My old pal Rob Harrell—whom I wrote about in this post and this post and this post—is scheduled to be featured in a CBS Evening News segment tomorrow or Thursday, and it’s not just because he’s talented.

Rob and I have been friends since we met in the sixth grade at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana, our hometown. Even in the sixth grade, he was a precocious illustrator and artist, and he went on to get two or three art degrees. These days he is, among other things, the creator, writer, and illustrator of Big Top, a daily comic strip from Universal Press Syndicate—the company that distributes Doonesbury, The Boondocks, and many other nationally prominent strips. Big Top appears in about 40 papers around the country, including the Boston Herald and the Detroit Free Press. In 2004, The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.”

Rob moved with his wife, Amber, to Austin last year, after having lived in Indianapolis since college. A few months ago, he was experiencing constant headaches and some unusual pain behind his right eye, so he went with Amber to have some tests done. Eventually the doctors determined that he had a malignant tumor behind his right eye. Did I mention he’s only 37?

[Continue reading "Something Cool Comes From Cancer"...]

To mark Halloween, I bring you the splendid artwork below, which my lifelong friend Rob Harrell created several years ago when he was experimenting a lot with scratchboard techniques. I’ve always thought this would make a perfect New Yorker cover. Anyway, Happy Halloween. More to come soon…

Last year The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top, my pal Rob Harrell’s nationally syndicated comic strip: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.” Andrews McMeel, the publisher of all the Doonesbury collections, just put out the first-ever collection of Big Top strips. My copy arrived from Amazon this week.

I wrote about Rob a few months ago in one of my first posts. We’ve known each other since middle school, when he was a Bloom County fanatic who amused himself by sketching pneumatic babes and other things in his notebook when he was bored in class. You can read Rob’s daily Big Top strips at ucomics.com.

Also received from Amazon this week: a copy of Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript. I’ve owned a xerox of this clever and hilarious book for about 20 years, but I’ve never owned a copy of the actual book. Oddly, my new copy has the appearance of a cheap bootleg: Both the cover and the pages inside were obviously reproduced from a mediocre photocopy of an earlier edition, not from the original plates. Given that the publisher is Penguin, this is kind of surprising. But I’ll be glad to replace my own tattered photocopy with something I can actually file away on a bookshelf.

The Indianapolis-based artist Rob Harrell and I have been pals since about 1983, when we started the sixth grade together at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana. Rob is the guy behind the excellent syndicated comic strip Big Top, which runs in several dozen newspapers around the country. Big Top will remind you of Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County. If there’s a funnier mainstream comic strip being published today, I’m not aware of it. Rob also paints and does commercial illustration; he’s got a brilliant conceptual mind and intimidating technique. The illustration below is from a few years back when he was experimenting a lot with scratchboard techniques. I’m posting it here because I think it’s perfect and hilarious.