Category: Cartooning

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.

My attempt at a comic strip was called Jeanie Beanie. The cast of characters…

Beckle, aka “Feather Duster”

Wendell Wilton, aka “Blubber Buns”

Jeanie, aka “Bean Head”

The camcorder Beckle is holding gives away the vintage. Jeanie was named after my twin sister. The bird and the walrus were childhood characters I performed, called Ba-Bird and Wally. Walter Lantz had a Wally Walrus cartoon character that spoke in a Swedish — or was it Norwegian? — accent and had a broken tusk. Wally was mediocre at best, and somewhere around age 10 I felt I had a better idea for a walrus character.

The premise of the strip at first was the characters would run a bookstore. I eventually realized that, like Jon being a cartoonist in Garfield, the setup was unnecessary, so I abandoned that idea, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll start at the beginning in the next post.

Yesterday’s single-panel Crankshaft comic strip reminded me of something I drew over 20 years ago, after reading about the introduction of the DVD format and the first widescreen, flat panel TV’s. I’ll explain the premise behind my comic strip when I post some more examples.

I really admire the artwork in Crankshaft. Until a couple of years ago it was drawn by Chuck Ayers. Since ending his run on Crankshaft, the art has been handled by Dan Davis, working very closely to Ayers’ style. As you can see in this picture, Davis uses a computer drawing tablet. If I ever get my drawing arm and brain warmed up again, I will remain a pencil and ink guy.