teenagers read manga, as did many older people. The generational and gender crossover is much greater than in the West: businessmen read manga created for 10-year-olds; older males read manga aimed at girls. Manga are read on commuter journeys, much like and in lieu of newspapers (which in Japan do not include comic strips). Further, a manga was the basis of Japan's biggest movie hit of 1988, Akira, a thriller by Ōtomo Katsuhiro. Manga creators have achieved celebrity status, and some even host their own television programs.
Women and minorities: from minor characters to creators
In the West there was no successor to either the woman-developed comic character—i.e., Marie Duval's Ally Sloper in the 1870s—or a major female comic character such as Wilhelm Busch's Fromme Helene (1872). As there were relatively few women artists until the 20th century, so there were few—relatively even fewer—women cartoonists and comic strip artists, even in the 20th century. Until the 1940s men created the female figures—such as Wonder Woman (begun 1941)—and the many comics designed for the teenage girl (such as Real Romance) and for the preteen girl, but Wonder Woman has since been embraced by feminist theory, which sees it as liberating. The first popular comic by a woman about a woman was Dale Messick's Brenda Starr, Reporter (begun 1940); until that point, women in comics had by and large been seen only in relation to children.
Not until the second wave of feminism broke in the 1960s and early '70s, and partly in reaction to the often sexist and misogynist male-dominated underground comics, did women become conspicuous, both as creators and as strong and central characters. As creators they launched controversial feminist issues into the public arena. A key event was the founding of Wimmen's Comix magazine (1972–92; later spelled Wimmin's Comix) by a group of female cartoonists including Trina Robbins, also a chronicler of the topic.
Since the founding of Wimmen's Comix Collective, women have been featured in a number of newspaper strips. Sally Forth (begun 1982) by Greg Howard details the life of a woman coping with children, husband, and a career outside the home. Cathy by Cathy Guisewite (begun 1976) follows a young woman obsessed with her weight and shopping. Canadian Lynn Johnston's loosely autobiographical For Better or For Worse (begun 1979) treats a typical contemporary nuclear family. In 1997 Johnston became the first woman to be inducted into the William Randolph Hearst Cartoon Hall of Fame, a part of the National Cartoon Museum (formerly the International Museum of Cartoon Art). Nicole Hollander's text-heavy but socially astringent Sylvia (begun 1976; not truly narrative) features a cynical unattached middle-aged agony aunt who dispenses her wisdom also on greeting cards and calendars, as do the main characters of many of the more popular comic artists.
In France, long hospitable to women artists and writers, Claire Bretécher specializes in cruel, Feifferish (non)communication. Active since the early 1960s, she has appeared in the elite political magazine Le Nouvel Observateur since 1973. A number of other women, including the radically political Annie Goetzinger and Chantal Montellier in her strip Julie Bristol (begun 1989), which features a female investigative reporter, have foregrounded feminist concerns. In Germany Franziska Becker's Feminax und Walkürax (1992) is a feminist response to Astérix (see above) and to macho Hollywood epics. The Finn Tove Jansson's Moomintroll stories have been translated into 34 languages. In Japan, where more women are active in comics than in the United States, Takahashi Rumiko is the best-known woman working in women's comics. Known as "the Princess of Manga," she is reportedly one of the richest women in the country.
Gay and lesbian characters entered the comic book in the later 1980s, becoming main characters by the following decade; Trudeau and Johnston were among the pioneers of this subject matter. In the newspaper strip this topic was often censored, although the tendency was to assimilate these figures into the everyday "straight" world. For the most part, depictions of the "gay world" as such were to be found only in small-circulation comic books, alternative newspapers, and online. Yet lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the ongoing Dykes to Watch Out For, in 2006 made Time magazine's list of 10 best books of the year with her graphic autobiography Fun Home.
Schulz in Peanuts first introduced an African American character, but his Franklin was a minor figure. Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks (1997–2006), which was syndicated in some 300 newspapers and transformed into an animated television series, featured a black child of the inner city named Huey Freeman as its main character. This character was the only consistent voice of dissent in American comic strips regarding the war in Afghanistan.


