Congratulations to Dan Johnson, father of my son’s best friend, Hayden, who came up with the perfect punchline to last Sunday’s strip.

Other quality entries were:

“Nahh, you really had to be there.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Eeek! Talking Dinosaurs!” (and many other variants on this)

and the ever-popular, “Do these muffin doilies make my ass look big?”

It was fun getting everyone’s take on the punchline, I think we’ll have to do this again sometime. Thanks everyone!

My friend Jim told me this joke the other day and I genuinely laughed. In adding an additional frame to it I thought of many possible retorts from the muffin. While they all made me laugh, none was just right. So I ask you, dear reader, what’s the muffin sayin?

Answer in comments here, at Reddit, or on Facebook. I’ll summarize the results here later this week.

I’ve been meaning to draw this for about a year. I adore Cog and want to build a working RC model someday, but for now this little Triumph Trident powered one will have to do.

It’s been almost a year since I started DiVsRo, and wow have I learned a lot. Had a lot of big changes in life too. Drawing a strip is fun and challenging, with so many disciplines to master. It’s much like running your own TV show, writing, directing, playing all the parts, building the props and scenes, and running the tickets and lights and sound. THankfully it’s only for a 30 second episode each week, but all that still takes hours of time. And it’s really hard to do all that as a rookie to the process…and do it well. Dave Kellet, the creator of Sheldon, has become a personal hero. I’m honestly not sure how he does it all and maintains such a positive outlook the whole time. It’s quite a feat.

So while this site will stay up and things will get posted to it as I feel like it, it’s going to be a bit more blog and less webcomic. Somewhere in there I’ll finish up the A-Z and I’m hoping to try out some new approaches using the same old characters, but more topical and current situations. Perhaps someday this will shape up into a proper comic again, but not right away.

Take care, and thanks for stopping by.

Brian

It’s been almost nine years…is it still too soon? This is the first time I’ve shown these to anyone outside of a small circle of friends, but they have always been interesting to me because of their frank, unfunny, non-political nature. What I drew was what I was feeling, thinking, and suspected was going to happen. Nine years later I still pick them up and frown with their lack of sympathy.

I drew these on September 11th, 2001. The bottom one I drew while the towers were still standing. It was inconceivable that they would fall. That morning I was awakened by the phone ringing, as I was a catalog designer working out of my home, and I was sleeping in.

“Hello?” I yawned into the phone.

“Brian, it’s your dad. Turn on the TV.” Now at this point in time my dad still worked downtown Chicago at the Board of Trade. That place is covered in TVs and ticker news displays. If something happens to a Siberian Yak that might effect the markets it’s broadcast live throughout the place. If my dad calls that early in the morning and says to go to the store and buy a lotto ticket I”d probably do it. He just knows a lot about the world.

So I’m staring at the building on the TV, every channel looks the same. The smoke is pouring out and I say, “What happened?” I’m confused, I just woke up, that looks like one heck of a fire, oh hey, that’s the World Trade Towers. I was just there a month before getting started on a project for Scholastic. That was cool, I worked downtown on Broadway and got to use a corner office of a VP who was traveling. I got to spin around in his chair and stare out the window at those towers, they seemed so far away. I wonder why it’s on fire?

Just as I’m putting all of this together I can hear the utter chaos that is happening on the other end of the phone. My dad is saying short and terse things to other people but I can’t make any sense of it. So a building is on fire. I’m thinking “what is the big deal, he’s in Chicago and I’m pretty sure that’s New York.”

WHAM. The second plane hits as I’m sitting there. The noise on the other end of the phone stops. I remember being surprised that the building didn’t move, considering it had just been hit by a plane. A plane full of people. “We’re under attack.” my dad said. “I have to go.”

I sat there, like we all did, and watched the whole thing. I drew a lot that day, as drawing is my refuge sometimes. Mostly I drew simple things, none of which I can recall. But I kept this one card. On one side Liberty has abandoned the torch and tablet, and put up a sign that says “Closed Guarded.” In the other Uncle Sam takes aim over the horizon, his striped pants a little stained, but he’s still standing.

These two sketches take me back to that day every time I see them. They make me wonder about how it has changed us, if it has changed us. Then I go listen to Mellencamp’s Justice and Independence and go on pretending everything’s ok.Sometimes I wonder if we’ll see a day like that again. Mostly, when I look at them, I’m sad for all the lives lost, changed, and wasted.

Yeah, it’s probably too soon.

Hi there. This one’s for Warren, my college buddy and old friend. His characters and pencil sketch, my ink and paint. I’ve officially become the colorist…Chasing Amy fans will know how ultimately tragic this is.  Chuckle. He’s been writing short stories about these three characters for the last year and they are becoming very “real” to me. He sent me this pencil sketch and I just went nuts for it, so I inked and colored it. I hope you enjoy our depiction of Nynko, Ghant, and Whisper, I enjoyed collaborating on them.

Well if you’re a weekly reader there are about to be some changes. I’m going to continue to put up comics, altho besides completing the A-Z series they will probably be more topical and less an attempt at a story. They will also be at random, not only on Sundays.

I’m also going to start posting my son’s art on a pretty regular basis…perhaps daily. He’s 3, so it will be rather abstract. I will figure out how to use the labels in WordPress to allow easy content filtering if you’re looking for the comics.

Thanks as always for stopping by, and aren’t Warren’s characters just amazing? LOVE IT!

