I admit it --  I am pumped for this trip. I grew up a Spider-Man-readin' kid, and New York's always been the quintessential city to me. On the other hand, I gotta get up at 5 in the morning to get to my plane, so I gotta get to sleep, so not so much yammering this update. But I'll go on and on about it once I get back!

Okay, the strip:

MoCCA Art Fest
By all accounts, this is a cool show, and I'm eternally+1 grateful to Keith Knight for letting me take half his table. If any of you Web-readin' fans live in New York, come by the Puck Building on Sunday and I'll be there, grinnin' like an idiot. Also, the brand-new Apostrophe Poster will be making its debut there, so come by and get one, people!

And while we're at it, buy some books! C'mon!

First, let's get this week's oh-so-relevant cartoon out of the way...

Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh was a bunch of things. "Sweaty" is the word that leaps most easily to my lips or key-typing fingers when asked how it was. The air, at least for a dry-air Albertan like me, is thick and swampy in Pittsburgh, and the miasma was intensified by the fact that there was a food-kiosk-full artsy fair across the street from the Hilton, a celebration filled with over-priced food emitting frankly nasty fumes that reminded me of a horse's ass.

In Pittsuburgh's favor, there were plenty of cute chicks. Real, milk fed girls who haven't succumbed to the tan-n-starve Hollywood crapola. And, of course, the people are friendly as hell. On the super plus side, I was delighted that the signing at fabulous Phantom of the Attic turned out the way it did. Considering this is a store that had never carried any of my books, in a town where my cartoon doesn't run in any newspaper, there was a pleasing little crowd of people who showed up to get their books signed. Thanks you guys -- you rule! A special callout goes to Jeff Yandora, proprietor of Phantom of the Attic, insanely nice, and who took me and Jen Sorenson of Slowpoke out for lunch after. Yeah! Fucking YEAH!

As for whether the actual trip will turn out ot be worth anything like the couple of grand I ultimately spent on it remains to be seen. I got a couple of good nibbles from some papers -- Steve Palopoli at the Metro Santa Cruz seemed into it, and there are some lesser leads.... Who knows? And of course, there were good times with Ted Rall and Ruben Bolling and Andy Singer, and I got to see the Warhol Museum, though I didn't eat any of those crazy sandwiches where they put the fries and coleslaw inside the sandwich itself.

But enough about Pittsburgh... what about New York?
Oh, yeah, baby. New York City. I am frankly pumped to head out there for the MoCCA Art Fest, already legendary for being an insanely good time comics convention. There's a shitpile of cartoonists and folks who are gonna be there -- hell, Frank Miller's on the list!-- and besides, it's in freakin' New York City!

I'll be sharing a table with the inestimable Keith Knight of The K Chronicles, and we intend to rock out as the low-life cartoonist cockroaches we are. Except Keith's married now, so maybe it won't be as partyful as all that. But good times are assured for all New York fans who make it out next Sunday, June 22, at the Puck Building. I hope that the Apostrophe Poster will make its debut there; I got and approved the proof from the printer, so I hope to deploy dozens and dozens into the hands of desirous New Yorkers. Then, once the magical invisible hand of the market has told me how much I can get away with charging for them, I'm gonna sell 'em online. Oh yeah, baby.

Oh, and don't forget to set your angryflower.com update expectations next week to Wednesday rather than Friday, on account of me not being around on Friday, cuz I'll be in New York City! AWESOME!

Other things
Well, I reviewed Harrison Ford's new waste of time Hollywood Homocide. Terrible, just terrible. And while I haven't written up a full review yet, I must heartily recommend the 2003 Chinese film Hero, which features a mess of incredibly awesome HK actors -- Jet Li, Donny Yen, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung-- in something I can only briefly inadequately describe as a super-intensified Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon combined with something like Run Lola Run and The Usual Suspects. This movie is martial-arts candy, every scene bursting and drenched with color and emotion and action. Every ten minutes I'd look over at the buddy I was watching it with and we'd both be agape, wordless with "Can you belive this shit?" looks on our faces. And arrows. This movie  is the arrowest movie ever. What I'm saying here is this movie is good, as in Lord of the Rings good. 

Links dump
Nothing too fancy this week, a whimsical slideshow about a plush Cthuluh...

Please Buy Books!
Just a reminder -- I'm signing them, I'm throwing in stickers, I want these suckahs to move. Perhaps you can help by buying some books.

On a related note, I heard back from Diamond Comics Distributors, and it appears that I will in fact be able to get the UBOPE listed in Previewsk, which means it should be possible to get it into actual comic stores. What does this mean for you, gentle reader? Nothing for now, but when that issue of Previews comes out in September, you folks gotta go to your local comic store and bug them to order some books. Don't get too worked up about it right now; I'll remind you when it comes time.

