Moongeeks.com

The Journey

  By age 5, I announced that I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist.
Cartoons were my passion, if there was a piece of paper to be had,
I would soon be filling it with drawings. I remember once as a child,
the neighbor who lived across the street got a job in a local department store.
One of her tasks was to remove the shirt-cardboard from men’s shirts before
putting them out on the display racks. She would save up stacks of this paper
and bring it home for the neighborhood kids to draw on. I remember how
happy receiving the paper would make us feel, and how grateful we were.
That paper was like a ray of sunshine on those cold rainy winter days
spent inside, in soggy, wet Seattle. It is amazing how a small act of
human kindness can become a memory that lasts a lifetime.

In 5th grade the bookmobile would come to our school. I remember finding
in the reference section (the books that only teachers could check out) a collection
of books called, “Best Cartoons of (and it would be of a given year)”. I asked my teacher
if she would check one of these books out for me because they were filled with cartoons.
Knowing how much I liked cartoons, she agreed, and I spent many hours practicing,
attempting to draw like the cartoonists in these books. Many of these cartoons were from
The New Yorker. One day, when a bunch of the guys were standing around my desk looking
over my shoulder at the cartoons that filled the pages, the teacher came up behind them.
She peeked over their shoulders, and discovered that some of the other cartoons were
from other popular magazines, like Playboy. That was the end of Best Cartoons.
And probably one of the reasons why I never went down that avenue to market
my cartoons, the magazine genre. 

I drew cartoons for my high school newspaper and later
attended Washington State University, majoring in advertising
with a minor in art. My freshman year of college I lived in a dorm.
For some reason that I can't explain, parties always ended in our room.
My roommate and I never started them, and we never planned them,
but without fail, parties always found their way to our room. On many
mornings about 3:00 AM there would be a pounding on the door…
“Yogi!”...“Turn down the music!”

It would be our next door neighbor, the foreign exchange student from
Sweden. We’d apologize, and laugh. As time went by, that neighbor
would borrow my Mad magazines, in exchange I would borrow his
kickboxing bag for working out, as we both boxed.
I left WSU to study design.

Years later I saw him on Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.
He went on to become the Russian boxer in “Rocky IV”,
Dolph Lundgren.
You just never know
what interesting characters
are sitting right next to you.

The in between years.
Between college and the present,
a lot of water has flowed beneath the bridge,
these were the story building years. Filled with
family and friends, school, work, people, places, and things.
The ingredients that many of us call life. And if you throw
all that into a sieve, work it, shake it, and work it
some more, what falls out is the good stuff…
For me it’s a comic strip called: Moongeeks.
I hope you enjoy it.