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Statistics Do Not Lie: Why You Need Search Engine Optimization
- Jana Pilkington-Williams
Most business owners understand that Internet marketing is a key factor in their success. In the modern world, print advertisement and television advertisement are becoming rapidly outdated.
However, the exact methods of effective online marketing are often misunderstood by the average person. One highly effective yet confusing method of online marketing is search engine optimization (SEO). There are many technical and logistical aspects to search engine optimization, and these aspects leave business owners confused and hesitant. This makes it incredibly tough to hire the right Pretoria SEO Company
Take A Look At The Hard Facts
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- Outbound sale leads (mail, print marketing, and similar tactics) have a close rate of 1.4 percent. Search engine optimization leads are significantly ahead of the curve with a 14.6 percent close rate.
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As you can see, search engine optimization is extremely beneficial for businesses of all sizes. Anyone can create a website to promote their product or service. However, a business simply cannot stand out without a strong Internet presence. Search engine optimization boosts search engine rankings, increases exposure, and raises sales numbers. The statistics above are just a few of the many facts that prove this marketing method is so crucial.
Still Feeling Unsure? Get Assistance From Professionals
You may feel somewhat hesitant to invest your time and money into search engine optimization. However, you can get guaranteed results when you hire an Internet marketing company to assist you. Some of the SEO related services provided by Internet marketing companies include:
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Sources For Statistics:
"10 Stats to Justify SEO - Search Engine Journal." Search Engine Journal. 21 Nov. 2011.
"8 SEO Stats That Are Hard to Ignore | ImFORZA Blog."ImFORZA. 19 Apr. 2012.
"6 Local SEO Stats Every Online Marketer Needs To Know." Search Engine Land. N.p., 13 Aug. 2015. Web. 02 Jan. 2016.


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Starting your own business can be a pretty daunting task. From having to find office space, obtaining licenses, employment, training and much more. But these a side, most importantly you require a business plan. Consider what course you are interested in getting the business to go? What profit are you expecting to take one, five, or ten years from now? These are important questions to ask yourself, but since you are still in the early stages of your business, you also need to closely consider these two things.
What area are you going to be in?
Let's take IT for example. It is an incredibly ruthless industry, with millions of businesses, both large and small, competing for a space in the industry. It is much more demanding for a beginning as you must prove yourself against these competitors and show out amongst the crowds. So beforehand you must first find your specialty. What kind of goods or services will you focus in? Exactly what do you offer that the competitors do not have? Do not simply go with the flow or popular market, instead be unique and offer something truly precious to your prospective customers. Ideally it is something they are searching for that your opponents simply cannot or have yet to offer them. This way, your business will stick out over the rabble.
How much are you going to invest?
Obviously, as a business, you need capital to turn your business ideas into more than just an idea or pitch, but a reality. Should you not consider your investment options then weeks down the line, your business will surely fail. It is hugely important to learn how much cash your business wants to both start and preserve, and what wriggle room you have within this. Making unrealistic investment goals is a big no-no for new business. Know where to get the investment cash- If you have not got large amounts of cash flow then you should locate some business acquaintances and inquire for an investment. Otherwise, you could take out a loan from a sound financial organization or a trustworthy finance group. A new and popular alternative is to attempt crowdfunding.
All in all what is key when starting Your Personal Business is to ensure you have a detailed and thorough business plan. Guarantee all avenues have been explored and that you are making realistic goals, with sector and investment tactics.


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Based on surveys performed, individuals still liked to get tough copy greeting cards with warm heart felt message, instead of e-cards which typically belongs to the Scrap or Trash folder. Ask yourself, "Do you like standard welcoming cards or e-cards?".
Buying a Birthday Card for a Teen
When a child ends up being a teenager it becomes more difficult to look for them. It's commonly not enough to simply buy a cake and a complete celebration may simply be a little excessive, when all they really want to do is to relax with buddies or be ruined for a night. One of the things that will never ever change is the present of a birthday card. The question though is what kind birthday card would a teen take pleasure in, when should you give it to them and what can you do with them?
The kinds of cards a teen will delight in
The first part of purchasing a birthday card effectively is to think about the fortunate child. Some children will desire funnier cards, where others will want gimmick cards. Find more information on electronic christmas cards from www.ekarda.com .
