DOuG pRATt drawings
Tomorrow, I will be attending an informal lunch with the New England chapter of the National Cartoonists Society. The invitation came with homework — a drawing for Inktober.
This took four hours, from preliminary sketch to inked finish. It’s a compositional mess, and my inking needs work, and much more patience, but it’s done.
I added a splash of color to a laser printer copy of the scan.
Thanks for remembering me, cartoon Donald, but it was half my life, 35 years ago, that my cartoon Donald called you a freak.
Let’s keep up with Colbert, as he expounds on the dinged male egos of American men today.
Thirty-five years ago, discussion of the “masculine identity crisis” for the “post-sensitive male” resided within the NPR/New Yorker set, as popularized by Robert Bly’s Iron John. I read the book and thought it was interesting, but not particularly compelling. By that point in my life, I considered myself relatively immune to such influences, after all of the “personal searching” I’d done during my college years. Which is the proper time for such musings, after all. Speaking of the various schools of thought I exposed myself to while a student, I highly recommend the HBO Max documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.
The buzz around Iron John inspired me to start working on this cartoon, with the intention of submitting it to The Comics Buyer’s Guide. I abandoned it after losing the inspiration due to interruptions for business travel.
There are countless reasons why businesses fail. Some are nobody’s fault. When the pandemic hit, restaurants did everything they could to survive, but many folded. Then there are the management failures. K-Mart wasn’t able to compete against Walmart. For much of the 20th century, Sears was what Amazon is today.
I will always be more than merely disappointed in my former employer of many years. Senior management’s hubris resulted in a total failure to respond in time to meet the competition from Epic Systems. (No relation to Epic Games, other than they’re both software companies.)
The Federal Trade Commission needs to apply a different standard to its definition of a monopoly where Epic is concerned. A reasonable estimate is that Epic manages 75% of America’s non-military medical records. (Oracle Health, formerly Cerner, has the military systems.)
Epic’s power and influence is finally starting to get some attention…
… from conservative sources…
… as well as from the far left.
In an effort to dump a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have kept, I’m spending hours going through old boxes and cabinets. As always, this process gets bogged down very quickly as I find some long-forgotten things and take time to look them over. Was it really thirty years ago I drew this cartoon for an office event?
Before my cancer diagnosis, I was foolishly getting ambitious about actually doing something fun outside of the house. So I signed up for a drawing class. With my continued participation now in doubt, tonight’s class, the second, may be the last I am able to attend. I should definitely know more about my medical condition tomorrow.
Tonight’s warm-up was a “drawing from the right side of the brain” exercise, copying an upside-down picture, borrowed from a Picasso portrait of Stravinsky. On the left is the drawing as I saw it, on the right is what I drew.
