Since my freelance workload is making it hard for me to compose my normal scintillating blog prose this week, I will vamp instead by sharing the vowel art that I have personally contributed to the cause.

Inkberry is a cherished non-profit lifeline for local writers that deserves everyone’s support, so rest assured that your money will be used in meritorious ways. Tickets are $30 (or $50 for two if you buy ‘em in advance).

I can’t think of a better way to spend a swinging Saturday night in North Adams — at least until the discos open.

Dolmen Books expects to bring the book out on June 6. I’ll give you more details when I know them.

And before I move on from stuck rubber matters, let me point you to a brand-new online review at Johanna Draper Carlson’s wide-ranging and informative site Comics Worth Reading. These many years after my baby’s creation, Johanna’s generous words are much appreciated.

I was a background blur to most everyone in view. They knew nothing about my career anxieties or artistic dreams or family crises. I was merely part of the scenery.

All of those folks in my field of vision, meanwhile, were similarly engaged in lives that I would probably go to my grave knowing nothing about. Were they store clerks? Fellow artists? Nobel laureates? Were they thrilled by freshly minted romances? Distressed by impending divorces? Did they realize, in certain cases, how very sexy they appeared to others? Were they worried about growing old, or might they take pride in every wrinkle?

To notice sexiness or a wrinkle, of course, a viewer has to focus. But even if one idly penetrates a blur’s surface to meditate on its details, one still knows nothing about the person within. And that goes both ways. If the oddly intense subway passenger across the car from me happens to allow her eyes to focus on me, she may decide that I look like an interesting person who is probably living an interesting life. Or she may not. Unless we break the barrier and converse, I will remain a mystery, whether blurred or in focus. Her event-and-emotion-stuffed life will proceed without my involvement once our train has reached its destination.

My friend Zina Saunders breaks through the blur barrier to converse. She is a painter who likes to stop and look closely at those bicycle messengers and musicians who cross her path. She asks them about their lives and passions. And then she paints them.

Her paintings will probably become a book someday, but while we’re waiting for that eventuality we can enjoy them by visiting the web site where she’s archiving them. It’s called Overlooked New York.

She doesn’t sweat realism when it comes to depicting her subjects’ bodily proportions. She likes drawing oversized heads so she can pack more feeling into the facial expressions. As the guy who brought Barefootz into the world, I can relate!

Zina’s DNA condemned her to be an artist. Her father was the late Norm Saunders, after all, who painted the legendary Mars Attacks! cards for Topps. If she hasn’t been on your radar before now, here’s a nicely done interview that will fill in some details.

Zina and I met while sharing microphones a few years ago on a panel of past-and-present Topps contributors in Philadelphia. Along with carving out her own niche as an illustrator, Zina has followed in her father’s footsteps by becoming a Topps contributor in her own right. I was there by virtue of the Bazooka Joe comic strips I drew during the 1980s along with the smattering of bits I contributed later on to the Garbage Pail Kids series.

When she told me a couple of weeks ago about her Overlooked New York project, I told her that I admired her ability to "nail [her] subjects’ inner lives with such economical brush strokes." Every blur in our world should have a chance to be coaxed into focus with such respect.

Eastern Massachusetts accommodated them by demonstrating how we do torrential rains and dangerous flooding on this end of the continent.

After boating by automobile through Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and other points northeast, they paddled toward Eddie’s and my neck of the mountains.

So, being old friends of mine, they chose the Boston Seafood Restaurant here in North Adams as their source for the fried clam strips their taste buds had been yearning for. (Eddie took the snapshot above, as you may have suspected.)

A good time was had by all. And that’s todays news from Lake Northadamsbegone. Now back to the freelance job that’s bedeviling my Sunday morning.

Meanwhile, we LGBT cartoonists of the world can take pleasure in the imminent arrival onscreen of characters created by one of our own. I was informed this week that a film version of Eric Orner’s hugely popular gay comic strip The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green is about to burst upon us.

No doubt about it: it’s the queer tooners’ turn. Frank Miller got Sin City into the multiplexes.Road to Perdition, the graphic novel brain-child of Max Allen Collins and Richard Piers Rayner team, made the leap. Terry Zwigoff steered Daniel Clowes‘ Ghost World onto the screen and now has done the same thing with Art School Confidential. The movie version of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor knocked everybody dead.

Meanwhile, pushy filmmakers can’t stop themselves from making Alan Moore comics into films (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; V For Vendetta) no matter how persistently Moore refuses their money and spits in their eyes.

You go, Ethan!

I know Eric slightly. I was on a "Gays In Comics" panel with him at an Out/Write in Boston a couple of decades ago. We didn’t shmooze a lot, since he was sitting at the opposite end of a very long table for the entire program, but his comments were enjoyable. A less cluttered bonding experience with him came in 2001, when The Advocate asked the two of us to collaborate on a "jam" strip in which Eric’s title character would be interviewed by my own gay character from an earlier era, Wendel Trupstock.

One is a drawing of the legendary folk-singer Odetta; the other is a group caricature of the Mamas and Papas. Both drawings date from my undergraduate days at Birmingham-Southern College.

Odetta played a concert at MCLA here in North Adams last winter. A fierce blizzard that evening discouraged Eddie and me from getting to the show, but Odetta herself did not let the snowfall deter her from making the long drive from Boston so the show could go on.