For this last one, a birthday card with a sliding pop-up function is always enjoyable. Remember though material. A more youthful teen might desire the more fully grown humor in the kinds of cards that would fit in Spencer's Gifts, however it may not be valued by the parent at all. So when you look for a birthday card always consider the individual you are buying for first.
When do you need to give them their present card?
Well, this one depends again on the plan for the birthday. If you are having a celebration at the youngster's home, then give it to them after the guests leave. While they may like a birthday card, it might be humiliating to read it when their buddies are still in the house. If you intend on going out for the evening, state going to a movie then letting the kid walk the mall for a few hours, then provide it to them before they go.
That way the warm feelings that a gift card provides them will carry through for the remainder of the day. What if the card is being offered by a fellow teenager, like say the child's buddies In this case, giving a birthday card is entirely as much as them as they know much better exactly what would be a proper place for the present. Let the children determine their social characteristics and timing.
What can you finish with a birthday card?
There is a great deal of ways making a gift card unique for the teenager. The most evident thing you can do and one that's appreciated by teenagers is to slip in some money. The amount that you put into a birthday card will differ from family to household, however amounts between twenty-fifty can easily be moved inside so the card isn't too large. Another thing you might do is to have all of your family and friends signs and symptom the card, which, again, works finest if you understand that the teenager is a sensitive type that would take pleasure in reading all those names. Normally however, keeping signatures to close friends works finest.


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30 December 2009
GUEST BLOG: Reflection for a Happy New Year! Happy New Decade!
THE ARTS: Cynthia Madden Leitner & Museum of Outdoor Arts
I just happened across this article I wrote for Denver Woman News. This profile of Cynthia Madden Leitner explains why she founded the Museum of Outdoor Arts, why art needs to be part of everyday life, and why women between 50 and 65 rock.
29 December 2009
THE ARTS: Meet My Auntie Artist
Meet my great-aunt Mary: an artist, a woman well ahead of her times, and one of my mentors. Mary was a fine artist, and she published a little chapbook of poetry that made a huge impression upon me when I was a girl. Learn more about her on the Friday Jones Publishing webpage.
24 December 2009
MERRY CHRISTMAS: From my hearth to yours
23 December 2009
WELL BEING: Material VS Spiritual
22 December 2009
"At Christmas play and make good cheer..."
21 December 2009
13 December 2009
THE WRITTEN WORD: "One of the few havens remaining"
"BOOKS: A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few sources of information left that is served up without the silent black noise of a headline, the doomy hullabaloo of a commercial. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy."
-- Edward P. Morgan
09 December 2009
28 November 2009
COLORADO COLLEEN: Alpine Skiing as Spiritual Exercise
22 November 2009
Happy Feast of St. Cecilia, Patron Saint of Music & Poetry
19 November 2009
THE WRITTEN WORD: Garrison Keillor on the Poet Sharon Olds
Some of last summer's secret garden blooms.
"I was a late bloomer.
But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky."
-- Sharon Olds
A literary and political friend forwarded to me Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac today as "an antidote to Sarah Palin," but whatever your political persuasions, you'll like Keillor's keenly appreciative piece about the poet Sharon Olds. Her poems have appeared in 100-plus poetry anthologies. Just click here now. And if you like, sign up for a free subscription to A Writer's Almanac.
To read "Red-footed Humorist," my Q.&.A. with Garrison Keillor, published in The Denver Post, just click here now.
18 November 2009
GARDEN GATE: Look at this post on lavender--nature's way of keeping holiday stress at bay
15 November 2009
"From the serene heights of art": Thomas Mann on Truth, Reason, Freedom
"Truth and reason
may appear to be crushed
but in our hearts
they remain eternally free,
and from the serene heights of art
the intellect may laugh at the triumph of folly…
Secure in the bond relating it
to all that is best on earth."
-- Thomas Mann
From DIESER FRIEDE, (THIS PEACE) published in 1938
Mann won the Novel Prize in Literature in 1929.
14 November 2009
WANDERLUST: Old Friends in New Orleans
09 November 2009
COLORADO COLLEEN: Introducing my Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer friend, Ken Papaleo
I met Ken Papaleo on assignment: Colorado Expression magazine had assigned me to do a profile on Ken, focusing on his hand-colored fine art photographs.
