How I Got Started: Comics and Cartoons (2004 - 2006)

Uh oh. We’re already in prequel territory and it’s only two weeks in! Time for the another round of investigation, revelation and embarrassment.

After writing last weeks short piece on my internship at Cartoon Network, I recalled an important series of illustration work that gave me my first real taste of professional deadlines and exposure.

Back in 2004, as a 19 year old about to turn 20, I decided that it was now essential for me to get my first piece of work in print before I turned 20 or I would have failed somehow. Looking back, it resembles a respectable, even admirable, realistic goal to have set; but, at the time it was more born out of a panic about needing to prove myself.

Closet Boy:

So, over the summer of 2004 I wrote and drew my first comic book “Closet Boy”. Not, as many people assumed, a story penned as a coming of age/coming out comic; but one that tells the story of a boy who suffers a minor accident in a closet factory and ends up having a closet inserted under his skin. As a natural side effect, he also gains the ability to teleport himself into other closets anywhere else in the world. Following?

Here’s page 8 of the story, you’ll have to forgive the poor timing of the Rolf Harris content. He was on the cover too….with a Velociraptor :/.

Much of the rest is too embarrassing to post here from a story perspective, I also had a weird hand drawn, with photo textures, style going on. I was pretty into poorly emulating Jhonen Vasquez’s writing too….. It goes without saying that my art has improved considerably since those times, but thankfully so has my sense of humour!

The Vegan Society Magazine:

Producing the comic was a fun exercise, and it went down well with my uni friends after I returned from summer break, so i decided to combine my passion for comics with the heady idealism of my younger self and wrote to the Vegan Society to ask if they would like a regular cartoonist to produce single panel comics for their monthly magazine (for free). They were happy to have me onboard, so I spent the next one to two years producing a new comic every month. It was fascinating to hear positive feedback from their readers and see my comic quickly make it to the prestigious back page along with the puzzles.

I hand picked a few pieces of work to show above. It was always important to me that I chose topics that could make every one smile, I didn’t desire to be preachy or militant (and never will), but found plenty of fodder for humour about vegan and non vegan issues alike. I’m actually still kind of fond of a few characters from these, the moose, the sausage, there was even a pretty memorable Leek in one of them.

I definitely want to get back into illustrating my own cartoons and comics this year, it’s something I really enjoyed, even if these ones haven’t aged so well.