A Personal Barber Gender Observation Concerning Eyebrows

Now this is true in my experience, not a generalization. I have been keeping score.

When I go to get my hair cut and beard trimmed I go to real barbers, you know, with the traditional poles out front and the outdated magazines in the waiting area.

I don't have a regular place to go. Around here barbers have strange hours, so I just drop in when and wherever I get a chance.

Over the last few years I visited a wide variety of barbers of both genders, I'd say evenly split 50/50, in several different cities in Thurston and Grays Harbor counties.

At this point in my life I am at the age where hair on my head grows wildly in places like out of my ears, nose, eyebrows, everywhere except the top of my head, which is thinning rapidly! Like my grandfather used to say, my hair is wavy, it is waving goodbye!

So here is what I have observed when it comes to eyebrows.

Male barbers always ask if you want your eyebrows trimmed. Female barbers never ask, they just do it before you know what is happening. So far, in my experience, this has been 100% true.


It is time for me to revisit James Thurber.

Mortymail 5/9/12

OK, I admit I have become a terrible correspondent to those of you who contact me via USPS. And I have been for a number of years. Burnout is liberating yet guilt-inducing.

Anyway. It is not my intention to make this a regular feature of Morty the Blog, but I thought I would report on some of the stuff I get in the mail before I send it off the to the Washington State University comix collection. In no way is this making up for Richard Krauss basically suspending Midnight Fiction, and I am not reviewing. If you are looking for a networking place, send your comix to Rick Bradford at Poopsheet.

I let my mail pile up quite a bit before I even look at it. Then I get out the jack-knife, slice those babies open after they have collected dust for a week or more, and mostly pay bills while some old movie is in the VCR. Yes, you heard me, I said VCR. Occasionally some comix stuff slips in there.

Here's what arrived this week:

Kel Crum sent me his latest, Scribbles. I'd like to know how he found legal sized paper to print this work in the classic enlarged digest size which I loved. I finally got to meet Kel at SPACE last year and admired his performance skills during the comix reading show.

Bruce Chrislip sent me a big packet of material. Included were copies of a couple jams from SPACE 2011. I found his reprint (20 years later) of Thurber of Ohio to be especially wonderful. Before Bruce and I left SPACE in Columbus last year to head for Cincinnati, we visited the Thurber House. I really enjoyed visiting the home of one great Ohio cartoonist while accompanied by another great Ohio cartoonist.

I hope one day Bruce and Joan Chrislip return to Washington State.

And finally, our old Newave comrade, Gary Fields, sent this great version of Morty the Dog! 

I love it!

SPACE 2011 Report, pt. 17

Before leaving Columbus, Bruce and I paid a visit to the Thurber House, once home to one of America's great cartoonists and humorists, James Thurber.

Naturally on a Sunday it was closed, but I enjoyed the Thurberesque dog art in the yard.

What a nice way to end a day of celebrating comic art.


Back in Cincinnati we viewed old photo albums and laughed at pictures of ourselves from the old Seattle days running around the sunny slopes of yesterday.

Many thanks to Bruce and Joan, and Bob Corby for hosting this visit.

Charlie Campbell, Evergroove's Overlooked Cartoonist

The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is known as being an early venue for many fine cartoonists, and whenever the topic comes up the usual list of illustrious names are recited.

But there is one name I have never heard in that lineup. It should be.

Charlie Campbell.

Yesterday I sorted through a bunch of old issues of The Cooper Point Journal, Evergroove's campus newspaper, and caught up on the Fall 1979 to Spring 1986 material. I graduated in 1979 and returned there to work for a couple years, starting in mid-1986. So reading these papers sort of filled the gaps for me. Yeah, I know, 30 years too late. So I'm slow. So what?

Campbell's single panel cartoons, which appeared in the CPJ in 1984, struck me as a delightful cross between two other cartoonists I admire, James Thurber and John Callahan.

With the help of private dick Arnie Wormwood, I tracked down Campbell to his Portland, Oregon based commercial music and sound design business and Charlie graciously allowed me to scan and post some examples of his 1984 CPJ work.