Early, J.W.E.

Jazz Scarecrow #2

2009-11-26T20:13:00.000-08:00

What follows is the second issue of Jazz Scarecrow, a self-published mini-comic from 1986, which was drawn in sketchbooks, photocopied and distributed to my fellow employees at National Record Mart, a music store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Each issue featured the lead story, a continuing serial adventure, plus a back-up story starring The Man From Country X, which was drawn in a sketchy, line-based style, as opposed to the more graphic black and white Jazz Scarecrow, a tale of Ronald Reagan-inspired paranoia and Orwellian conceit, plus a one-page cartoon, usually in yet another style/approach. All stories were drawn and written panel-to-panel, page-to-page, without any preliminary planning. No pencils were involved, just technical pen ink on the paper, even solid blacks were filled-in with the same technical pen, as I’d yet to attempt using a brush and ink or pen. The title lettering was created with the inimitable Letraset Brand Prestype. Spelling mistakes were not unusual.
This second issue introduced gray wash tones to the art, created using watered-down India ink. This was one of the first times I had ever attempted this technique.
Note the misuse of the term “sibling”, as used in Operation Sibling, which should have been Operation Offspring.
For those of you who like to curl up with a pillow and watch your cartoons, click here for a handy slideshow of all twenty-four pages, soundtrack not included, but I suggest The Midnight Room by Jennifer Gentle, or most anything by John Fahey.
Either way – any way – I hope you enjoy!

The Super World of Poetry

2009-11-19T19:41:00.001-08:00

The following gallery consists of the only remaining pages of a peculiar coloring book I owned as a child. Entitled The Super World of Poetry, it was published in 1970 by Japco, a British publisher of whom I can dig up very little on the internet, other than their having also produced a brief line of “magic paint” books that featured updated versions of fairy tales, drawn in a positively mod fashion.
The Super World of Poetry was given to my brother and I as a gift from our great aunt and her husband, Larry. I clearly recall us both having the same fat edition, probably over a hundred pages thick. We received these the summer before moving to America and I’m quite sure only mine made the journey across the Atlantic. It was a well-loved book, treasured along with the giant-sized Star Trek coloring book I’d received that same summer. The pages shown here, lovingly colored and otherwise doctored by yours truly, only exist due to my having removed them from the book in 1981, to utilize in a show-and-tell demonstration for a class in art school. I cannot quite remember the point of the demonstration, but I think it had something to do with the “potential” of the comics form – a lecture that went out to mostly deaf ears in Pittsburgh back in the early 80s.
I can only now feverishly imagine the rest of this strange attempt at imbibing classical (read: stodgy) poetry with DC super heroes, especially such odd choices as Wildcat, and The Challangers(sic) of The Unknown – who took a truly bizarre ride through Leigh Hunt’s Jenny Kiss’d Me.
The section I salvaged, Green Lantern doing William Blake, is weird enough, especially in its queer shift in tone in the latter half, the car crash pages as intoxicatingly “off” to me now as they must have been back in those blurry days of adolescence. The art, as usual for such quickly knocked-off productions, is a clear amalgamation of the work of Silver Age artists like Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane and Sid Greene, all who worked on Green Lantern at one point or the other.
Having searched fruitlessly for any evidence of this unusual publication (I vaguely recall a cover over-flowing with juxtaposed heroes, framed by vine of roses) I now present what little I have left, a testament to its inscrutable production. I hope you enjoy!
- J.W.E.

Jazz Scarecrow #1

2009-11-12T17:52:00.000-08:00

What follows is the first issue of Jazz Scarecrow, a self-published mini-comic from 1986, which was drawn in sketchbooks, photocopied and distributed to my fellow employees at National Record Mart, a music store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Each issue featured the lead story, a continuing serial adventure, plus a back-up story starring The Man From Country X, which was drawn in a sketchy, line-based style, as opposed to the more graphic black and white Jazz Scarecrow, a tale of Ronald Reagan-inspired paranoia and Orwellian conceit, plus a one-page cartoon, usually in yet another style/approach. All stories were drawn and written panel-to-panel, page-to-page, without any pre-planning. No pencils were involved, just technical pen ink on the paper, even solid blacks were filled-in with the same technical pen, as I’d yet to attempt using a brush and ink or pen. The title lettering was created with the inimitable Letraset Brand Prestype. Spelling mistakes were not unusual.
For those of you who like to curl up with a pillow and watch your cartoons, click HERE for a handy slideshow of all twenty-three pages, soundtrack not included. But might I suggest any early record by The James Taylor Quartet, or perhaps The Legendary Pink Dots. Maybe even a more recent recording by The Residents or Stan Ridgway’s The Drywall Project?
Either way – any way – I hope you enjoy!
And, for those of you who were there – “Rock against Reagan!”

A Certain Sanguine Elegance: My Mother, The Painter, 1949 Studies

2009-09-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

My mother, Phyllis Holland, in 1949, ready for art class, farm cat in tow.

The following gallery features seven watercolors painted by my mother, Phyllis Holland, in 1949, when she was sixteen years old, some two years before she attended Kingston School of Art, in Southern England. Mainly monochromatic in their original form, chiefly studies in dark blues and browns, they show a focused interest in the fold and form of clothing, as well as the composition of the crowd, the exotic settings offering great interpretive possibility, a narrative quality I have responded to by attempting a cross-generational collaboration, composing sixteen-word descriptive sentences for each, in honor of such early creative ability, a youthful talent that inspires me to this day. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

She was alone amongst the spinsters, their countenances owl-like with anticipation, awaiting the village gong.

We must forgive the indelicate motions, her suggestive pose, thought Mrs. Hallow, turning to look away.

A certain sanguine elegance claimed the abandoned runway, a long knitting needle piercing Esmeralda’s pale stomach.

His heart dying with the sun, he felt the longing in his majesty’s weary, forlorn gaze.

The second agent narrowed her dark eyes, a nasty smile pushing at her rich, robust lips.

The forceful gale offered the Campbell sisters time to abandon the lingering mockery of the veil.

The youngest daughter faced the mother, wearing her father’s porcelain absurdity – her tongue dry, twisted rope.

