November 8, 2007
It Begins

As I sit here surrounded by both ends of life, what with Paul Norris dying at 93 this week and my oldest grandchild, Nathan, turning 6 the next day — I inaugurate The Toonopedia™ Blog. If it's not clear, or even if it is, I'm Don Markstein, the guy who launched this site and wrote all the stuff in it.



Tho I've been posting articles about cartoons on this site since just about the time I laid claim to the domain Toonopedia.com, back in 2001, this is the first time I've had a place here to address people on a more personal and less formal basis. So I'll be a bit looser here. Not too much looser — I still don't plan on saying anything you couldn't hear on network TV — but here in the realm of informal writing, you might occasionally hear a word the networks use only late at night.

In other words, while I won't use the words I danced around but didn't actually use in my articles on Private Snafu and Sad Sack (you know the ones I'm talking about — you learned them on the playground), words of lesser naughtiness may turn up from time to time. In fact, I plan to use one or two here in a couple of days, which is my best estimate for when my essay on those Danish cartoons everybody was talking about last year will be ready for public consumption.

Why write about old news? Well, I didn't have this soapbox when it happened, but it was such a highly-charged cartoon-related news item that I feel like it's still an appropriate topic in a toon-related blog.

What I'm saying is, if I happen to feel like writing about any toon-related topic, I'll simply do so. Year-old news items, stuff nobody cares about but me, whatever. If that's not to your taste, what the heck, I won't go on about it for too long. And it won't be more offensive than watching TV late at night.