Cartoony Looney – 10

Comic book editor and publisher Cat Yronwode had a column in the Comics Buyer’s Guide called Fit to Print. The column had header drawings that were submitted by anybody and everybody.

My submissions were strange in sort of an underground cartooning way. I made anagrams out of Cat’s name and the name of her column, and I used Gyro Gearloose’s little lightbulb helper character as a springboard for ideas. There is a six year gap between these two samples, with the top one being from 1990.

Cartoony Looney – 9

A couple more drawings from my time doing graphics work at a newspaper.

And, what the heck, here is a single panel example of my comic book drawing style, from when drawing that way still mattered to me. It looks rather generic because I was focusing on structure, and not style. This is from my portfolio that I showed to Joe Orlando at DC Comics, who said I “showed potential.”

Cartoony Looney – 8

Okay, I was wrong. I’m not ready to start showing Jeanie Beanie strips. This was a strong editorial piece in CBG I drew in protest of the surveillance and harassment of comic book shops, and the arrests of some owners, for selling underground comics. There’s a reference to “Watchmen” in the last panel.

I should note that I knew the notorious “Cherry Pop Tart” comics only by reputation, and I was a couple of years away from being the father of a son. Would I have let him see something like Cherry when he was 10-12 years old? No, but I had some Playboys when I was 11.

Speaking of becoming a dad, appearing below are a few panels from the last thing I worked on before that happened. But even with my wife’s due date approaching I was still traveling on business and couldn’t get the piece done before the day of the blessed event.