He’s the title character of a cartooning project that’s been dominating my life for the last few months, and if all goes as planned he’ll continue to be an ongoing presence well into 2007.

He’s a struggling artist who, in concert with his two diminutive "alter egos" Go-Slow and Gung-Ho, is part pitchman and part cheerleader for All Things Adobe. (For the benefit of you non-digital-graphics-users, I’m referring to Adobe Systems Incorporated, the generator of ingenious software without which most of us present-day designers wouldn’t know how to get up in the morning, Photoshop being its most widely-known crown jewel.)

His name is Mark the Art Guy and his enthusiasm for Adobe’s line of software is to be expected, since he wouldn’t exist had I not received email last March from Karen LeFever of the company’s marketing wing inviting me to create a biweekly webcomic for Adobe’s web site. The strip’s goal would be to use a lighthearted narrative to generate curiosity about (and ultimately, of course, an irresistible inclination to purchase) the latest upgrade for Adobe’s integrated family of digital tools known as Creative Suite 2.

I’ve made only one glancing reference to this endeavor (it’s the "strictly commercial" gig referred to in my April 27 post) — initially because an amazing amount of preparatory paperwork had to be plowed through before I could be absolutely sure the whole thing was really going to happen, and subsequently because it’s the sort of thing one just doesn’t blab about months before it materializes.

But all the groundwork has now been laid, even though an exact launch date or URL hasn’t yet been set (I’ll fill you in on those in future blog posts). So I asked Karen this week if I could stop limiting myself in this weblog to coy remarks being really, really busy all the time and start talking openly to you about what’s been taking up so much of my time.

Hence this unofficial announcement to Cruse insiders of my webcomic-in-the-making.

Of course, those of you with good instincts for detecting Things Being Left Unsaid must surely have suspected from my constant protests about being overworked that something had to be up. After all, the gigs I’ve occasionally described haven’t exactly added up to calendar-killers.

But while I’ve refrained from burdening you with a play-by-play account as events unfolded, the fact is that I’ve been pretty much living and breathing Adobe since the contract was inked. OK, a little time had to be set aside to plan my soon-to-begin cartooning course at MCLA and slightly more time was required to prepare the soon-to-be-published cover art plus a comic strip for UAB Public Health magazine.

But mostly I’ve been living in Adobeland.

First we had to figure out what Mark would look like and which of my stylistic approaches would work best for him. (We decided, as you can see from the teaser panels above, on a largely but not completely black-&-white universe with lots of crosshatching.)

Then we had to roughly chart out the "story arc" I’ll be following during the feature’s 20-installment run.

I’ve drafted individual scripts for the episodes that will get the ball rolling and they’ve been approved by Adobe. Scripting projects like this one is especially hard for me, since my normal comedic reflexes don’t ordinarily allow for an extra requirement that a company’s products be showcased. But that requirement, of course, is Mark the Art Guy’s raison d’être.

It’s taken time to sketch out rough versions of the inaugural episodes for the Adobe folks to peruse. They seem satisfied at this point that what I’m providing is what they are paying for. So I have moved on to drawing finished artwork.

Along the way I have also had to carve out time to bring myself up to speed on the Creative Suite tricks that I’m drawing comic strips about. Not that I’m any kind of expert yet. It takes take practice before you have all of the "Ah ha!" moments you hope eventually to have when you’re exploring upgrades to familiar software. But Creative Suitre 2’s has cool new attributes that I’m enjoying getting a handle on.

Three episodes are complete as this is written. The date for going online with the series is apparently just around the bend. As I said above, I’ll let you know more when I know more.

Being a pitchman isn’t a role that exactly fits me like a glove. But I can honestly say that I was already a fan of Adobe’s flagship software long before this recent gig entered the picture (as visitors to my site’s longstanding Cartoonists Corner, which came into being years ago with no prompting by Adobe, will attest). That bolsters my comfort level. In other words, there’s been no need to bend my ethics into pretzels for the sake of a paycheck the way I would have to if, say, Satan approached me in the night with word that Fox News was eager to shell out big bucks for a cartoon frontman.

That’s a gig I’ll pass on to Art Guy Mark. With Adobe, by contrast, I’m cool.

A particularly excruciating gaffe from that endlessly excruciating blind date eventually inspired the cartoon below, drawn twenty years later for a mini-comic anthology called "Horrible Misunderstandings."

