The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Robots, Demons & Dayjobs by David Kantrowitz

2026-07-08T08:30:00.000-04:00

I regularly read books of funny comics by creators I'm not familiar with. This is usually great - new funny stuff! new perspectives! potentially new favorites! - and there are lots of books out there by lots of funny people.

But then I come to write about them here, and I worry that I'm saying exactly the same thing each time: this is a newish book of funny stuff, by somebody I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

For example: Robots, Demons, and Dayjobs. It's a 2025 collection of comics by David Kantrowitz, who has worked for Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other places - these nine things seem to be all personal work, and there's no sign they were published anywhere else first before this book. (Though they easily could have been.)

So it is a newish book of funny stuff, by someone I hadn't heard of previously, and it is funny, and you might want to check it out.

(See what I mean?)

Most of the pieces here are short stories in comics form - the Table of Contents entry "Twelve Single Panel Cartoons" being an obvious exception.

The first and last pieces are in a pseudo-storybook layout, with big blocks of typeset text, and tell stories about a character based on Kantrowitz - one about finding a big trash can full of trophies, and one about accidentally wearing a red shirt to Target (and the horrors that ensued).

But most of the book is in more normal comics-format, with various odd creatures - a skull-headed restaurateur, a log-limbed ball-bodied dude named Wizard Dinks, two hard-working monsters, a succession of overly polite robots - getting through their days however they can.

Kantrowitz has mostly worked in kids' media, I think: he has the sort of sensibility, art style, and concerns that you see in creators who have toiled on big corporate stuff for younger readers and are now doing more personal work. His art is expressive and mostly pretty crisp, though he varies his style quite a bit in these stories. The subject matter is not aimed at kids, but it's also not "adult" (in the sex & drugs sense), either - there's a feeling that he may be talking to adults more here than he's used to, but it's all accessible work, with a mostly broadly comic sensibility.

I will note that this book is not available in the usual hegemonic retailer that I typically provide links for. I linked above to the Hoopla library app, where I read it. (Your local library might include Hoopla access: if so, I greatly recommend it.) It's also available directly from the author. I didn't see an ISBN, so it may not be more widely available, but Kantrowitz is LA-based, so, if you're in that part of the world, you might see him at a show somewhere, selling these. Take a look.

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum & Jon Buller

2026-07-07T08:30:00.000-04:00

The "and" in the author line above is doing more heavy lifting than usual: Joshua Slocum and Jon Buller didn't work together in any sense on this book. They never even met.

Well, they couldn't: Slocum disappeared in 1909, and Buller, I'm pretty sure, wasn't even born then. (I can't find biographical details online, but he's a modern illustrator and cartoonist whose career seems to stretch back to about the turn of the century - this century - so he's likely in his forties.)

The original Sailing Alone Around the World was a non-fiction book by Slocum, loosely based on letters he wrote during, yes, a three-year period when he sailed 46,000 miles alone in his sloop Spray from Massachusetts to Massachusetts, the hard way. It was published in 1899, and is one of the standard classics of the adventure-travel genre, on that short shelf with books like The Worst Journey in the World and The Long Walk.

Buller has published a long list of books for children, along with his wife Susan Schade - she writes and he draws mostly early readers and middle-grade books. The two of them did a comics project a few years back, the intriguingly-titled Nudism Comes to Connecticut. But this one seems to be all Buller, working from Slocum's original book.

His version of Sailing Alone Around the World translates Slocum's book into comics form, with mostly big square panels with cleanly-ruled borders and large sections of Slocum's text as captions. His art has a lot of cross-hatching, and his people are slightly cartoony in a vaguely Edward Koren style - both of which both reflect his story-book experience and work well for a story set over a hundred years ago.

Joshua Slocum was a seasoned seaman in the early 1890s, in his mid-forties with years of experience as a master of sailing ships around the world. He'd run off to sea (the time it finally took; he'd tried before) at the age of sixteen in 1860, and had been working since then. But, with the rise of steam ships, his skills were less and less valuable, and it looks like he had a period of unemployment.

So he decided to refurbish a small sloop, the Spray, and plan for that round-the world trip. Buller starts by adapting the work Slocum did to refurbish and rebuild Spray, which took two years - that gets us through the first twenty pages of the book, and then Slocum sets off on his trip.

