Nopps (1990) – Marty Frammaker

Missing: stale gum

Opening a new untapped vein of cartoons here: baseball cards for the fictitious players that have toiled in a tabletop game I’ve been playing since 1979 with my friend Eric.

Explaining this league (known simply as “League”) would take too long for a single blog entry. Suffice to say, the names of every player come from our fertile and not infrequently demented imaginations. Quite often, there is special “real-world” significance to the name. For example, this guy is a tribute to my mother (“Marty”), who ran a frame shop (“frame maker”). The number of hours Eric and I have lost spent making up names and player back stories…well, it’s probably not a coincidence that neither of us have made our fortunes and retired.

A lot of the fun of making these cards is matching the style of various Topps releases (my preference is for the years Eric and I were collecting baseball cards–this one is the 1977 design), which involves researching/finding fonts and pushing the limits of my image-editing skills.

I also enjoy coming up with twisted versions of the banal factoids that the Topps cards always featured, so this little hobby even scratches the creative writing itch a bit.

2021-10-05 – raven

Hello, birds!

This past weekend I visited my college pal Geoff, and at one point we got to talking about hobbies. I mentioned that cartooning was one of mine, and it led to me forcing him to check out this blog. As has been his unfailing wont for the entirety of our friendship, he was quite complimentary and encouraging: Ge-offy is as gracious as he is a liar.

Be that as it may, our conversation was just the shot in the arm I needed to rally some inspiration and break out the ol’ sketch pad. So here we go, picking up where I left off on the Inktober 2021 prompts. I have some catching up to do.

This prompt didn’t do anything for me. The only thing I could think of was Edgar Allan Poe–kind of obvious. I considered drawing my friend Bill, a park ranger who served at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, in front of the Poe House. And though that would have been in line with my goal of getting more of the people most important to me into my “cartoon canon,” I still wasn’t enthused about the Poe angle.

Not to worry, Bill. Your (comic) time is coming soon.

Anyway, I started just playing with the word “raven,” and it reminded me of that weird unpronounceable backpack company that Maia was so crazy for once upon a time. So here we are. As a bonus, I get to knock off another “collect ’em all” entry. I’m still gunning for a full series of 30.

Oh, Corvus is the raven genus. I needed a word on the patch and couldn’t think of anything else. Hey, I’m not on trial here.