Cartoon by: Rosko - defunct?

As you all know, our fellow SHC Chris Rosko has had his strip printed in the Birmingham Weekly for some time now. It's called Cartoon by: Rosko (year 1, year 2, year 3). Sadly, it seems that this era has come to an end. I recently read this blog post about it on Rosko's myspace:

Thursday, March 18, 2010

CARTOON BY: ROSKO YEAR 3 AND OTHER DISASTERS
Current mood:Not nearly as complainy as this sounds

So, as I told my one(1) fan (who may wish to remain anonymous) and another stranger/friend, who was foolhardy enough to ask how I was (James JAJAC go friend him and watch his hilarious movie), I am recently demoted from semi-professional comic stripper to unpaid unpublished amateur doodler.

This is as a result of my long time friend and editor of the Birmingham Weekly resigning her post of ten years to go on the dole. Hers was a thankless job and I don't blame her one bit, but my inspirado has taken a serious blow and I am left only with my meager MySpace page as home for my comic.

As of this writing, Year Three has only 2 strips thus far. I will continue on periodically doing them, so please, no setting yourselves aflame in the town square in abject despair.

However, like any good artist, I am always happy to accept money or care packages as validation for my "art." So, if you, or a clone of you, or someone near you, or someone you don't even know, is in need of a screwhead cartoonist with enough of a college education to drop out of college, a sliding scale of morals and taste, shockingly low computer and typing skills for his generation, a well-groomed mustache, and the ability to write long rambling sentences, I am the man for the job. Also, I am good at creating titles for things, and would be a master Onomatopoeianist if such a designation existed.

Currently I am the night crew manager for a grocery store with the worst karma imaginable, where I work hard for pennies and the spite of my co-workers, neither of which is contributing much towards my effort of getting the hell out of my parents house, where i've been languishing for what is nearing an unbelievable 2 years now.

I would make a great "kept man" (LADIES ONLY, please), or human house cat and am willing to relocate. No paper training necessary! I make a great White Russian, and only burn myself once per cooking of frozen pizzas, and microwaving foods is very rarely problematic.

Anywrought, thats enough for one blog I think. Thanks for whatever You are out there doing. We couldn't do it without You.

. . . Phew! Rosko's post paints a vivid picture of what life can be like for a cartoonist in Alabama, where there are no big illustration or animation industries.

Hang in there, Rosko! If you keep drawing your strip, we'll keep reading it!

Maybe you could mount a campaign to be reinstated at the paper. Do you think, if they got a slew of emails, that they'd put you back in? Perhaps with the help of the Salty 'Ham's mailing list and facebook list, you could orchestrate such a slew.

Instead of posting your comics on myspace, I might suggest putting Cartoon: by Rosko up online using smackjeeves.com. As all the SHC's probably know by now, I've recently posted a big batch of semi-secret comic sketches (if any of you haven't read them, let me know and I'll send you the link). I've found smackjeeves to be quite handy: It's free. You don't have to be real savvy to figure out how to work it. It has a bunch of different templates to choose from. You automatically have First, Back, Next, and Latest buttons on your comics. And there's a community of web comics creators on smackjeeves, who might stumble upon your strip through the site. So that might bring in a few extra readers. I haven't tried other places, except for comicspace.com, so I can't really compare. But it seems pretty good, to me. In case you're interested.