First, a cartoon. I didn't think I was gonna do any more LoveBot strips for a while, but I didn't have any other ideas this week, so here's

Pittsburgh times...
Lots of Pittsburghians e-mailed me with advice on subjects as varied as the existence of the Andy Warhol Museum to the necessity of trying a sandwich served with the coleslaw and fries on top. Also, by a wide margin they recommended Phantom of the Attic as the primo comic store in the area. So, I made a couple of quick calls and now I'll be signing whatever books I can get across the border there on Saturday as described below:
 

By "possible guests" I mean I talked to Ted Rall, who said he might show, and he vaguely hinted we might be able to drag Tom the Dancing Bug's Ruben Bolling along, and maybe Jen Sorenson from Slowpoke. Who knows?. We'll see. At any rate, to all Pittsburgh Bob fans: show show show, and help me convince Jeff the owner that he needs to order books from me.

Speaking of books...
I keep forgetting to nag you people, but seriously -- buy books! I'm signing them, I'm throwing in stickers, I'm goin' totally cracker crazy over here! Buy them books! I need to earn some money to pay for The Ultimate Book of Perfect Energy!!!

Apostrophe Poster
Well, I colored up the poster and sent it off to the printer, so I should have a proof back when I return from Pittsburgh, with (I hope I hope fingers firmly crossed) the posters themselves becoming ready just before I take off to New York, after which I will start taking orders online and such. This is a rough .jpg of what it'll look like, assuming the CMYK colors read sort of true...

What else?
Well, we got a couple of movie reviews to chuck atcha. First is Finding Nemo, a score of a movie, and second is a German film, The Tunnel. It's not exactly a wide release, playing at the Metro here in Edmonton, but it's making the rounds at festivals and such, and it's worth a look.

Random links
I keep running into it and then losing it again, so I'm gonna put the George Bush Scorecard of Evil link up here just so I know how to find it. And while we're at it, how about that crazy death camp action, huh? Pretty rockin' stuff! 

And I've got my own trip to the lungs planned. That's what they call Pittsburgh, right? "The Lungs of America?" Didn't I read that somewhere? Anyway, I'll be departing next Wednesday to the dreaded Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention, there to try to convince recalcitrant editors that they should not only buy a comic they've never heard of when they could get one of the big ones like Ted Rall or Tom the Dancing Bug, but that they should get one like mine which is horizontally-oriented and thus represents the most difficult Tetris layout challenge imaginable. Yeah!

I'm gonna be there for a while, until Monday, so if any of you Pittsburgh readers out there have any suggestions for anything worth doing, or hot tips on comic stores I might hit maybe on Saturday, you should e-mail me instantly.

As a result, please reset your angryflower.com update expectations to Wednesday for next week. Thank you.

Reviews?
Nothing at the moment, unless you want to read my review of a goofy Canadian quasi-documentary that played here in Edmonton at the Metro, Gods, Gambling and LSD. I hope to see Finding Nemo tomorrow, though, and man, I sure wanna give it lots and lots of stars. We'll see.

Links and Dump
Lesse, a fella named Craig sent me this link to his Dada comics, which feature a statue of David talking about things. Then my former colleague at See Magazine, The Most Famous Guy in Town, has managed to get a scrap of new content up on his site, so there's a link. Last week I complained that I couldn't get ahold of video from The Daily Show. Then a reader sent in this link, though slightly reluctantly for fear of an avalanche of Bob readers crashing the site. I would suspect that fear is misplaced. The same person also sent me this link to a page with a lot of seemingly-unreadable characters and tons of pictures of model robots facing off against each other. I was also sent a link to Elftor, a crudely-drawn webcomic that's rather goofy and offensive. I kinda like it, I don't know why.

And man, I so want to get these Apostrophe posters cranking out... if I can get them to the printer before I take off for Pittsburgh, that would be the most elegant proof of God I could ever conceive.

Going Soon...
Two weeks later, I'm heading to sweet, stinky, terrorist-targeted New York City, there to cram my stuff onto half of Keith Knight's table at MoCCA (I don't even know what it stands for) on the solstice, Sunday, June 22. Should be a party. Whee! And now I do know what MoCCA stands for -- it's the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Cool!

This week is all about a quick, efficient German-style update presenting the basic facts and then splitting in order to take advantage of some huge sunlight we've been rarely afforded here in Edmonton. So, the cartoon:

Just Leave Me Alone, Okay?

Rest assured, even though I have "Just Leave Me Alone, Okay" in big differently-colored eye-catching letters on my web site, that's not how I feel about all you fine readers. If anything, I feel the opposite. Indeed, I was gratified at the relative flood of encouraging e-mail that came in on the whole make-a-nice-color-poster-of-the-Apostophe-cartoon idea, so I'm desperately trying to spend money and make it happen so that you people can turn around and spend your money, leading somehow at the end of the day to me ending up with more money than I started with! Capitalism totally RULEZ!!!

