My first book could rightly be called ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People’, because procrastination is one of the things I do best in this world. I have wanted to put together a book of cartoons for The Oddness for a few years now, but I never got around to it. I had time on my hands during the pandemic, like everyone else, so I started thinking about the first book in between baking sourdough bread and hording toilet paper.
My sourdough bread didn’t really turn out that well, unless you wanted an organic paper weight. But the book really started to come together. As I looked back on some of the cartoons we created over the last couple of years, I felt like there were enough really good ones to put into print. I feel like this first book is a good introduction to The Oddness and my overall sense of humor.
So after a few years of trying to figure out how to create a web-comic that people might enjoy, I finally have enough quality content to justify a print book. Hopefully you, the audience of faithful comic readers, will agree with that conclusion and enjoy this little collection.
I would never compare my humor to any of the great cartoons, but I will say that I have been inspired by, nay, obsessed with classics like The Far Side and Bizarro ever since I was a child. They broke the mold of what a cartoon in the Sunday paper could be about and spoke to me in a very profound way. For me, those cartoons were the highest form of art – they snuck mind-bending ideas and surrealist humor into the otherwise not-so-funny pages.
In any case, the book will be out in time for the holidays and all of the information about pre-sales and ordering will of course be posted here and on social media. This will be a test of sorts for The Oddness as a series, and for me as a writer. Do people dig it? Are we relevant in today’s world? Should we do more cartoons and even a few more books over the next years?
I hope this will be the next step for the series, and allow me to devote more time to writing and developing The Oddness.