Bear Clause Publications Blog

A lot of my cartoons are drawn to poke and needle friends and family.  When my daughter, Kris, went off to the University of Massachusetts in Boston to get her Masters Degree in creative writing, I naturally assumed they would teach her to write…. HOME!  Now, don’t get me wrong.  Not writing home is a long-standing tradition in the Evans Family and I probably have the longest streak of non-writing on the books.  But, that’s me and has nothing to do with what other people should do.

One of the advantages of being a cartoonist and thus holding and ultimately pointing the pen, I get to decide when a line has been crossed.  One day, after I had made the 50′ trek to the mailbox one more time to no avail… under the scorching heat of the Sun,  (I think it must have gotten over 70 degrees in Northern Michigan that day!)  I decided something had to be done to bring attention to this injustice.  You would think a prestigious school like hers would at least acknowledge the problem and have one of their first Core classes be something like: “Writing Home Daily-101” or, something like that.  It was time to act.  The cartoon was an attempt to point out an obvious problem in their curriculum.

Several years later, the tables have turned. I have to get up to speed on this writing thing… I promise to text Kris as soon as I figure out how to turn on my cell phone and locate the right application. LOL

Birthdays were the topic at our Senior Breakfast Club at the Big Boy Restaurant.  The talk drifted to all the usual jokes about growing old…  Most of it centered around the loss of a body function or your mind .  Or how the celebration interrupted nap time.  Or heat from the candles driving you back from the cake.  That kind of stuff.  There were a lot of laughs about the condition we are in and memories about the good old days… what we could remember.  What we didn’t remember, we made up.

As I drove home, I was reflecting on all the birthday celebrations I had attended over the years. My thoughts gravitated to the usual staples of birthday parties…cake and ice cream.  A few days earlier, I had overheard a conversation in which a person was talking about eating a birthday cake that had thick caramel and the problem of it sticking to his teeth.  I got an image of what that mean to an older person and the cartoon idea came to me.

This cartoon idea came from conversations I had while creating the storyline for my new Children’s book: “Discover the MAGIC of Rainbows: Annie Oxidant finds the path to Healthy foods”. During the process of  gathering information for the nutritional portion of the book, the term “Whole Food” came up a lot.  I happened to see a picture of a large police officer eating a donut and the image of the cartoon was formed.  Ironically, the first person that saw the cartoon wanted a copy of it.  Tony, her husband,  loves donuts and has the figure to prove it… Funny how that works!

I got this idea while sitting in the waiting room of the local GM Dealership.  The Service Rep was trying to explain to a customer that the problem with their car was something to do with the “computer programming” and “it might take a while to track it down.”  As a Senior Citizen with limited understanding of computers, I wondered why they didn’t do what my son told me was the first thing to try when a computer quits working… “Re-boot it!”.  I then got a mental image of what the mechanic was doing in the back room to locate the problem.  I think they call it “cross-marketing”… When the computer problem is fixed, they will need to send it to the Body Shop to add the finishing touches to the repair bill.