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.
Next are a couple of the first Calvin & Hobbes parodies I did. Working very fast, I was doing rough drawings in ink. Earlier posts have examples that were rendered more carefully, but I still like these gags.
Yes I know that in panel 3 below it should be “whose” and not “who’s.”
Carlyle & Hobson later made a guest appearance in my wannabe comic strip called “Jeanie Beanie.” I’ll be starting a long run of those in the next post.
In 1988 I was in line for a take-out lunch at M.I.T., near where I worked, when I overheard an excited conversation about something strange that was happening with Internet-connected computers on campus. It turned out to be the infamous Robert Morris Worm incident. Another technical troublemaker I became aware of around that time was the notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick.
Until the Internet hit big my primary technical specialty was data communications and networking. There was a period of overlap and transition that I enjoyed very much, when statistical time-division multiplexors were replaced with Ethernet bridges, which in turn gave way to IP routers.
In 1991 I was working on my first Internet-related project, involving an implementation of the Telnet virtual terminal protocol. Working with IP-enabled communication servers from Gandalf, Xyplex, and Xylogics — none of which are still in business — I became very familiar with Telnet and something called raw TCP sockets. In those early, clunky days of online tech I could connect a dumb ASCII terminal or a DOS-PC running ProComm to a modem and dial into a comm server with Internet access to get online.
With all of that background in mind I drew this cartoon for the Comics Buyers Guide. Twenty-eight years ago, anticipating the possibility of identity theft, swatting, and an overreaction by law enforcement seemed extremely extreme. But now, not so much.
Definitely click to enlarge!
The little serial interface diagram of a null-modem cable was an in-joke to myself, showing wires getting crossed. The name Estes is a dig at Senator Estes Kefauver, who is infamous to those who know comic book history.
Not everybody I know is a fan of Bill Griffith’s Zippy, but I am, and Griffith has a point in today’s April Fool strip. It appears to have been drawn with Griffy’s left hand, which happens to be my drawing hand.
Zippy the Pinhead by Bill Griffith, King Features Syndicate, April 1, 2019
Being a fatalist, I would go even further than Griffy, and say that editors have thrown in the towel on comic strips all together. Although a recent kerfuffle in the Boston Globe showed that it’s still too early to cut the comics page too deeply.
I admire everyone who has found a place in what’s left of syndicated cartooning, but that doesn’t mean I admire all of their work. Some cartoonists simply can’t draw. This post includes a couple of quickie cartoons that appeared in the Comic’s Buyer’s Guide so very long ago, when I was struggling to re-learn how to draw.
What really happened after Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny returned to Earth
Here is another one of the Calvin & Hobbes parody tributes I did. I was working towards doing a mash-up with Dennis the Menace, but never got there because — wouldn’t ya know it? — I became a dad.
I never got around to inking this installment of C&H, despite completing the pencils. My ideas about Carlyle being a “holy terror” — a favorite expression of my mother’s — were getting a little “out there.”
“Honey, do you think Carlyle bothers the neighbors very much?” “Oh, I’m sure they’d say something if there was a problem, dear.” “Why do you ask?”
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.
Click to enlarge, but you know that
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.
“I’m the NRA!”
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.
Carlyle & Hobson, by Watterdown
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.
“Can’t Catch Me! Can’t Catch Me!” “I Take it Back! I Take it Back!”
