Funny Papers

When I was just a lad I loved to draw.My early cartoons featured dinosaurs, rocket ships, and lots and lots of soldiers. They were of value only to my parents, who probably still have them around somewhere.

As I grew older I kept drawing, my skills got a little better, and the dinos and rockets disappeared. The soldiers, however, remained until I eventually grew old enough to become one myself.As a soldier, one thing I found is that when not actually soldiering one ended up with a lot of spare time.

This could be filled with partying and drinking, and while I enjoyed the partying and drinking I found I wasn't very good at them.

But drawing?

Drawing I could do.

(If this one seems out of place with the others, I did this as part of a series for my then-girlfriend involving famous ancestors of hers, usually in some sort of compromising position - there was one of her "ancestor" in Lexington, 1776, with Paul Revere pawing her bare breasts and leering "Now, let's see...were these two if by land or two if by sea?" with the redcoats leaning over the Dutch door. This was her descendent as Star Wars Princess. Laugh if you will, but she enjoyed them, and laughter is as potent an aphrodisiac as poetry or jewelry. Fuck Kay - many a kiss begins with a chuckle. Anyway, that's why this one's here...)

Posted to Panama back in the final days of the expiring Canal Zone era I had even more time to draw, and I did.

For a while I even put out my own little paper, a compendium of vanity and nothingness I called "Evac Section Newsletter". For years I thought I had lost all trace of this stuff until whilst pawing through my military paperwork folder I came across a file that had a bunch of these old drawings in it.

I don't pretend that these odd little comics have any more value than the old dinosaurs and rocket ships. But they do, to my biased eye, have a certain charm, they were a part of me back in the day, and the youngster I was then is still part of me today.

If nothing else they are an artifact of a time, and a place, that has vanished like the Etruscans; the American occupation of the Panama Canal Zone, circa 1986.So I will post up one or two of these things every so often, as much to amuse myself as anyone else. I hope you enjoy them, but if not, just remember that there's all SORTS of worse stuff published every day. Just check the magazine rack the next time you check out at the supermarket. Trust me. And just think; these may well turn out to be the Pompeii-wall-paintings of Panama in the Eighties, as well as a momento mori to the wide boy I was in the flower of my manhood.Ah, but I was a roaring cartoonist of a fella then, a regular broth of a boy! Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait,dammit!