I was honoured to be asked again to create a Bubble Fox guest strip for San Diego-based cartoonist Jon Esparza, who runs guest comics by selected artists every September while he takes a well-deserved break. This one is more of a Planet Joey comic with a guest appearance by Bubble Fox to be honest, but the important thing to remember is: always make sure you’re in the right state of mind before reading comics, kids!
I was honoured to be asked to create a Bubble Fox guest strip for the amazing San Diego-based cartoonist Jon Esparza.
It’s short and sweet, but the idea started with wanting to do the strip in black and white as an homage to how Bubble Fox appears online. From there, I had to incorporate helium somehow to turn someone or something into a balloon in the surreal world of Bubble Fox. And lattes aren’t on the beverage menu high above the ground…
This special comic is dedicated to Jennifer Cuthbert’s The Adventures of Lollipop, celebrating it’s 20th anniversary this month! Lollipop and her gang have visited almost every corner of the globe, so I took a moment to imagine Lollipop’s gang visiting Cold Springs… with Joey and Herb standing by to deliver the hard truth. Congratulations on twenty years of adventures, Lollipop – here’s to twenty more!
We’d like to wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! To all of our readers, thank you for your support in 2020 and best wishes for 2021!
Well, we’ve come to the end of our run of six promotional comics and there you have it: Joey and Herb don’t sound so confident about the longevity of this thing. Don’t take their word for it, however. Next, we go back to the beginning with the storyline ‘Destination: Cold Springs’, where we catch up to Joey and his family en route to Cold Springs, Manitoba…
Gaston has reached the end of his rope here. He really, really, really wants to destroy this comic strip. Thank goodness Mimi is able to talk some sense into him and hey, a Beetle Bailey reference for the old folks out there!
As an homage to the days of comics being printed on good ol’ newsprint, our villains have now run the gamut of ways to sabotage this thing: fire, India ink and now it’s been revealed that Gaston had asked the artist – me – for whiteout. Remember that stuff? Also known as ‘correction fluid’ and by the brand name Liquid Paper, it was pretty darn toxic so I opted to go with the other kind of whiteout we have here in Canada…
If this strip was indeed printed in a newspaper, dumping a large bottle of India ink on it would be a surefire way to destroy it. As it turns out, a closed comic panel will allow a gas to pass through it, but not a liquid. Who knew?
In yet another homage to the comic strips of yesteryear, Gaston has moved on to Plan B: India ink. Mimi seems to have her doubts about this strategy, but the bigger question is: where did Gaston get such a large bottle of ink? And where did Joey and Herb find a fire extinguisher that quickly?
Now that Planet Joey has gone live, you might be wondering when you can look forward to the next exciting instalment going forward. Here’s what we’re starting with in terms of a schedule:
New Planet Joey comic strips will be posted twice weekly on Monday and Thursday mornings. Every third Sunday morning (ie. every seventh strip), a larger format comic – in the vein of the weekend colour comics – will be posted.
New comic strips will also appear at the same time on the various social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Ko-fi and always one day earlier for Patreon subscribers.
To kick things off, we’re running a series of six ‘promotional’ strips featuring our heroes and villains already locked in conflict and afterwards, we’ll go back to the beginning and catch up to Joey and his family en route to Cold Springs, Manitoba.
Here it is, officially the first Planet Joey comic released into the public domain! Gaston is hell bent on sabotaging the new strip with fire (forgetting that he’s in it), which… seems like an ineffective way to ruin a webcomic. Imagine that you’ve travelled back in time and you’re reading this in a newspaper and it makes more sense. This is the first of six promotional strips featuring our heroes + villains we’re running to launch Planet Joey. Please feel free to share and/or engage in the comments section below! Trivia: This exact strip was originally drawn in the spring of 2003 almost exactly as you see it here. Over the years, it’s been re-drawn a few times as character designs and my inking styles and methods changed, but it has essentially existed for 17+ years waiting for this day.