2024: Distant Scenes from Coffee Lovers' Cartoons

This was a year of behind-the-scenes prep for projects that will begin to be released in 2025. I also stepped back from social media, uninterested in constantly offering up images to be scraped by artificial intelligence. As Coldplay sang 22 years ago on “Politik” their opening track on A Rush of Blood to the Head: “Give me real, don’t give me fake.”

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of 2024 in illustration:

Published two Frega DiPerri long-form illustrated humor articles.
Frega + DiPerri made an ugly sweater.
Frega DiPerri cartoons were both rejected by and published in magazines.
We made new Buddy and Romeo cartoons and prepared a book collection.
I made some pictures
and did some sewing.
Our Christmas card sales continued to reach new heights.

In January, I published a faux workout plan for when you’re out in the snow with little kids. It was first published on my personal blog located in the corner of the Internet abyss so having it land on Frazzled enabled it to reach an audience. In a perfect bookend to 2024, “Daycare Snow Day Workout Plan” has been published again in the January/February 2025 issue of Funny Times.

This is on the cover. Ha!

Their graphic designer did a fantastic job with the layout and I’m looking forward to sharing that with you soon. You can, of course, check it out now though at FunnyTimes.com

The entirety of January and February were devoted to producing new comic strips for our forthcoming book, Buddy and Romeo: Alone for the Holidays. The book has been a long time in the making. Planning began in 2019 and it was “ready to go” as a small self-published title in July 2020. When it became clear that the ramifications of the pandemic would be more far reaching and longer lasting than ever imagined, Alone for the Holidays didn’t seem like a very funny (or tasteful) title in light of the fact that it was the entire world’s reality for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, I think we’re in a place where the book (title and all) could be funny again.

We took another look at the shelved 2020 version in late 2023 and, under Frega’s creative direction and skilled editorial eye, devised a plan to expand the book from 40 pages to 130. We created almost two dozen brand new Buddy and Romeo comics last winter/spring and recorded the process in a mini docuseries, which was released episodically on YouTube. Five out of of the planned six or seven episodes were completed and three were released. Episode three centers upon our process of generating ideas.

Though the expected self-publication date was summer 2024, as the book began coming together, I started to think it was worth shopping around to agents in case it may work on in traditional publication. At that point, the project was put on hold while a query letter was drafted. Full disclosure, that’s as far as we got because, according to the calendar, it was time to focus on preparing for the new season of our Coffee Lovers’ Christmas series.

We’ll begin shopping Buddy and Romeo: Alone for the Holidays around in early 2025.

The 2024 winter months were busy. In addition to the Buddy and Romeo book, we worked behind the scenes on an everyday greeting card line drawn from our magazine cartoon collection.

Within Reason will launch in January 2025.

Most of our projects (both solo DiPerri and Frega DiPerri endeavors) are in development for years before release. Buddy and Romeo: Alone for the Holidays has been in development since 2019; We actively worked on Coffee Lover’s Christmas for seven years before finally posting “First Brew” (the original 10 designs) for sale in 2019. Such was the case (albeit to a lesser degree) for our long form humor piece “Scenes from the CrossStitch Games,” which Frega began writing in 2021. “Scenes from the CrossStitch Games” was first published in April on Slackjaw and then reprinted in the October 2024 issue of Funny Times.

In the spring, I exercised my illustrator muscles by adding a couple new images to my portfolio.

The Social Media Post

Get Set — Bake!

I also completed two personal pieces that pay tribute to Margret and H.A. Rey. Studying and working in H.A. Rey’s surprisingly complex drawing and media style was informative. I’ve since adopted a version of his method of applying single brushstroke wash shadows for our Frega DiPerri cartoons.

One of the most surprising realizations I made about H. A. Rey’s work through this process was that with his limited pallet of red, yellow, blue, and green, he does not actually use brown for the titular character. George is painted in red! The illusion of “brown” and “peach” come from the degrees of pigment dilution and the dominance of ink wash in those areas. Magic!

I put a significant amount of time into a long-form Frega DiPerri humor piece that we began working on in October 2023. Much work remains but completing it before spring is a priority. Hopefully we will publish and share that with you shortly.

Our Frega DiPerri cartoons made the rounds on the magazine circuit and we had first time publications in Literary Review; Funny Times; Slackjaw; and Centaur. Of the cartoons published in 2024, here are two of our favorites.

Published in Literary Review

Published in Kappan

In August, I attempted to make good on a long-standing promise of sewing Buddy plush dolls by hand for each paid subscriber to the Buddy and Romeo Cartoon Substack. One attempt after another after another.

Despite all of the frustration and set backs (which included having to take the machine apart and replace a worn out part), the doll is coming along. I had to put it aside to prepare for the upcoming new season of our Coffee Lovers’ Christmas greeting card/print/product line.

When time permits, I’ll resume work on the Buddy doll. Probably spring or summer 2025.

I got a shock on my 40th birthday when an email came in from Funny Times informing us that they wanted Frega and I to produce an exclusive ugly sweater for them. This commission was the result of how happy they were with “Scenes from the CrossStitch Games,” which they published in their October 2024 issue. Frega, as always, was on fire with ideas and we sent our favorite four concepts to Funny Times for approval and feedback. Then they chose one for us to bring to final.

You can win Ugly Sweater Day at work with our “Cold As Ice” Holiday Sweatshirt! We can tell you from experience that they’re super soft and comfy. Order yours today at FunnyTimes.com

Our sixth season of Coffee Lovers’ Christmas was our best to date. Each year since we launched the series in 2019 has been bigger than the last and this year continued that trend with even bigger sales in 2024 than our previous biggest-ever year, 2023. Astonishing. In addition to online sales and holiday vendor sales, three brick and mortar shops put our cards on their shelves this year and two of the three also carried prints and mugs.

In addition to some new gift item options featuring some of our most popular designs, we added a new illustration called “Special Order” to our catalogue this year.

We had intentions of adding two new illustrations for 2024 but we noticed some compositional issues with one of the two pretty late in the painting process so that one will need some reworking before its debut in 2025. Here is an incredibly small cropped preview of the next image from early November before I started painting it.