The Cartoonist’s Brother Graduates

Oh, the memories. During the run of Narbonic, my brother Conor graduated from both high school and college. He’s now a TV news producer in Pittsburgh. And I remember drawing this thing like it was last week. Man, time flies.

My hair was really curly at the time because I was growing out a horrible layered haircut that I don’t want to talk about. (Andrew still draws my hair this way; I guess this is how I always look in his head.) And, yes, I did wear flannel shirts just like Dave’s. The T-shirt bears the logo of Keith Knight’s comic The K Chronicles. At the time, I saw a lot of Keef, who was on the Cartoon Art Museum’s board of directors and generally a big mover and shaker in the Bay Area cartooning scene. Now he lives in L.A.! Why must the world keep changing so quickly? I feel like singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof and crying into a glass of pink wine.

I know the giant cordless phone looks like another blast from the past, but actually I haven’t upgraded my phone in six years, so that remains accurate.

My brother is not a nerd, so listening to my nerdy music would indeed be very embarrassing for him–doubly so when he was in high school. Also, as you can see from the photo, he looks nothing like me. We’re about as dissimilar as two siblings can be unless you count those families where one of the kids is an adopted ASL-signing chimp. We basically have nothing in common except for picking on my mother.

I can’t remember how I got my hands on that baby photo on short notice, but of course a naked bath one would have been better.

4 thoughts on “The Cartoonist’s Brother Graduates

  1. This is a cute one. I especially love your enthused, Mell-like posture in panel 6. 😀 (And I spy with my little eye…some vanishing stripes in panel 9. It looks artsy)

  2. There have been people who knew both my brother and me for several years without realizing that we were related. The really amusing thing is that there is another pair of brothers that we’ve been friends with for ages, and everybody always thinks that one of them is my brother and the other one is related to my brother.

  3. Today: the cartoonist revealed!

    (…Discounting that easily-overlooked earlier appearance in this episode, I mean.)

    Anyway, this is a defining moment in Narbonic’s author-reader relationship. Henceforth, the audience’s perceptions of webcomic and creator are now inseparable intertwined.

  4. I wonder if he’s still working in the TV industry in Pittsburgh on Elfhome .. after all, having a sister that does Mad Scientist webcomics *has to have* given him an edge on dealing with the shift and shift in Worldview. 😉

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