Just Make Circles! It’s Easy! My earliest brush with the super hero dynamic

2009-08-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

The following gallery consists of some dozen drawings made during the 1973 school year, when I was nine years old. A recent immigrant to The United States, I was still figuring out the uniquely American cultural phenomenon of caped gymnasts flying through the air, stopping bank robberies and runaway circus trains.
Having happened upon an old “How to Cartoon” book, I quickly applied the circle-drawing approach to the physique of the super hero, resulting in these amusing attempts at imitating what I saw in comics drawn by the likes of Wayne Boring and Jack Kirby.
Finding it hard to resist my innate storytelling “gift”, I also played Stan Lee, giving my characters gloriously derivative and unwieldy names and costumes.
Enjoy!

Bicycle, A Murder Story

2009-08-04T17:04:00.001-07:00

Created during the summer of 1985, when I was twenty-one years old, this forty-page cartoon adventure begins with the mysterious death of Pierre Cyclone, top rider on the elite Spicey Tomato Sauce Bicycle Racing Team. Cyclone dying from a sting on the nose by a mechanical bee, the story quickly careens down the twisted path of a fantastical murder mystery, one navigated by a detective named Pinchin’ Greatness, a character who owes as much to Jack Kirby as he does Arthur Conan Doyle, complete with an attire that predates late 80s hip hop fashion, featuring a towering high-top fade and giant chain and medallion (but still leaving room for the more traditional tweed sleeves and pipe). With his sidekick, Tuck, who is Watson by way of Quasimodo, with more than a little Igor in the mix, the partners in the Pinch n’ Tuck Detective Agency are soon searching for the maker of the deadly insect drone, enlisting the help of their friend, Robot-Maker, a sort of a young Bill Gates in an iron lung, who lives in a windmill, creating mechanical prototypes for commercial clients, like Gerard the Monkey, the half-finished giant flying simian robot who sheds nuts and bolts wherever he goes. With Robot-Maker’s help, they learn that only one man could have made the intricate cyborg bee, along with an equally murderous mechanical spider and a swarm of enormous, truck-sized bees. That man is Racer Zero, long thought dead, a bitter old bicycle racing rival of J. Edgar Spicey, retired owner of the Spicey Tomato Sauce Company. A heinous revenge plot, designed to ruin the Spicey Company by having them defeated by the new Tangy Tomato Sauce Company Squad (who turn out to be robotic riders), is soon uncovered, but not before Pinchin’ and Tuck have encountered villainous florists and chocolate makers, have battled an army of robot insects at a renegade circus, and have evaded a secretive black-garbed bomber, all before old Mr. Spicey decides to race one last race, against the resurrected, half-mechanical Racer Zero, the winner’s tomato sauce company taking the trophy at the finish line.
This adventure of commercial skulduggery and comical mayhem was one of a series of similarly odd utilizations of the comic medium created during this period (see Lt. Bubba Fist Remembers 1941 for another example). As with everything I did at this time, the story and art were laid down in a completely improvisational manner, each page begun at the upper left, drawn and written as I went, no script or layouts existing to show me the way. Using only a fine-point marker (Pilot Razor-Point), I would draw the outline of each panel, then write the desired text or dialog, create the balloon around it, then draw the characters and background, even as the next panel was forming in my mind. Even the solid black areas were filled in with the same fine marker, as crazy as that might sound.
Having finished the forty-odd interior pages, I created the cover, placing it all in the 57th issue of the imaginary summer special of an anthology entitled Bonus Comics, giving it something of the look of Golden Age American publications, even though the story itself owed much more to my European upbringing.
Strangely enough, the story is credited to F. Fredericks, a pseudonym I occasionally used at the time, the origin of which I can no longer recall.
To view the entire story in a slideshow format, click here.

Jeremy's War

2009-07-22T13:13:00.001-07:00

The artist, 1970.

Just this past evening, while pouring through a collection of early childhood sketchbooks and diaries, I hit upon the inspiration for my next novel (I write novels, they aren’t necessarily published).
The impetus for this upcoming work came hurtling out of the following gallery of seventeen drawings, all taken from the period 1967–1971, during which time I was living in the rural north of Glasgow, in Scotland, my fourth year quickly becoming my seventh, a phase of childhood colored with the hue and cry of violence, a time of sanctioned beatings and thrashings, of the ugly face of nationalistic prejudice, of teeth liberated from a bloody mouth by an unexpected fist, of furtive figures pacing the moors, of football thugs and skinheads, of physical experiments and the doctoring of nature’s surroundings.
These violent visual cacophonies of lead and crayon, a time-compressed collage of WWII armies, ancient barbarians, and medieval knights, were drawn carefully, yet forcefully, from a young consciousness, the determining features of the psyche of a boy who had grown up surrounded by the threat of recent English history, by the seemingly eternal, advancing armies of Adolf Hitler, as portrayed in the oft-terrifying stories of my mother, told only on rare occasion, when she felt compelled to make known her experience as a child of that terrible war.
She’d tell of the German “Doodlebugs”, the surface-to-surface missiles that held their shrapnel in hollow cavities encircling their canisters, deadly caches that rotated as they hurtled through the sky, creating a great noise that sounded, after much dreadful repetition, like doodle-bug, doodle-bug, doodle-bug.
She’d tell of how the tiny farmhouse she grew up in shook as the chattering death candles ripped at the night sky, how she and her parents huddled beneath their small kitchen table, every window blocked with dark crate paper, a gauntlet of homes, blackened like crouching ninjas, running the course to London, north from the icy grey surface of the English Channel, across which hovered the German army, resting on the bent pride of the French, waiting for its most-vaunted strategists to come up with a victorious plan for crossing the twenty-mile waterway from Calais, to take England and wring liberty from its pale neck.
She’d tell of the Stuka, shot down into an oak tree just down the road from the family farm, of seeing the pilot’s parachute hanging from the cockpit, like the messy strands of some giant broken spider’s web, the pilot nowhere to be found.
She’d tell me of my Papa, her father, a bunion-toed farmer named George Holland, who, during this time of great shortage in able-bodied men left to stand the shores of home, was picked to be one of the infamous “Home Guard”, a ragtag brigade of little men who took turns, terrified sentries marking the highest point in each of the many rural villages lining the bloody blitzkrieg to London. Papa, his feet so tight in his army-issue boots, spent one or two evenings a week, poised atop Leith Hill, in the county of Surrey, his plow-worn fingers tight about his plywood rifle, his neck sore from the weight of his steel helmet, shivering, wanting for a cup of tea, dreading the painful walk home.
What I learned from these family-spun tales was that war could be both the worst, and the funniest, thing imaginable, as strange as that might sound, especially to those whose history has not been so marked with war’s trenchant din.
Even in the very real face of a German invasion, my family found the humor in the fact that, if Hitler had plowed across the Channel, it would have mostly been men like my granddad who would have met him in “armed” resistance. If you knew my poor Papa’s feet like my mother knew them, the regular Epsom salt baths in the stone-floored pantry, Papa’s trousers rolled up to his knees, his bare legs dropping into a metal bucket sporting a head of steam, then you’d have every right to see the ultimate humor, and the reflective horror, in such an imagined scenario, one which, thankfully, never transpired (more to miscalculation than any inability on the German side). Nevertheless, mine was a country where family died, where family bled, where families were torn apart, but still there was laughter – laughter and the very precious sanity it preserved.

