Frazz by Jef Mallett for August 18, 2017

Cool.

Was she about to say that in her day, kids didn’t play baseball with apples?

Nor with tomatoes. (It’s still summer.)

I hope those were the yucky apples their sell cheap at the produce clearance bin. :P

summertime and tomatoes are plenty

He’s standing a little too close for comfort. I hope tomorrow he’s covered in fruit!

I’m glad Caulfield turned the tables on Mrs. Olsen, that was getting annoying.

Hold on a second for a minute here — didn’t somebody make a comment yesterday about today still being “In my day”? Has Frazz been hacked like HBO?? Jef — DON’T GIVE IN TO THEM!

What’s next, frog baseball??

Carpe Diem.

Nice. Glad to see Caulfield being nice!

He is correct. Age is as much attitude as it is time!

I used to do that with the ruined tomatoes, only I’d use an oversized zucchini as a bat. Now days there’s something in my soil that prevents the growing of either.

I would never even think of destroying food even bad food that way.

This was a really great comic. Sometimes I wonder why I still read Frazz, since I do usually find the main character annoying, but strips like this are a lot of fun. Being older doesn’t mean you can’t have fun!

Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you.

Nice to see they have achieved detente.

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Frazz

20 hrs ·

My dad was a choir teacher, and a good one. I had him from 6th grade through high school, and I’m a better cartoonist for it. That’s not supposed to be a joke — he was, and is, a generalist supreme. If he taught you everything there was to know about how to sing and all it did was help you sing, he’d have wondered what he did wrong that it didn’t cross over better into the rest of your life.

My senior year, we did this exchange concert with a choir from Listowel, Ontario, and one of the numbers was a tongue-in-cheek multi-movement opus called “Animals.” One of the songs, one of the themes, explored the kind of chanting you associate with echoey monasteries, and I somehow landed the solo part. Here’s the thing: you HAD to sing off key, so now you know how I got the part.

Except the director from Ontario wasn’t buying my story that I was just the worst singer who could remember the words. “You can’t sing that bad, and make it work, without knowing exactly how to sing,” said the Zen master choir director. Okay. Silently, I met him in the middle: I knew full well how to sing, but didn’t have the confidence I’d be able to pull it off in my usual terrified state onstage. This gave me an “I meant to do that” out, the same way cartoons in the context of fine art did for so many years, too.

I still don’t dare sing in public, but I’m not terrified to draw for the world. And in today’s Frazz, I got to draw Mrs. Olsen poised to swing a baseball bat like someone who’d never held a baseball bat, and I couldn’t have done it and made it work without knowing exactly how to swing.

Made my day!