Monday - January 3, 2005:

I discovered the Pencil Jack forums a few weeks after coming up with HB. It is a forum for budding artists of all sorts to share their latest stuff. Well, it seems the site features a personified pencil tip as a mascot. The facial features are placed further down on the pencil but it is an angry looking face that reminds me a little of HB in one of his rages. Of course, I have no plans to take HB any further than, oh, about five more strips, and there's little money to be made on the concept so I guess I'm off the legal hook.

The feathery title character in Todd and Penguin bares some resemblance to Opus from Bloom County, but David Wright's Penguin is far more innocent if not quite as entertaining. There is plenty of homage paid to the various influences on Todd and Penguin though, and the strip seems to enjoy a good measure of popularity. Of course, David has put in several years of work on the thing at this point and it has improved consistently, so he deserves it. Digging through the archives was a joy of artistic and comic story-telling growth as the early strips are sometimes weak in both. Early strips wander all over the place stylistically, but recent strips have settled on a Waterson line, bold, thick and energetic. I was glad to see this one Websnarked a couple of days ago too!

Thanks for the submission.

-Bob Stevenson