The first, in the latest crop of daily sketches.

Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been starting and stopping for years. Sometimes I crank out work daily for years before crashing out and walking away for extended periods of time. This time around, I’m a lot older, much more focused and have big plans and pants to match.

This one came from me grabbing a stack of index cards, and sketching with a brush pen that I never quite got the hang of (I have others that I like very much, but this one I couldn’t figure out). I was a pleased to find that the pen, as I had always suspected, was a good pen, and that maybe, decades after purchasing it, I finally had the skill to make it do the things I wanted it to.

Anyhow, this, as you can see, is a surly, grown-up Charlie Brown. Peanuts and many newspaper comics loom large in my head, for as a small person I would try to learn how to draw by copying comics out of the paper. Funny thing is that while Peanuts looked like something easy to emulate, I struggled greatly with copying Schulz, I was much better at copying Bloom County and Garfield. When I grew up and went to art school and whatnot, I finally understood why Peanuts was so hard to copy. It’s a master class in reducing cartooning to a seemingly simple, easily readable form. It’s the old learn how to draw a horse properly before, blah, blah, yackety, smackety.

Yeah.

-GNM