The dogs are barking. I think that means we’re due for an earthquake.

Fenrir tends to like blues songs or Ringo Starr songs. She’s absolutely devoted to “Octopus’ Garden” and “Yellow Submarine” and comes running to the piano as soon as she hears the opening notes.

The real trouble with this arrangement is that I have three cats who hang around the living room.

They’re not happy about this new dog thing, but none of them have even TRIED to take the instrumental solo verse when I play, so screw them. The dog’s in the band.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Dogs and comic books go together like squirrels and nuts…which is to say one tries to eat the other….

But dogs are occasionally the comic book star.

This is a “Who’s Who in DC Comics” art entry from fairly early in my career. Rex the Wonder Dog, originally drawn by Gil Kane, but drawn badly here by me. Who doesn’t love wonder dogs? Writer James Robinson bought this piece of original art from me because he too loves the wonder dogs.

This is some of the art from a series of Seinfeld/Superman ads for American Express that included Jerry’s dog cavorting with Krypto. I got to do the artwork for the ads, but never got to meet Jerry’s dog even though Jerry’s dog got to meet Krypto. There are no perks in cartooning like there are in sit-com stardom.

For last week’s Bun Toon, also animal based, click the bunny above

It turns out, once I found it, that the mock up of the Daily Planet was a plastic bag, and not a phony newspaper. So, sorry about the quality of the scan, it’s impossible to make the shiny plastic work in my scanner. I’ve tried sacrificing to the gods of digital technology ( smashing an analog video tape in front of my hard drive while chanting ), but ain’t nothing going to make the “photo” section of this come out well. Ah, so what, you can read the jokes. This particular Daily Planet bag is one of my favorite pieces of swag from my world of art stuff. I LOVE Jerry Seinfeld, and have for years, and it was a tremendous woo hoo to help him put his arms around his Kryptonian buddy like that.

Before we leave the land of Seinfeld/Metropolis, I have two more images. When the final art ran for these ads (in subways and store posters, etc.) there were two little tweaks I didn’t love. 1) The asked me to change the expression on Superman’s face in the party image so he was laughing more. I liked the original image, it looked more “CURT SWAN” to me, which was the gig. And the shot of Superman at the fence was too “skinny” for the art director, so we photoshopped him a little extra girth before we put him into the photo. Funny the nonsense that sticks in an illustrator’s brain for six years. Anyway, no that I have a blog, I get to post the original drawings, the way I liked them. At ART LAND I control the world! BWAH HAH HA H

Speaking of images I don’t control, check this out, just below this paragraph. It’s a box of crayons I came across a couple of years ago, whilst gamboling through a local K-Mart in my home town. The Superman image is mine, from the nineties, part of an attempt at putting a Batman Adventures spin on Superman a few years before his show spun-off, and done around the time Superman was a long haired hippie freak. I assumed when Bruce Timm did his designs for Superman that my designs got tossed into a bin. But here’s one of them, on a crayon box from 2008. What the…? Can’t vouch for the quality of the crayons.

Here’s a fun image (below) that NEVER ran anywhere in print or online, so far as I recall.

It was commissioned by Wizard Magazine, I’m going to say around 2001, or thereabouts. It was for an article about Superman and his fans, and I was asked to do “MY” iconic image of Superman. Seeing as we’d just been forced to endure another couple of issues of the BLUE SUPERMAN that year, after we’d seen him retired back in ’98, I felt the most important image I could think of was the big red cape turning his back on the nineties and striding ahead into the 21st Century. Well, the folks at Wizard didn’t run it. They paid me though, which was nice, and gave the artwork away to a contest winner. I have no idea if he was as unimpressed by as Wizard was…I still like it and now I get to show it here!

More later today, if the deadline gods are kind…it is Hoverboy Friday, after all. And tomorrow, WEEKEND STRIPS begin. Which is to say, I start running strips, not start blogging while naked. I’ve been naked this whole time.