I'll admit that though I can hold my own at drawing with pen on paper, I'm lost at anything but the very basics when it comes to photo editing software. My logo, long in need of a rework, got some outside help from professional cartoonist Mark Hill. I knew Mark during our student days at the University of Illinois, back when the Eighties ruled. His art that graced the pages of the school paper was slick enough to pop eyes back in the day, and with all these years of additional practice he puts out some even better work now. Not only am I proud to be acquainted with someone who's good enough at creating funny pictures to make a living at it, but honored to top my masthead with a Mark Hill original.

Kevin Gleeson
2007.08.01

I apologize to those readers who have been wandering in looking for new material and coming up bare. Lately I've been working under the hood making some structural improvements, and will be putting in some postings of my own shortly.

Meanwhile, I have some gems for you by some new contributors. My brother, Brendan Gleeson, a graphic artist by profession, excavated some production grade comic strips to share with you from deep within his hard drive. He created Slippers, the tales of a girl who wanders her surreal dream world in her jammies with Pal, her magical sidekick. We have a couple weeks of daily strips lined up for you to enjoy.

Jerry Lazar is the manager at a branch office of a large mortgage firm, and a friend of mine from several years back when we worked at the same company. Though we're such polar opposites politically that we'd probably never vote for even the same Water Commissioner, we have a friendship based on a shared sense of how funny works. He's authored a couple fake news items to run here, which I hope will be the start of many more good things to come.

Peace through laughs!

Kevin Gleeson
2007.05.29

This project's working title was Blogpoon.com, but I bonged that to avoid any potential future conflict with National Lampoon. They're heavily vested in the word "Lampoon" and have spent much capital to build it out as their brand. Better to pull the plug on that at the starting gate than further on down the line.

And so, for want of something new to call this, "Big Fat [Something-or-other]" has a humorous ring to it, and so the next task was to complete the phrase. Various body parts came to mind: BigFatHead.com was my first choice - because I really have one - but that name's taken; Big Fat Butt comes off as too porny, and Big Fat Finger too obscene. Big Fat Toe evokes imagery too painful to laugh at, and when you get down to it, naming other Big Fat body parts could be construed as mocking some unfunny maladies and deformities some folks really suffer from.

Cutting to the chase then, why would I find a big fat hat funny, and a derby in particular?

Guess!

Kevin Gleeson
2007.05.17

I coined the name Blogpoon for a site concept I came up with in which to lampoon the self-absorbed pervasive practice known as blogging. After receiving the satisfaction from an absence of Google references to the word "Blogpoon" that it is indeed a word of my own coinage, I registered Blogpoon.com and got to work at once creating humorous content.

Very soon thereafter, like a computer running background subroutines during user downtime, my brain generated funny ideas practically on its own and presented them to my consciousness at grossly inconvenient times: while I'd barely entered the first stages of sleep, in the shower, on train rides to work, or grilling cheese for the kids; I adopted the practice of having a sketch diary close at hand. As these ideas lent themselves to many varied formats, such as comic strips, short stories, pictorial features, animations, and radio skits, it became apparent that Blogpoon needed to be expanded beyond the one-act show of lampooning blogs and bloggery.

My brand of humor is a blend of very old school (what an arts critic would no doubt dismiss as low brow), where physical comedy meets the locker room. I'm the rare 40-something guy who will watch an entire episode of Seinfeld with a straight face but bust out at Laurel and Hardy; I'll take a pass any day on the soup nazi, the birth control questionairre and the valet's b.o. and laugh tears at Oliver Hardy with a duck in the back of his pants. You can have Friends, and I'll take Mr. Bean. Give me the Stooges throwing pies and bungling with tools and you can have, um, whatever the hell they're showing on Fox these nights. In comics, I'll do Robert Crumb over Boondocks and Don Martin over Doonesbury. I'm the rare combination of a conservative, practicing Catholic with a laugh out loud sense of humor that's oftimes down in the sewer, our God-given vital bodily functions providing the greatest fuel for my mirth.

Writing is simple enough, but cartooning presents a challenge. My drawing skill is all self taught, and last I did it was with hand tools back in college some 22 years ago. I hope to see my skill with digital tools evolve here in these pages as I keep at it. We'll see if I can't solicit some guest contributions down the line from my family, a couple of whom are graphics professionals.

Building the Blogpoon software was a project I started in 2005, on which I worked on and off in the sparse, sleepy moments left over after family, work, sleep and all other obligations ate up the best and most productive of them in the day. I composed every bit of code and design in this site, spurning any of the preformed and templated blogware packages in pursuit of thrill of rolling the works of my own application start to finish. Its original incarnation runs in the ASP.Net framework 1.1 and lives in an SQL Server.

On with the show. Enjoy!

Kevin Gleeson
2007.05.01