Exercise.

Thanks, Dad.

I made this in honor of my Dad for Father's Day back in 1994. At the time I had a weekly comic strip in the Philadelphia Daily News. I gave this as a gift to my Dad the following Father's Day. He had it hanging in his house for many years. Forgive the quality of the scan, I did my best to clean it up.

100 years ago.

Our home is 100 years old this year. With that comes a lot of thought into what it must have been like living here in 1910 and who exactly it was that lived here. As far as we know there was a Dairy Farm in the back of the house (the foundation is still there) as well as the Post Office and General Store which is the current house next door. A friendly neighbor recently told me that the man who built the house was a police officer and his wife was still the owner of the home only 5 years ago. Anyway I often think about what their conversations were like just after building the house. Did they think about who would own the house 100 years later?

Now I'm thinking about who will be in the house in 2110 but that's a story for another time...

PS: Absolutely no research was used in the drawing of that radio, that's why it looks so bad.

Here is a link of life in 1910.

Boys will be boys.

This is one of my favorite Inside Dirt comics from 1993. Every so often I would make a comic in which the main characters would be their younger selves. Doing so would allow me to illustrate some memories from my childhood. In this case it was based on my two older brothers, Mike and Dan, who would spend hours building intricate models and soon thereafter would go find something flammable in the garage and set it on fire. Our unsupervised single Mom lifestyle taught us many things about combustibles and I'm sure it brought much joy to the hearts of our neighbors.

Philadelphia Zoo Annual Report Comic Strip

I honestly can't remember when I did these strips (2000?). I do remember that they were done for the Zoo's annual report. The idea was that one strip would be at the bottom of each page of the report telling the story of a typical family visiting the zoo. For the most part I was directed as to what to place in each panel, but some of the humor was left up to me. Well, as you can see the strip never went to a finish because some bureaucrat down the line decided it was "inappropriate for the zoo." Thankfully, I was still paid but I was saddened to hear that no one would see this since I had spent so much time on it.

So here it is, in all of its rough-unfinished-misspelled-sloppily-lettered-splendor...