Frazz by Jef Mallett follows the adventures of an unexpected role model: an elementary-school janitor who's also a Renaissance man. While he's sweeping the hall, he's whistling Beethoven. Or Lyle Lovett. He paints the woodwork in the classrooms; he paints a Da Vinci on the cafeteria wall. He's a trusted authority figure who is every kid's buddy. He took the janitor's job while he was a struggling songwriter, and when he finally sold a hit song, he decided to stay on at school. Frazz appears in 200 newspapers worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune and Detroit News. "A few years back, I wrote and illustrated a children's book," says Mallett. "When I was traveling around reading it at school assemblies, I noticed that often, the most respected, best-liked grown-up in the building was the janitor. And I thought, 'Hmm, there's a comic strip in that.'" Often praised for its intelligent wit, gentle spirit and effortless diversity, Frazz won a Wilbur Award from the Religion Communicators Council in 2003 and 2005 for excellence in communicating values and ethics.
© Jef Mallett - All Rights Reserved.
Frank & Ernest by Thaves
Fred Basset by Alex Graham
Comments (17) (Please sign in to comment)
Tirasmol
said, 7 months ago
hah cute
Ewal Doh said, 7 months ago
Woops, an octave would be 8 notes and would be A-H.
Late nite Jef?
QuiteDragon said, 7 months ago
“Lettered Bubbles”??? Don’t get it. All I can think of is either a test in comic book form or a well-educated stripper.
Tubbycat said, 7 months ago
Just like a week has 7 days and not 8 (monday to monday) a scale can be said to have 7 notes: a h (really b) c d e f g and then back to a, which we won’t count as it is a, only an octave higher.
QuiteDragon said, 7 months ago
@QuiteDragon
The little circles you fill in with pencils. Ah, that was obvious. Too early.
Rspauld411 said, 7 months ago
Fill in with a #2 pencil.
puddleglum1066 said, 7 months ago
@Ewaldoh, @Tubbycat: actually there is a good case for saying an octave is eight notes, not seven. It’s because the relationship of sound frequency to notes is a logarithmic progression, not an arithmetic one. In an arithmetic progression like counting, it makes sense to say a decade is 0-9, and the next decade is 10-19, etc. But in a logarithmic progression, each octave represents an exact doubling of frequency, so one octave would be, for instance, A (440HZ) to A(880 Hz), and the next octave would be A(880Hz) to A(1760 Hz) and so on. Yes, this makes it a bit weird when you realize you’ll be singing fifteen notes (not sixteen) when rising two octaves, but that’s the way it works for logarithmic progressions.
Ronald Davis said, 7 months ago
@Ewal Doh
Music has what we computing types call a “fencepost problem”. (If you want a fence 50 metres long with a post every 2 metres, how many fenceposts do you need?) Thus, for example, a third plus a third yields a fifth.
MikeFromMichigan
said, 7 months ago
Reminds me of the old Kudor Vocational Inventory test, hundreds of ‘Would you rather dance in front of people or rope cattle’, ‘would you rather pilot a fighter plane or serve dinner’ type questions. .About 20-30 pages of that. A classmate changed his occupational preference on each page so they made him take it over again. He’s a very successful lawyer today. Oh, we ALL felt it was a total waste.
Lektio said, 7 months ago
@MikeFromMichigan
I’ve taken something like that. My results said I should be a psychiatrist or a lawyer…
I hate people, have an immense disdain for the courts, and have a mental disorder that makes it almost impossible to read other people’s emotions.
Not exactly the world’s most reliable test.
vwdualnomand said, 7 months ago
standardized test are useless. now, we are teaching kids not education, but study for the test. and, it doesn’t really mean anything for next level of education. i knew a girl who got a perfect on sat, full ride at mit. but, she quit after 1 year, so she can get married, and no more full ride.
Allan Reini said, 7 months ago
Not to dredge up THIS tired, old debate again, but taking a test sideways like that, just for the fun of it, seems like something a young Calvin would do, too. Sans music, of course.
Editer63 said, 7 months ago
And we’ve seen Caulfield using the bubbles to make pointillist art.
Night-Gaunt49 said, 7 months ago
One of the things that geniuses and creative people do is to take something then do something very different with it. Like what Frazz did with the multiple choice questionnaire.
ellisaana
said, 7 months ago
@Ronald Davis
Depends on what is in the fifth.
I’d prefer Irish..