 Bag of Pennies (Posted 12/07/2004)
I have a lot of school drawings concerning bags of money. Pennies in this case. Since graduation I imagine bags of money with dollar signs instead. |
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 Tenacious Tenure (Posted 12/06/2004)
I have cartoons dating over a four-year period at Penn State, from summer 1976 through graduation in 1979. This is a late entry from 1979, and shows I've learned a thing or two about arrangement, etc. I don't remember having strong positions about the issue of tenure and the quality of instruction, although it is a recurring theme in the editorial cartoons I was providing. |
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 Rising Tuition (Posted 12/05/2004)
Another recurring theme at the Collegian was the rising cost of tuition, although as a resident attending a state school, I think I've since paid monthly Visa bills bigger than the semester's tuition we were charged at the time ... of course I was earning $2.25/hour working at the library, so I guess it is all relative. This drawing probably went with a feature article or op-ed piece written by one of the staff reporters. |
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 Bureaucracy Battles No. 7 (Posted 12/04/2004)
In 1977-78 I won a first place Sigma Delta Chi award for Editorial Cartooning, largely on the strength of the "Bureaucracy Battles" series ('Star Wars' was the big movie that year, which likely inspired the title), and a fairly thin field of competition. My predecessor at the paper, Tom Gibb, had graduated after winning the award (I think) more than once ... he was a very funny, very talented cartoonist in the tradition of Mike Peters, and was the real competition! I remember this as a series of 10 cartoons, but I've seen numbers as high as 11, and I don't have the complete set . |
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 Bureaucracy Battles No. 8 (Posted 12/03/2004)
Number 8 of the "Bureaucracy Battles" series which, if run today, would probably earn me a visit from the Homeland Security boys.
My favorite bit of this drawing is the 'Tuition' sign in the background. |
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 Bureaucracy Battles No. 11 (Posted 12/02/2004)
Number 11 of the "Bureaucracy Battles" series. At some point during this period I read and was greatly influenced by a book about the artist Winsor McCay (of 'Little Nemo in Slumberland'), as well as 'How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way' by Stan Lee and John Buscema (only the classics for me). As a result, I was constantly playing with one-, two-, and three-point perspective in drawings from this period. |
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 Date Analysis (Posted 12/01/2004)
One of my earlier efforts, based on a (grossly distorted) conversation I actually overheard in the student union building. The real joke here is that I went on to marry someone named Carol! |
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 Dog Power (Posted 11/30/2004)
I have no recollection of the story this goes with, but I like the dog. |
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 Government Dummies (Posted 11/29/2004)
Editorial cartoon from my second year at the paper. In these days before the dawn of the personal computer, artwork was penciled and inked (look at the door frame and the edge of the door). Then the drawing was simultaneously photographed and sized to fit for its place on the page. Prior to setting it into the galley, you could shade further with sheets of gray "ben-day" paper, which you'd paste down on the area to be shaded and trace around with a razor blade. |
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 Fake Beer (Posted 11/28/2004)
I dimly recall this early drawing going with a story of a party thrown specifically as a prank on campus security. Kids were loud and obnoxious but what appeared to be beer at the party was actually Mountain Dew or something like that. |
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 The Floating Man (Posted 11/27/2004)
Picture probably for my weekly "In Edition" column. I can't figure out what the deal is with the girl's face, which seems to be pressed up against a pane of glass. |
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 To Succeed is to Fail (Posted 11/26/2004)
One of my first cartoons for the paper. Not only is it using my high school drawing style, but the joke was almost certainly given to me by my father. I always had a big problem coming up with punchlines, although Dad has no such problem. (As a student at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh he had drawn the paper's comic strip "Captain Duke"). |
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 Tenacious Golfer (Posted 11/25/2004)
No idea what this is for. The proportions make me think it was for an 'In Edition' story. |
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 The Jet Car (Posted 11/24/2004)
A transition drawing. The high school style is still evident, but a background emerges, the cop is turned one-quarter away from profile, and the Jet Car has comic-book style shading (those squiggles are what they used a lot for "Iron Man"s armor). |
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 Kilroy and the Frog (Posted 11/23/2004)
An "In Edition" drawing, I think. I can't remember the story, but I love the frog suit! Has a certain Thurber-esque quality to it. |