My father, for his part, told me of the mile-long convoys of tanks and trucks and cannons that regularly groaned as they made their way across the North Country, from the seaside of Liverpool to the bleak working class houses of Manchester, to the opposite coast, of the bombers whose bellies rumbled about the heavens, of the shortage of fresh food, of the muted bugles for the returning dead. And he reminded me that three of my great uncles had been killed in WWI.
It was this atmosphere, one still scented with the sulfur of combat, the cost of sacrifice, in which I was raised, some eighteen years after the war had ended, a time in Great Britain when the best-selling comics were mostly war-based, bearing titles like Commando, War Picture Library, Victor, Battle, Warlord, and Smash!, publications that rode a seemingly ever-increasing popularity, keeping a nation of boys alert to the recent threat of the Nazi menace and the insidiously industrious means by which it set about taking the world.
I was engulfed in the war-torn adventures of characters like Baddock of the Bombers, Policeman in Khaki, Steel Commando, Captain Hurricane, and my favorites, The Breakneck Patrol, a crack British motorcycle stunt team who, trapped in Germany at the outbreak of war with Britain, disguise themselves as German soldiers in order to wreak motorcycle-driven havoc on Hitler’s doorstep.
These were the direct descendants of my father’s Biggles and Gimlet novels, the pulpy adventures featuring ace flyers, penned between the wars by W.E. Johns, a sort of Santa Claus of the military literature canon, a peddler of soft-war tales featuring irrefutably heroic and virtuous men of British birth.
Being weaned on such a heavy diet of war by-product, it is hard to imagine it not, in some fashion, clamping down hard upon my young psyche. The comics I read were still printed on war-ration newsprint (anyone at all familiar with the uniquely-British phenomena of “government toilet paper” will understand how poorly this paper compared to standard newsprint), to say nothing of the obsessively-detailed toy soldiers I collected at the time, amassing the complete forces of numerous countries, like some tiny, scruff-kneed dictator, sending them off in legion, to destroy one another upon the carpet covering my bedroom floor.
The drawings I made during this early adolescent period, I feel, are represented both my informed familial history and by the very primal heart of our species, the legions of boys, and girls, rising from the steamy stench of the battlefield of the id, their forearms thick with the blood of their ego’s enemy. We might seek to surround our children in a secondary womb of blues and pinks, wrapping them in the fuzzy and the cuddly, but the inescapable truth is that there is a tiny killer in every smiling infant, a creature who’s very existence hinges upon the instinct to defend, to strike out at that which seeks to inflict restraint on its physical being, acting upon the subconscious directive to take the life that would take its life.
There is nothing either extraordinary, nor particularly unique, about these drawings, and yet I believe they are a valid representation of our inherent relationship with war and conflict, of the silent fury that dwells in the human belly.
The process by which they were created, largely based on my three-dimensional game playing upon my bedroom floor, generally involved first drawing two armies, one occupying the right, one the left, or folded in upon one another, as the battle progressed and armed birds fell from the sky. I would then equip these shape-delineated or color-coded adversaries with individual weapons, as well as an armada of vehicles, stationary guns, flags, and other equipment. Next, I would proceed to commencing the action, drawing the intersecting paths of bullet and bomb, creating an intense, angry scribble at the heart of each, marks that I find represent, through future reflection and assignation, the trails of battle’s indiscriminate lack of mercy, the veins of its heartless heart.
Finally, each man, or weapon, thus destroyed, was then either buried in a sea of tighter scribbling, or hastily erased from the drawing, leaving its ghostly impression to linger the killing paper.
Add to this the omnipresent Swastika, the sad and ominous presence of hovering bombers (like bees seeking pollen), the frequent cries of HELP! coming from those succumbing to war’s thirsty grip, and it all, to me, seems as resonant as any tale thus told of the blind madness of man at war.
But, then again, what do I know? I’ve never lived through one.

Papa and George Protect Leith Hill, 1968

Procession of the King of the Holy Trident, with Zombie Troopers, 1967

Low Bomber Over Exploding Convoy, 1971

Foot Soldiers Raiding Psychedelic Rocket Launcher, 1970

Nazi Canon Artillery, with Cavalry, Encounter Mongol Hordes, 1968

So Much Help, Angel Soldier vs. Pirates, 1970

German Plane Entering Houses, 1970

Planes Dying Above the London Zoo, 1968

Rear Flank Attack is Imminent, at Castle Black Sun, 1969

Knights Encounter Barbarians, On a Sandy Dune, 1971

Big Bomber Escapes Castle for Firefight, 1971

Barbarian Village Burns By the Bay, 1968

The Battle at Ghost Castle, Our Memories of…, 1968

It Was in 1870, with Battleships, 1969

Jeremy’s Army, 1968

Three-Eyed Bomber Vanquishes German Tank, 1970

The Red Swirl of The Mosquito Fighter, 1970

Childhood Excursions, on Paper

2009-06-17T22:14:00.001-07:00

The following gallery features illustrations I created between the years of 1967 and 1972, from the ages four to eight, a time when the impulse to visualize trumped any hesitation of confidence, a state I wish was as natural now as it was then. I certainly knew what a mistake was, even as a young child, and can clearly remember feeling great frustration when the lines I put down didn’t match those my brain had whispered to me, but there was something unrestrained in childhood, an unspoken license to fail, failure being the path to “getting things straight”, as my father used to say, about most everything my siblings and I attempted, but rarely realized with anything nearing initial success.
I’ve been told I didn’t walk until I was nearly two years old, all it took to keep me happy sitting in a corner was a sheet of paper and something to draw with. My mother recalls me drawing turtles during this early artistic sit-in, indicating each section of the turtle’s shell, an uncanny look of concentration on my face.
Looking back on these drawings now, nearly forty years later, I feel a strange kinship with the images. They might seem amusing and brimming with the naivete of childish instinct, but I also see something of the conscious effort to compose my budding visual vocabulary, an effort I struggle with to this day, always sensing that old challenge when offered a new task, part of me retreating to that quiet corner of the room, my back propped to the wall, my eyes set with determination as I seek the connection of ease that lingers, with varying obscurity, between the elusive pedestal of my mind and the reactive notion of my hand.

