Category: Waxing nostalgic

The final Guy With a Hammer dailies!

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This week’s vintage 1993 Guy With a Hammer daily strips are ALL-NEW … and the last of these strips I completed. Since the storyline was transitioning from this point into a comic book-formatted story (or that was the plan, at least), it was a natural point to take a break. I did enjoy doing them, even if the comic strip restrictions weren’t a natural fit for this character.

I really enjoy writing and pacing for continuing adventure strips (as readers of Watusi’s online comics can easily tell), tho, and am leaning more to a return to the standard 4-panel grid I used in early Watusi strips when I return to ongoing posting of my talking dog comics. Until then, you can at least enjoy the interactive “Give the people what they want” serial in my monthly newsletter! 

I hope you enjoyed this dive into the archives, because there’s more of this kind of thing in store later this year for my big 40th anniversary project…

[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]

More Guy With a Hammer dailies!

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This week I spent a lot of time writing and editing for my big 40th anniversary project, and finished the first draft of a big part of it! I felt a little guilty going on such a deep dive at the expense of not even touching my other projects, but I think it paid off by keeping me present in the world of that story without other distractions. Now I can set it aside to rest before I revisit it with fresh eyes for a final edit next month…

Anyway, here’s another week’s worth of vintage 1993 Guy With a Hammer daily strips for your reading pleasure! 

[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]

The Guy With a Hammer dailies!

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I’ve been spending a lot of time this month digging into some of my earliest comic book work, researching for a big project coming later this year celebrating 40 years of creating my own comics! So in addition to sifting through past printed art, and notes for things that never took shape like I’d planned, I’ve also uncovered some complete– but never printed– work featuring my very first comic book character, Armen Hammer! In the early 90s I was indulging in a brief revival of the character, renamed “A. Hieronymous Hammer”, and decided to take the character on a spin thru the daily comic strip format. It wasn’t done with any intention of submitting it to a syndicate, but to make new content for my own digest comics. It was a good exercise to see what I could do with the daily strip format, both learning its limitations (for my writing style) and how to make comics every day while holding down a full-time job. I have about a month’s worth of these, many never before seen– and the rest only little seen– that I’ll share with you here. I hope you enjoy them; it was fun for me to rediscover theses strips, even if I’m not sure any of them will end up on the page in my big project…

[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]

The bull(-headed) Moose

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It took me a while to track down the artwork for this comic (which is at least as accurate as your average TV biopic), but “‘Murica”, the MSCA art show coming up next month, gave me the impetus to do so. That gallery show is in conjunction with the play The Complete History of America (abridged), but when I learned the venue was asking for “editorial politico cartoon style entries that are irreverent and fun but not so far from “center” that anyone would be made truly uncomfortable” I immediately thought of the uninspiring comic “Mallard Fillmore”, and became uninspired myself. Fortunately, while talking with another group member, I remembered this piece (& how it would fit the theme), which I sepia toned to use as a print to display there. Plus, cleaning up the artwork for this puts me one page closer to finishing my Larry’s Kitchen (where this comic first appeared) archival project…

[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]

Holiday piece No. 2

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Much like last year’s posted holiday piece (which I referenced in the new print piece I did for 2020), this year’s archival selection (an odd-shaped piece from 1986) is going to be incorporated into a new project. Not, however, in this year’s holiday piece … but in a project for next year, when I’m celebrating 40 (!) years as a published (and publishing) cartoonist! More on that to come in the new year…

Thank you for taking the time to check out my comics & artwork this year; it’s much appreciated! Wishing you all the best for this holiday season and for 2022!

An April Fool’s blast from the past!

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I’ve written before about my time spent as a member of APA-5 and what a large part it played in finding a voice for my cartooning work. It gave me a free-form venue were I could make any sort of comics without concern for its final printed form. One of those comics (this one, in fact), introduced Drake, my own evil twin! In best evil twin form, he embodies a lot of the things I don’t like about comics, and back then that included the whole bad girl/softcore genre that filled comic distributor catalogs. There’s a lot about the comics medium (words + pictures) I love, but there’s a lot about the culture of comics that is definitely cringe-worthy … and that’s the kind of stuff Drake loves!

A couple of names of other APA-5 members are dropped in here, where Drake pitches edits on their work to get more in line with what he wants to see. Those mailing comments were a big part of APA-5 membership, but I usually kept them as a separate text section. Integrating them into my content as I did here was a rare occurrence.

I’ve also mentioned before how I’m working to get the content from my APA-5 years digitized & into a form that I can share, and this is a part of that effort. Because [SPOILER ALERT] Drake ended up playing a fairly large role in that body of work…

[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]

A rediscovered gem

… well, “gem” might be too strong of a word….

Since I self-publish many of my comics, I usually find a spot for them (more or less) when I draw them. While digging up reference for a project (more on that in a bit), I ran across this page I drew for what would have been the second issue of a FooF comic that never quite got off the ground. Each issue featured the hero’s mad scientist foe floundering with his projects until (surprise!) one succeeded & led to a confrontation between them. Before I could get that issue fleshed out, though, a couple of other projects derailed it, projects that were ultimately more satisfying creatively: first was my alt-weekly “Continuity and Vine” strip, followed shortly by the Watusi jam comics.

But I’ve learned never to say never when it comes to dredging up old characters in new forms. One of the “anthology-like” venues I mentioned in my 2020 goals is my participation in Cartoon Loonacy, a quarterly APA. Figuring that two pages of content an issue there will equal an eight-page story by the end of the year, I’m picking up where one of those failed attempts left off to tell the shocking saga of FOOFENSTEIN! When done, I can include that tale (along with some others I already have in the works) in a FooF-themed comic. I even feel pretty confident it won’t suffer the same fate as the FOOF #2 of twenty years ago…

(Want to follow along with FOOFENSTEIN in real time? Since Cartoon Loonacy (like most APAs) is only available to contributors, I’m also posting the strips for my Patreon patrons. Not currently part of that club? You can join here for as little as $1/month!)

[January 2023 UPDATE: I’ve closed my Patreon page.]