I'm finally live with a revamped site, thanks to Photoblogmeister Matt O'Sullivan. Here, you can place advance orders for the Weltschmerz comic book. It will be launched (and delivered) on April 6. This site is still somewhat barebones: The character descriptions and archive (where you can view cartoons by character, theme or date) are still to come. But you can leave comments on the strip above. And I've annotated strips going back into 2005, if you want to browse with the "back" arrow.
I got the idea for this sequence of cartoons while lying in bed with a 39 degree fever, heart racing because of too many asthma drugs. A sequence of events with Raj in Pakistan came into my mind. I had wondered what Raj's fate would be once he was forced on a Pakistan-bound plane by his fellow Canadians in December of last year. That feverish night settled it.
I fleshed out the story line and worked out the individual strips last week. As sometimes happens, events seem to mirror my cartoon. Last week, a Canadian was taken hostage in Palestine -- and released after the captors found out he was Canadian. It makes next week's cartoon seem a riff on that incident, when in fact it won't be. Sometimes I resent reality preempting my cartoon. But then again, it makes the toon more relevant.
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