06 November 2009
COLORADO COLLEEN: Smiling in the Mountain Forest
"You ask me why I make my home in the mountain forest, and I smile, and am silent, and even my soul remains quiet; it lives in the other world which no one owns." -- Li Po
19 October 2009
TREBLE CLEF: Will Write for Music!
"Isn't it always love?"
-- Karla Bonoff
Sometimes, the tides turn in our favor.
This is one of those stories of serendipity, karma, or coinkydink: Whatever you call the web of life when happenings unfold in a mysteriously and uncannily connected manner.
James Baca, my photographer partner snapped this photo of me last month in Santa Barbara. We were winding down our 12th year of work there. Of the coastline drive, Thousand Steps is a touchstone spot for us in Santa Barbara--but that's another story. I only bring it up because Santa Barbara is significant in this story, in a roundabout way.
ON ASSIGNMENT: Santa Barbara sundown Photo by James Baca
Last fall, while flying home to Denver from the charming little open-air airport at Santa Barbara, James and I sat across the aisle from folk-rockers Karla Bonoff and Kenny Edwards. I'm a huge fan, have seen them in concert half a dozen times--initially when a freshman in college--so I thought I recognized the musicians. I noted that they were sharing a Rolling Stone. Then Kenny pulled out his Bose headphones, so I ventured a guess and I passed a note to Kenny: "Are you two musicians?" I jotted, "Because you like like Karla Bonoff and Kenny."
Kenny smiled and nodded. We both turned off our iPhone iPods, and we had a brief conversation. Turns out the musicians live in the Santa Barbara vicinity. Before we landed, I jotted down my email address and asked Kenny to keep me posted about Denver appearances because I would love to write a piece about them for The Denver Post, where I for many years have contributed regularly and have begun writing more and more music pieces.
Subsequently, Kenny and I exchanged a couple of email messages, but did not quite make the connection.
We tried again before the show last Saturday at Swallow Hill. Karla was interested in doing an interview, but, alas, the Post was already filled. Freelancers tend to get caught in the middle: Sometimes the newspaper is willing, but the artist is not. Other times, vice versa.
On an upbeat note, however, Ricardo Baca invited me to join his roster of bloggers for Reverb, The Post's online music blog. My maiden voyage into the Reverb waters was the Karla Bonoff concert. So all's well that ends well.
Here's a link to Reverb, which is a cool blog for music junkies. To check out my Karla Bonoff review, reviews of various genres, and lots of concert photo essays, too, just click here now.
And then go dig out your Karla Bonoff CDs and give them a whirl. And if you don't have her music in your collection, here's a link that allows you to order autographed copies at no extra cost. The website has her tour schedule, all her lyrics, info about Kenny Edwards' new solo CD et cetera. For Karla Bonoff's home page, just click here now.
11 October 2009
THE ARTS: Terrarium as art form
If you saw the terrarium I designed by request as part of "Cabinet of Curiousity" at Museum of Outdoor Arts, you might have logged on looking for instructions about how to create a terrarium.
Please click on this link to go to my Examiner.com page. Scroll down or search "terrarium" to find an entry titled "Terrarium as art form." You'll see a photo similar to this one. That post includes more details and links.
If you're in the Denver area, don't miss the whimsical wonders at Cabinet of Curiousities" now showing at Museum of Outdoor Arts. This is art for everybody. Make a point to stop by the museum's indoor galleries housed in Englewood Civic Center. Your inner child will thank you, and so will the part of you that secrets away little items of nostalgic, nature or sentiment. MOA opens its doors free of charge.
and the arts will support you."
I'll conduct some more research on terrariums and will try to find more links.
Once I get the photos of the little terrarium from the exhibition's fun opening last night, I'll post them here, too. Meanwhile, for the exhibit, here's the label copy I wrote:
The roots of the terrarium
As early as 500 B.C., ancient Greeks grew and displayed plants in closed, transparent containers; but terrariums have their true roots in London. In 1827, London physician Dr. Nathaniel Ward discovered the scientific principle of terrariums.
Studying a moth emerging from a cocoon in moist soil, Dr. Ward noticed tiny ferns and grass growing in the earth contained in the jar. These plants, to the good doctor's surprise, grew for years inside the jar without watering because the mini-greenhouse formed a miniature, self-sustained ecosystem complete with a water cycle.
