So, new comic will be up tomorrow as soon as I can get it finished! Thanks for your patience!

A couple of years ago, my wife and I decided to stay in on Halloween to hand out candy to the kids in the neighborhood, but basically our only trick-or-treater was a teenager with no costume (he was wearing a flannel shirt, so maybe that was in order to be  lumberjack or cowboy or something, but around here that’s everyday wear) who came late in the evening.  He even had a guilty “I know, I know, it’s late and I’m far too old for this, I just want some free candy” look on his face.

I would have been more annoyed, but he had the exact same Star Wars pillow case that I had when I was a wee lad.  It really brought me back, so I let him have some candy.

We ate the rest ourselves.

Except the Almond Joy bars.  Yuck!  Seriously, who likes those?

Bonus geek cred points to the first person who can identify Honk’s costume.

I am quite pleased with Zombie Sarah Palin’s hair.

Well, I’m back, and I thought I’d return with a deep-dish edition — my first ever!

In case you’ve forgotten — or are new here (Hiiiii!) and haven’t checked out the archives yet — when last we left our intrepid travellers Ronnie and Honk were setting out for the drive back home, after a quick visit with Ronnie’s brother Gerry and sister-in-law Kim, where the news was shared that Ronnie is an uncle-to-be.

Today’s guest strip comes from a person who has had a monumental influence on my life — if it wasn’t for her, I would never have met my lovely wife!

Lisa Dulin is a college friend of Anna’s, and I’m glad to call her my friend too.  She doesn’t have her own comic any more, but she does have one o’ them newfangled Deviantart pages.  Check it out! Thanks Lisa!

As my little cartoon paternity leave draws to a close, I just want to again give big thank everyone who helped me out with guest strips.  If you haven’t had a chance to see their other work, here they are again!

• Chris Flick (Capes & Babes)
• Cameron Davis (The Adventures of Plant-Man and his sidekick Flowerin’ The Seedling Wonder)
• Anonymous Ray (and the boys from YCS)
• Matt Stout (Big Sandy Gilmore)
• Ben Wilson (Greg and Gary Comics)
• Dave Buist (Taking the Bypass)
• and of course, Lisa Dulin (Deviantart)

If you had wanted to submit a strip, please still do!  I’m sure there will be times during this parenting thing when having some extra strips ready to go will be a lifesaver.

In celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving, today’s guest strip comes from a fellow Canuck, Dave Buist, creator of Taking the Bypass.  That he did an “Ask a Canadian” gag was just icing on the turkey, as it were.

Ha ha! See what I did there? Not cake, but turkey, because it’s Thanksgiving, and people eat turkey on Thanksgiving! People, like Canadians. Of which I am one.

Still got it, Chris. Stiiiiiiiiill got it.

. . .

Anyhow, I just love his version of Ronnie, too.  He looks so . . . sassy! Check out his excellent comic, and drop him a line to thank him for helping me out.

Today’s guest comic is by Ben Wilson, the young Aussie creator of Greg and Gary Comics … and this one is really awesome to me.

Why?  Well, Ben is only 14 years old.

You know what I was doing when I was 14?  I was tracing real comics — mainly Jim Lee’s stuff — and Wizard Magazine covers, and acting like that meant I could draw almost as well as the artists I was copying.  What I wasn’t doing was writing and drawing my own regular strip (and let’s face it, if I WAS it would have been about a cheap Batman knockoff), developing my own style, and putting it out there for the world to see, never mind making and submitting guest strips for other artists.

I think Ben’s doing awesome, and he has a great future ahead of him if he keeps it up. So check out his comic and give the kid some encouragement.

Today’s guest strip comes from Matt Stout, creator of the fantastic Big Sandy Gilmore.  Check out his strip and let him know how much you appreciate him helping me out.  It’s a hoot!  Makes me want to do a strip with talking animals again…

One of the funniest things to me about this guest strip is that he actually stumbled on a little inside joke at my church.  My pastor Mike is really fond of using Rob Bell’s line “I love my wife… and I love tacos…?” when discussing how the English word “love” can mean so many different things.  I guess it’s common to become familiar with your pastor’s favorite little phrases after a while, but that his is about tacos cracks me up.

