I’m going through boxes and found this flyer from the 1980 Atlanta Comic-Con.

I ran across ‘The Monkees Go Mod’ while perusing a bookstore and I thought I’d share a couple pages of cartoon artwork from the 1967 book. Both are drawn by Dick Hodgins, Jr. If the style has a Dennis the Menace type look, that’s because Hodgins was an assistant to Hank Ketcham drawing Ketcham’s strip ‘Half Hitch’ and helping with the Dennis strip.

Hodgins’ dad was also a cartoonist. For years he was staff cartoonist for The Orlando Sentinel in Orlando, Florida. While at the Sentinel he drew a history of Orlando comic strip and a ton of other art. Later Hodgins, Sr. joined his friend Jim Ivey at Jim’s ‘The Cartoon Museum’ to teach cartooning classes. I was one of the lucky ones to take one of those classes. I’ll have to post some Hodgins, Sr. art sometime.

Here’s some new art I’m doing for Swampy’s Florida. The new strip will be up Tuesday which begins a little trip for Swampy, Pasco Pete and Bunny. Starting a lot of trouble is Ma Watson who arrives looking to hunt Swamp Apes.

Saturday I helped out my good friend Angie Boynton with her campaign for school board in Marion County.

This is a caricature illustration I did a few weeks ago for Donna Hartsfield, above. I met her at a restaurant near in Winter Park, Florida, and produced the entire piece there.  I didn’t want to post the photo until the recipient received it. Jeff was presented with the art last weekend, so here’s the photo of Donna and the art.

Too much swirling around to work in the studio, so for the first time a quite a while I headed over to Chelsea Coffee and knocked a whole lot of artwork out in an hour and a half. Above is a photo of some of it.

Here are some caricatures I drew this past weekend!

Pedro, above, is a young 97 years old! It seems fishing is a key to his youth!

Today is the birthday of actress, Mary Carver, who played the mother, Cecelia Simon, to those bickering sibling detectives in the very popular 1980’s series ‘Simon and Simon’.

I drew this for the Simon and Simon fan club on Yahoo, which I’m not as much a part of than I’d like.

I love this part of John D. MacDonald’s ‘Free Fall in Crimson’. The hero, Travis McGee, gets frustrated with new technology. MacDonald was brilliant in having pinning an issue exactly. Even though he wrote this in the early ’80s.:

‘I jumped up so quickly I splashed some of my drink on the back of my
hand. In a higher than normal voice, I said, “I don’t like all this! My
God, when it got so you couldn’t rent a car or check into a good hotel
without a credit card, I had to sign up. I had to have a bank account to
get the credit cards. I keep getting into more and more computers all
the time. Boat papers, city taxes, bank records, credit records, IRS,
army records, census records, phone company records…. God damn it, I
feel like I’m getting more and more entangled Like walking down a dark
corridor into cobweb after cobweb. I didn’t sign up for this kind of
lousy regimentation! I don’t want to be a damn shareholder, owner,
manager, or what the hell ever. I’m getting smothered.”

They were both staring at me. “There, there,” said Aggie. “Poor baby.”
She turned to Meyer, “Poor baby doesn’t comprehend the modern way of
guaranteeing anonymity and privacy, does he?”

“Tell him, dear,” Meyer said, looking fatuous.

“Sit down, Travis. The computer age, my rebellious friend, is strangling
on its own data. As the government and industry and the financial
institutions buy and lease more and more lovely computers, generation
after generation of them, they have to fill them, they have to use lots
and lots of programs, lots of softwear to utilize capacity. How am I
doing, Meyer?”

“Very nicely.”

“Meyer taught me this. What you should do from now on, Travis, is to
make sure you get into as many computers as possible. Lots of tiny bank
accounts, lots of credit cards, lots of memberships. Have your attorney
set up some partnerships and little corporations and get you some
additional tax numbers. Move bits of money around often. Buy and sell
odd lots of this and that. Feed all the information you can into all
their computers.”

“And spend my life keeping track of what the hell I’m doing?”

“Who said anything about keeping track? If you can get so complicated
you confuse yourself, imagine how confused the poor computers are going
to be.”‘

A very busy past week. Above is one of many completed pieces.

Here’s a Florida illustration in progress. More to come as it comes along.