Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

The New Disruptors Bonus Episode with Lucy Bellwood

My dear friend Lucy Bellwood passed through town last weekend, and stayed with my family as the start of her book tour for 100 Demon Dialogues, a set of cartoons in which she engages with her inner critic, who appears in the form of a smack-talking demon. She’s a talented illustrator and writer, and the book is full of tension and embrace: she doesn’t cast her demon out, but helps him understand her better. You can order a copy of the book via her site or ask your local bookstore to carry it. (You can also order a plush version of the demon, as I did.)

She asked me to have a conversation about creativity and our latest projects in front of a live audience at Brick & Mortar Books in Redmond. (Which, by the way, I highly recommend: the store opened last year, has great selections, and

Cartooning

Charlie Brown, Pedestals, Toxic Masculinity, and the Nature of Desire

Cartoon panel by Zach Weinersmith, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal .

I just saw the new Peanuts movie with my kids, who are avid Peanuts fans and aged 8 and 11. We all felt it captured the nature and tone of the comics very well, even though it uses a sort of felt/fuzzy 3D that adds texture and stereoscopic effect without trying to create a weird 3D world. Snoopy when he's not fully to the side is represented as in the comics—with his eyes like a flounder, which looks correct!

But the little red-haired girl is a prominent plot point in the movie and, spoilers ahead, I fear the film recapitulates some troubling aspects from the strip. Charlie Brown is not a harasser or an aggressor, nor, should it be noted, are his intentions even inappropriate for his ostensible age, which seems around nine in

Podcasting

Th-Th-Th-That's a Mystery Solved, Folks!

In the style of the podcast 99% Invisible's narrative.

I was in Taos. It was 2001. We were in an adobe-style house. It had been restored to within an inch of its life. The floors were sand-set stones. The walls, stucco. The roof line had the ends of what seemed to be logs sticking out. I don't know if there were logs supporting the roof. That's the style. That's what it looks like, but the inside could have been fake. There's no way to tell.

The house had uncomfortable seating and not enough. We rented it from an acquaintance. With just five of us, we couldn't all sit down at the same time in any room or even in adjacent rooms. At night, in the room my wife and I shared, a fax machine's tones bled through the wall. The acquaintance hadn't told us she'd rented an owner's apartment to

Cartooning

Bear Playing a Sousaphone

Talking with a friend in the UK on Twitter, my memory was jogged about my dad's granola company, Wildtime Foods. He and a friend at a newspaper the to worked at found themselves at loose ends, and formed the business. Their first product was a baked bar with a gingerbread-ish taste, something like a brownie but not as sweet. It was called, wait for it, a Grizzly Bar. (Gingerbread, Wildtime Foods, Goldilocks...you see.)

They commissioned local artist Paul Ollswang to create a set of illustrated cards that were randomly inserted in packages. Collect them all and win a prize! This was 1981. I dug around and found the cards on a site memorializing and distributing Paul's work.

Wildtime Foods trading card, 1981, by Paul Ollswang

Paul died young at 51, sadly! Lovely, weird man who looked exactly like his illustrations. R. Crumb liked his stuff.

Dad sold his interest