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.