Make Mine Mike

Toon time. As usual, it's full of inside family jokes, such as:

We joked that on a much-needed vacation, my mom spent more time sleeping than enjoying the sights. She might've seen Nina Foch, a star of "An American in Paris", and an acting teacher I had in film school.

My mom was very supportive of my film career, helping out as exec. producer (and playing a small role) in an indie I made. Maybe it's 'cause we both love movies, from The Thief of Baghdad to Christopher Walken flicks like The Dead Zone, Search and Destroy (in which Walken does an obligatory dance number, singing "Shoeshine Boy") and True Romance.

That movie had a line about certain fruits and vegetables, which segues into a reference to an old family schtick about my grandmother and my Uncle Barry who went from hating to liking the taste of eggplant. My mother, on the other hand, never got over her disgust of seafood. She won't come within a mile of anything that even might've been within a mile of a fish.

Mom had three other all-purpose excuses to get out of doing things: She has an achey back, her eyes are bad, and she doesn't have a cuisinart. So no schlepping, no night-driving, and don't you dare try to compare her to Martha friggin' Stewart.

I wanted to display this after I did a series of posts on my cartoon influences, because you can see an homage to Rube Goldberg, Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, MAD Magazine and Sergio Aragonés' Groo the Wanderer. The premise of this strip was basically taken from a Sunday comic of Bloom County, too.

But with this Hallmark holiday approaching, I couldn't put it off any longer. Happy Mother's Day.

(click on the images to enlarge)