Comic Series
Sundry Comix
Da Boids -1 Page
Nora Talbot -3 Pages
Larry Lagoon's
Fanzine Blues
Larry Lagoon's
Comic Dreams
Larry Lagoon's
Funny Pages
Suzy
by Richard O'Brien &
Bob Vojtko
Low Budget Funnies
by Bob Vojtko
Samurai Nun
by Bob Vojtko
Stovepipe
by Joe Wehrle, Jr.
Backstory
When I first began cartooning, my good friend Haran White and I drew on regular drawing paper. The kind sold in pads in the office supply section of discount stores and supermarkets. For ink and lettering, I used ball point pens or felt-tipped markers. The color was applied with colored pencils sold in the same store as the paper. In a way they were the ultimate in small press comics: one-of-a-kind.
Digging up background material for this website, I unearthed a early comic story from a storage box called Trouble on Orbus! It was a 5-page story that featured two characters named Saunders and Flint. Flint looks a lot like Potatoes, and the adventure is a space opera to boot. So I guess this story, Trapped on Jupiter, was in one way or another rooted in the earlier trouble that apparently once occurred on Orbus.
One of the last comic series I created using felt-tipped markers and color pencils was called Infinity. The series was named after the spaceship and featured a crew of space-worthy explorers that encountered hostile alien worlds and beings everywhere they went. The Slingshot spacecraft in this tale owes most of its design to the Infinity starship.
When my cartooning techniques evolved to bristol board, I created several one pagers. Although I sent them off to several Underground Comix publishers on spec, none of them were ever published. One comic was called Mashed Potatoes and Muscles McNee. It was the first appearance of Potatoes, who was "a cold and homeless pup" wandering the city streets in the dead on Winter.
My earliest aims at professional cartooning where drawn using a crow quill pen. I used this technique on several one comix: Charlie in Church, Bull Shit, The Konvict, the Mashed Potatoes story previously mentioned, Strange Prospect, and Farlie Fan in Cream City. When I started my formal art training classes I was introduced to rapidiograph pens. The control and consistency of technical pens complemented my drawing style, so I immediately began using them for all of my cartooning efforts and later for the technical illustration work I did to make a living. All of the comics created for the first issue of Midnight Fiction were drawn using this new found inking technique.
Trapped on Jupiter was drawn on bristol board in pencil. I inked directly over the pencils using technical pens and then erased all of the remaining pencil lines. The size of the original artwork was about 13" x 16". The tints were added with zipatone adhesive screens. Originally I traced the shapes onto the screens themselves and cut them out before applying them to the artwork. You can see the less-than-perfect-fit on the first panel of the space ship. I soon switched to applying the screens directly onto the artwork and then cutting them out with an X-acto™ knife. This was a considerable improvement.
I was first introduced to Western sidekicks through a TV series about the great Western movie series of the 1930's. These were B-pictures that ran around an hour in length and got second billing to the main features on theater marquees. As I recall, the show ran on PBS and was called They Went Thataway. Each show highlighted one of the great series with actors like William S. Hart, William Boyd, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, Bob Steele, etc. I loved catching a glimpse of the grizzled, old sidekicks that most often provided comic relief or plot complications for many of these Western heroes. They were the inspiration for the character Dusty.
Trapped on Jupiter originally was published as the lead story in the first issue of Midnight Fiction. The print run was classic small press comics; in the neighborhood of 100 copies. It was advertised in Alan Light's The Buyer's Guide. The ad was done on a full 8.5" x 11" sheet and reduced to 1/16 of the publication's tabloid page size. Midnight Fiction #1 sold for 20¢ a copy. As you might imagine the response was moderate, but by the time the second issue was finished, the first one was sold out. Issue #2 had a print run of 500. It also was advertised in The Buyer's Guide and received plugs in other newave cartoonist's mini comics and small press publications.
Trapped on Jupiter was first published in the Fall of 1972. I used some of the pages as part of my portfolio during my art school entrance interview. One of the instructors there was Bill Feeny. He was a cartoonist before he started teaching and was an assistant working for Bud Sagendorf on the Popeye daily comic strip sometime during the '60s. This is a sketch he did for one of my classes demonstrating how to use coquille board and grease pencil. I was lucky enough to get the original sketch from him.