Rest Your Glass Here

Cartoons on Coasters and Other Miscellany

Jun 27, 2026

Spread out your picnic blanket, because we just opened a basketful of cartoons and pithy commentary to enjoy along with a cold beverage of your choice. It’s all waiting for you under the pavilion at Bloggers’ Grove.

The old drawing board hosted a variety of characters since our last newsletter. The comical cast included a bird, Humpty Dumpty, tikis, a lawyer, and a Bizarro take on Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Looking Ahead & Looking Back

If you could see into the future, you’d be able to identify the five Secret Symbols that will appear in the complete version of this panel.

Our archival imagery this time around is a six-pack of drink coasters I designed in the last century. The first is a 1992 promotional item for my solo comic book, Beer Nutz, which lasted for three issues. Most of the stories involved a trio of beer-swilling knuckleheads who frequented the fictional Scottie’s Bar.

A few years later, I designed a set of four coasters as a pledge premium for WFMU, the world’s most free-form radio station. These were letterpress-printed on thick pulpy stock and were a lot of fun to work on. We used black ink plus two custom Pantone colors: a deep red and a sort of mustardy tan. When the red and tan colors were overprinted, the result was a rich orange-brown shade. I had free rein to come up with the images and taglines.

The “We Feel Your Pain” characters were a grubby homage to the Piel Brothers Beer mascots Bert and Harry Piel, who appeared in a series of animated commercials. Bob & Ray, the classic comedy team provided their voices.

This 1996 design was my one and only assignment from Screw, whose art director hired many cartoonists during the publication’s heyday. It’s a curious souvenir of one of the worst promotional ideas in history.

Supposedly, the magazine’s employees were sent out to distribute stacks of coasters to bars throughout New York City. The theory was that after a few drinks, people would call the toll-free number and subscribe.

Of course, it backfired, and Screw ended up paying for countless drunken crank calls, not to mention printing costs for thousands of coasters, and a meager fee for the illustrator. That was the beginning and the end of my career in smut.

Bizarro Fashion

This “Chess King” T-shirt is one of the items now available in the Comics Kingdom Bizarro Summer Collection. There are several new shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, and insulated tumblers. Every purchase helps out two hard-working ink monkeys.

Alternate Configurations Department

Here’s the landscape version of Friday’s valet gag. It was my favorite of the week, combining comics and music. It also reminded me how difficult it is to draw the seemingly simple Peanuts characters.