Tumeyland

BOLERY RANEL is my 1982 one-pager comic inspired by Milt Gross. At the time, I was attending Florida State University in Tallahassee. While I acquired a somewhat mediocre liberal arts education there, I used the fabulous microfilm archives of the university's Strozier Library to provide myself with an education on newspaper comics history. At the time, rerpint books were few and far between. The only real in-depth books on American newspaper comics were Bill Blackbeard's Hyperion Library (Strozier has a complete set). Hmmm... come to think of it, perhaps my mediocre college education was in part the result of those stolen hours spent as a comics archaeologist. For three years, I regularly visited the twilight basement of the huge library where I sat in front of ancient microfilm viewers and noisily cranked through tens of thousands of muddy newspaper images to search for great old comics. Little did I know that my long-time friend and colleague, Frank Young (winner wit...

Here's a selection of comics drawn on ruled notebook paper. Virtually everybody has done comics and doodles as a school student. These efforts to combat stultifying lectures and asphyxiating boredom are "pure" cartooning, with little editing  -- a mainline to the subconscious. Most of these are drawn by my 12-year old son, Reid, but I've thrown a few of my own, as well. I really love Reid's glyph style of cartooning. A while back, inspired by ancient western Indian rock art, I designed a few glyphs of my own. On his own, Reid began making his own symbols, and incorporated that into his visual expression. Next posting, I'll share entire comic stories on notebook paper by the talented Olivia Gibson, my partner's daughter. This one was a guess as to what 'Washington D.C." stands for... And here's a few by me... Bluesman and American Treasure Muddy Waters