In other news, I saw and reviewed the new Jim Carrey travesty Bruce Almighty. 

And that's about it. Curiously, nobody sent in anything to be dumped in the link dump (or at least nobody sent in any link that worked). I've been spending too much time outside to know if there's anything good to point you towards, though I must admit I'm rather choked that for some reason I'm not able to play an apparently excellent clip from Jon Stewart's The Daily Show of Bush vs Bush, with Governor n' Pres dukin' it out and leaving in their wake enormous putrifying slabs of deceit and misrepresentation lying in the sun like mad cow corpses.

And I suppose I could gently urge anyone out there who hasn't already to buy some books. I could, and I will. Please, dear citizens, buy some books. 

Welcome, everybody. Got a wad of stuff to throw at you, some of which I should have put up on Tuesday or Wednesday, but once again I succumbed to laziness and didn't. Dammit.

First, of course, the cartoon:

Then, of course, the movie review:

Reloaded

And why not, might as well throw in a link to a page about the Philosophy of The Matrix, including the essay "What's So Bad About Living In the Matrix?" I spent some stupidly up-until-4-am time Tuesday night reading a pile of this crap, along with getting sucked into some ferocious criticism of this final season of Buffy at TelevisionWithoutPity.Com.

And, as it turns out, I got another movie review as well, Down With Love, a trivial bit of Ewan MacGregor/Renee Zellweger fluff that dares to open against the Matrix juggernaut. 

And then there's this crazy image from the distant past...

There it was, in the pages of the The Solstice, the Gateway summer fill-in paper at the good old University of Alberta (Warren Ferguson and Steven Yi, editors), 11 years ago last Monday, that the very first Bob cartoon appeared trembling and newborn in print just as you see it here.

God... 11 years... How is it that I only have three books out by now? Oh right... I barely did anything for the first three or four of those Bob-drawing years. 

Speaking of doing things, I got around to ordering some stickers, so of course I'm going to start madly and personally stuffing stickers into every envelope of books purchased from me over the Internet. Huh? Sound good?  And, I'm thinking of making up some10" x 20" color Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe posters. Great for the workspace, not to mention every classroom in North America! Any of you cats interested in that kinda thing? Let me know.

Reviews?
None this week, I'm afraid... I got sloppy and let Daddy Day Care slip by without a review. But I hope to get my Matrix Reloaded review up as soon as possible... maybe by Tuesday, if get to to special-see it early.

Links to Dump
First there's a selection of altered propaganda posters I got sent, not too shabby. I also received a  link to a pretty good flash at Newgrounds, but the server was overloaded when I last checked. And lastly, a fella sent a link to his cartoon Biblebot, though I can't seem to find the cartoons on it, but maybe I'm just tired. 

And I guess I should throw something in here about buying books... 

This week's all-too-personal strip, something of a follow-up to If You Love Someone...:

They sure printed this particular cartoon small and crappy in See Magazine this week. If you have spare time, and especially if you live in Edmonton, you could bitch to them about it, if you liked.

Reviews and such
Only one big movie review this week, for X2 (the new X-Men movie). I've got it here, and the good folks at Comicreaders.com also have it, and they've got pictures as well.

Links to Dump
Well, I got a link for a site called Silent Waters, which has some  anime stuff and video game reviews and some nice blue HTML layout. And Jimminy Crickets, that's all there is for links to dump this week! Is anybody out there reading this web site any more? Hello? Well, now I'm here I might as well throw in a link to the letter I wrote to Jean Chretien about Canada's possible participation in America's entirely retarded proposed Missile Defense System. Gotta ride those hobby horses down into the dirt like mad, you know, and I sure do hate NMD! And I'm not even an American! And I wish I had a whole pile of fancy hand-picked links about political stuff to enrage and annoy you folks, but right now, 3:18 am MST, I don't. But if you're looking for that kind of thing, Buzzflash is where I recommend starting.

And Lest We Forget...
Jeez, what a wonder angryflower.com is, don't you think? No popups, no banner ads, no subscription fees-- nothing but the goods, baby. And all I ask in exchange, again and again and again, is that you cheap slackers buy some books. God, I love America! 

And what the hell, I might as well throw the current mockup of the UBOPE up here, get some reactions...

Reviews
And last week I was all boasty about how many reviews I had, and this week I've only got one, for a slight little thriller called, in Canada at any rate, Steal. 

No, wait, I tell a lie, there is another review, but it's for a comic, Chewing On Tinfoil. Quite a good comic, actually, and the review is posted on ComicReaders.com, along with that old Bulletproof Monk review...

Links whut got sent me...
A cat sent me a link to a bunch of well-drawn cartoons with terrible political ideas by the editorial cartoonist at the L.A. Times, Michel Ramirez. I've also been directed to a cartoon called Sauce at a web site called WorstEpisodeEver. To be honest, I haven't really looked at it, I'm just clearing out my Inbox. Click if you dare!