*as translated by Google

“Cómic Never showed as much indirect labor cost. Worlds, universes and minorities populate this essential work” (Boris Izaguirre)

It has not very often in that a work related to the world of cómic as much wakes up passions in the public as in the specialized critic, and is that Stuck Rubber Baby (Different Worlds in Spain) has taken all the possible prizes to international level.

And now, finally, it arrives at Spain, in an edition of luxury superior to all the made ones until the moment in the rest of the world, in which all the details have been taken care of, as much the technical edition (it covers lasts with back in skin), aspects, the translation (it is had counted with which it is considered by all like the best translator within the world of cómic, Diego Garci’a), etc. In addition, has been consulted with he himself author at any moment with the idea to make an edition that outside its affability.

That’s me: not just one in a million, but one in twelve million!

(What took Howard so long? I’m sure you were asking before I finally jumped into the swim last February. The 11,999,999 weblogs already available for perusal could hardly have been leaving you sated, after all. Only the addition to the mix of my own inimitable ruminations could possibly fill the gaping online vacuum that remained.)

So here I am, and a few people seem to be reading what I write. Some dedicated blog-readers even leave comments responding to my posts. God bless them every one, since each such instance of individual feedback helps reassure me that I am not performing for an empty house.

Usable data remains scarce, though, about what’s being most or least enjoyed by the larger (if not necessarily large) pool of silent visitors who may or may not find find old drawing from my files amusing or care to learn from me that my dog is cute.

Still, each bit of data is useful, so I took note when a friend told me recently that he resists posting feedback about my entries because to do so he would first be required to register his email address with an online service called TypeKey.

His unease is understandable, since giving one’s name and email address to any online entity brings with it fears that a fresh flood of spam will follow.

But for what it’s worth: the TypeKey authentication process comes recommended by Jason Bergman, the trusted friend who’s been my full-service web enabler for years. Indeed, not only is a registree’s confidentiality respected by TypeKey but the service also functions as a deterrent to twisted souls who might be inclined to maliciously undermine the blog itself.

"Spam became a major problem for me when I had free-for-all comment posting," Jason explains with regard to his own blogging experiences, "and I just got sick of it. With TypeKey, that’s not much of a problem. … Plus you can ban people this way if they post anything offensive. Again it’s rare, but it’s nice to have that power."

I give weight to Jason’s opinions in general, and there’s no denying that some blogs have been seriously — in some cases even fatally — overwhelmed by malicious flamers eager to dump truckloads of negativity into a weblog’s comment bin unless someone is checking IDs at the door. And openly gay bloggers like me can be especially tempting targets.

Hence my mild little TypeKey shield. But really, no one should mistake its presence for an unwelcome mat.

A "trip" (of the LSD variety) is what I and some friends were winding down from on a June night in 1969 when, while wandering through the streets of Greenwich Village and admiring the undulating colors of Tiffany lamps in store windows, we happened upon the Stonewall riots in progress.

And this weekend I learned that, by a quirky coincidence that is of no consequence in the least, a young actor named "Trip" (or Trip Langely, to be specific) will be portraying my trip in a production of Carol Polcovar’s stage docudrama My Mother Told Me I Was Different: Voices From The Stonewall Rebellion, which will be playing at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex in Manhattan through the weekend of July 21-23 under the direction of pioneering gay playwright and director David Gaard.

I met David when we both participated in the Chip Deffaa Invitational Theatre Festival several summers ago and we’ve kept in touch since then, so David alerted me to the fact that my serendipitous and acid-soaked brush with the historic Stonewall riots has been woven into a corner of the larger tapestry of more important first-person accounts that make up Carol’s stirring (to judge by the script, which David emailed to me on Saturday) montage of testimonies.

Mine is a but the tiniest of threads in the play’s tapestry — and rightly so, given my fringe standing as the hallucinating observer of a cultural revolution in the making those many years ago. Had I been courageous enough to leap into the fray and hurl a flaming garbage can or two, I would have given Trip a little more drama to work with.

But it’s always nice to be included, and I wish Trip and the rest of the play’s cast the best as they bring to fresh life an evening in my personal history that remains indelible (if shimmeringly indistinct in its down-to-earth details) in my mind.

Below: Playwright Carol Polcovar and director David Gaard confer backstage.

He didn’t hold up the purchase of our house on their account, but neither did the inspector sugar-coat reality. Eventually — by which he meant significantly sooner than Eddie’s and my bank account would prefer — the aging, crumbling cement steps in front of our house were going to have to go.

