Meet the Comics Pages Tim Rickard Cartoonist -- "Brewster Rockit"
Friday, June 8, 2007; 1:00 PM


Join Washington Post Comics page editor Suzanne Tobin on Friday, June 8 at 1 p.m. ET for a discussion with "Brewster Rockit" cartoonist Tim Rickard.

I was able to get a few questions in - I'd encourage you to read the whole thing as it was interesting, but here's the bits from me:

IJOCA, VA: How do you draw the strip? Pen and ink, or is it done on a computer?

Tim Rickard: Half and half. It's drawn in ink, scanned into a computer, and the rest of the work is done in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.
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IJOCA, VA: How long did it take you to develop the strip and get it syndicated? How many papers do you have? Did you pick up more than the Post when Amend dropped his daily?

Tim Rickard: Not enough. Now I'll have to convince another cartoonist to cutback.
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IJOCA, VA: Will you be in DC in July for the AAEC convention?

Suzanne Tobin: For those of you that don't know, AAEC is the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention, which will be held in D.C. July 4-7.

Tim Rickard: Sorry. I'll be busy that week staying up til 4 doing cartoons.

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IJOCA, VA: Did this strip start as a webcomic? If so, did you have to make any changes in technique, style or story when taking it into print?

Tim Rickard: No, it was a syndicated strip from the start. But it has gone through different looks since its inception, though.

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Actually, I think I was 4/4 on this one. I started posting questions because Ms. Tobin was asking them which I usually figure isn't a good sign. People might have just been surprised though as the chat has been on hiatus for a good long while except for last month's Reuben nominees. It looks like she's back though, because she closed with "Join us again next month when we meet another fascinating cartoonist
here on "Comics: Meet the Pages."" I'm glad to see these back - they're always interesting.

Richard Thompson has a hilarious sendup of Free Comic Book Day that about 37 readers of the Post will get and appreciate. In their continuing effort to combat e-piracy, the Post hasn't put it online yet, although you can see last week's panel.

Meanwhile a few other strips in the Post are worth noting today (that's the May 5th strips).

Bud Grace goes for a dose of reality in the Piranha Club.

Bill Griffith's History of the washing machine in Zippy was just lovely.

Pearls before Swine breaks the 4th wall in a graphically-amusing way.

Speaking of graphic, what's the deal with yesterday's Baldo? First his aunt walks in on him naked in the bathroom and seems to suggest a Red Hot Chili Peppers fashion, and then we get this strip. Am I reading too much into this or is there a "size of his dick" joke here? For Better or For Worse had a PMS joke today, and Brewster Rockit had a fart joke with spiderwebs coming out of a character's ass (a Spider-Man 3 tip of the hat).

Finally on Monday, two diametrically-opposed cartoonists ran similar strips on the Virginia Tech murders right next to each other: Prickly City vs Candorville.