Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Virtual Book Tour + #Giveaway: Secret Plans Vol III by Tami Knight @GoddessFish



SECRET PLANS, VOL. III

Tami Knight

GENRE: Cartoons/Humor


BLURB:


Tami Knight started drawing cartoons about climbers when the glaciers were a lot larger. C'mon in and enjoy Knight's rats and humans as they get up to mountains of mischief! This book may even help you re-work yer primal scream!

And, dang, Jon Krakauer wrote the forward.

PURCHASE SECRET PLANS: VOL. III on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Barnes & Nobel


Excerpt:

In 1981, Knight started to draw cartoons inspired by the absurdities of climbing. She found a wealth of material simply by observing the fanatical, oddball climbers she hung out with. In her cartoons, they were depicted as rats with long tails, beady eyes, and pointy noses. The rats were usually wearing climbing harnesses and chalk bags, but no clothing. Like Knight’s real-life friends, the rats were dirty, smelly, constantly broke, totally obsessed with climbing, and excessively fond of beer and single malt Scotch whisky. Many of the rats were surprisingly charming.

Knight had found her calling. She saw herself as the climbing tribe’s court jester, keeping inflated egos in check with affectionate ridicule. Her demented cartoons became a hugely popular feature in the most widely-read climbing magazines of the day. For North American climbers, she was our Charles M. Schulz, our Gary Larson, our very own R. Crumb.

Over the decades, Knight published six books of climbing cartoons. In this book, her seventh, almost every cartoon she’s created since 1981 has been collected in a single magnificent volume that provides a grimy window into our peculiar, alarmingly-addictive sport.


Welcome, Tami Knight

My book is a compilation of cartoons about climbing that I’ve drawn in the past forty plus years. I’d like to tell how I got into drawing these cartoons and how they’ve evolved from when I was age 21 to now +age 65.

As a little kid growing up on the west coast of Canada in the 1960s and my Mum bought lots of Dr. Seuss books for my brother and I. Four-year-old me struggled with the black squiggles on the pages but those drawing! Seuss’ world drew me in with fish driving cars, an elephant sitting on an egg, stacks of turtles and the interweaving of humans and creatures. It fired my imagination; it really did.

I graduated to Mad Magazine, Archie comics, the Far Side, and, eventually, to Art College. At the same time I started climbing and mountaineering. And so, the mind meld happened: cartoons and climbing.

I drew climbers as rats. That doesn’t seem very nice but, honestly, climbers are rascals! They love to live on the cheap. They’re wily. They’re survivors (at least the ones who survive are…). And they’re smart. Rats!

Climbing and mountaineering has a very long and storied history of very dramatic literature. There’s The Ascent of The Matterhorn, by Edward Whymper, published in 1880 all the way up to the zillion books about climbing Mt Everest of today. But nearly all these stories are mostly Shakespearean in scope; lots of epic suffering, tension, intrigues and death.

And, yet, my experience of being with climbers was they’re really funny and adore a great big laugh. In the early ‘80s, I decided to send up all this big drama using that which I loved best – drawing cartoons.

At first, I drew stories about my climber friends. In one story, my then-boyfriend Peter, a very strong climber but who really didn’t do a lot of bike riding, got on his bike and rode 75 miles (120km) to visit a friend. Why? He wanted to visit his friend! Then he had to ride the 75 miles back home again. Now if you’ve ever ridden a bike you know that, as you ride, your butt gets chafed. And it doesn’t magically get to a maximum point of chafe and stop there. I’m guessing now your imagination is thinking “ewww!”. Well, you’re very correct. Half-way on his return trip, he had to stop, call up his Mum and get her to come and get him.

Total. Cartoon. Fodder.

I also started to make fun of climbers and their gear. Climbers will dumpster dive in order to save up that hard-earned cash to buy a spanky new rope. They’ll own no furniture but will have four backpacks, three helmets, six pairs of climbing shoes, ski kit worth 3,000$ and even a kayak they keep at their parents’ home because their girlfriend booted them out. How is this not also total cartoon fodder?

As the years then decades passed, I gained more experience as a climber and was able to find in the barrel more low-hanging fruit to shoot. For example, rock climbers like to wear their specialized rock shoes really tight. This gives a better “feel” for the rock because the foot can’t move inside the shoe. I thought putting one’s foot into a vise and then using a hammer to make the foot even smaller might be of help for climbers who really want tight boots.

All tolled, it’s been a wonderful time sourcing ideas for cartoons and I’m grateful to everyone who’s had a laugh at my cartoons and even more grateful to folks who buy my book. 


AUTHOR Bio and Links:


Tami Knight has been drawing cartoons and illustrations about climbing since 1981. Her work is a regular feature in Alpinist Magazine but has appeared in climbing media all over the world. She was the 2003 recipient of the American Alpine Club literary award. Knight lives in Vancouver, Canada.

CONNECT WITH TAMI KNIGHT

Website ~ Instagram



Giveaway:

$15 Amazon/BN GC 





Follow the tour and comment; the more you comment, the better your chances of winning.


7 comments:

Nancy P said...

Fantastic cover

Goddess Fish Promotions said...

Thank you for featuring SECRET PLANS today.

Marcy Meyer said...

This looks like an entertaining read.

Michael Law said...

Thos should be a very enjoyable read. Thanks for sharing.

Rita Wray said...

I liked the excerpt.

Sherry said...

Looks like a good book.

Daniel M said...

sounds like a fun one