The final Guy With a Hammer dailies!

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.]

Even more Guy With a Hammer dailies!

This week’s vintage 1993 Guy With a Hammer daily strips are ALL-NEW, plucked from my file of unpublished comics! Hope you enjoy!

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

Still more Guy With a Hammer dailies!

Here’s another week’s worth of little-seen Guy With a Hammer daily strips from the 90s; hope you enjoy! 

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

More Guy With a Hammer dailies!

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!

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

 

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.]

Oh, what could have been…

So, earlier this summer I took an online RISO zine-making class from OutletPDX in Portland. They were the same group that taught the RISO print-making class I took last summer, and I wanted to play around a little more with the technology & get published in one of their publications.

The theme was “Things we love about where we live”, and in June I was pretty optimistic about what my summer might look like. Alas, that window was only briefly open before Delta took hold here in the Mid-South, and I was back to mandated masking and pretty much sheltering in place before I got the chance to enjoy any of these things I love about Memphis…

An odd thing (well, odd to me) about Outlet’s Let’s Make a Zine! Volume 6 is that they didn’t want to make any extra copies available, either for contributors to purchase or even for them to sell in their own store! I’d hoped to have some copies of this multi-colored extravaganza to sell once I could get back to doing shows again, but I guess the vision of easily printed and distributed media they touted in the class wasn’t something they actually believe in practicing…

So, since I have no other way to share this cartoon (or the story behind it), here it is now (rather than my customary year after publication), in as close to its dayglo glory as is possible to scan!

It’s actually a shame I wasn’t able to have extra copies, because I did make my first tentative steps back towards doing shows at Memphis Zine Fest 6 over Labor Day weekend. It would have been an appealing item for that crowd. Instead, I took the opportunity to show off the books I’d finished over the nearly two years since I’ve last done a show. There wasn’t a crush of crowds (which was good, given where our numbers were earlier this month), and it felt okay. So okay that I’ve signed up to do another (larger) event in November…

One of the new books I showcased at Zine Fest was Monster Melee!, inspired by a format I saw in the Outlet virtual class. It was really a soft debut, as I was saving it for October’s Monster Market! I was happy with how it turned out, and was able to use some of what I learned in the RISO class to try out a new kind of coloring for me…

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

An April Fool’s blast from the past!

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 monster inking job

As you know from reading my comics, I try to put most of my creative energy into my own creations. But every once in a while I take a detour into the world of fan art; one such recent time was when my friend Mike Sullivan proposed collaborating on a Halloween project featuring plant-based monsters created by Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics. It sounded like fun and– since I needed to get some more inking practice before I dove into my next project (more on that soon, as it gets closer to publication)– I took a stab at it … and was pretty pleased with how it turned out, even though I don’t often provide finishes for other artists.

[A technical aside to some of the above terms: traditionally, drawings for comics needed to be rendered in black and white for reproduction, so artwork drawn loosely in pencil had to be finished as stark black/white inked artwork (usually by a different artist) before it was then colored for the final product. You can see this progression– from Mike’s pencils, to my raw inked drawings, to my final artwork prior to Mike’s coloring job– below.]

Here’s what Mike had to say about this piece:

“Halloween falls on a Saturday, during a full moon– BEWARE!! THERE MAY BE MONSTERS ON THE PROWL! CREATURES ON THE LOOSE! And these alien entities have assembled from the plant kingdom to seek revenge on the human species this year from way-out in space and from way-back to the past of the 1950s! This double-page spread is an homage to those stories from Atlas and early Marvel Comics by Jack Kirby with Larry Lieber filling in the dialogue (maybe a few words from Stan Lee). Check the key (below) so you can identify these pernicious plants if perchance you should encounter them this weekend! And STAY AWAY from Where Creatures Roam and Where Monsters Dwell!! Happy Halloween!!”

Happy Halloween, indeed!

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

Introducing the Old Guy!

This story from 1999 is another of the pieces I really enjoyed creating during my seven & a half years of Larry’s Kitchen zines (more about that here). I recently got it scanned & tidied up for my compilation project, and thought I’d share it with you here. It’s the prequel origin of the Old Guy, the venerated hero in my very first comic from 1982, a character who I came to enjoy more under the name Emmett Elder … and who you might know better as Watusi’s sidekick in “Watusi and the Emerald Serpent”! I wanted the visuals for this story to be like that in some of the B-character features from Golden Age comics, so I dug out my 1970s treasury reprints and used “Johnny Thunder” and “Spy Smasher” for inspiration. 

(And for those of you aren’t comic book fans, the last gag is that Emmett is made entirely from wood … which just so happened was also the Golden Age Green Lantern’s weakness!)

By the way, I never completed that “Comic Hero Primer” I mentioned … I just found comics that were more fun to make that superhero comics, whether straight or satirical! Tho I do still get a kick out of mimicking the simple art and sometimes wonky story flow from those early days of comic books…

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