Friends who saw her perform reported that the frail, elderly woman who appeared on the stage was in sharp visual contrast to the robust figure who knocked my Birmingham crowd dead forty years ago. The power of her voice and personality, though, remain as formidable as ever.

Time takes a toll on all of us, but some have a gift of seeming somehow undiminished by whatever the passing years can deal out.

I drew the Mamas and Papas during the 1967 "Summer of Love." My heart was in San Francisco that summer but my body was stuck holding down a summer job in the art department of the Birmingham News. My main duty was retouching wedding photographs for the paper’s society section, but once or twice a week the art director would throw me a small spot illustration assignment.

The Mamas and Papas drawing stood out from all my other illustrations that summer, both for the prominence of its display (it was cover art for the paper’s Sunday-supplement magazine) and its subject matter. Although I had taken a mere puff or two at that point on the stray marijuana cigarettes that passed my way and although my first LSD trip still lay several months in the future, my soul was already awash in the utopian euphoria that came with membership in a counterculture that was just then reaching the Bible Belt and was feeling its oats. Love of the Beatles from 1964 onward had been my first experience of feeling aligned with my generational peers instead of alienated. The zest and soaring harmonies of the Mamas and Papas represented everything that was spiritually liberating in that period. I relished drawing their faces, and if I had had a way to take part in the summer’s pilgrimage to San Francisco, you can bet I would have happily worn "a flower in my hair" (as suggested in Scott McKenzie’s hit single) without feeling the least bit silly.

Instead I remained in the Magic City, retouching photos and executing small drawings (plus that cover art) for the News. For a while I allowed myself to imagine that this grunt work might somehow open the door to drawing an actual comic strip for the paper — a strip whose success locally might conceivably lead to national syndication and fame. Maybe if I kept thoughts of hippie rebellion at bay I could manage to join the company of cartooning heros like Al Capp, Walt Kelly, and Charles M. Schulz.

When I mentioned such dreams to my boss, however, he quickly squelched them.

"I’ll never let one of my staffers draw a regular feature," he informed me. "It would turn into some kind of "star" situation and the other staffers would be jealous."

As soon as he said that I knew that, while having a summer job was handy and retouching photos was not that abhorrent a way to pull in a buck, my future as a cartoonist clearly did not lie at the Birmingham News.

You see, I wanted to be a star.

Then there’s the sub-genre of Catholic art created by artists and writers who attended Catholic school during their youth. Once again I’m forced to extrapolate from such slim evidence as is available to someone whose closest brush with that particular educational environment was strolling past John Carroll High School on Birmingham’s Southside when I was of college age. But judging by works like Christopher Durang’s 1979 satirical play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All To You, there seems to be an element of bracing, unapologic revenge fantasy in many such works, with ancient psychological hurts once inflicted by tyrannical nuns serving as catalysts for score-settling by their student victims now grown to adulthood. What works best in this circumstance, as Durang has demonstrated in his stage works, is humor.

Of course, I’ve never known any tyrannical nuns personally, so I can’t actually attest from personal experience to their real-world existence. But I have known some quite tyrannical Southern Baptists, and I can only shudder at how even more drunk with power they might have been had their sense of divine anointment been fortified by a uniform proclaiming their holiness whenever they walked through a door. So it doesn’t seem a stretch to conclude that something corporeal keeps prompting one artist after another to look back in anger (or ridicule) at events and personalities they presumably felt scarred by in the Catholic schools of their youth.

On other fronts: the "commercial" job I alluded to is still too germinal to talk about. My North County Perp two-pager has, unfortunately, been relegated to the back burner for a while, the inevitable fate of non-remunerative endeavors elbowed aside by income-producing projects. (The bills must be paid, y’know.) As you may have noticed, my mid-week blog posts were also a casualty of the week’s professional demands. I did, however, get the lawn mowed.

The animated typist I used to decorate Monday’s post, meanwhile, led my sharp-eyed pal Bruce Garrett to comment by email: "You did the typewriter’s carriage movement backwards deliberately didn’t you?"

Gulp.

Ther clunky black Underwood that occupied a place of honor in my childhood home in Alabama remains an important memory from those days. Both of my parents were part-time writers, you see, so the clatter of metal keys springing rhythmically into action was soothing background noise to me. It meant that my parents were absobed in the same kinds of happy creative reveries that I had begun to discover. Like the noise of freight trains passing fifty yards outside my bedroom window several times a night, the family Underwood’s clatter lost any harshness it might have otherwise have had because of its comforting regularity in my daily life. By the time I was seven I had begun typing out scripts for imaginary radio plays on the same machine I watched mom and dad using.

Of course, if you had looked over my shoulder in those days you might have noticed that my manipulation of the carriage was a little weird, just as my ways of grasping pens and eating utensils have always been. We left-handers constantly devise unconscious work-arounds that allow us to use devices that were created for use by the right-handed majority. Typewritter carriage levers were obviously positioned with the needs of right-handers in mind, as are the shapes of the loops at the ends of most scissor handles. Minor hurdles to utilitarian gracefulness, these are — but we lefties forge onward.

So if the cartoon fellow in my Monday animation moves oddly when viewed from behind, so probably did I before computer keyboards kicked typewriter keyboards overboard. My memories of all that have clearly faded, acclimated as I have become to a world where digital text "wraps" automatically on LCD displays that, unlike typewriter carriages, don’t move back and forth in front of you while you compose masterpieces for the ages.