Stilwell frogs

While I've been doodling comically since I was a kid, the origin of my cartoon art is "Stilwell," the comic strip I drew for the weekly student newspaper at Cleveland State University, circa 1971-73. I tried to satirize campus life, using little froggy characters. Some of the things I targeted, such as the crabby cafeteria lady who used to work in the eatery in Stilwell Hall, in the center of the campus, resonated, and the strip had a bit of a following.

The strip died when I graduated, but the characters stayed with me, and about 40 years later, fairly recently, I began to toy with the idea of reviving the strip for a general audience. Here's what I consider a successful effort.

But it just didn't go very far from there, so I kind of put that idea back on the shelf, in favor of the generic visual puns I've been doing for the past 15 months. However, I did tackle one major Stilwell frog exercise that I had a burning curiosity about. I wondered if I could do a Stilwell frog parody of the character-jammed cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. It took many hours over many weeks, but the result stands as one of my favorite images. Which is why I'm injecting it here.