It was in 1861 that Sir Richard Owen of London, first named the Echinodon, which is Greek for Hedgehog teeth. It’s no wonder the poor little herbivore is named for its teeth, that’s the only part of the skeleton we have. However, like Ringo Starr, there’s a second name by which this dinosaur is known, stemming from a find in Colorado not very long ago. Those are known as Fruitadens.

But really, the real story here is Sir Richard Owen. He named this creature, by some accounts, just two years before coining the term, “Dinosauria”. But others say most of his life’s work in this area is stolen from colleagues. Ah, the seedy underbelly of Paleontology!

Regardless, Sir Owen is arguably the man responsible for the establishment of free and open museums filled with recreations of giant dinosaurs. He is, more or less, the father of our fascination with Dinosaurs in general.

Thank you, Sir Owen, peace and love.

Only 4 letters in, and we already have one dinosaur, the Brontosaurus, who didn’t exist, and now this, a dinosaur that is not technically a dinosaur. I’m seriously questioning the quality of my grade-school education, because these are not new facts, either.

The dimetrodon was around WAY before the dinos, about 250 million years ago, and have some reptilian features and some mammalian. Technically, they’re called synapsids, and are distant relatives of modern mammals. You know, like humans.

Weird.

That also means the dimetrodon has no relation whatsoever with alligators or marlins. How incredibly diverse living creatures have been on our planet, so diverse they sometimes look alike and have no shared evolution at all.

Thanks for all the great comments and ideas for more dinosaurs!

SEE-low-FIE-sis  I’ve been trying to rhyme it for a week, and I’m still looking at the pronunciation stuff every time I try to say it. I understand the use of Greek to name dinosaurs, but since most of those monikers are not self-evident, and we don’t all know ancient Greek, isn’t it missing the point?

For example, this guy’s named for his hollow bones, am I alone in not having figured that out from the name? He should be named AlphaRunner 2cR. You know it’s an early dinosaur, from Alpha, it’s a runner, it uses 2 legs, it’s a carrion eater, and the R would indicate extreme weight reduction to a Racing level.

Paleontologists should consider naming dinosaurs like cars. The Ankylosaurus? It’s the ThetaTankyZoid 4Vc. How would you rename a popular dinosaur using automotive naming conventions?

Or better yet, which dinosaur deserves the name Epoch Turbo STi

Most importantly, is there a better rhyme than “rhinoceros?”…and hey, isn’t that Greek?

The Brontosaurus has gone the way of the planet formerly known as Pluto. The primary difference, however, is one of 100 years.

That’s right, the Brontosaurus has not been a legit member of the dinosaur community since 1905. We’ve been calling it the wrong thing all the way up to 1994, when some fun-killing scientists called out the US Post Office on a series of Dinosaur stamps that mistakenly labeled an Apatasaurus as a Brontosaurus. The Postal Service, in an rare moment of indignation, replied, “What, you’ve never seen the Flintstones?”

No, not really, but they should have. I mean we have only our institutions to protect us. For instance, MS Word doesn’t try to correct Brontosaurus, so it’s real. Wikipedia disagrees. I’ll let you be the judge.

What’s great about the Bronto is that it captured America’s imagination in 1879 and was described as a water-dwelling, snake-necked vegetarian that dragged its tail low and held its head high. Don’t let me shatter this illusion for you, because it should never change. The Brotosaurus, symbol of the Sinclair gas stations, is not subject to the fickle ways of science. Much like my memories of working at a Sinclair gas station, where I once changed the fuel line on a 1969 Mustang for a damsel in distress using only my teeth and some Scotch tape, it belongs there, lovingly enshrined in our flawed fictional memories.

The truth is that the Apatosaurus, Greek for “Deceptive Lizard”, was named first by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1877. In 1879 he also claimed to have found the partial skeleton of a creature he named Brontosaurus. In 1905 Science ruled that they were one and the same. The Bronto lost out, and has been de-scientized and is now fictional. Meanwhile, here’s what we have since learned about the Apatosaurus…prepare to shed the illusion of the peaceful water-cress munching swamp-dweller.

The Apatosaurus had one claw on the front foot, three on the back. Um, ew?

As a juvenile the Apatosaurus could run on its hind-legs like one of those crazy New Zealand lizards. Imagine 2 tons of reptile running on its hind legs. At you. Oh yeah, no way I’m attaching a halter, bridle and saddle to that guy, let alone ask it to quarry rock. So long, Flintstones!

It didn’t live in the water, it wandered the woods like a massive Hoover. It held its tail very high and its head down low. Like a big reptilian cow. Some say it had to be that big to process giant piles of plant and water in order to allow it to ferment…gaining calories and somewhat self digesting. And possibly creating a LOT of natural gas. Like a cow…not an oil refinery.

Lastly, in 1997,  Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft built a computer simulation of its tail and found that, due to being shaped like a giant bullwhip, it could theoretically generate a whopping 200 decible “cannon-shot” just shooing away flies away!

Very impressive, but much like Pluto, I prefer the science of my youth to the truth. I’m sticking with the Brontosaurus.

I was reading to my son the other night, and we were having fun with Shel Silverstein. I really love Shel and his work, but there’s little of it I can read to a 3 year old. I had the inevitable thought of, “Well, how hard can it be?”

Apparently, it’s a bit harder than I’d thought at first. How many 3 year olds know what an Anvil is? Of course, hitting is bad, decapitation is worse…and teaching a kid the dubious humor of “cankles”? I’ve already failed to sell the idea to a certain core demographic of kid’s book buyers…grandparents.

So to anyone who has an idea for a Dinosaur alphabet strip, drop me a line or comment below, cause we have 25 more to go and I’m not stopping until they’re done. B is for…