Also known as Wardian Cases, terrariums allowed botanists to transport tropical plants safely from one continent to another, aiding the development of botany.
Ornately decorated terrariums grew in popularity as household decorations in Victorian times in the United States.
Today, all you need is a clear glass or plastic container to build your own terrarium, creating your own miniature ecosystem.
09 October 2009
NAMASTE': Meeting Baron Baptiste at His Yoga Immersion Day in Denver
Here's a thrill from my yoga mat:
That's me sharing a laugh and a high-five with yoga master Baron Baptiste, who founded Baptiste Power Vinyasa Yoga--one of three yogic traditions I've studied and practiced. I just opened my 18th year of practicing, and marked the milestone with the honor of meeting Baron last weekend when about 300 yogis joined him for a Baptiste Power Yoga immersion in Denver. My friend Lori and I unintentionally arrived very early and so we unrolled our mats in the very front row! We had just finished 3.5 hours of vinyasa. Whew. While Baron had us practicing headstands, I took the liberty of introducing myself since the two of us had talked at length on the phone during an interview for a piece I wrote about him for fitness section of The Denver Post, which provided this photo. More on this later. I've been promising several friends I would post some comparing and contrasting of the three forms of yoga I've studied: Iyengar, Bikram, and Baptiste Power. Soon! But for now, namaste'.
05 October 2009
GARDEN GATE: Gardens Grow Communities--Three Anecdotes of Strangers in my Gardens
Many people as they walk or run or push a stroller past, praise my gardens. (Thanks, in large part, to Mike Eagleton who designed much of my landscape, and to my crew that helps keeps it well tended.) But from time to time I have extended exchanges with strangers in my gardens.
Photo by Quincy Benton
Strangers In My Gardens
The other day, for the third time this growing season, I had a satisfying exchange with a stranger in my garden.
I had walked home slowly from yoga class, appreciative of the precious slant of warm midmorning autumn sunlight. When I had walked to class earlier that day at 7:45 a.m., I'd worn a ski cap and gloves, but when I made my way home at about 10 a.m., the day had grown warm and summery. I had plenty of work to do, but these balmy days of autumn seem almost as intoxicating as the first warm days of spring. Call it Autumn Fever.
It takes an optimist to plant this late in the season. I suppose I am mostly optimistic, but I know from experience that pansies are tough. Flowering kale, too, looks lacy and delicate, but in fact likes a bit of ice in its veins. So I'd made a sortie mission to Home Depot for a pair of pumpkins and a flat of pansies and five one-gallon pots of flowering kale.
When I should have been working at my laptop, I decided—given the beauty of the day—to work in the garden instead. I needed a gardening fix. I'd been on assignment and then had contracted a cold or flu or some such virus that had sapped me, yet I marshalled on and on, under the weather in Southern California. I had not been in my garden in nearly two weeks for any time to speak of--and both of us had suffered the separation, my garden and I.
My garden heals me. Grounds me. When I spend time in my garden, I cultivate something of my soul. Problems and concerns and other creative endeavors—words and images and ideas—simmer on the back burner. Gardening affords an incubation period. Drawn into the senses—the spicy smell of the roses, the paint box colors of the pansies, the prickle of the cosmos seeds as I collect some to share with a friend.
Pilfering memorial hollyhock seeds
So having contracted Autumn Fever, I hung out the "Gone Gardening" shingle and played hooky out of doors. I hustled from my secret garden to my front garden, schlepping my flat of pansies and replacing burgundy mums with 'Frost Prince' flowering kale in the ornamental concrete urns at the top of the first set of stairs in front. These urns were a gift to me many years ago. They have weathered well, and the urns stand as hybrid architectural and horticultural sentinels of my front stoop. I change out the plants in these urns several times over the season. In spring, pansies. In summer, succulents. In autumn, flowering kale, which I'd just planted and needed to water. As I walked down the stairs and headed to my spigot and garden hose on the side of my house, I spotted a scooter. The sporty thing parked just outside my porch, down the bank, in the middle of the sidewalk, looked like a joke of some kind. The scooter was definitely a girl scooter, painted the color of grape sherbet, but metallic, the color of chic lipstick or nail enamel.
