Young Milton

Hey, peops. I have a fitting 4th of July post for you. A bunch of comic strips, just as the Founding Fathers intended.

A few weeks back, I mentioned how I recently located a treasure trove of my old daily comic strips for the local Boulder newspaper, the Colorado Daily. Called Cereal, the strip ran from 1983 to 1985 and included more than 400 comics in all.

Strange as it may sound, I'm reminded of Cereal by the recent and all-news-consuming death of Michael Jackson. (It's as if Ed, Farrah, Billy, Karl, and Prince never happened. Okay, Prince isn't dead but he's Prince, FFS! Shouldn't we be taking this time to thank our lucky stars Prince is still with us?!?) The years I wrote Cereal in obscurity were the same as those that MJ rocketed to superstardom with Thriller. So naturally, I devoted a handful of my strips to Thriller-era parodies. Read more » 

Last Monday, I mentioned how recently I stumbled upon my cache of 400+ comic strips that I wrote and illustrated during the tail end of my college career. The comic strip, in case you forgot, was called Cereal. It never actually appeared in color, but thanks to Photoshop, I can turn the official logo into a collection of colorful, sugar-coated letters floating in artificial milk. Just the thing for a high-calorie breakfast.

I also mentioned how Cereal is the reason I was first confused for a computer graphics expert. To learn why--you know, like, as if you care--forge ahead.

Below is a summary of the turning point in my career in one frame. For the sake of modernization, I've added color in Photoshop. But otherwise, the image appears as I created it 25 years ago, six years before Photoshop hit the market, a few months before Adobe announced its existence. It's a blend of hand-drawn line art--which I drew with a real pen on real paper--and computer art--which I printed from a personal computer, cut with an X-Acto knife, and pasted with rubber cement (not Edit > Paste).

Now for the long story: Read more » 

As many of you know, I've been writing graphics and design books for more than 20 years.  Back in those early days, I routinely worked for clients, creating graphics and designs on a daily basis.

But even before that, I wrote and illustrated a daily comic strip for a popular Boulder free newspaper, the Colorado Daily (still in publication). The name of the comic strip was Cereal. In all, I wrote more than 400 of the comics--all the black-and-white weekday variety--from my Junior year of college in 1983 until after I graduated in 1985. I was paid precisely $2.50 for each one, or $12.50 a week. For you youngsters, that was not good money back in those days; that just plain sucked. But I did it anyway, strictly out of love for the art.

In the process of moving offices a decade or so ago, I had sealed all 400+ original drawings in cloth, wrapped them in plastic, and placed the sealed result in a shoe box. (Not the recommended method for preserving fine art, but it worked surprisingly well!) Then I placed the shoe box in a larger box to be moved. But as these things go, somehow a few of the boxes got lost in the shuffle and I haven't seen my beloved Cereals since. Until now, that is. A couple of weeks ago, I located a cache of missing boxes and--wouldn't you know it?--at the bottom of one of them, under a stack of late 1990's multimedia CD-ROMs, was that very shoebox and its contents, in absolutely mint condition!

Which is why, with your permission, I'd like to share a few of these 25-year-old comic strips with you. In which you'll learn, among other things, the origin of Shenbop. Read more »