In these challenging economic times...

Poster/T-shirt treatment added to this one. I have a copy posted at my desk at work to remind myself that we're not just a newspaper anymore, we're a multi-platform media outlet. It's also a reminder that those of us who have the 2012 Kowalczyk Kartoon calendar get to see some different cartoons on the wall starting tomorrow. Don't forget to flip, and happy new month!

More Stilwell frogs -- Very early froggery

Continuing the digital restoration of the "Stilwell" comics that ran in the Cleveland State University student newspaper, The Cauldron, in 1971 and 1973. This one was published on April 27, 1971, one of the early strips. There was a definite "commuter school" vibe to Cleveland State, and this is sort of a lament about that. CSU was a fairly new university (7 years old) back then, a long-time engineering college (Fenn College) that the state had developed into a full-fledged university to handle the growing demand for higher education, because of those pesky baby boomers -- yes, those same baby boomers who are now bombarding the Social Security system. Most of the students back then were folks who grew up in and around the Cleveland area and couldn't afford to go to a better school. The thick volume being read by the frog on the right -- "Vowels" By Chizzum -- is a reference to an actual Cleveland State University professor. If google serves me accurately, that was William S. Chisholm. I took a class on Transformation Grammar with him. I remember having long lectures about diagramming sentences chalked out on a blackboard and otherwise immersing ourselves in grammar and sentence structure down to almost the microscopic level. Prof. Chisholm was, as I recall, a very laid back but passion person about the subject matter he taught, and he knew his stuff. I imagined that a guy like that could easily punch out 700 pages about vowels. What I got out of the class was a better-than-average sense of sentence structure and the ability to write a grammatical sentence that has five consecutive "thats" in it": "He said that that "that" that that sentenced contained was an error." The second image is a clipping I saved from the April 13, 1971, Cauldron. I saved it because it was the first actual appearance of one of my frog characters in the newspaper, before I started "Stilwell." If I remember correctly, we had a small typefit issue with this event notice, and this was my way of getting my froggy character into the paper. In examining this for the first time in many years, I'm more intrigued now by the clipped portions of personal ads that surround it. They look fake. In fact, it looks like many if not all of them are jokes written by the newspaper staff. Ergo, this is likely from an April Fool's issue, which we did do back in those days. If I'm right about that, then I strongly suspect that this item with the frog in it was also totally bogus, too.

Neighbors being neighbors

More Stilwell frogs -- the first "Stilwell"

Continuing the series of digitally restored comics published in The Cauldron, Cleveland State University's student newspaper, 1971-73. According to my records, this was the first in the Stilwell series to appear in the paper. There were a number of them dealing with dysfunctional social situations. The joke in this one was not original. It was shamelessly stolen from banter by Paul Stookey in the "Peter, Paul & Mary In Concert" double album, circa 1964. Stookey's comedy narrative was a stock feature of the famous folk group's concerts. The strip ran on April 20, 1971. I would soon discover that there was a wealth of original material happening all around me on campus.

More Stilwell frogs -- Cafeteria cliques

Another in a series of digitally restored cartoons published between 1971 and 1973 in The Cauldron, the student newspaper at Cleveland State University. Stilwell cafeteria wasn't merely randomly peopled. There were social strata. Certain tables were "claimed" by the members of the fraternities and sororities on campus. The Greeks would hold court at their respective rows of tables throughtout the day as their ilk came from and went to classes. You just knew not to sit at the Tekes' or the Deltas' table, nor at any other table within earshot of them, if you valued individualism and genuine social interaction or just wanted to eat a bland meal, sip a cup of flavorless coffee and study for a while in relative peace. This cartoon is obviously a sendup to this dynamic. You can probably tell that I did not, to put it mildly, identify with my fellow students who "belonged" to these organizations. I was perfectly content not "belonging" to any group. That is, until my circle of friends formed our mocking takeoff on them, a co-ed "frasority" we called Mei Kong Delta, named after the mouth of a river in Vietnam. I should point out, also, that in my five years at Cleveland State, I never saw a rat in Stilwell cafeteria, although I must confess that the nickname of one of the people at our table was "Rat." Seriously. The one used in this comic, which was published on May 4, 1971, is just a comic device, used in the last panel, a panel that also attempts to faithfully represent the southeast corner of the cafeteria, next to the curtained plate-glass windows looking out onto East 24th Street.

