Since the Journal Star’s website decided to run a Dave Nabity file photo for their 2006 election preview instead of their own artwork (which was on the front page of the print edition), I thought I’d share it here.

Also, I am a big fan of seeing the various stages that go into making any kind of visual art. In case there is anyone out there like me who enjoys this type of thing, I present to you the Three Stages of Today’s Illustration:

1. The pencil sketch

2. The ink wash / line work

3. The finished colors

A good portion of my web hits lately have to be credited to google’s image search.

I traced it back to a basketball message board – a Jesus / basketball discussion started, and someone googled “jesus hoops” and found this – one of my most popular cartoons ever.

Jesus made a lot of cameos in my Daily Nebraskan cartooning days. But moreso than that, a lot of embedded religious symbolism did too. I had this idea of making editorial cartoons a modern version of symbolically-layered religious art like you see from the Renaissance. I wanted scholars to one day come along and say “Well, the late 20th and early 21st centuries were pretty much devoid of that type of art where a bunch of religious references are just kind of tossed in, except for this kid in the human-clumping known as Lincoln, Nebraska, who apparently thought he would make some kind of Biblically-literate cartoons that would please no one, as they served to offend those who would care enough to understand the references.”

So this, the first of those cartoons, made its splash in March 2000, I was given a little dose of the “heretic” / “you don’t understand what you’re talking about” treatment, and the cartoon faded away to a memory for some former college students. Well now it’s experiencing a life of its own thanks to google image search, as it has spread to a half-dozen or so more message boards and now it’s appearing on some blogs too.

Good messiahs keep popping back up, I guess.