1. Daddy
A life drawing of my father, asleep in his chair after returning home from a business trip, circa 1967, Strathblaine, Scotland. It appears that he quite liked the flavor of his sideburns.

2. Superman
An early attempt at copying from an existing illustration, most probably executed in 1971 or ’72, my exposure to American super heroes being almost non-existent before moving to the States in ’71. Wayne Boring would be proud.

3. Naked Ladies
From a 1967 school exercise book, a diversion from my intended studies, the subject of my artistic inclinations showing itself quite early on in the game. Not much has changed. Not even the functional particulars of ladies.

4. Drugs are People Too
This strange act of animating pill bottles and remedies is from 1971. I have no idea what compelled me to do this. Perhaps, as a recent émigré to a new world, it had something to do with the culture shock I was experiencing. Perhaps I just had a headache?

5. Glasgow Storefronts
The city of Glasgow was a dark and often unwelcoming place during the late 1960s, its shipbuilding yards towering over woebegone streets lined with little shops that seemed perpetually coated in ash and soot. Every trip into the notorious Scottish port was an adventure, leaving me with fleeting images of the brutish side of life, even as the flickering lights in a toy shop window beckoned me inside, my pocket weighted with pennies. I drew this for a school assignment, in 1968, after having returned from one of those impressionable weekend shopping visits.

6. Kids: a sociological breakdown, as rendered by the young artist
While enduring the trials of cultural assimilation, I here attempted to sort things out for myself, applying old world class divisions to my new set of American peers, in this clinically perceptive bit of stereotyping from 1971. You can well imagine how surprised I was to learn that “poor kids” on both sides of the Atlantic subsisted on a regular diet of snails.

7. Fortress of the Future
Like most boys my age, I was compulsive about the details of the world of working things; the operations of airports, train stations, military machines, the tank at the back of the upstairs toilet (it wasn’t me who poured in half a box of soap detergent, I swear it wasn’t). This busy schematic, from 1970, of an armed futuristic city, came complete with an amiable and floating satellite enterprise, congenially named Joe’s Repair Shop.

8. The Rubbles
One of the keys of successfully adopting a new culture is to embrace its cartoon icons, something I was desperately trying to accomplish here, in 1971, with this awkward focus on Barney Rubble and Bam Bam, along with a mightily-confused Dino. To this day I can feel the instant shame of realizing I had drawn the car too small. My instinctual cover-up with the dialog balloons was perhaps one of the earliest indications that I might have a future in cartooning. The alternative was to work on the mechanics of scale, but who wants to do that?

9. Weirdoes
From 1972, an exercise in ballpoint color, and the adventurous meanderings of the antler. A proud moment in a young career.

10. Which is Nice?
Culled from a 1969 school workbook, another deft usage of ballpoint, along with a spontaneous barrage of lettering. Note the written indications of the particular sweets each boy has held in his cheek.

11. Destroy All Monsters!
Here is one of the many battle pictorials I excelled at during my pre-adolescence, this one, from 1972, featuring many of my newly-favorite monsters, Gammera, Rodan and Reptilicus. Was anything more seductive to an eight year-old than the sight of a rubber lizard stepping on a building full of screaming people? I think not.

12. Richard Petty
Though, perhaps watching Richard Petty racing his stock car came close. This colored-pencil tribute to my favorite race car driver is from 1972, I being well on my way to absorbing the prime divinities of the American way of life.

13. “Wresterls”
Here’s another tribute to new heroes, this time the many faces and forms of professional wrestling, circa 1971, most stars of the WWWF, like Chief Jay Strongbow, Haystacks Calhoun and, of course, the inimitable Andre the Giant. Back then, my Saturday mornings were divided between the ring-pummeling bruisers and the Tokyo-smashing monsters. Was it any wonder I’d spend the rest of the afternoon rolling about the lawn like a turbo-charged hamster? My hat is off to anyone who can decipher the identities of all of the pictured wrestling stars by the initials labeling them.

14. A Silly Symphony
The origin of this picture is a mystery. If I indeed took in a symphonic performance in 1971, when this was drawn, I cannot recollect it. Nevertheless, it exhibits a keen interest in audience reaction, the “boo fans” seeming to have gained the upper-hand over the piously-saluting fans below. Was the Boston Pops ever really so divisive?

Drawing on Popular Music

2009-05-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

The following gallery of pop star illustrations is taken from a period spanning 1981 to 1983, when I was briefly an art student, then, with more longevity, an unemployed artist.
They are not necessarily of musicians I liked at the time, more they are those I thought made the better subjects for drawing. As usual, they run the gamut of styles, my visual schizophrenia having been well-established early in my “career”.
The final two pieces were for the very last art class I attended – Advanced Cartooning. I’m proud to say I received a C- for this utterly pointless Elvis Costello exercise, one of my better grades, as I ultimately failed the class. And I’m proud of that too.

John Lennon, all hairy and angry.

REM, all hairy and “college-radio-ey”.

West End Central, a British metal band, drawn live.

Dee Snyder, lead singer of Twisted Sister.

The Who, splash page to an aborted comic book.

The Who, title panel to above-mentioned comic.

Stevie Wonder, one of my actual favorites.

Bob Dylan, another of those favorites.

Ric Ocasek, one of the more visually-arresting pop figures.

Huey Lewis, looking as pleasantly goofy as ever.

Lords of the New Church, ex-Dead Boy Stiv Bator’s early 80’s band.

Madonna, a fine example of my “spaghetti” period. There was something about only drawing one eye too.

David Bowie, in his Let’s Dance guise.

Big Country, the Scots who made guitars sound like bagpipes for one summer of popularity.

Elvis Costello, model sheet for the aforementioned cartoon class debacle. For some reason, we were taught to create model sheets for a drawn cartoon, as if it were a movie and we were animators, which about sums up the grasp our teacher had on the art of cartooning. Do I still sound bitter, after all these years?

