Category: Cartoony Looney

They’ll be here soon, but first I have to double-check the tax returns before finalizing.

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.

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.”

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.

A few more of my cartoons that were in CBG, and a few that weren’t.

A tribute to EC Comics.

A tribute to Carl Barks.

A tribute to Donald Trump. Kidding!

That was one of my worst drawings to appear in CBG, but it shows I didn’t like the not-duck Donald even 30 years ago, and my opinion of him hasn’t changed since then. Hey, at least I didn’t give him a small hand! The clichéd use of money bags is unforgivable. That’s supposed to be a picture of Carl Barks on Uncle Scrooge’s wall.

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.

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.