So inexorably has their decline continued in the two years since we assumed ownership of our home that desperate measures have recently been called for to protect public safety. Specifically, since last winter Eddie and I have had to keep two flower pots permanently and conspicuously placed so as to steer visiting friends and pizza deliverers away from the most dangerously eroded portion of the ascent (see the top left photo below).

The worst was accomplished in less than an hour. Now, thanks to the expert carpentry of Lance Howard (seen above midway through his construction job), newer and decidedly better wooden steps are materializing to make the climb to front-yard level a breezier experience.

Our flower pots served us well and for that we are grateful. But it’s time now for them to move on to more conventional uses.

We were airborne by the time I made it to the New York Times Book Review and found my mood elevated even higher by my discovery that the Times had seen fit that very Sunday to give Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home its due.

And that was just for starters. Eight days after Sean Wilsey’s aforementioned piece in the Book Review ("a pioneering work…" said Wilsey) there came a second review of Alison’s "Family Tragicomic," this one written by George Gene Gustines ("painfully honest and richly detailed in words and images…") for one of the same paper’s Books of the Times columns.

If you read my March 13 blog entry you already know that I’m firmly in the "Hooray for Alison" camp, and — given the heightened mainstream awareness of graphic novels that has taken place during the eleven years since the Times oh-so-cruelly ignored Stuck Rubber Baby (brief pause for envious teeth-grinding on my part) — I’m not surprised in the least by the widespread accolades garnered by Alison’s book. If any comics artist has even been overdue for general acclaim, it’s the talented Ms. Bechdel.

I would be embarrassed, of course, to own up to even a miniscule degree of professional envy if Alison didn’t admit to similar feelings toward herself. In a profile of Alison written by Hillary Chute in this week’s Village Voice the creator of Dykes To Watch Out For muses, "It’s weird because I’ve been publishing books for over 20 years [and] nothing has ever gotten attention like this. So, in an odd way, I feel envious of my own self. It’s like, how come nobody paid any attention to me before? Is my comic strip worse than I thought? Or is this book better than I thought?"

Yesterday I heard from my French pal (and Wendel translator) François Peneaud, instigator of the Gay Comics List, who tells me that Alison’s book is gearing up to make waves on his side of the Atlantic as well. "I’ve just learned that Fun Home will soon be published in France," he tells me, "and that it will be serialized this summer in a left-wing newspaper, Libération. Which is absolutely great, because a lot of people who don’t read bandes dessinées [That’s French for comics — H.C.] will see it."

François has wasted no time in composing his own online review of Fun Home, by the way, a review capped off with a link to the fascinating video of Alison’s working methods that is currently housed on the book’s promo page at Houghton Mifflin’s web site.

It’s a choice look at the artist at work in her lair. And while I’m fascinated to learn that some of Alison’s secret drawing tricks are almost as peculiar as mine, my favorite moment is a moment of deft synchronicity between Alison and her cat, who clearly has learned from experience how to safely step off of a desk’s surface into what would be, absent Alison’s perfect timing, thin air. You’ll see what I mean if you watch the video.

Our pets come to know us so well. And we them.

This blog has suffered a dry spell due to my unusually unrelenting work load the last couple of weeks There has been no corresponding dry spell outdoors, however.

Which means that our ever-lusher grass cover has shown me no mercy, no matter how convincingly I have tried to explain my need to juggle pressing deadlines indoors instead of spending time guiding a machine across uneven terrain while revealing to random onlookers how far I have fallen since the days many decades ago when I was a moderately trim young hottie on the make in gay bars.

Anyway, I hope to resume posting updates here with more regularity soon. In the meantime, meet our tenant Elizabeth (above, seen not mowing) who with her husband Jake has generously contributed four dogs to our backyard canine collection. Pearl is the white beauty beside Elizabeth in the snapshot. The smaller, blacker dog at center stage is Dukie, followed by Harpua and our own semi-dalmatian Lulu. And I can’t swear to it, but I believe that’s fifth dog Leroy’s tail peeking out from behind my work gloves.

There are also two cats in Elizabeth and Jake’s apartment upstairs (Fee and Harry), but they remain discretely indoors out of deference to Lulu’s hunting heritage, which is expressed in the form of horrifying fates visited upon the possums and woodchucks who have unwisely ventured into her backyard territory.

(Incidentally, if you look beyond the green wire fencing in the background you will see what our yard would look like if left unmowed for, say, three weeks during the Massachusetts rainy season.)