I'm just sayin'

More Stilwell frogs -- Cafeteria in chaos

Another digitally restored cartoon from the Cleveland State University student newspaper, The Cauldron, published on Oct. 26, 1971. It's interesting how some of the cartoons bring back forgotten details of campus life. The cafeteria in Stilwell Hall had apparently been upgraded, though the particulars of the make-over escape me. I do remember that the place got a little roughed up in a riot that broke out the previous year after the Kent State shootings. Hugh plate-glass windows were smashed and chairs got tossed. The main topic in this cartoon, however, is the campus radio station. It didn't broadcast; it was patched into the cafeteria's PA system. At times, the volume level was not carefully monitored, so it could be piercingly annoying. Also, references in the cartoons to how much things cost continue to amuse. I'm sure that the price tags on the plates are meant to make the point that the entrees were too expensive, particularly considering the modest size of whatever the glops in the middle of them are supposed to represent. And, on top of that, flimsy plasticware at those prices? What an outrage!

Boxing madness

If you are sane and you'd like to feel what it's like to be insane, try drawing a crowd of spectators at a sporting event, from scratch. As much work as it was in this case, it feels like a cop-out because, in the end, I lazily decided to put the crowd in a monochrome shadow instead of coloring everybody in Photoshop. If you are already insane, never mind; you already know what I'm talking about.

Happy Father's Day, all

It's not much, but this is the only father-related cartoon I have in my collection. So, if you're a dad, count yer blessings. This one's for you. If you're a dad who still has his teeth, count yer blessing even more!

Annette

Another idea submitted by my brother Rob. You have to go way back to the 1950s to get this, so you youngsters talk amongst yourselves or google it. For the "Mickey Mouse Club" purist, I have included a black-and-white version of the cartoon because the original version of the show predated color TV. You can check out clips of it on YouTube if you feel like you need a Mousekefix.

Bowling pins

Water we doing?

We Southern Californians are now in the midst of the long stretch of time when we get very little rainfall, so...

My First Caricature

Now for something a little different. I'm studying caricature drawing. Well, let's just say studying caricature drawing is on my agenda, because I'm only one chapter into Tom Richmond's "The Mad Art of Caricature!" I wanted to test my totally untrained skill before I drill too deeply into the subject, just so I have a point of comparison. So, this morning, I drew this. It is a caricature of me attempting to draw a caricature of a stick figure who is rapidly growing weary of posing for the drawing. My drawing is bad, because it just is. But it's dripping with story-telling quality because you can almost picture the stick figure getting even more annoyed, perhaps highly agitated, after he takes a gander at that drawing. Hey, you have to start somewhere. And why not start with the masters? Mr. Richmond just won the Reuben award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, and he does some brilliant work for Mad Magazine. This? This doesn't even deserve to be associated with Tom's work, I admit it.

The poverty lion

If you think a cartoonist's life is sketchy, try living below the poverty lion.

The little-known origin of 1950s doo-wop

Who knew?!

Was this really Nes-cessary?

This is one of the stupidest puns I ever spent too much time with. But I gotta post it sometime, so let's get it out of the way. You have to like puns better than you like breathing if you expect to enjoy this one. You might not even get it. The setting sort of reminds me of Wells Park in El Cajon, because of its basically flat greenery with nondescript, boring apartments and houses in the background. So El Cajon. In an unrelated matter, a check of my blog traffic shows that I have a very, very small handful of page views originating from Russia and Malaysia. Interesting. If you're ever in those countries and you happen to see one of my cartoons in an art bin, on a greeting card or on a T-shirt at some streetside market or some such, it's probably stolen off the Internet. Do me a favor and go up to the vendor, stick your face right in front of his/hers and shout at the top of your lungs in the most sarcastic tone you can muster, "YOU'RE WELCOME!"