His initial plan is to go east, and he gets to Gibraltar without too much incident. But there a friendly British ship tells him the southern coast of the Mediterranean is still full of pirates, making Slocum's intended path to the Suez Canal much too dangerous.

So Slocum instead went the other way, recrossing the Atlantic at its narrowest point back over to Brazil and going down the coast of South America and through the Straits of Magellan, where bad weather delayed and diverted him for more than a month.

But he did make it through, and got across the broad Pacific to Australia. He spent some time there, meandering up the east coast and across the north, before setting on across the Indian Ocean, stopping in South Africa and then finally heading back home across the Atlantic a third time.

Along the way, he saw a few pirates - mostly at a distance, mostly in small boats, and mostly "natives" - put in at Juan Fernandez to honor the memory of Alexander Selkirk (the original of Robinson Crusoe) and ran into a lot of seamen he knew from his earlier career or that knew him by reputation. He also ran aground at least once, and had to do extensive repairs in harbor (various ones, all along his journey) multiple times - par for the course for a wooden sailing ship on a long, rough trip. For a book about sailing alone, there's a fair bit of convivial dinners and 19th century pleasantries, including dialogue that I assume is straight out of Slocum's book.

Sailing Alone is the kind of book that in the reading feels like it was much easier than the work was in reality, so the reader starts to think "I could do this! That would be grand!" in his best 19th century diction. But it was an impressive accomplishment, and Slocum got a fair bit of fame from doing it. His book was a bestseller, making him enough money to buy a farm on Martha's Vineyard, where, of course, he ended up not spending much time, since he preferred to be at sea. It was on the Spray that Slocum disappeared, about a decade later - the assumption is that he died in a rough sea, but, like Ambrose Bierce, his body was never found, so readers can make up any pleasing stories they want.

All of This and Nothing: Get It On

2026-07-06T08:07:00.000-04:00

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week's song is not from the 1960s. It might sound that way, but it's actually a 2008 song by an Australian band, The Chevelles.

This is Get It On.

It was the lead single from a record designed to launch them in the US, Barbarella Girl God - they leaned into the '60s thing, I think, at least somewhat - and that record has a bunch of other good songs, too. She's Not Around, C'mon Everybody, and Every Moment I particularly like.

I don't think the launch "took" the way everybody hoped, which is why I'm classifying this as one of my Obscure songs this year. But a good song is a good song, and ones you haven't heard before are wonderful, so, if this one is new to you, you're welcome.

It sounds to me like yet another "rock band on the road" song, with verses loosely about specific US West Coast cities - no details, just the "here's what's next" of a band on the road in a blur of shows and highways:

Well, I'm seein' things in the highway lights
Twenty-four cities
I don't see the sights
Too far from home
Forgot my own life

And those kind of songs are fun. For those of us who don't go on tour with a rock band - which is the vast majority of us - they encapsulate the great parts of that life (excitement, cool music, novelty, moving on quickly) and avoid the less-pleasant bits (living in a van with 2-5 people you used to like, long hours on the road, eating whatever's available on those highways, etc.).

This is a good one; it gives the feel of that road rolling on, with something new around every corner. The feeling that you might as well Get It On.

Quote of the Hour: What Doesn't Change

2026-07-05T23:59:00.000-04:00

I like to think about things that have always been the same, from remote human history up to and including now. People's heads have always been about as hard as they are today and have hurt about the same amount when they bumped together. Horses have always shaken flies off themselves, whether waiting to pull Pharoah's chariots or standing at a kiddie ride at a county fair. Meat cooking on a fire has smelled delicious in exactly the same way forever.

- Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx, p.24

Quote of the Hour: Can He Handle It?

2026-07-05T23:00:00.000-04:00

As the bus sailed away with Harry safely on the top deck, she held Candy up so she could wave goodbye to him. He wasn't stupid, he was never going to stop asking questions. Perhaps she should tell him the truth about everything. Truth was such a novel ideal to Crystal that she found herself still staring after the bus had disappeared up the road.

- Kate Atkinson, Big Sky, p.315

Quote of the Hour: Explaining the Unexplainable

2026-07-05T22:00:00.000-04:00

I have never wanted to write about my drawings, and I still don't want to, but it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to do it now, when everybody is busy with something else, and get it over quietly.

