Illustration Flashback Friday!

I know this is usually “Illustration Throwback Thursday” but yesterday was a holiday, so I bumped this to today.

We recently had a little water damage in a basement storage area and I had to clean the whole room out, digging through a lot of boxes of old papers and file cabinets full of stuff that mostly got tossed out. Some of it was old artwork or copies of same. During the digging I came across this one-page comic I did in 1991.

For a very brief period of time I did some editorial cartoons for what was then the Comic Buyer’s Guide, a trade newspaper/publication for the comics biz. A friend of mine, Mark Engblom, was a regular doing editorial cartoons for them, and I tried my hand at a few like this one.

Thinking back my CBG cartoons were very mean-spirited and spiteful. I remember I did one that trashed comic book artist Jim Aparo, who worked on Batman at the time ans is now sadly passed away, for drawing basically the same face on everybody and only changing mustaches and accessories. I also did one making fun of John Byrne for refusing to work on anything that was not printed in “prestige format”. I had some balls, or more accurately was just a little asshole, for ridiculing artists who were great talents and big names in the industry, and I was a total nobody with very rough drawing skills. Ah, youth.

Anyway if nothing else, looking at this 27 year old cartoon reminds me that I’ve come a long way in both art skills, humor, and being a grown up.