More Stilwell -- Freshman Orientation

More riffing on the crabby Stilwell cafeteria woman's anger management issues. Published in 1971 in The Cauldron, the student newspaper at Cleveland State University and newly digitized on my blog.

More Stilwell frogs high jinks

Another restored "Stilwell" comic (a strip I drew for the Cleveland State University student newspaper in the early 1970s). Most of the action was centered around the cafeteria at Stilwell Hall on the campus. This one was published on March 4, 1972.

Amphibian teatime

It's California Primary day, so what the hey, here's a tea party pun. It helps to know what a newt is, and, no, I don't mean Gingrich.

More Stilwell -- Early cafeteria lady

Here's the latest digitally restored "Stilwell" comic strip. This one was originally published May 11, 1971, in The Cauldron, Cleveland State University' student newspaper. This was fairly early in the comic strip's run, so the frogs and my artwork in general were a tad rudimentary. I did quite a few comics on a particular cafeteria worker's inability to be student friendly. I've already posted one strip that deals with the fact that she became visibly annoyed when someone would ask her for change for the vending machines that were situated right next to the cafeteria line's cash register station. This cartoon was an earlier take on the same theme. The mention of "1219" bears explanation. It is a reference to House Bill 1219, which was introduced by the Ohio General Assembly in the summer of 1970. The state law stipulated that any student, faculty member or university staffer who was involved in any of a number of offenses related to a campus disruption would be expelled or fired. It followed the Kent State shootings and a number of campus protests that erupted in the wake of that massacre in which four students were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen sent to break up an anti-war protest on May 4, 1970.

A hardscrabble existence

Another idea pitched by Rob Krier. I decided to use the folks from Grant Wood's 1930 painting "American Gothic." It was Rob's idea to have a player star

ing at a tray full of vowels, which, of course, are impossible to form into a word if there are no other words on the board yet. I rested the farmer's pitchfork against the table. Photoshop made it a lot easier to draw the game board from scratch than it would have been if I had attempted it freehand. I did, in the original sketch, but it was aweful, so I ended up using the line tool.

Owl bet this makes you groan

This makes a nice all-purpose greeting card, with art on the outside and the caption on the inside. Watch out, Hallmark! (Copywright 2011, John Kowalczyk, all rights reserved)

More Stilwell -- Protest march in New York

I didn't want to get too far past May 2012 before restoring and publishing this cartoon that appeared in The Cauldron, Cleveland State University's student newspaper, that month in 1972, four nice, round decades ago. The back story is that a major march and rally protesting the Vietnam War was taking place in New York City. The student goverment at CSU, which usually was immersed in issues that had absolutely no relevance to most of the students at that commuter campus, for a change did something useful by arranging for a couple of buses, probably supported by use of student funds, to make the trip to NYC. Students who couldn't otherwise afford the trip but wanted to be a part of the protest now had the means to get there. Apparently, we each had to kick in $5 as our share of the cost. I went and did my thing along with many others, marching en mass down Broadway, where we converged on a park and listened to speeches. A highlight was an appearance at the rally by John Lennon and Yoko. We sang "Give Peace a Chance." Eventually, the country did. But, hey, it didn't last, did it? The nation had pretty much grown completely fed up with the war at that point. Everyone who made the trip, as far as I could tell, was sincere about its purpose, despite what my cartoon suggests. I was just toying with a motif that some students would be so shallow and narcissistic as to take the $5 round trip just for fun and frivolity. I found no evidence of that in real life. The reference to CTS is to the Cleveland Transit System, the name of the city's public transit system at that time.