Update on the lowdown

Dean Yeagle has informed me that a prison reform advocate has taken an interest in his 'banned in North Carolina" story.
The name of the prison reform advocate? Hugh Hefner!
This is going to be even bigger than I thought.
Dean will be at the Comic Con in San Diego this week with a huge sign on his booth reading 'BANNED by the North Carolina Department of Corrections." He should sell out quick.

I remarked that my book will only be 1/400th banned since it has only one of Dean's girls in it and therefore only a fraction of the louche content. Then again, I am drawing back views of pigs with a vertical line bifurcating the hemispheres and reaching to the tail.
So that might get me in trouble with those people who would deny that such anatomical features exist. Unfortunately it won't get as much copy as pretty girls not being allowed in jail.

Dean will actually be on the radio discussing the incident.
"And on the BANNED IN PRISON front - I sent basically the same letter as I sent you to a talk show host in NY named Lionel, who is one of the few you can laugh WITH instead of AT. He was once a prosecuting attorney in Florida, and has been railing against the Bush administration for a while now. Just the other night he was talking about the strange puritanism we've still got in the US, so I thought he'd enjoy the story. He did, and he invited me to be interviewed about it on the air. Although he's in NY on WOR, he's broadcast across the country, from 10PM to 1AM on weeknights, and earlier on Saturday. I listen to him online - there are podcasts the next day on www.lionelonline.com. First I'll send him my sketchbooks, so he knows what we're talking about.Publicity!"

There is something a little strange in discussing cartoons on the radio, but what the hey. As Dean wrote to me after the Danish imbroglio, "Remember when the people complained about violence in the cartoons?"

It's apparently still okay to complain about sex in cartoons.

On an unrelated front, I've sent a letter to Disney Publications to ask for permission to print some of Ken O'Connor's artwork. We'll see if this actually happens. If not, I have two excellent photos I got of Ken when he was still healthy, and those will have to suffice. But the first 'reader'--Brian McEntee- sent in his suggestions for changes and they have already been incorporated into the manuscript and illustrations, so I'm 1/3 down and two more crits to go...