Elvis Costello, again, in all his “fuck you” glory. That was my fuck you glory, mind you, not his, though he was certainly an inspiration to any overly-confident, angry, rebellious eighteen year-old, such as I was.

The Super Hero: Portraits in Marker

2009-05-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

I drew these portraits in 1977, when I was thirteen and a big fan of Marvel Comics. I find some accidental/automatic instances of an innate visual dexterity in each of them, moments that are more pure than any I can ever hope to fabricate or plot. Perhaps you’ll agree. Excelsior!

Adam Rich Must Die!

2009-04-08T20:32:00.001-07:00

If you were alive, and living in America during the latter half of the 1970s, you might well recall a brief publishing phenomenon known as the “photo-novel”, a sad attempt to package, in cheap paperback form, grainy, black and white stills from movies and television shows such as Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Battlestar Galactica and Mork and Mindy, with dialog balloons imposed, like the fumetti photo comics first made popular in the U.S. during the 1950s by Harvey Kurtzman and his crew of Mad alumni.
Having been the proud owner of all three above-mentioned literary photo classics, I was eventually inspired to parody their opportunistic and ungainly approach to story-telling, one which, as you can well imagine, required a great deal of pruning of any narrative substance the typical Dickensian episode of Mork and Mindy might have offered in its original incarnation.
The year was 1981. I was a young, seventeen year-old art student, already campaigning for my dismissal from the two-year institution that daily sucked away at my soul. As I had done throughout high school, I ignored almost all dictated assignments, instead busying myself with projects of my own inspiration. Many of these involved cartooning, of one form or the other. These back-of-the-room productions featured a stable of rotating characters, of which Billy Doom was a favorite. Billy was a beanie-topped little nightmare of anti-authoritarian fervor whose arch nemesis just happened to be Adam Rich, the marshmallow-faced child star of Eight is Enough, a show whose dying embers had then just about gone out.
The following unfinished masterpiece of disgruntled art student boredom, charmingly entitled Adam Rich Must Die!, stars Billy Doom, along with Rex, his sidekick dog (as played with commendable gusto by Mick Jagger), as well as cameos by everyone from Mad Max to Bob Parker, in a nonsensical story built upon a slapdash collage of photos, clip art, old comic book panels and my own simple cartooning. I present it now, in all its incomplete, abbreviated glory, as testament to the entirely stubborn nature of a young artist, one who managed to
fabricate amusement from the dregs of any given situation. Enjoy! –J.W.E.

PS Sorry about the abrupt ending. I’m sure you can apply your own imagination and find a suitable ending. Literally anything will do. That's by design.

Jack the Ripper Jr.

2009-04-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

The following pages comprise the existing legacy of my earliest dabbling in the milieu of the underground comic. Created in 1978, these mostly artless, crude attempts at satisfying the adolescent desires of my fellow junior high art class students, feature Jack the Ripper Jr., an almost-cute update on the infamous London serial killer. A pot-bellied man-imp wielding a scimitar, who constantly delighted in chopping to bits a huge-breasted foil named Dolly (whose relationship to Dolly Parton was never in doubt), Jack Jr. eventually became more of a tough-talking doofus, a character I imagined would help make me the next Robert Crumb. Acting on this ambition, I bewilderingly included him in a package of “fan art” I submitted to The Comics Reader, an early fanzine mostly concerned with mainstream super hero comics. What they made of Jack I’ll never know, for they never replied, not surprisingly. For the full, shameful origin of this dastardly little terror, read I Was a Teenage Porn King.

I believe the above three pages were Jack’s first appearance, wherein he meets his buxom nemesis/eternal victim, Dolly – on the beach, no less, towel-to-towel. Yes, they met “cute”.

In these two, Jack does his best to explain that’s he’s really just “regular folks” after all. Nice try, Jack.

Here Jack gets his very first (and I believe only) ink treatment, a fine dressing up intended for publication in the 70s fanzine, The Comics Reader.

And finally, here’s Jack’s next appearance, nearly thirty years(!) later, as a one-shot update cartoon in Seattle’s The Stranger. He finally acquired some semblance to actual “cuteness”. Clearly, I’m getting soft in my old age.

The Daily Pit

2009-03-25T18:48:00.001-07:00

As the era of newsprint journalism begins its sad stumble into the sunset, I thought it only fitting to offer the world the following examples of my own early journalistic ambition, to be left electronically, like bruised flowers, on the plot marked for the grave of the modern newspaper.
The following gallery is culled from the six issues of The Daily Pit (re-titled The Weekly Pit with the sixth issue) that constituted the total run of the newspaper parody I wrote and drew from Dec. 26, 1977 to Jan. 22, 1978, using photos clipped from actual papers, along with a purely adolescent imagination, one steeped heavily in the satirical influence of Mad Magazine and Wacky Packages.
This would predate a subsequent stint as cub reporter for my high school paper, a heady first year with the fourth estate, one that would see me destroy a German exchange student’s social life by encouraging her to let me print her description of most Americans as “fat”, a riveting bit of journalistic fire that would win me the Rookie Reporter of the Year award, an honor bestowed upon me in a school assembly wherein the announcement of my winning was blessed with a hearty round of “Porn King! Porn King!” by the rabble I shared an art class with, where I dispensed pornographic cartoons like a smut-fueled vending machine (more on this in a later post, not to worry).
For now, please enjoy the journalistic buffoonery of a thirteen year-old living in those heady days of Jimmy Carter, Evel Knievel, Burt Reynolds, and Star Wars. For a complete slideshow view of each of the six, five-page issues, click here.

And My Anger will Result in Your Death!

