Wayback Wednesday: The Pajama Game

I was a pretty driven kid, all things considered. I've known all my life I wanted to be a cartoonist. And I actually made sure to take assignments to teach myself to draw on a deadline. I took jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do, or weren't in my wheelhouse, just to train better. Doing a more realistic style wasn't my strong suit, but I tried it here on my high school musical's poster for The Pajama Game.

Design-wise, and especially on the logo, I think I did pretty well. In actual drawing, oh Lordy is there a lot to wince at. Bad figures, deformed faces, steroid-induced bodies. But you get better by doing, right?

I also was in the stage crew for that musical, which was a lot of fun, and I wished that I had done that sooner. I waited until I was a senior and had a girlfriend in the cast to get involved. But I loved my time on that show, and still have one of the sewing machine pieces (lovingly referred to as the Satan Desks) that I designed for the show here in my house. I can't bring myself to get rid of it.

Wayback Wednesdays: Schooltones

Let's go back to high school, my days at Lake Catholic. I did the comic strip for the school paper. It was an odd gig for me at the time. The paper came out every couple of months, so it was more a magazine than a newspaper. I was a Bloom County fan, as mentioned before, and deep down wanted to do a four panel strip with recurring characters. Unfortunately, the schedule didn't let you build anything like that. So, I had to do a straight-up gag strip.

I sed to say that it'd take me one month, twenty-nine days and 22 hours to write the strip, and two hours to draw it.

The name of the strip was "Schooltones". Lake Catholic, you see, didn't have bells, it had tones. A high b-flat if I remember right. So, instead of School Bells it was SchoolTones. Man, was 14 year old me clever!

The problem was, at the time, I wasn't funny at all. I hadn't taken John Troy's humor class at Kubert, which taught me the important lesson of lower your standards. I wanted to do laugh-out-loud classic comics, and I wasn't good enough. But if I just tried for a smile instead, I could learn and build to something better.

Occasionally, I did a good one. I leave it up to you whether this one was one of those. Here, in the height of the 1988 political season and Halloween, I took a pretty obvious shot at Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle, the Rosetta Stone of comedy at the time.

In the background is someone dressed as Dr. Crusher, because I always tried to throw some hidden Star Trek reference in my strips. You'll also notice my old signature, a Klingon"R" lookin' thing that was my attempt at a TZ. My family had a couple artists in it, and there was a family signature. In my youthful quest for indivduality, I tried to carve my own out, but I was never satisfied with it. Eventually, I went to the familar family sig, and I'm very happy and proud that I did.

My Virtual Refrigerator

I think I mentioned here, and definitely mentioned in my Twitter feed, that I'll be the subject of a News-Herald article coming this Friday. It's set to tie in with a book signing I'll be doing on this coming Sunday at Barnes and Noble in Mentor. The interview was fun to do, and it's very flattering to be the focus of such a thing. I have't seen the article, and I'm hoping that I didn't say anything stupid in it. I was able to recall exactly how many houses I had, as well as not pushing anything off as being "above my pay grade", so I think I did okay.

The reporter asked that I provide some artwork for the piece, so I had to dig through some old files. I found some fun stuff. I decided to try to dig up an old Schooltones strip from my tenure as the cartoonist for the Lake Catholic High School Lake Line newspaper. I couldn't find any. (I'm sure I have them, still. Probably upstairs in some bankers' box, I'd bet.) I was able to find some pieces from my "portfolio", circa 1983. By portfolio, I mean a red Trapper Keeper folder with several marker and crayon drawings that I brought to my very first convention, the Creation Comic Convention at the old Stouffer's Inn in Downtown Cleveland.

I remember being proud of it, and showing it to Bob Wiacek, who was generally complementary. I don't expect that Bob was geniunely impressed by a 12-year old's scribblings, but he was positive enough in a "keep at it kid, you're on a decent path" kind of way. That kind of support is priceless in a young artist's journey. Gil Kane was also there, whom I knew from his Star Hawks strip and other similar work. Gil's art didn't appeal to me then, and much like Kirby or even Simonson (whom at that show I mentioned disliking, since he made the grevious error of not being Paul Smith on the X-Men) I didn't start to appreciate and even like until later in my life. I kind of regret that. It would have been nice to talk to him a little more.

So, presented here are two drawings from that portfolio. One is of Laser Raider, a character I created for my grade school newspaper and was heaviy influenced by Dynamite Magazine's Dynamite Duo (later drawn by students of the Kubert School that I would even later attend myself). The other is Firestorm, proving my fascination with the character started at an early age. I remember being a young kid and drawing characters whose limbs looked like sausage links, since I didn't understand musculature, as well as not being able to draw noses or feet. With that in mind, I'm a little surprised at how inoffensive these drawings are. They aren't great, to be sure, but they hold up just a little better than I thought.

I also notice that I was using a signature different from my "family" signature. The now-familiar elongated ZAHLER with the united H and L and curved R going to the year was on all my Dad's and Aunt's paintings. I think I was somehow rebelling against it, although later I'd come to embrace it and I like the continuity that comes with having the family signature. I did change it a little, elimiating the vertical line in the E. Every generation adds something, I guess.

She ain't into wine and roses, beer just makes her turn up her nose

So you want to know what the next exciting issue of Love and Capes will feature? Here it is, True Believer, it's going to be people having dinner and not talking. In fact, I may just repeat this panel over and over for the next fourteen pages.

Okay, it won't really. In fact, there's dialogue on this page, just not in this panel or the two before it. And it'll be funny, trust me.

I also like the sportsbar setting for this page, too. It's different than most of the other restaurants I've had scenes take place in. And you may not be able to make it out, but that's a Lake Catholic Cougars banner above them, although what it's doing in Deco City, I don't know.