Late July Roundup

Weekly posts just ain't my thing for the time being

Photo by Xavier McLaren on Unsplash

Unpredictable Infrequency

I love providing a free newsletter to anyone interested in subscribing to Frank’s Buffalo Born Babble. It is a creative outlet for me and a pleasure to produce. Lately I have found it nearly impossible to stick to a weekly schedule for a few reasons, but more one reason than the rest—and it’s good news for me. I’ve had a crush of patent illustration jobs come through one after another, and they piled up fast. You don’t mess with invoiceable clients.

One of these days I am going to post graphics and other informative content about the patent illustration business. It’s not all Rube Goldberg contraptions.

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I like his style

Enough with the excuses. I’m taking a page from The Graeme Gallery authored by Canadian editorial cartoonist Graeme MacKay. I not only like his drawing style and biting satire, but I also admire his pacing. He devotes his efforts to the most pressing task at hand: meeting an unforgiving daily deadline. Later on Friday or Saturday, he posts a summary of his work that week.

Without going too far the other way, I’ll likely be posting newsletter installments that feature a few cartoons at a time every few weeks. If I can pick up the pace, I will. I doubt anyone is missing a weekly Frank’s Buffalo Born Babble in their IN folder, but I felt the need to tell you I’m not dead. Yet!

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This morning’s front page story in the Buffalo News

prompted me to pull the following cartoon from the June 27 Niagara Gazette as my first “what you haven’t seen” editorial.

This cartoon was my reaction to a story in the Niagara Gazette about an accident on Friday, June 19.

I had already been upset at the reckless e-scootering on my own street, hardly a major thoroughfare, but busy enough to host an accident. “Someone’s going to get killed” became my curmudgeonly mantra every time I saw a rider zipping along.

I’ve no objection to the tech that has put e-bikes and scooters within reach of the average schlep like me, but there have to be regulations and, more importantly, ENFORCEMENT of the rules.

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I like to draw cobwebs

Niagara Falls and Niagara County have been making frightening headlines recently regarding buried contaminated waste, but before that stuff hit the fan, the big story in Niagara Falls was the ongoing tug-of-war over a chunk of land called “Parcel 0.” On opposite ends of the rope were Mayor Bob Restaino and the landowner, Niagara Falls Redevelopment (NFR), controlled by family offices associated with billionaire Howard Milstein.

• Mayor Bob Restaino’s Stance: The city must use eminent domain to acquire Parcel 0 for a $210 million public events arena to boost tourism and secure state funding.

• NFR’s Stance: The forced land seizure must stop because Parcel 0 is needed for their privately funded $1.5 billion digital data center, which will create 550 jobs at zero taxpayer cost.

Cartoon from August 12, 2023:

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I did not address the topic again until May 2, 2026. In this cartoon, I swapped rope for basketball netting.

If you remove all of the text like so …

… you get a template for just about any stalled project. There’s a 30-second shot clock in NCAA basketball, so it’s only right that I give you this 30-second video:

Finally, an agreement was reached in early June. Mayor Restaino believes a new arena would land a minor league hockey team. NFR’s plan for a massive data center, the kind that can support real-time information crunching, say the kind you find in many sports. There’s a gag! So I cobbled together this rough drawing.

The Niagara Gazette had just stopped running a comics page as a cost-saving measure. I didn’t want to be next on the chopping block, so I included the publisher on my rough draft submission for approval, trying, y’know, to look valuable and useful to the paper. She liked this local idea along with the other cartoon I offered (see below), which ran on June 6.

If Niagara Falls lands a minor league hockey team that plays near the proposed data center, I’ll pull that unused rough out of storage.

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I’ve got a few more published cartoons making their Substack debut today.

Distractions Я Us!

I had to laugh when Trump reached into his magical box of excuses for our country’s woes. If it wasn’t for lack of space and the need to keep the wheel readable, I’d easily have doubled the fifteen choices here.

The grade school simplicity of this cartoon made it a fun one to draw and color. Orange makeup was slapped on with no subtlety. Gimme dat big fat crayon! That’s how I see his pastiness.

I bounce around with styles, sometimes rough and sketchy and other times tight with fancier coloring. It depends on my mood, the nature of the message, and how much time I have to work with. Especially the last thing.

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There’s nothing to eat around here!

How many kids have screamed that complaint? Aside from true hardship cases, it’s not that there’s nothing, it’s that they don’t like what’s available.

Tainted lettuce has been a big story and offers a low-hanging vegetable for cartoonists to pick. I opted to go after the next biggest food story.

The New World screwworm is a parasitic fly whose larvae eat the living flesh of warm-blooded animals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the current risk to the general public and locally acquired human infestations to be very low, but I wanted to jump all over Bobby Kennedy Jr. since he’s the (cough-cough) expert in charge of MAHA, Make America Healthy Again, plus he supported cuts to the CDC.

It appears that the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran is as strong as wet toilet tissue. Why would this be any better?

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You’re all caught up, except for a recent cartoon I made about buried toxic waste, a story that gets bigger and bigger by the day around here. I’m going to bundle that with my next post, hopefully in a day or two.