Category: Cartoons

You guessed it.

My First Published Cartoon

~ Mark Heath ~ 3 Comments

My First Published Cartoon

I post this picture every once in awhile as inspiration for those who’d like to draw a cartoon, but believe they can’t.

I’m not saying that everyone can draw a cartoon. But when you look at the early material of many cartoonists — mine, anyway — you’d be reluctant to say with confidence, “This artist will definitely learn how to draw one day. More or less.”

I believe I earned seven dollars, fifty cents for this.  I probably owe them change.

(note that my style has changed, but my signature has stayed the same. I remember working on that signature in elementary school. It took time for my skill to catch up with it.)

Tools of the Trade

~ Mark Heath ~ 2 Comments

Tools of the Trade

I don’t have the hat anymore, nor the couch it’s sitting on. But I still have the lap board (one word? two words?), and the Rotring pen. I miss the hat and the couch, but mostly the hat. My head is immense, you could set it on a stand and use it as a globe. Not many hats fit. They mostly slide around on the north pole. They can’t stay still. They’re tectonic plates rearranging the Earth. But that modest and otherwise unremarkable hat was just large enough to make itself comfortable.

Yelling Bull in a Crowded Family-Oriented Theater

~ Mark Heath ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t seen Katrina, Queen of the Trees, in a long while. I’m not even sure that her name is Katrina. She only appeared for a few weeks. She was too much mammal in a strip about too-much frog.

This daily is noteworthy to me because I cursed in a mild and indirect fashion. Buddy, the frog yelling, “Bull,” is looking for Bull, another frog character. His final “Bull!” makes me laugh. It’s like yelling BULL in a crowded family-oriented theater, with no one noticing.

Or, perhaps it was noticed, and considered unremarkable. When you’re writing a strip, you never know for certain what’s allowed, until it isn’t.

Bull, as profanity goes, is tame, domesticated, Bowdlerized, nearly invisible. But in a family strip — that’s how it was sold; I never thought of Spot the Frog as family-oriented — yelling Bull! felt subversive. I wrote a lot of subversive dailies in Spot, but few noticed.