2009-02-18T21:09:00.000-08:00

The following half dozen random pages are from a comic book I created in 1978, the first of many releases from DJ Comics, a joint production with another comic-reading nerd, a friend named Derek (see The Secret Society of Super Liars for the full story).
The ungainly-titled The Deadly Duo Presents Sweatbee & Conductor #1 featured eighteen pages of badly photocopied B&W art, panels I cribbed from existing comics, redressing the likes of Spiderman, The Wasp, and Ms. Marvel as my own characters. The banal dialog was later squeezed into the balloons, in the classic Marvel production style.
The Deadly Duo #1 was sold at my middle school for 20¢ a copy. Derek’s contribution was hand-coloring each cover of the dozen or so print run. I craftily turned a copy in to my art class for my summer project, getting an A, and a pat on the back, from my eminently sexy art teacher, Miss Brown, who was renowned in my over-heated peer group for regularly failing to wear a bra. Which, of course, to us was no failure at all.
Created during my short-lived obsession with the super hero genre, I thought nothing of peopling the story with Marvel and DC characters, a solid legal team apparently at my disposal.
Looking back at the individual pages and panels I am surprised at how primitive they are, especially where my source material failed me. In places the art appears to have been taken straight from the worst coloring book one can imagine, in others it almost (through not fault of its own) borders on the more sublime sensibilities of a post-modern artists like Gary Panter. For a reading of the complete comic, click on this slideshow.

I was a Teenage Monster Hunter

2009-01-26T20:44:00.000-08:00

Artemus B. Googam, outside the famous Carnegie Library, soon to be his “house of shame”.

Perhaps it isn't quite accurate to say I was a teenage monster hunter, I was actually twenty-two years old, but all things considered, my goofy nature then being at its zenith, I was still close enough to the teenage years to credit myself with such a title. Besides, if you knew me in those days, I’d hardly need to argue the point.
The year was 1986. Somehow, I had talked the head children’s librarian at the respected Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh into letting me conduct a storytelling workshop before an audience of a few dozen kids and their parents, a slideshow dramatization of the imaginary escapades of professional monster hunter and portrait artist, Artemus B. Googam, a name inspired by Jack Kirby’s classic monster comics of the 50s and 60s. As a monster portrait artist, I’d first track down the mightily eccentric beasts and talk them into sitting for a sketch, the proof of which I would present to my audience, explaining how I caught up to my various subjects, showing photographs of me in the field, taken by my brother’s then-girlfriend, a student photography major. I thought it was a perfect set-up to inspire kids into creating their own monsters, going on to draw and write about their own, filling the public schools of the Greater Pittsburgh area with dozens of budding Jack and Jackie Kirbys. Little did I know the kids would be the ones eating me for lunch, not the colored pencil creatures I‘d drawn for them.
This being the era of Miami Vice and Crocodile Dundee, I modeled Artemus B. Googam on some unwise approximation of the two, no doubt with a dash of mid-period Duran Duran tossed into the mix. Attempting an Australian accent, I was quickly berated by the outspoken youth of the steel city, telling me how “phoney” I sounded.
Who knew library crowds could be so tough?
Still, I managed to withstand the impolite barrage. The parent’s attempts at quelling the adolescent near-riot only made me feel more pathetic. I desperately wanted to earn their respect, to inform them how I’d actually bicycled some forty miles on hilly country roads to get there, my monster-hunting gear in a backpack, my trademark monster-wrangling hat slung about my neck, but that would have only courted more ridicule. I mean, what kind of a monster hunter rides a bicycle?
Nevertheless, against these overwhelming odds, I somehow survived the ordeal, even the eventual should-have-seen-it-coming jamming of the projector, and sent the little creatures on their way, no doubt to liberate America from its creative complacency. I’m also happy to say that the librarian’s reputation was spared. She, in fact, has gone on to create a very popular series of children’s books. I won’t name which, as I wish to spare her any lingering embarrassment for having helped unleash Artemus B. Googam on the unsuspecting world.
Below are a few of the bleary photos of me in the rural wilds of Western Pennsylvania, doing my best to look convincing in my mix-and-match outfit, looking more Junior Samples than Paul Hogan. These are taken from decrepit, old scratched slides, thus the foreboding Blair Witch aesthetic at work. Following these is my actual show introduction, plus a few of the more successful of my monster portraits, the ones the rabble didn’t mock, along with their scripted descriptions.
Just imagine a squeaky-voiced bastardization of an Aussie drawl and you’ll get the picture. I’ll appreciate it if you’d hold your catcalls until the end of the post. Cheers, mate!

Artemus atop a haystack as the daylight disappears, searching for the dreaded Hayroll Troll.

Artemus in the field, literally, the field where Abner the Sort-of-a-Cow grazes.

Artemus up close, mugging, posturing for a replacement spot in A Flock of Seagulls, or maybe it was Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

G’day, folks, my name is Artemus B. Googam, but you kin call me Art, ‘cause that’s part o’ what I do. Ya see, I’m the world’s ONLY full-time professional MONSTER HUNTER!
Now, I want ya all ta understand that bein’ a hunter doesn’t necessarily man that I carry a gun, ‘cause I’ll tell ya right now I DON’T. (Boos from the crowd) That’s right, mates, I carry a SKETCHBOOK with me when I hunt me monsters and try ta convince ’em ta pose as I sketch ‘em.
That’s one TOUGH job, let me tell ya! Some monsters don’t have much patience for the ARTISTIC aspects of life, ya realize. But I didn’t spend most o’ my life learnin’ ta draw and readin’ up every book on monsters just ta let some impatient beast stop me, no way on a wallabee!
The most important thing that a good monster hunter needs is a big IMAGINATION! (snickers from audience – I think it was a parent) Yep, that’s right! Ya see, mates, ya gotta use yer MIND if ya wanna find those hairy, slimy, scaly critters. And ya gotta THINK like a monster too. And that can get pretty CRAZY. SO, let yer imaginations GO and I’ll show you some of the weird friends I made on my wranglin’ travels in the outback!

HILLY BILLY, the Graffiti Gremlin – Huntin’ fer Hilly Billy is a real dangerous job because the house he lives in has more holes than swiss cheese. One wrong step an’ yer flat on yer back on the dusty floor of his messy home!

FRANK, the Forest Beast – Frank hides in big holes he digs. The trees on top of his head look like regular trees, but then he jumps up and DIGREEADOO! yer on top of his bleedin’ head! He tries to shake you off an’ straight inta his big mouth, but if yer clever ya kin climb into on of his holes and get away. Frank snores very loudly at night an’ blows all the leaves from the forest. He considers himself a right ‘andsome beast and combs his vines each an’ every mornin’.

ROCKFACE, the Boasting Monster – Rockface stands atop high cliffs of stone an;’ dares ya to climb up an’ touch him. “Feh, little people, you are too SMALL to come up HERE!” he boasts, laughin’, stones sprayin’ from his rocky mouth. Rockface has SUCH a big old head that he boasts twenty four hours a day, seven days a week!