Today’s guest comic comes courtesy of Ray, from a certain goonish forum.  He didn’t want to send it himself — maybe he thought there was something awful about it — but I loved it so much I sent it to myself.  You’d think by now they’d know I’m hovering around there too!

If you’re unfamiliar with Tim Buckley’s web comic Control-Alt-Delete, and specifically with his recent (and much derided) attempt to make a drastic change in tone from “wacky crude gamers being violent” to “touching story of a couple who have a miscarriage” , then this strip may not make much sense, cute as it is.  If you are familiar with the comic and the storyline… well this parody was too good to not share.

The Guest strips continue!

Today’s strip is courtesy of Cameron Davis, creator of The Adventures of Plant-Man and his sidekick Flowerin’ The Seedling Wonder.  Check out his site and drop him a note of thanks.

In baby news, we came home from the hospital on Saturday, and everyone is doing great.  We’ve even gotten significantly more sleep than we expected to get. My wife and I make a pretty super team.

Here he is, mere moments old:

My life will never be the same again, and I’m ecstatic.

Welp, I was hoping to get one more comic done to round out the big road trip, but it looks like this is it!  Bright and early in the morning we’ll hopefully get the ball rollin’ and hopefully at some point tomorrow I’ll have a healthy baby boy!

While I tend to my paternal and husbandly duties, however, I put the call out for some guest strips to fill the void, and I’m pleased to share some of my favorites with you all over the next week or so.

First up is Chris Flick, creator of Capes & Babes. Please check out his great strip, and drop him a line and thank him for helping me out! :-)   Thanks a million, Chris!

Parting is such sweet sorrow…

I still have that cactus mug, too.

My brother and I were always pretty good at both self-deprecating and brother-deprecating jokes with one another.  It’s a habit we can fall into pretty smoothly when we see one another, much like our discussions of comics, movies, and various and sundry geekery.

Sorry this is up late!  I’ve had a rather long, exhausting day.  The next few stand the chance of being even more interesting, too.

Everything’s okay!  But let’s just say that if you have a guest comic you’d like to submit to be run during my brief hiatus when the baby is born you’d better get on it soon!

This is pretty close to what I actually said during my toast at my brother’s wedding.  I still can’t really explain it, other than that I improvised poorly and, genuinely wanting to make my new sister-in-law feel welcomed to the family, I thought it appropriate to assure her I didn’t hate her.

I think she’s forgiven me.

There’s a story among some of my friends about the time this happened to one of us (declaring our love of Snapple to a not-so-impressed border guard), and it seems that, after all this time, no one can remember to whom it happened and who else was there to witness it.  At least, I can’t.

Regardless, it’s always stuck in my mind as a great way to get your car torn apart in a search, just for being a smartass.

The specs are simple: just create and send me a comic featuring any of the cast of Life of Ronnie.  Make it an 850px wide (or larger, and I’ll resize) image; black and white, grayscale or color, that’s up to you.  Whether you’re limited to stick figure drawings or you’re a professional, just have fun and be creative! Oh, and keep it clean, please.  I’ll choose the ones I like best and run them while I’m occupied with poopie diapers.

Also, if you have your own comic, blog, deviantart page, or whatever, please let me know so I can send people to see more of your work.

Looking forward to seeing other renditions of Ronnie!

Bonus points of you can pick out the real albums on Honk’s iPod, without using the power of the interwebs!

Ammonia and bleach.  Borax and bleach.  Do not mix!

In fact, you’re pretty much best not mixing any household cleaners together.  I learned this the hard way, though I’m happy to say I wasn’t actually the one that made the mistake.

At this rate, that’ll make for a pretty short vacation.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to explain to my American friends that Canadian/back bacon is not the same as ham.  I’m beginning to think that I’m coming off as a little… manic about it though.

Perhaps I should have clued into that earlier, since the usual response is to jokingly act incredulous at first, and then back away slowly when I start in with the porcine anatomy lessons.

