Diesel Sweeties, an excellent long-time web comic, starts its well-deserved syndication this week -- "reformatted for print publications and respectful of the taste conventions of family newspapers." Hats off to cartoonist R Stevens for making the leap, and taking on the seemingly impossible task of creating a daily comic strip and a different daily web comic at the same time.

R Steven's brush with The Force partially inspired this cartoon. Last year, his "Chewie is my co-pilot" T-shirts brought him a cease-and-desist letter from Lucasfilm. He ceased and desisted, pulling the shirt. I'm not sure if any publicity was generated via litigation marketing, but now he has a syndicate deal. So The Force is with him, even when it's not.

Of course, the other inspiration was the gimmicky, money-generating web site that sold ad pixels for $1 each (and the myriad others that ask for money in return for the dubious pleasure of supporting one guy's drive to be a millionaire).

(This was originally going to be a two-parter, with Cosmo receiving a cease-and-desist letter, and unipixel versions of Mohammed and Osama bin Laden being uploaded to his site and causing Jihadists and the CIA to target him as well. But my gut said one strip was enough; I risked getting too obscurely Photoshop-centric and a little dated.)

10 Years Ago This Week: January 16, 1997
The below cartoon (with enlarged "2000 - The Movie" poster) was written before the furor over Y2K (or even the phrase Y2K) had emerged into public consciousness. But even so, there was a certain apocalyptic giddiness in the media. If the Y2K virus hadn't come along, someone would have invented it. (Or maybe, as I speculated in a later, not-yet-posted Weltschmerz cartoon, some 60s nihilist hacker actually did.) It is an interesting hindsight read, since our almost religioius obsession with landmark dates and round numbers has not subsided.







Retailers for Attack of the Same-Sex Sleeper Cells:

Toronto:
Pages, 256 Queen Street West (at John). On the graphic novels table.
The Beguiling, 601 Markham Street (near Bloor and Bathurst)
Book City, three locations - 501 Bloor St. West, 348 Danforth Ave., 663 Yonge St.
Hairy Tarantula, 354 Yonge Street (near Dundas).

Guelph:
The Bookshelf, 41 Quebec Street.
Macondo Books, 18 Wilson Street

Waterloo: Words Worth Books, 100 King Street South

Kitchener: KW Bookstore, 308 King Street West

Hamilton: Bryan Prince Bookseller, 1060 King Street West

Ottawa: Collected Works, 1242 Wellington Street West (at Holland)