ABNER, the Sort-of-a-Cow – Abner lives in green fields where cows are grazin’ fer feed. He fits in ‘cause he looks kinda like a cow but has a pointed tail and he barks like a dingo he does. He wears a golden ring inside a his mouth, which he bites on ta keep his teeth strong so’s he kin bite into the rocks that he eats with a litta pinch o’ thistle-seed. Abner often stands in tha middle of a herd and don’t nobody know he’s even there. He just barks away and the cows run off. He don’t mean to scare anyone, it’s just the way he is.

McCONNEL, the Mill Monster – McConnel is often referred to as “Monty the Fish” by the local natives, due ta his resemblance to an old caretaker of the mill named Monty, who fell right inta the river a hundred years ago. He was standing in a boat, singin’ to his bride. Some say he comes clear outta the water at night to sing fer her still. “I don’t know whys I love ya like I do’s, I don’t knows why, I just do!”

The SPOTTED SNICKLE – He is a very tricky beast, one who often climbs to tha top of a high tree an’ sits there just snickerin’ about everything from ice cream cones ta toenails! If he sees you he’ll laugh so loud the ground’ll shake. His favorite food is peanut butter cookies. Ya all will know which tree by tha crumbs sittin’ around the trunk.

The Last DJ on Earth

2009-01-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

Created in the Spring of 1981, when I was seventeen, The Last DJ On Earth, billed on its cover as “The First-Ever Rock-Musical-Fantasy Comic Never Published!”, is one of my first fully-realized multi-page comics, featuring early attempts at traditional cartoon lettering and creating ruled panels and borders. The drawings were, in places, lightly indicated with pencil before being embellished with a fine-point felt-tip marker. The story and dialogue, as with my later comics, was created panel-by-panel, but hesitancy with the form led to a less off-the-cuff approach than that which informed later full-form efforts such as Bonus Comics #57 and the Jazz Scarecrow. Created on the heels of the summer-long run of my very first published cartooning, a comic strip entitled Flip Rhodun, which ran daily in the local paper, The Last DJ was an outgrowth of plot and characters meant for a second forty-week story arc in the daily strip and a continuation of that feature’s “big-nosed” style. It is essentially a tribute to my favorite musical group, The Beatles, notably many of the cartoony characters in their Abbey Road swansong, and an obvious nod to the animated film The Yellow Submarine. I was also heavily under the spell of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Thirty Three & 1/3, whose popular single, Crackerbox Palace, led to the creation of the story’s Crackerjack Palace. The original art appears on standard letter-sized pieces of copy paper. My father kindly agreed to duplicate about half a dozen copies on the office copy machine at the factory where he worked. I believe these may have been distributed to family, and perhaps one or two friends. I still have in my possession one of the stapled copies.
Encouraged by having accomplished this early undertaking, I proceeded to begin a sequel, featuring characters based on Jefferson Airplane (Aeroplane Jefferson) and The Rolling Stones (The Rolling Bones), but the project was put aside after I’d created only three pages, which are included here as a postscript.

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

2008-12-29T21:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-15T21:02:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-02T19:19:00.001-08:00

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.

Curse of the Stained-Glass Window!

2008-11-03T22:36:00.000-08:00

On the eve of Election Day, I thought I'd drag up this little cautionary parable from the depths of my pre-teen literary career. Written in 1971, when I was a patriotic, civically-minded eight year-old, it's an obvious call to keep firm the separation of church and state. Whatever happened to my social conscience in the intervening years, I'll never know.

My Mother, the Artist

2008-10-28T16:06:00.001-07:00

My mother, fourth from the left, in the white dress, accompanied by a group of her fellow artists, at a camp retreat in the early 50s. Note the Brownie camera held lovingly in her hand.

Born in the south of England, on October 23rd, 1932, my mother, Phyllis Holland, was the only child of vegetable farmer named George Holland, one of four brothers who had each inherited a quarter of their father’s farm. Nicknamed Pudge, her father was a hard-working, kind-spirited man, who met, fell in love, and subsequently married an equally generous sole named Winifred (known as Winnie to her family and friends), a servant from a nearby manor house whose lineage was an open question, one leading to an unfolding of deep family secrets and the clandestine relationship between one of the heirs of the property and a member of the work staff.
Raised in a tiny cottage without running water or electricity, Phyllis soon found an inherent artistic inclination, one not in evidence in either of her parents. Nevertheless, she was encouraged to pursue this interest and was soon excelling at art in school, eventually going on to attended the Kingston School of Art in London, where she again excelled, especially in drawing and painting classes. Upon graduating, she went to work in the design department of a local ceramics pottery and proceeded to build a resume of her illustration work, selling card designs to Gordon Fraser, the top greeting card company in Britain, as well as living the life of a young artist in the early 1950s, experiencing the burgeoning bohemia of that pivotal period of European culture. It was during this time that she met my father, David Eaton, while on a cycling tour. The two were married soon after and, in an efficient manner, produced four children, the third of which was I.
Sadly, Phyllis found being a mother and keeper of the family’s domain left precious little time for her artistic pursuits. Throughout the years, my older sister and I (also blessed with the “art gene”) have attempted to resurrect this latent talent, offering regular enticements in the gift of art supplies, but the resistance is always strong, such a prolonged absence creating little confidence. Of course, every sketch I have managed to eek from my mother’s hand, over the years, has been a treasure worth keeping. I will showcase some of these later period works in a future post, for now I’d like to introduce artist, Phyllis Holland, by way of some of her earliest student sketchbooks, a series of drawings done from life, of her family (and a poor bird), at work and rest, about the old farm house, as well as a couple of illuminating photographs. I hope you enjoy.

My mother, as a baby, with her parents, Winifred and George, 1933.

Finally, here’s my mother, in 1951, as a student at the Kingston School of Art, being costumed for a New Year’s Eve party. This photo was published in the Sunday Graphic newspaper. The amusing caption read: Wouldn’t Father Neptune be proud of this attractive young daughter of the deep? Wouldn’t anyone – even a fishmonger – be happy to make a catch like this? But Phyllis Holland is a mermaid for one night only – New Year’s Eve. In her salty sea-suit she will join other students of Kingston School of Art in their tableau at the Chelsea Arts Ball.