Anyhow, I was back up in Canada a couple of weeks ago camping with some friends, and as camp chef for the weekend I picked up some real back bacon to cook up for breakfast.  As fate would have it, we forgot to bring any dishes (oops) so we were forced to eat our delicious back bacon and scrambled eggs on large hotdog buns instead.  Back-bacon-on-a-bun! Mom would be so proud.

EDIT:  Yes, mom, back bacon is also known as peameal bacon in Canada, although that refers specifically to the variety that has been sweet pickle-cured and rolled in cornmeal.  Which, I suppose, is probably the most authentically and uniquely Canadian way to have it if one has the chance.

This is pretty much how I started going out with my first real girlfriend, years ago.  She took the news pretty well, too.  Ahh, for the simple life of a naive teenager again.

I love how teenage buddies Ronnie and Honk turned out.  Bonus points for you if you can tell me what it says on Honk’s shirt.

I never will live down that mullet, though.  Dang.

I’m happy to report that this didn’t happen to me.

Happy Ronday!

Janet really does seem to take these things well, doesn’t she?

Regardless, maybe Ronnie would have more luck if he just did the opposite of everything he thinks he should do.

So, this past weekend, thanks to very fortunate timing, my wife and I were able to pick up a sweet Wii package from Costco, complete with the usual stuff plus Wii Play, an extra controller and nunchuck, and Super Mario Galaxy.  You can guess how we spent the weekend!

That’s right, doing laundry!

However, we also got in some time breaking the new game system in, and dang if it ain’t a hoot.  It’s amazing what kind of a sweat you can work up (if you’re mii) playing on it.  I suppose that’s a good thing for all involved.

Other than Ronnie’s rather sneaky reasons for throwing his party, this happened to me!

Many years ago I threw some sort of pot-luck party one night (knowing me, it was probably a Survivor Finale Party) and some wonderful soul — whom, I cannot remember — brought a delicious tray of homemade brownies.  On going to check out the spread, I was really impressed with the perfect paw-print design that had been made in the frosting. . .

. . . and It took me longer than Ronnie to figure out that they were not supposed to be there.

There was a time when I got together pretty regularly with some guys to play roleplaying games, most every Friday night in my late teens and early college years.  Eventually I moved away, but the tradition continued unabated without me, turning into something sacred.  When yet another move brought me back to town and back to “guy’s night”, at some point I inquired about inviting girls (okay, a girl, who I really would have rather spent my night with…) to join us, but the idea was quickly quashed by the others, with dire warnings in hushed tones that such a thing had been tried before but didn’t go well and must never be attempted again.

I was never quite clear on what went wrong, but something like this is my best guess.

I was going to say that the only thing here based in fact is that Honk’s real life alter ego really does have his birthday in January, but I guess I can also add that he’d totally have my back if I needed him to pretend it was his birthday for some reason. 

Assuming that meant free cake.

At work, my main project for the last month or so has been making stop-motion animations of action figures for Hasbro’s various “action toy arenas”.  Transformers and Star Wars figures and vehicles, this time.

Of course, in order to properly animate figures to show off what they can do, it’s important that one be very familiar with the toy, so the first step with each one is essentially play-time.  It’s been pretty sweet being paid to play with toys. I swear, sometimes my life feels like a scene out of Big!

I realized that it’s been a while since we got to see one of Ronnie’s Ninja Apprentice comics.  Thankfully, he has Honk to keep him from going for the cheap jokes.

Yesterday was my first Father’s Day. Yes, our boy may still be in utero, but he still managed to get me a nice card. Here’s hoping his thoughtfulness continues into life outside the womb!

My own father was home alone yesterday, since mom has flown back to Ontario to visit with her own father for a couple of weeks, but he drove down to Redmond from BC so we could go to church and out for a nice lunch together. I got a full rack of ribs, and he got the Prime Rib. Let no one ever claim we Routly men don’t like our meat in copious amounts.

And yes, as you may have heard, it’s true that more collect calls are made on Father’s Day than any other day of the year. Mother’s Day is the biggest holiday for phone calls, but I guess kids are more willing to pony up the money for the call if it’s for mom!

I’m having a lot of fun with this.

NyQuil (with pseudoephedrine, of course) always gives me the most vivid, awesome dreams.