And see, I'm even too tired to beg you all to buy books right now, goddammit.

And that's all I got! 

Reviews n' stuff
I've been a busy little reviewing bee this week, so let's see what's up. James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss 3D Imax movie is out, and I've reviewed it. Then there's Chow Yun Fat's pleasing little effort BulletProof Monk. I reviewed that too. Annnnnd, that's it for this week. How'd I get the feeling there were lots of reivews? Oh, that's right; I did one for next week. That's why I got confused. 

What else?
Last week I made a snarky comment about knocking over a statue of George Bush, and a couple of people e-mailed this Jubilant Crowd Dismantles Statue of Bush link. And I got some link dump submissions. Here's Voodovelvet, with spooky stuff, I guess. And then one of the cats from the fanklub, who goes by the name "The Fury", has a webtoon available for looking, Life Goes Off. Not a ton of stuff up there, but it exists.

Attitude 2
This I'm rather jazzed about. Weekly strip readers and patriots should already be aware of the legendary Ted Rall, who takes few prisoners, shames me with his furious rate of cartoon production, and actually went to Afghanistan and wrote and drew a book about it. A year ago he put together Attitude, a rather awesome collection of political cartoonists, guys like himself, Tom the Dancing Bug, This Modern World, The City and others. Now he's doing a sequel, Attitude 2, and it looks like I'm going to be in it, along with guys like Keith Knight (The K Chronicles), Jason Yungbluth (Deep Fried) and David Rees (Get Your War On). I frankly couldn't be in cooler company. Should be a hot book when it comes out, tentatively planned for next January.

And while we're at it...
Buy some books, you guys! They're awesome! I'm signing them! I zoom them off by air mail the moment, the very second, I get the order! And I need the money to pay for the next book!

Oh, and by the way...
How about that sacking of the National Archive and Library in Baghdad, huh? Read this article by the indispensible Robert Fisk from the UK's Independent if you want to feel like crying. Remember how outraged everybody got when the Taliban destroyed those Buddhist statues? Now imagine if there were American soldiers 50 feet away watching the Taliban setting the charges and doing nothing. That's what happened in Baghdad, folks. Records, artifacts, documents that go back to the beginning of human civilization, gone. Destroyed. Burned. No amount of money can ever bring them back. Irreplaceable parts of the human story, vanished forever. Awesome.

Meanwhile, if you're watching CNN, everything's going great, with a few minor wrinkles. I was watching CNN a second ago, and they had a story about how wild rumors are afoot in Iraq. Somehow these people have gotten the idea the Americans only care about oil! Crazy! According to the story, these people have been addled by Saddam's propaganda; otherwise how could they believe such wild nonsense? Seeing the Americans protect the Oil Ministry and the Interior Ministry while leaving the rest of the city to burn couldn't have anything to do with it, of course...

Did the US intentionally allow the museum to be sacked? Who knows? I sure as hell don't. But in fact, it's even scarier if it didn't happen intentionaly, if it happened because the Americans were just too dumb and clueless to prevent it. It's unbelievable how shocked and stunned and caught flat-footed Americans were by the notion that they would be responsible for upholding order once they knocked over Saddam. They didn't have a massive corps of military police and civil engineers ready to jump in and start repairing the damage. There's no sign they thought to bring in additional medics that they could have deployed to the various hospitals (cuz I'm pretty sure they would have trumpeted the hell out of it if they had). And, centrally,  it never seemed to occur to them that all of their soldiers are now going to have to become the police in a world where they don't speak the language, there's no legal authority, and people are still shooting at them.

The military says that's not their job, but in this most foully political war, that is precisely their job, unsuited as they are to perform it. They've placed themselves in a trap where very quickly the Iraqis are going to start getting angry at them and they're going to start getting angry right back. Imagine how Iraqis are going to feel about US soliders manning everybody's favorite fact of life, the checkpoint. Soon resentment sets in: "We came here to free them, and they're spitting on us! Fuck these people!" Hell, it would be a tough situation for anybody, requiring an unusual amount of patience, grace and humility. Are those the words that pop into anyone's mind when they think "American grunt"? I know that many of them are strong, good, brave men, heroes all, sure, whatever, but let's not kid ourselves; lots of these guys are aggressive, angry assholes, too. They start shooting at protestors (already happening), protestors start shooting back... it's not going to be increasing the peace. 

The smart thing would to let the UN back in, get some peacekeepers in there, mabye find some guys who speak Arabic. That would be start, a nudge towards legitimacy. If BushCo refuses to do the smart thing --and let's face it, their record stinks-- and insists on full-bore occupying Iraq, I don't see any way out of the inevitable escalation of resentment and violence.

On the other hand, who knows what the hell's going to happen?