Chicken Skin Gloves and a Faggot of Thunderbolts

2008-10-06T22:17:00.001-07:00

This is an odd little book of illustrated verse that I drew in 1987. It was based on a similar volume from 1983, entitled Talking to the Fat Man by the Laundromat, a title inspired by the song You Can’t Fool the Fat Man, from Randy Newman’s 1974 album, Little Criminals. The original version featured radically different illustrations.
The unusual title originated with a hitchhiking trip about Great Britain I’d taken the previous summer, the chicken skin gloves having been spotted on display in a military museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. The “faggot of thunderbolts” refers to the bundle of lightning often pictured in the hand of the god Zeus.
The style employed was mostly influenced by the American illustrator/cartoonist, Gahan Wilson, and his English counterpart, Ronald Searle, two of my favorite darkly humorous illustrators at the time.
The words, dubious at best, penned when I was still nineteen, are a reflection of my desire to write nonsense rhyme in a lyrical form, most probably inspired by having read a lot of Edward Lear, and John Lennon’s A Spaniard in the Works.
Living in Portland, Oregon during the summer of 1987, training to be a puppeteer, I set up an appointment with an editor at Seattle's Real Comet Press and took the train north one Monday morning, intent on selling them on the peculiar book. I was given but a few moments in the editor’s office, as she flipped through the photocopied version I’d mailed the week before, smiling and taking deep breaths. Needless to say, she didn’t know quite what to make of it, or what to do with it. It certainly wasn’t Lynda Barry.
And thus, it’s been sitting, hidden away in a box for some twenty one years.
If you’re curious to see the whole of what still exists of this orphaned little project, simply click here for a slideshow presentation.

The GoodGang in The Attack of the Flowerman

2008-09-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

I was nine years old in 1973, when I created this, the debut issue of my first real attempt at sequential storytelling. Not having seen a super hero comic before I’d moved to America from Scotland, some two years earlier, I was just beginning to grasp the genre and all its rigid parameters; its need for costumes and secret identities, its designation of powers, concepts only ever indirectly touched upon in the humor and adventure comics I’d read in Great Britain. The GoodGang represents, in its minimalistic presentation and storyline, my initial distillation of these literary precepts, as well as my first encounter with drawing paneled images. The lack of word balloons speaks again to my roots, many of my favorite episodic strips in Britain, like Rupert, having indicated dialog by quotations, like prose.

Big Suburban Fire Comics

2008-08-05T00:32:00.001-07:00

During the summer of 1985 almost every aspiring cartoonist on the planet was dreaming of being the next Gary Larson, resulting in hordes of vastly inferior Far Side knock-offs spewing from the syndicate spigots. One can only wonder just how many never even made it past the editorial slush pile.
I wish I could claim that I was immune to this covetous rush, but I was not. I put together at least three separate takes on the single-panel gag cartoon, one being Big Suburban Fire Comics, a disparate, fleeting enterprise that culminated with a scant eight samples, none of which ever left my hands. Perhaps even I, locked in my thoroughly non-commercial mindset, saw how far removed this overly cerebral approach was from what the editors of American dailies were looking for. Nevertheless, I opted to adopt the Big Suburban Fire moniker and spent the next year creating many multiple-panel cartoons signed as such. I will be presenting many of these in posts to come. For now, I offer up the never-before-seen original octet, featuring two notably different drawing styles, not to mention some frightening misspellings.

An Ample Infatuation: From the Chopping Block

2008-07-22T23:37:00.001-07:00

When, in 1988, at the ripe age of twenty three, I was asked to come up with a two-part, ten-page script for Marvel Comics’ Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham, I went whole-hog (sorry) on the project, supplying not just the written text, but also complete panel-to-panel layouts.
Here, presented in all their glory, are those original drawn layouts, which I have updated, adding the scripted dialog, courtesy of the “magic” of the computer.
Also, I’ve included five pre-layout roughs, featuring strangely poetic shorthand script notations. Note the “ham-themed” pink paper and red pen work.

LT. BUBBA FIST REMEMBERS 1941

2008-07-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

This unpublished, pseudo-memoir comic, created during the summer of 1984, was largely based on articles and advertisements found in pre-WWII era issues of Life, Collier’s, Good Housekeeping, Ladie’s Home Journal, Popular Mechanics and others (a trove of which I had acquired the previous year). All of the drawing was accomplished with two technical ink pens, a technique that involved no penciling or pre-planning, no rough layout of any sort, each page was drawn right onto large 11 x 14 sheets of sketchbook paper, starting at the top left, working my way down to bottom right. The text was improvised simultaneously, written, literally, as it was lettered onto the paper (my spelling suffered noticeably from this approach). The style of the scrapbook imagery is greatly influenced by the old news and advertising photographs I was absorbing, many being direct line translations of such, feeding it all into the mock life and sensibilities of my character, Bubba Fist.
This was my attempt at writing far out of my social or political reach, focusing on the fascinating generation of American life I had recently become so familiar with, by way of the old magazine collection. The narrative eschews a devoutly patriotic, hard-boiled, male American ethos, circa the early 1940’s, one so at odds with my own twenty year-old feelings at the time of the Reagan Presidency that its sense of restraint amazes me. There is not an ounce of my adopted “punk rock” guise evident, not even in the odd parting letter from Mr. Fist, declaring his run at the highest office.
Perhaps I saw something in these older days, something that greatly appealed to me, a climate so different from what was going on in the country at the time, a nostalgia for a world I had never known. I also saw Fist as the real thing, Reagan never seeming more than an actor.
To view all twenty one pages of the comic in a slideshow, click here. You can also peruse them individually.

Flip Rhodun, Space Marine in the 23rd Century

2008-05-21T00:14:00.001-07:00

Bridging the gap between childhood cartooning and my earliest attempts at creating professional-looking comics, this forty three episode strip ran from June 22, 1981 until August 13, in The Butler Eagle, the daily newspaper of the small, western Pennsylvania town in which I lived from the mid 1970s through until my graduation from high school in the early 80s. My first published cartooning, it is an amateurish, muddled affair, but, I believe, one with a modicum of reckless charm, most stemming from my sheer naivete. Drawn at print size, with magic marker, featuring my very first encounter with ruled, pre-determined lettering, it was quite a learning experience, to say the least. The very informed letter following the strips essentially says all that needs to be said about how much I had to learn about the craft of cartooning. And, some twenty seven years later, I’m still learning!

Childhood Art- Cars, Bikes & Tanks

2008-05-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

A sampling of childhood drawings of imaginary vehicles, hot rod cars, motorcycles and military vehicles.