All Eyes On The Jumble

Here's an eyeful of my latest batch of Cartoon Jumbles, a sneaky preview of the dozen or so favorites I will be posting over the next couple of weeks, starting tomorrow. Tune in each day for a look at the great selection of cartoon combinations requested by art fans all about the country!

New Math Investigator

This is one of my regular illustrations for the Seattle Weekly, appearing now, in their print edition only.

Hot Stuff and Luke Cage: Three Stages of Creation

Here is a look at the pencil to paint evolution of an early predecessor to my current Cartoon Jumbles series, featuring Harvey's Hot Stuff, the Little Devil, and Marvel's Luke Cage, Hero for Hire.

Greetings From Albuquerque

This is the art to a recent cover of Albuquerque's weekly, Alibi, commissioned by one of my favorite art directors, Tom Nayder. For a gallery of past Alibi covers I've drawn, click here.

BOO!, With Four Os

This is the cover to a story I wrote back in 1982, BOOOO! And He Muffed It!, one of a series of short novellas/long short stories I attributed to an assortment of made-up authors. The covers, all done in black and white, were a study in comic-inspired graphics and hand-done lettering. I've recently colored this one, adding new dimension to it. The odd little story begins as such: Desperate Washington and Mister Tom Duran were the best of friends, but having the two of them together in one car, in a race across Ohio, was sheer insanity – both knew it would never work.

KISS: Destroyer in Sequins

This is a recent illustration for the Seattle Weekly, a reimagining of KISS as a preening boy band revue.

A Large Banking Concern

Here's a sample comic panel I recently created for a large banking concern, as part of my audition for the job of illustrating a graphic novel commemorating their 75th anniversary. Can you hear the cash registers ringing in the distance?

The Taxi Poet

This was part of a dozen cartoons I created back in 1989, intended as a daily panel strip proposal entitled Big Head. One of a few such attempts I built around overly-obtuse humor, riding the Far Side popularity wave, it was never pitched. I've now added color, some twenty-one years later.

William Shattered

The above grid of images was taken in early 2000, during the flurry of photo-opportunities that followed the purchase of my first digital camera. All shot from my couch, they approximate the broadcast of the 1963 Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare at 2000 Feet, starring William Shatner.

False Identity Man Fumes

This illustration can be found in this week's print edition of the Seattle Weekly, along with two others.

Televolution (it's hard to pronounce)

This is my latest illustration for Steven W. Humphrey's always funny I Love Television column, which runs weekly in Portland's Mercury. For a big gallery of many dozens of the some almost- six hundred(!!) of these I've drawn, click here. There's something kind of special about this week's illustration, it being the very first time in over fourteen years I've all but dispensed with black line art for this feature, letting color and shape chiefly dictate form.

The Milk of Inhuman Kindness

This is a photo collage I created back in 2002. The central image I built and photographed, then scanned and supplemented with the collected framework of images, taken from a great variety of old books and magazines in my possession.

An Englishman's Batman

I drew this parody of a Gene Colan Batman cover when I was seventeen, the "lime" in Batlime referring to my nickname at the time, one derived from the WWII term for sailors from the British Isles, which commented on the huge amount of limes they ate to avoid the ravages of scurvy. Adopting the moniker with pride, I proceeded to create dozens of comic stories featuring lime-based characters, a green marker always at hand.

Calvin & Blondie, A Near-inscrutable Union

Here's a recent pencil study for a possible future Cartoon Jumble, a conscious push in a far more abstract direction for these iconic convergences, depopulating the expected particulars of Chic Young's comely Blondie and Bill Watterson's manic Calvin, letting boyhood fervor clash with feminine decorum, upsetting any semblance of a maternal compromise.

Girl With Apples

This watercolor was a recent gift, a painting meant to evoke the look of coloring/activity books of the 60s and 70s.

One Ghost Cartoonist Revealed

For about a year and a half, during the mid 1990s, I ghosted a weekly cartoon strip that ran in Seattle's the Stranger. Entitled Gordy, it was created by a well-known cartoonist, who turned it over to another well-known cartoonist, then to me, both of us agreeing to write and draw it in an anonymous fashion (as had the originator). I think the idea was to have it appear as the machined product of some obscure cartoon syndicate, the sort of oblique feature you might have expected to find on the classifieds page of your hometown daily, back in the heyday of newspaper productivity. I quickly ran with it, unhindered, soon creating a wide cast of additional characters and situations, culminating my run with a long, serialized adventure. This is one of my self-standing strips, to which I've now added color.

A Donkey In Stripes

This is a favorite part of my illustrations for this week's Seattle Weekly. Want to see the rest? You'll have to pick up a copy of the physical paper. Take that, internet!