Birds do it, bees do it, now I’m doing it too. Welcome to my tentative experiment with the blogging format.

To be honest, I’m more than a little skeptical about this. Most blogs are self-indulgent tripe, far too many political blogs, regardless of whether they speak to the left or the right, preach to the converted. Can I do any better? Not likely. More importantly, I know that I’ll often be too busy to post anything. Will people keep checking back?

I already get the chance to express myself politically and otherwise in cartoons and columns, so I don’t plan to use this blog the same way other politically-minded people like, say, Tom Tomorrow does: commenting on current events, linking to news stories, that sort of thing. Right now I’m going to use this blog to discuss what it’s like to be a working cartoonist and columnist, discuss and respond to the mail I receive. So let this serve as fair warning: if you send me e-mail, it may very well end up here, being critiqued, ridiculed or otherwise served up in a way that could displease you.

I’m also going to use this forum to announce events I’ll be attending. Towards that end, I’ll be at an opening reception for “Schlock ‘N’ Roll” cartoonist Ward Sutton’s latest project, a gallery event called “Breaking News.” It’s at 7 p.m. this Thursday, October 9 at the Judson Church, 55 Washington Square South at Thompson Street in New York City. As Ward puts it, there’ll be “special clips from The Daily Show, a presentation from The Onion, artwork by Art Speigelman, a cartoon reading by Tom Tomorrow (This Modern World), performance by Zeroboy, music by Joe McGinty & Nick Danger (Loser’s Lounge), animation by Robert Smigel & J.J. Sedelmaier (SNL’s TV Funhouse), as well as:

Melinda Beck * Jennifer Berklich * Ruben Bolling * John Boone * Damian Catera * Robbie Conal * Jim Costanzo * Jay Critchley * Anita Di Bianco * DD Dorvillier & Michelle Nagai * Mariam Ghani * Josh Gosfield * Peter Grzybowski * Peter Kuper * Steve Lambert * Sandra Low Ulrike Mueller * Barbara Nei * Pink Punk * Michelle Pred * Ted Rall * Sarina Khan Reddy * David Rees * Michael A. Rippens * Ward Sutton * Micah Wright * and many more!”

Nowadays I’m in the final push to make the deadline for my next book, which will be out next spring. I’ll let you know more about it later, but it’s going to be all prose and will probably be the closest thing to a full-fledged explanation of my political philosophy that I’ve ever written. The cartoon and column format aren’t really long enough to get into a lot of nuance; with luck this book will solve that problem. Also be on the lookout for “Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists,” out in February from NBM Publishing.