I skipped this strip in the queue for a while, because it seemed appropriate to use this day to remember radio host, journalist, musician, and old friend Andrea Lewis, who died with shocking suddenness this past November.

I’d already been in the middle of a radio-show storyline when I found out, oddly, so it seemed like a sign to pay tribute in the strip, somehow. But in the wake of such awful news, it was hard to come up with anything that’d be appropriate to a lightweight comic strip, let alone sufficiently honoring of her professional legacy and my personal memories of her. I settled for a visual salute to Andrea’s warm, brilliant presence in the studio and everywhere else, and to her nickname JazzDiva, as well as a background hat tip to Louis’, one of her neighborhood haunts in the Ocean Beach area of San Francisco, the city she’d called home for decades since driving there solo in a van from Detroit.

Fortunately, others have done a superior job of honoring her life and work. You’ve got to scroll the dial just over halfway to get to this tribute show on KPFA, and I wish they’d also archived the longer tribute hosted by her colleague Victoria Z, but it’s a good sampling. Tributes by The Progressive and California poet laureate Al Young, and Youtube coverage of her Nov. 24 memorial service in Oakland are all good too.

I last saw Andrea in July ’09; we had lunch just down the road from Louis’ at the Beach Chalet. It was an unusually beautiful afternoon for Ocean Beach in July; we caught up the way old friends do when they live 3000 miles apart; she followed up with a Biblically long Facebook message about her favorite guitar apps that reminded me what an impressive music geek she was in addition to everything else that made her so remarkable. Four months later, she was gone. She was so young, she’d accomplished so much, she’d had so much left to do.

There are any number of ways to honor Dr. King today. For me this year, it’s remembering a friend who walked with his spirit, working til her life’s end to give voice to community activism, to explore how all forms of oppression are connected, and to find beauty in a remarkably wide range of personal experience. And promising to do as much as I can in service to the memory of both.

The Gallery is back up–small blooper on my web guy’s part, but he’s been busy putting together the gigantic strip archives I finally got to him, which would make anyone tired. Right? Coming soon! No, really…soon!

Hey, sorry for the posting delay, I overslept, the dog ate it, I meant to call, the bus was late…it was the holidays. Happy New Year. Here’s to 2010.

Who doesn’t give advice to one’s exes? It’s so right, yet so wrong.

Just in time for Black Friday!

I’d never heard of Buy Nothing Day ‘til now, reading an old punk-anarchist friend’s online argument that it’s “ill-conceived, privileged, and useless.” He’s got a point – and I’d add “undersold”, no pun intended, given it’s been around for 17 years and still makes barely a ripple annually.

Still, there’s something to it. For ten of those years at least, we’ve been buying instead of building, with increasingly little to show for it. We aren’t a manufacturing economy anymore, but pretty soon we won’t be a consumer economy anymore, either. With our vast land and resources we’re capable, somehow, of the next big thing, but nobody knows what it is.

Most of the NYC subway’s remaining elevated lines are along the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront and do have beautiful views, sometimes on the platforms themselves, as with the Marcy Avenue stop pictured in both “Ideal-O-Logue” and this article, though I was insane to fixate on that as a backdrop with just hours to go before deadline…

I’ve enlarged the thumbnail strip having been made aware, by myself and others, that the blog can be a little hard to read. Remember that you can still click on the strips to get a larger image still. But I’m curious, anyone else finding the site hard to read in general? Think I need to bring up the point size?

I’ll have two strips in the Color of Comics exhibit at this weekend’s Miami Book Fair, which seems to have taken rapidly to comics and graphic novels. Hear hear.

Does the Color of Comics Matter?
Friday, November 13, 6:30 p.m., Centre Gallery, Third Floor, Bldg. 1

Is there a need for race and multicultural representation in comics? Does the presence or absence of certain people in an entertainment medium affect the way they are perceived in the real world? Is “looking for a face like mine” relevant at a time when this nation has a black president?

These and other questions will be explored when artists featured in the Color of Comics art exhibit sit down with moderator and show curator Alex Simmons, writer for Archie Comics. Panelists include syndicated cartoonist Jerry Kraft, Mama’s Boyz; Ray Felix, Runaway Slave; Dawud Anyabwile, Brotherman; Fernando Ruiz, Archie Comics; and Anne Sibley O’Brien, The Legend of Hong Kil Dong.

In an era of bank predation so rampant and unregulated that Congresspeople actually have to rouse themselves to propose legislation requiring banks to warn against overdrafts, isn’t it time for a little reverse-engineering? I have an imaginary computer programmer all ready to help.