Draw the Line Here

The world really is a terrible, terrible place, and the best that most people can do to stay sane is indulge themselves in hobbies and interests, things that make them happy. Easier for some than others, obviously, and some even choose to block out any kind of news at all, anything that doesn't affect them directly is cast to the wind like so many... Crisp packets? Anyway, this place right here is predominantly a comics blog. Stuff about comics, both good and bad, but never (hardly) anything "heavy". It's not a place to discuss the world at large and isn't trying to solve anything - I'm neither qualified nor clever enough to do anything of the sort. BUT, when something comes along on the "world stage" that the whole world pays attention to, and is also directly related to the "main thing of interest" on this particular blog, well, something has to be said.

Back in January, following the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, everyone responded in their own way, mostly along the lines of "this is an attack on freedom of speech" - I went along with the option of posting the cartoons that "caused" all the trouble in the first place (because I'm dead cool and all that) whilst pretty much every cartoonist alive went ahead and did exactly what they'd been doing all along, which was to carry on doing what they've always been doing. Cartooning, that is. "We shall not be silenced" and all that, yes! The Professional Cartoonists' Organisation, meanwhile, along with English PEN gathered sixty-five cartoonists and got a book crowdfunded, with profits split between a fund for the families of those that were murdered in France and English PEN's Writers At Risk programme, which defends freedom of expression world wide. And this is that book:

It's for a great cause, obviously, and you can order yourself a copy here if you like. Back in this corner of the universe, let's have a peek at some of the wares on offer within the book's 100+ cartoons...

Crazy golf with a Swedish couple we befriended

And so back to Scotland once more, this time in a celebratory vein. If you "enjoyed" any combination (or even all three) of Electric Soup, Northern Lightz and Wasted, this may be of interest. It's a thing that you can actually buy in real life! Presenting, for your pleasure, The Khollected Khaki Shorts:

You can go and buy it from the Braw Books shop, for just under ten of your Earth pounds, right now if you want. Definitely worth it, 220 pages collecting the "best of" the 28 issues that were made between 1999 and 2011. Because I'm dead cool and so on, I was already familiar with a lot of the stuff in there. Bought the final last issue spectacular thing when it was first out, and then early last year, co-founder Adam Smith sent me as many of the older issues as he could find - nice of him, yes? You can pretend to be hip and with it by familiarizing yourself with some of the contents before ordering yourself a copy, by following on and reading this summary sort-of-thing about Glasgow-based underground sensation Khaki Shorts, right here...