Fritz Cartoons

Angry Alien Productions come out with some very funny stuff.  I could run through them all day.

I got the call on Friday with the news that a Rackafracka cartoon has won the Foldsy Greeting Card Design Contest.  The Rackafracka cartoon Melted Snowman won the top prize for last months greeting card design submission contest.  The Foldsy community voted on the top designs and the top design wins $250.  The top ten design go on to be available for print and for sale as actual greeting cards will be available on Oct. 15th according to Foldsy.

You can view the winning cartoon here and I will announce where you can buy this card when it becomes available.  Please look to foldsy for new designs from Fritz Cartoons in the future and please vote for Rackafracka when you get a chance.  You can can also do a search on Facebook.com to find the Foldsy application so you can vote for your favorite design right from your facebook page.

Thank you to all who voted for me.  Please remember to support your local webcomic by voting and buying his greeting cards.

Why couldn’t I come up with this?  I need to buy a hamster.  My pet rock hasn’t done jack squat for me.

Every Wednesday I have BNI (Business Networking International), and I’ve been a part of this group for 4 years now.  We meet at 7am until 9am for breakfast and we share with each other about our business in hopes of creating referrals for each other to help our businesses grow.

During these meetings every week we have 1-3 speakers that will get an extra 7 minutes to tell more about thier business.  The listeners are to pay attention in hopes that what the speaker might say will bring about a referral that could be good for the speaker to act upon.  Part of the responsibility as a listener is to also fill out a speacker evaluation form as an effort to give constructive feedback to the speaker so they can improve for the next time.

Just recently I’ve gotten in the habit of taking these 7 minutes speeches as an opportunity to see if I can illustrate a cartoon on a topic that is relative to the topic that is discussed in the presentation.  This is harder than it sounds, because you can’t draw something if you don’t know what the joke will say.  Some industries I have not been able to come up with a joke and so I was not able to draw anything.  Its been a nice challenge for me and it is also entertaining to the speaker and those around who get a chance to read the cartoon after they had spoken.

In the cartoon below, Dennis Nix, who is a life insurance broker for Mass Mutual, was giving a talk on how when a person dies if they had been insured by Mass Mutual than they family of the deceased may get a check.  So as the cartoon clearly stats I made one of the tombstones in the grave yard a large over sized check to the amount of $1 Million, then one guy says to the other that he could tell which guy had Mass Mutual for his insurance.  Rough as it is, I like this one because the 7 minute cartoon challenge really came up with a gem that I think could be a finished Rackafracka.  This cartoon would be excellent for a newsletter, website or direct mail as well if Dennis wanted to do something like that.

The front cover of Buchalter Nemer quarterly newsletter.

Rackafracka has found its way to the front page of Buchalter Nemers’ quarterly newsletter, Points & Authorities, and here is the latest version.  They contacted me and wanted a custom cartoon that could go with a theme that the newsletter would have.  The topic being that during this time of economic uncertainty a company can count on Buchalter Nemer to see you through it.  Being a full service law firm they can take care of anything that a company could go through during this economic melt down.

Anyway I was happy to approach this topic and it wasn’t that hard since this sort of topic reaches everyone.  My client is the one who said belt tightening over the phone and that is all I needed to hear.  I came up with the idea for this cartoon almost instantly.

Using cartoons in newsletter, direct mail, greeting cards are a good way to reach your clients and potential customers since the cartoon is easy to read, fun to look at and it adds a great way to illustrate your point to those who may not understand right away.  Another benefit is that if your reader likes the cartoon enough they will keep a hold of the publication and hang it in their office, or show their friends.  This can cause viral marketing that is the most popular way to spread the word about your company or message these days. I’ve been doing custom cartoons for several years now and can help you even write the joke.  Just tell me what the topic is going to be and I’ll do the rest.  Tell your boss or your marketing department to use Rackafracka in their next newsletter.

BTW, for you Fracka Fans out there who noticed the cartoon on the front page of the newsletter is smashed a little, I want to tell you that that is how they printed the newsletter and I’m not bitter.  For the correct proportion check it out here.

Sometimes when I’m riding on the bus I get to thinking.  I can’t say how I really got to thinking about a monk going to the cleaners and finding out that his robe had shrunk, but none the less it did come into my head and so I drew it fast into my sketch book.

I like this cartoon because of the social impact it may have if in fact monks do send their robes to the cleaners.  My gut tells me that a true monk would not.  A true monk would probably wash his robe himself or do the opposite and throw some dust onto himself when he gets to feeling like weeping and gnashing his teeth for a bit.

Another part of me says a monk would not be so vain as to worry about how well a robe might fit onto ones body.  Although the vanity would have surface at some point as I don’t think I’ve seen any monks in sack cloth that are showing so much leg as Morty in this cartoon.

I like the bunny slippers in this cartoon.  It fits because I’d imagine that a monk who has taken a vow of silence or the like, would possibly have an impulse to have something to hide and if a monk were to care about the length of his robe then he most certainly would hide some slippers or rainbow socks or something.  I chose the slippers since I think a monk walking around the church all day praying would want to where something comfortable.  Who wants to tromp around a monastery all day in penny loafers?

My sketch in my sketch book is all wrong on how the monk looks, as I think the big belt looks like a Santa Claus belt.  The sketch book drawing also doesn’t show the other guys robe in its “proper” length so the joke isn’t funny without the revealing of the proper length of robe.  That is why in the final I put two monks with proper atire so as to put emphisis on the fact that Morty is not following proper monostary dress code.  I also don’t know if monks have hood draw strings on their sack cloth robes so I didn’t put it in the final.

This is not the story for you if you get weak in the knees when seeing images of roasted or cooked meet.  And I will admit that when I was at the Empress of China Restaurant at a charity fund raiser for Project Concern International on Saturday, I was a bit surprised when the 1st course of a 10 course meal was brought out and it was a roasted Tweedy bird.

I thought I saw a Tweedy bird

Now growing up in Iowa where the only exposure that I had to the Chinese culture was the local “King Buffet” which was just a glorified Kentucky Fried Chicken with sweet and sour sauce and fortune cookies, so it stands to reason that anything short of serving up a bucket of chicken is going to send some sort of shock to my system.  I’m not saying that I didn’t eat it…I’m just saying that it was something I hadn’t done before.

The charity event was a really fun time.  They had a silent auction as well as a live auction which another event I had never been apart of.  The live auction was exciting and there was a real battle for a couple of the prizes.  The auctioneer was Mr. Brooke Sivo from Bonhams.  He very much the professional and really had the auction moving.  I got to talk to him afterwards and he told me some things about auctions that I think will inspire some new cartoons.

The band was very good too.  For being a band put together just for that event they were very tight and fun to listen to.  Overall I had a really good time and because I went with one of the organizers from the committee I was there until the very end.

My friend Ray Simon invited me to his sponcored table at the Project Concern International Helping Children & Families: Then and Now Event held at the Empress of China on Grant Street in San Francisco.  I got to sit on one of the event planning meetings that Ray also invited me to and it is a great and thoughtful group of volunteers who have an international reach.  The event is tonight and I expect that it will be a good time.

This is my first event for PCI so I hope to learn a lot about this non-profit.  Most of my support of the group has come because Ray is a good friend of mine.  I was able to provide small signs for the event which were nothing glamorous but directional signs helping people find the place where the dinner is going to be held.

Here is a video that is from PCI’s youtube channel.

This is a twisted tale of parenthood.  I like the roughness of the animation and the twist at then end that makes it all worth waiting for.  This is my pick for the week.  What’s yours?