Smithfield Cartoonist Transforms Ordinary Moments into Relatable Comic

For Tim Jones, Sundays were special growing up. They were the days when he’d eagerly await the newspaper to hit the driveway, flip to the funnies, pore over printed episodes of Garfield and Peanuts, and scribble his own cartoons beside them. Many years, an art degree, and inked drawings later, the grown Jones is living his childhood dream as the successful creator behind his own published comic: Sour Grapes. 

“What inspires me is just my everyday life,” Jones explains of his sarcastic strip, which started in 2013 and now appears in 28 newspapers – even ones in California and Texas. “I might go through something or hear something that week, and I just put it into their world and see how they’ll handle it.” When he refers to “they”, he means the original cast of characters that make up Sour Grapes: Aesop, the miserable flying dog; Maddy, the not-so-bright astrophysicist; Constance, the moody teen; and Ominous, Aesop’s pet cloud, to name a few. “A comic strip needs to be relatable and stay that way,” he says, “so Sour Grapes speaks to the problems and bad days that we all have – and makes light of it.” 

The process of pen to print, Jones admits, is anything but quick. “I’m the slowest artist known to man,” he jokes, ”but I do have deadlines!” He begins by mapping out the episode in his head, selecting the right character for the topic and what it will look like. Next, he sketches out the strip with pencil, then ink, and finally scans it into his laptop for digitization using Photoshop to clean up mistakes, add text and color, and export in high-resolution for the newspaper. But the work doesn’t stop at the art: “I do everything from soup to nuts,” says Jones, who operates as a one-man band, listing marketing, promotion, book compilation, invoicing, and merch design as additional responsibilities for the solo artist. Thankfully, even with the impact of COVID-19 on so many businesses, Jones has remained in-print for the duration of the pandemic. “I’ve done some COVID-related episodes,” he says, but keeps in mind the balance between seriousness and humor, like the importance of mask-wearing as demonstrated by Ominous the pet cloud, who has a lot of, er, droplets.

Over the last 20 years of his career as a cartoonist, Jones has found success both locally and beyond with Sour Grapes, but his true dream lies with a national syndication. He describes a drawer full of rejection letters over the years, but is unfazed: “Jim Davis was rejected seven times before Garfield took off, and it was the same with Schultz,” he says. “You can’t win if you don’t play.” See more of Tim Jones’ work at SourGrapesComic.com.