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 Leaving Home (Posted 11/22/2004)
Orientation issue drawing, probably. To this day, this is pretty much the only car I can draw. |
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 A Little Car (Posted 11/21/2004)
Another car. The dating ("4-12-78") in the corner is from my grandfather Albert, who got the paper by subscription and saved a lot of the drawings, which I never even thought to do until later. |
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 Minimal Effort (Posted 11/20/2004)
Earlier cartoon before I really learned much about perspective. I'd switched out of the Engineering curriculum into Math, at this point, which set me up for more essay-oriented courses. This came as an enormous shock ... although I subsequently got used to writing a lot, right through my MBA thesis big papers would always but me into a Raskalnikov-like funk. |
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 Martians (Posted 11/19/2004)
The caption says "So far we've spiked their atmosphere sample with nitrogen and put slides of Jupiter over the camera lens. Want to pose with us for the next group of pictures?" The next couple of Mars landing attempts just impacted on the surface, so I always wondered if I had been close to the truth here. |
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 Parking Problem (Posted 11/18/2004)
Drawing for a feature story. The text for the 'parking' sign was provided by a little speciality machine in the production room, waxed on the back and fixed into place. Then it oxidizes and turns a disgusting shade of yellow, hence the smudging. |
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 Pig Latin (Posted 11/17/2004)
One of the first cartoons I did for the paper. The pig is good and it is all downhill from there. I'd transferred into the Math department by this point, which had a lively international grad student population. As a result, you got a lot of instruction in a wide range of accents. To the extent that State College was cosmopolitan at all, that was it. |
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 Under Attack (Posted 11/16/2004)
This actually looks like a drawing recycled from a poster I did for Dr. Mark Peattie's 'History of the Military' class. It does great until the bizarre glasses she's wearing. Makes me think I was trying to make her look like someone in particular, bt I can't think of who that would be. |
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 The Pope Joke, or, My Bob Woodward Story (Posted 11/15/2004)
I had a few 'Pope' cartoons after the death of Paul VI and the subsequent election (and sudden death) of John Paul, and then John Paul II. The joke is sophmoric (sadly I was a senior at the time), but it ran the day I met Bob Woodward, who looked at it and said, "This is really funny ... and your life is going to be miserable for the next few days." He got that right.
Woodward was on campus for a speech, and post-Watergate, all of us on the paper were in awe of him. His comments to me happened during a longer talk he had with a bunch of us, which got off to a slow start because we were all too tongue-tied to say anything. Finally Bob Frick (now at Kiplingers) broke the ice with, "So Bob ... who's Deep Throat?" |
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 Ratso Rizzo (Posted 11/14/2004)
Frank Rizzo was a dopey, mean mayor of Philadelphia, thankfully sinking now under the sands of time. As a Pittsburgh kid, I never really cared much about him, so this cartoon is giving voice to opinions expressed by comrades from the eastern part of the state. |
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 Robo-Professor (Posted 11/13/2004)
Notice how in every crowd shot, one student is asleep. That's me. |
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 Shark Attack (Posted 11/12/2004)
From another orientation issue (the gray is part shading, part the patina of an old piece of newsprint). The kid in the inner tube is intended to look like one of my roommates at the time. |
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 At the Health Center (Posted 11/11/2004)
One of my earlier efforts. I particularly like the secondary joke ... the kid with the sore finger but bandaged face. |
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 Thought Bubbles (Posted 11/10/2004)
Drawing for somebody's feature story. |
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 Toga Party (Posted 11/09/2004)
Lots of drinking cartoons. This had to happen after the big flap about the campus cops getting firearms, which I remembered being incensed about (the cop is wearing a holster). On the other hand, several years later, a student on campus went nuts and shot several people with a hunting rifle, so there were clearly aspects of campus security I hadn't appreciated at the time. Toga parties were big in the wake of National Lampoon's 'Animal House' |
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 Man in the Van (Posted 11/08/2004)
This drawing was never used. It is just in pencil, and I'm not sure what Kilroy there is hiding from. |
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 Vote (Posted 11/07/2004)
This thing took forever. Before PCs, most specialty typeface work like this was done by hand. The lines for the type are a kind of layout tape. The stars involved more work with a protractor than I've ever done since. |
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