I live along a busy one-way thoroughfare in a historic district of central Denver. Twice over 20 years, cars have veered off the avenue and careened through the gardens I've grown on the right-of-way alongside my house. But I'd never seen a scooter parked in the middle of my sidewalk. Curious, I looked around to see if somebody was having trouble.
Then, like a ghost appearing from a mist, a woman walked out from behind the tall pink hollyhocks of a plot I call Avenue Garden West for sake of naming a territory so as to somehow understand it and map it.
The first thing I noticed about this woman is that she held in one hand a Ziploc baggie and in the other hand a pair of scissors. Initially, I felt territorial. How dare she happen along and help herself to seeds from my garden without bothering to ask permission? I huffed a smidge, my feathers puffing, hackles up. Then, I chilled, remembering that gardeners are peaceable people, and realizing that I was flattered she was ransacking my garden for seeds. I felt profoundly appreciative, really, that somebody would want seeds from my garden enough to actually come collect them. She looked friendly enough. About my age, perhaps a bit older, she was attractive and funkily dressed with an aging-hippie-meets-urban-cool vibe.
"I'm collecting seeds to plant in a park," she said, no apology.
I just said, "Oh." I thought about asking whether she'd considered asking permission.
But before I could, she asked me about my hollyhocks.
I asked her about her park. She mentioned the name, a park I'd not heard of, which is not unusual since Denver has so many parks. I think the park had the name "Baca" in it. I asked her where it was. Somewhere in LoDo, she explained.
"A friend of mine committed suicide in that park a year ago in August," she said.
I cluck my tongue. "Awww," I said, shocked, compassion rising in my throat. I was so glad I had not run her off my property earlier when I first discovered her snipping seeds sans permission. "I'm so sorry," I said. And I was.
"He was a flower guy," the woman said matter-of-factly. "So I spent all this money putting in all these things. Tulips. All kinds of things. And nothing grew."
"What a beautiful gesture for a memorial," I said to her.
"Nobody has a black thumb"
She said, "I have a black thumb."
"Nobody has a black thumb," I said. "These hollyhocks? They're tough. They'll make it. You watch and see. And take some cosmos seeds, too."
"Which ones are cosmos?"
"The purple ones," I pointed to the bank behind her.
And she walked over to a sizable lavender shrub and touched a late bloom. "That's lavender," I said and touched one of the thistle-colored cosmos blooms. "The lavender won't seed, but cosmos will. The seeds are prickly, so be careful when you gather them. These are prolific. They might take over the place. Just sprinkle them. They'll self-seed. The hollyhocks, too. And maybe take some of the gallardia. Blanket flower," I said, pointing to the corner crowded with flowers that exactly resemble the inside of a nectarine cut in half.
"I'm funny," the lady said. "I don't like yellow."
"Well, some people don't," I said. Again, I might have copped a "beggars can't be choosers" attitude, but I didn't. I noticed again the metallic mauve of her scooter. I did not try to talk her into any yellow. Who am I to cajole? I've been obsessing over an all-white garden, for goodness sake. I can relate to color quirks.
Suddenly, I grew self-conscious, aware of all the weeds poking up in the flower bed where she went after the little dried wheels of hollyhock seeds. "I need to get out here and weed," I said.
"I don't see weeds," the woman said, "I see flowers. These hollyhocks look ancient. How long have you lived here?"
"About 20 years," I said. "The cosmos came from my mother's garden. Help yourself. And good luck."
"Thank you so much," she said with sincerity; and I left her to collect her mourning seeds.
Inspiring beauty along the parkway
The second episode with strangers in my gardens happened a few weeks ago. I was working in my garden when a man and a boy stopped by on their bikes. The man introduced himself and his son. They lived a few blocks away, he said.
"I've been admiring your garden."
I beamed. "I like it, too," I said, proud as any parent.
He explained that he wanted to plant the right of way at the end of his block along our busy central Denver, one-way avenue. He asked about which plants would do well. I showed him some low water, low maintenance plants. I warned about planting things that would grow too high, interfering with sight lines along the trafficked avenue. (The way my hollyhocks unfortunately do.) I applauded his idea, encouraged him to pursue his beautification plan, even offered to help if he needed more assistance.
