Yes, Osborne gets his love of the roasted bean from me. I meant to draw an old fashioned grinder, coffee pot and the antique stove Wally & Osborne use, but I didn’t have any coffee while doing this comic…

I use to drink it with cream and sugar but not anymore, now I’ve trained myself to just like it plain black… and strong. Eventually I will probably just have a bag of coffee beans for breakfast.

I’ve decided that we need a coffee category here too.

Drinking out of a cup with a beak looks like it probably ends up being a pretty messy ordeal.

Caffeine is a stimulant found in the seeds, leaves and fruit of over 60 plants (coffee of course being a main source), though to some insects feeding on those plants it can paralyze and even kill them, a natural pesticide. Besides coffee it is also found in cocoa, that’s why your chocolate comes with an extra pick-me-up. Mmm, chocolate and coffee together, a nice mocha latte, that does it for me. 90% of North America runs on caffeine daily.

I try to limit myself to just one strong cup of coffee each morning, but I’m hooked enough that if I don’t have that I risk a headache.

Penguin Webcam Time!

If you haven’t been watching the Penguin Webcam, it is time. It is located at at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and captures images of a gentoo penguin colony every 15 minutes. Camera 2 is zoomed in nicely on two nests. Right now the colony is incubating their eggs, so in the coming months you can expect to see some chicks making their way into an icy world.

Much thanks to Martin Grund for putting this project together and the support of the O’Higgins German Research Station.

Mmm, I just finished up a deeeeelicious cup of coffee as I finished up this comic. I’m now a powerhouse of creative energy until I crash in a while.

Though commonly referred to as beans, coffee actually comes from the seed of fruits from trees in the coffea genus. The green seeds are then roasted which creates special chemical reactions that produce the coffee magic. At this point, us consumers grind them up (or purchase pre-ground) and brew them with some quality H2O.

Thoughts On the Book

So there I was, laying up the first Wally and Osborne book collection, only four or five pages into it. It was basically the strips as they appear on the site, but just crammed into a book, as many as would fit onto a blank white page so you would get the most bang for your buck.

But I just wasn’t happy with it. I don’t just want a collection of single strips that you already can read on the site stacked onto printed pages. I want the book to stand on its own, as a book independent of a daily strip. I want it to be beautiful, to flow, to have a variety of content. I’ve reinvented what it will be, it is going to take a bit longer, but it is so going to be worth it. Every comic and every frame will be laid out different from they appear on the site, to fill and become pages, sometimes recreated and other times multiple comics will be seamlessly joined together. It will have new content that does not appear on the site, not just original stories but content also incorporating my news posts and fact tidbits. I’m really excited about it, it will be a book I will be proud to have created and you will be happy to have on your shelf… or coffee table.

I’ll keep you updated on it and put a progress bar up for you if that would be of interest. Maybe share some teasers from it as I work on it.

Osborne has just discovered the greatness that is known as coffee, just as I once discovered many years ago. And now it is a part of my life as it will be a part of Osborne’s. It is with me every waking morning. I love the coffee. I need the coffee. My teeth used to be really white. I love the coffee.

Todd and Penguin

Many of you are probably already familiar with the Todd and Penguin webcomic, it’s been around for over 5 years. David Wright had a guest comic month this month and invited me to do one for today. I had actually talked to David long ago giving him some tips on graphics back when I had started another webcomic and had no idea I’d one day be doing a comic also featuring a penguin. Long live penguins in comics. Well, maybe not David’s penguin Penguin… during the guest strip run he’s been mauled, boiled, stabbed and now bound and left for dead in Antarctica. Sorry Dave!