- James Thurber, "The Lady on the Bookcase," p.657-58 in Writings & Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Stout Denial

2026-07-05T21:00:00.000-04:00

He eyed her apprehensively, like some rat of the underworld cornered by G-men. Painful experience had taught him that visits from Connie meant trouble, and he braced himself, as always, to meet with stout denial whatever charge she might be about to hurl at him. He was a great believer in stout denial and was very good at it.

- P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, pp.10-11

Quote of the Hour: American Cuisine

2026-07-05T20:00:00.000-04:00

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.693 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: If They Call It Tourist Season, How Come We Can't...

2026-07-05T19:00:00.000-04:00

It is a long abandoned belief that tourism, like competitive athletics, makes for international friendship. The three most hated peoples in the world - Germans, Americans and British - are the keenest sight-seers. There are very few English villagers who have seen an Egyptian; very few Egyptian villagers who had not seen an Englishman; the result is that the English generally are well disposed toward Egypt, while the Egyptians detest us. Sympathy for foreigners varies directly with their remoteness.

- Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law, p.722 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: Decisiveness

2026-07-05T18:00:00.000-04:00

It is one of the great advantages of being a tycoon that your life trains you to take decisions at the drop of the hat. Where lesser men scratch their heads and twiddle their fingers, the tycoon acts.

- P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever, p.15

Quote of the Hour: The Unsleeping Eye

2026-07-05T17:00:00.000-04:00

I seem to remember I went to a cinema that night. Or it might have been a casino. The cinemas blur in my mind, and so do the casinos. The only safe thing to say is that I didn't go to my solitary, expensively riverside home. I wasn't sleeping anymore. If you didn't sleep in it, what else is a home for?

- D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, p.47

Quote of the Hour: Fans are Slans

2026-07-05T16:00:00.000-04:00

Of course, there was a kind of fandom, and I knew them, but they were all real weird freaks, and they were unpalatable to me because they did not read the great literature. There wasn't anybody that read both. You could either be in with a group of freaks who read Heinlein and Padgett and van Vogt and nothing else, or you could be in with the people who read Dos Passos, Melville, and Proust. But you could never get the two together. And I chose the company of those who were reading the great literature because I liked them better as people. The early fans, they were trolls and wackos. Being stuck with then would have been like the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, I mean, up to your ass in shit. They really were terribly ignorant, weird people.

- Philip K. Dick, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.140

Quote of the Hour: Understanding Pigeons

2026-07-05T15:00:00.000-04:00

People who do not understand pigeons - and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them - should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons. Pigeons come closer to a zero of impingement than any other birds. Hens embarrass me the way my old Aunt Hattie used to when I was twelve and she still insisted I wasn't big enough to bathe myself; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me. They have absolutely no effect on anybody. The couldn't even startle a child. This is why they are selected from among all birds to be let loose, with colored ribbons attached to them, at band concerts, library dedications, and christenings of new dirigibles. If any body let loose a lot of owls on such an occasion there would be rioting and cat-calls and whistling and fainting spells and throwing of chairs and the Lord only knows what else.

- James Thurber, "There's an Owl in My Room," pp.216-217 in Writings and Drawings

Quote of the Hour: Theory of Lies

2026-07-05T14:00:00.000-04:00

"It's a funny thing - I suppose you've noticed it - the people who lie the most are nearly always the clumsiest at it, and they're easier to fool with lies than most people, too. You'd think they'd be on the look-out for lies, but they seem to be the very ones that will believe almost anything at all."

- Gilbert Wynant in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.861 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: Five Aunts

2026-07-05T13:00:00.000-04:00

On the cue 'five aunts" I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter but the courage which one brings to them, I pulled myself together.

- P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season, p.10

Quote of the Hour: Los Angeles Dining, 1949

2026-07-05T12:00:00.000-04:00

I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed 'em and throw 'em out. Lots of business. We can't bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You're using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They're just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here we go again. You're not human tonight, Marlowe.

- Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, p.268 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Exclusive News!

2026-07-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

The real work of the propaganda department was done through unofficial channels. To the horde of competing journalists the government communiqués were of negligible importance. They were transmitted instantly in full by Reuter's [sic] and the other agencies and gave no material for the special news which the editors were demanding. This had to be procured by other means; it had to be jealously guarded from rivals. It could not be investigated for fear of attracting their attention. An exclusive lie was more valuable than a truth which was shared with others.

- Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, pp.652 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: REMF, a Few Wars Earlier

2026-07-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

An army in line-of-battle awaiting attack, or prepared to deliver it, presents strange contrasts. At the front are precision, formality, fixity, and silence. Toward the rear these characteristics are less and less conspicuous, and finally, in point of space, are lost altogether in confusion, motion and noise. The homogeneous becomes heterogeneous. Definition is lacking; repose is replaced by an apparently purposeless activity; harmony vanishes in hubbub, form in disorder. Commotion everywhere and ceaseless unrest. The men who do not fight are never ready.

- Ambrose Bierce, "One Officer, One Man," p.101 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Quote of the Hour: Policeman's Progress

2026-07-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

His last beat had been in the heart of tempestuous Whitechapel, where his arms had ached from the incessant hauling of wiry inebriates to the station, and his shins had revolted at the kicks showered upon them by haughty spirits impatient of restraint. Also, one Saturday night, three friends of a gentleman whom he was trying to induce not to murder his wife had so wrought upon him that, when he came out of hospital, his already homely appearance was further marred by a nose which resembled the gnarled root of a tree.

- P.G. Wodehouse, "The Romance of an Ugly Policeman," p.202 in The Man With Two Left Feet

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 4, 2026

2026-07-05T08:30:00.000-04:00

I was ordering a movie from the library this week - Knives Out, which I just saw six years after everyone else - and I got a book as well. This is it.

Seek You is a 2021 graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This. I have been thinking of it as new, but I guess I've been thinking that for longer than I thought. The subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness," which I suppose explains what it covers as well as any longer explanation I could give here.

I'm expecting to read it quickly - that's the deal with library books - so I'll see what I think of it then.

Quote of the Hour: Just a Place

2026-07-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.
The Graysons were on the fifth floor in front, in the north wing. They were sitting together in a room which seemed to be deliberately twenty years out of date. It had fat overstuffed furniture and brass doorknobs, shaped like eggs, a huge wall mirror in a gilt frame, a marble-topped table in the window and dark red plush side drapes by the windows. It smelled of tobacco smoke and behind that the air was telling me they had had lamb chops and broccoli for dinner.

- Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake, p.118 in Later Novels & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: The Joys of Enthusiasms One Will Never Pursue

2026-07-05T07:00:00.000-04:00

I thought how delightful it would be to make a study of the trade in marble and rare stones, tracing the course round the Mediterranean cities of the porphyry galley from the hottest quarries in the world on the Red Sea coast; a trade so active that practically no porphyry has been quarried since and all the pedestals and urns of Napoleonic bric-a-brac were made, so I am told, of stone cut in the time of Caligula. But this is the kind of thing one thinks about only when one is traveling; all the time that I am abroad I make resolutions to study one thing or another when I get back - Portuguese, map-making, photography; nothing ever comes of it. Perhaps it is a good thing to preserve one's ignorance for old age.

- Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, pp.383-4 in Waugh Abroad

Quote of the Hour: How it Works

2026-07-05T06:00:00.000-04:00

Corker looked at him sadly. "You know, you've got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead. We're paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn't news. Of course there's color. Color is just a lot of bull's-eyes about nothing. It's easy to write and easy to read but it costs too much in cabling so we have to go slow on that. See?"

- Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, p.80

Quote of the Hour: And Then What Happened, Fella?

2026-07-05T05:00:00.000-04:00

...[I] went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o'clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.
Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.
We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.
I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.

- Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, p.97 in Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: Your New Office

2026-07-05T04:00:00.000-04:00

There was a desk you could've landed Sea Kings on (but the legs were grooved with scratches) and the sort of chair that emperors used to sit on; a huge leather-covered sofa out in the western prairies; the wall opposite the door was one huge window, with a view of all the kingdoms of the earth; against the north wall, enough raw computing power to send a manned probe to Andromeda. If you lived in a room like this, sooner or later you'd be overwhelmed by the urge to be discovered sitting in your chair stroking a big fluffy Persian cat and drawling, "We meet at last, Mr Bond."

- Tom Holt, Barking, p.70