The GoodGang in “The Purple Cat's Power Play!”

From 1973, the second issue of my pre-teen superhero comic, The GoodGang. For a nine year-old, I had a far better grasp of graphic structure (and clumsy dramatic narrative form) than of the written English language, an all-too-telling sign of the obvious damage a steady diet of comic books will do a young man.

My Mother, the Artist, Part Two

The following is a second gallery of works, in various media, created by my mother, Phyllis Holland, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.
The first seven were student exercises from her tenure at the Kingston School of Art, in England. They showcase an impressive facility in disciplines as varied as gouache, pen and ink, graphite, even three-dimensional window display (the “supporters” in Gay Supporters refers to the English term for suspenders, not proponents of equal rights for same-sex couples, regardless of how strangely fitting the image might be for either usage). The second-to-last is a portrait of her mother, Winifred, known to me simply as “Nan”.
The final five are samples of secondary school and childhood work, the last two being cartoon tableaux clearly influenced by Walt Disney.
The photographs, that both precede and follow the art, are of my mother and her fellow art school friends, mugging for the camera outside a fabric shop, circa 1950, as well as with others, dressed as pirates, ready for some school festivity.

Some Opinionated Work

The following are samples of my editorial page cartoons and illustrations that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1985 to 1988, first as a freelancer, then during a brief stint as the paper’s staff illustrator. True to my chameleonic nature, the styles shift rapidly and widely, depending on the subject matter. These were some of my very earliest such published pieces in a major daily newspaper. For the full story on this early tenure, see here.