Hot mug of Pearls

If you look closely at today's Pearls Before Swine comic, you'll notice a shout out to F Minus from my friend Stephan Pastis. I got to meet Stephan at the Reuben awards (the Oscars of cartooning) in Orlando. I think we ended up hanging out with each other because we are both under 100 years old. (Haha, just a little joke, other cartoonists.)
We are pictured here with our book editor, Erin. Behind us in the crowd you can spot the sprightly Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) and Bill Keane (Family Circus). This was right before Stephan and I challenged them to a vigorous game of beach volleyball.
You might have noticed some of Stephan's characters in one of my comics from a while back:Stephan has a blog too.

Tea-Time Clown Tattoo

This might be the greatest thing I have ever seen.
In March of 2008 I published a comic featuring a guy named Mikey (based on my tattooed brother) regretting his tattoo choice: Tea-Time Clown.
Today I received a message from the owner of a tattoo shop in Vancouver, Canada. He told me that the cartoon was popular with his customers, and also with his tattoo artist friend.
In fact, he liked it so much, he created a tattoo flash with some alternate Tea-Time Clown tattoo designs.
His designs include a Tea-Time Clown in a race car, a Tea-Time Clown as royalty, a sad Tea-Time Clown with a broken teacup, and of course a standard Tea-Time Clown, as seen in my comic.

This was enough to make my day, but then it got better... I present to you, an actual Tea-Time Clown Tattoo!
The owner of this awesome Tea-Time Clown tattoo now has the perfect answer when someone asks the question "Have you ever done anything you really regret?"

I couldn't be more proud.

Tattoo by:
Cohen Floch -Tattoo Union, Vancouver B.C.

Tony Cooks an Egg

The Face of Hate

I've been getting an unusual amount of hate mail lately. I consider that a good sign for the most part, but I still have to wonder, who are these people? What do they look like? Who has the time to seek out the email address of a cartoonist, just to harangue him? One person in particular has sent me a few emails expressing how much he despises F Minus.

"You aren't funny...at all."
"All of the other comic strips are hilarious, then yours just wrecks it. Completely."
"I feel like closing the paper after reading your pathetic excuse of a comic."
"YOU MAKE ME WANT TO STOP READING THE COMICS ALTOGETHER"

His extraordinary anger over my little comic strip intrigued me. I decided to to a quick search for his email address and I discovered his Facebook profile.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... The Face of Hate. Through his profile I learned that he has managed to wrangle himself seventeen online "friends" despite his abrasive disposition.
But I shouldn't be too hard on him. He clearly leads a difficult life, apparently in the frozen tundra, where he was forced to kill a large rodent and fashion the pelt into a crude hat for warmth.
I don't think I will continue to seek out these hate-mail writers after this experience. My dreams are already haunted by those vacant eyes and pointed snout. I've learned my lesson.


UPDATE: It turns out one of the "17 friends" is the cousin of a friend of mine, and had this to say about the hater:

"I barely know the kid. He was in my speech class and hung around the emo/goth/kids-who-wear-black group. All of his speeches were on random, less-important wars or something... like Franco-Prussian or ones that you don't normally hear about. He was also very nervous up there. I read the blog... am I really only one of his 17 friends?"

Sounds like he's down to sixteen, I'm afraid.

Nudity!

I've been getting a lot of requests for a T-Shirt with the slogan from this comic, and I wanted to let you all know that I'm in the process of making one available now. I'm also going to try to overhaul the outdated F Minus store. More on this as events unfold.

Let me know if there are any other F Minus comics you think would make a good shirt.

1500!!!...or so.

Comic counting is not an exact science, but today's comic might be the 1500th published F Minus comic. However, if you include comics from the college years and comics that weren't published nationally it's closer to 1800... whatever. My birthday isn't for five more months, so let's celebrate.

Thanks to Theo for the heads up.