Category: Cartoony Looney

Oh, those days so long ago, when “video” meant something you would hold before watching.

Discovered buried in the Stygian depths of the DogRat archives! From my newspaper cartooning days, a 1980 prediction of shoe bombers on planes. Hijackers in those times wanted to fly to Cuba.

This strip shows that I was still experimenting with the character designs. The gag is one of my favorites.

After this point I switched to working on bigger paper. The next Jeanie Beanie strip begins the run that was my serious attempt at producing quality drawings.

This is the Grandma series, where I introduced a character I was hoping to make a semi-regular in the strip.

I briefly experimented with making Jeanie older, giving her — ahem! — a bit of a bosom.

Note that Wendell’s name is spelled with an “a”. This was done to avoid any potential conflict with Howard Cruse’s character Wendel. But to make it official, the walrus is Wendell.

The pencil work in panel 1 below shows that I wasn’t happy with the figures being so small. Lots of wasted space in panel 3.

Once again my visual ideas were getting ahead of my drawing ability. And in panel 2 the top word balloon should be pointing to Grandma.

After an uncertain start with Grandma, Wendell and Beckle quickly find common ground with her. “GH” is for “General Hospital.”

I wanted to try producing a full week’s worth of a continuity.

It was immediately apparent that I was getting way too ambitious for my drawing and inking ability.

So I decided to do what I’ll call “rough finishes.”

It would take a while to warm up again to working with a brush.

When I was somewhat more confident I went back and re-introduced the Vampire Walrus, which I’ll post later.

What’s interesting to me now is that I had already begun to improve somewhat by the end of the series.