This is something I drew — yikes! — 40 years ago when I was working for a small daily newspaper. It was my way of drawing in a style that somewhat resembled underground comics. I had not yet come up with the “Dog Rat” pen name.
I won’t bother telling the events that led to me deciding on a technology career and abandoning cartooning. But I didn’t let go of pencil and ink completely, because by the end of the 80’s I was an occasional contributor to the now-defunct publication The Comics Buyer’s Guide.
Edited by the late Don Thompson and his wife Maggie, a highly respected team in comic book circles, CBG was a welcome outlet for this frustrated wannabe cartoonist. I was surprised and pleased when this contribution, a parody of an ad campaign at the time, was accepted and published.
Most of my work for CBG was awful. My excuse to myself was I’d gotten married and bought a house, and my job was very demanding and it required a lot of traveling. The truth was I’d forgotten how to draw! But I had fun and I thought a few of the CBG pieces, like the one below, turned out all right. Except for the references to baseball cards and Hummels, this was semi-autobiographical.
Eventually I felt that I’d started to re-learn how to draw. I began working on an homage to Calvin & Hobbes called Carlyle & Hobson, named after two other philosophers.
Soon after that I became a father. Not only did I give up contributing to CBG, I stopped drawing and I even took several years off from running. There was no choice but to concentrate on the demands and responsibilities of real life.