I showed his young son the seeds of several plants, explaining that they'd all started from tiny seeds. When I showed him one hollyhock seed and then showed him the towering, thick-stemmed hollyhocks with all the colorful little hoop skirt blossoms, the boy's eyes went round. He said, "Wwwwwwow!"
My sentiments exactly.
Begging a flower for a lover
And the first heart-warming incident in this string of encounters with strangers in my gardens happened last spring. While working in my garden, a young man stopped by. He, too, had been admiring my garden. He was formal, polite, enthusiastic. "I drive by here every day on my way to my girlfriend's," said the young Romeo, probably in his 20s. (Difficult for me to judge age anymore, since I just turned 49, a blinding turnstile age.) At any rate, the Don Juan plead his case, "I was thinking how happy my girlfriend would be if I could bring her just one of those beautiful flowers."
"The tulips?" I asked, a bit incredulous that he had stopped to beg a flower for his lover.
"Just one?" he pleaded.
How could I refuse so romantic a gesture?
"You pick it," I said. And he did.
I wish I could have seen the look on his lover's face when he showed up with that flower. I wish I could have seen what she'd done with it. Was it in a pretty vase on the bureau in her bedroom? Atop her bathroom sink? The centerpiece of her dining room table? I could only hope she would cherish the tulip as much as her sweetheart had. I pray the tulips return next spring. I will gladly share another and another and another.
If you grow a garden, know that your garden is not for you alone, but for all who would look upon it. All who would steal its seeds. All who would imitate your edge of Eden. All who would beg a flower for a lover.
For more greenthumb matters, please visit my Examiner.com page, where I serve as Denver Flower and Gardening Examiner. Just click here to link.
COLORADO COLLEEN: Happy Feast Day, St. Francis of Assisi
a happy feast day!
St. Francis has successfully crossed ecumenical boundaries,
and he's often associated now not only with animals,
but also with the environment
and peace.
Plus, he's the patron saint of Colorado,
so he's one of my favorite saints.
I called on him constantly when I had my dogs Friday and Copper.
I made a pilgrimage to Assisi, after my dog Friday died,
and I left some of her ashes there
near where the body of good St. Francis lies for all eternity.
But that's another story.
Photo by Quincy Benton
depicts my secret garden's St. Francis statue,
a gift from my late parents.
See that crack around his neck?
Once, my girl Friday got so excited chasing a squirrel,
that she jumped up and toppled the tall, heavy statue.
Upon impact, his head fell off,
and St. Francis of Assisi became St. John the Baptist
until he got his head on straight again.
For more about the environment, garden angels, flowers, gardening, and other greenthumb matters, please drop by my Examiner.com page where I serve as Denver's Flower and Gardening Examiner.
Here's a link. Just click here now.
Hope to see you there.
04 October 2009
THE WRITTEN WORD: To Sanctifiy Your Sunday--Or Any Day
"Dear one, you are growing up. You are beginning to sense and appreciate the coming changes. The ground-swell is beginning to sweep the planet. Fresh winds are blowing, untruths and injustices are being brought to trial. The world court, in its very infancy, is beginning to meet out justice. It is coming, it is coming.
Thoughts or reactions, anyone?
Peace be with you!
01 October 2009
Happy October: 37 Days Til Ski Season Opens!
to much of my garden;
but in my in box an email reminding me
of the one consolation:
37 days until ski season opens in Colorado!
Photo depicts my college housemate
Betsy "Logan" Edwards, at left,
and moi atop Vail.
Betsy brokers real estate in the Vail Valley
in case you're looking for
a get-away in the high country.
Meanwhile, bring in any plants
you intend to over-winter in the hospitable indoors.
Toss a blanket over your tender plants outside--
especially those tomato vines!
Indian Summer extends our growing season,
but not if Jack Frost nips too hard.
30 September 2009
THE WRITTEN WORD: Thoreau on Imagination
—Henry David Thoreau
THE WRITTEN WORD: It can be done
that the man who says it can't be done
is generally interrupted by someone doing it."
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), philosopher, author, publisher
And just in case you think this fast-paced world is new,
check out the date of this author's death.