Please, please bear with me with this one. I think that it might get better for ya… But, we shall see.
So, pretty much ever since I’ve held a job, I’ve done cartoons about said job. Usually on the job. Believe me when I say that this was very, very important work, especially in my development as a burgeoning cartoonist. It helped me in some weird, strange way to hone my chops. And to keep my sanity working for the people that I worked for and with the people that I did. It helped.
Now, when I said bear with me, I mean with these cartoons that I will present shortly. They are rough. they are crude. They are immature. And very dumb, as you will probably see. But… But… I do think they have some value in that they were fun to do. I/we laughed. especially at our own dumbness. But, there are some gems (a dolphin in a space suit? Genius!) in there somewhere and it does get better. The road is bumpy.
Bear with me.
I’ve had a paper route and did do some related strips when I was doing a strip called Wade’s World and may present some of those. I had a year long stint in high school as a stockboy at a clothing store in a mall. No cartoons from there. That outlet wasn’t really on my radar, even though cartoon strips were. My descent into workplace toonage began right after high school when I took a job as a floral delivery guy. The one thing that this job had that I didn’t have with following jobs, is that I really liked this one. After loading up for the first part of the day, would head out locally, then down into Detroit and the Pointes. Hospitals and funeral homes were a daily visit. Every single one, every day. Then back to the shop to reload, head to the northern suburbs. The older ladies that made the arrangements were dirty as hell and I receive quite an education from them. They would serenade me with Bobby Darin’s version of “I love you Baby,’ but replaced ‘Brucee’ for baby. In the van I was by myself, with a radio and my thoughts. Cartoons emerged. Not really about that place or the people that worked there, though…
With a past classmate, a strip of sorts emerged… Star Florists.
Above was a promo that I sketched up a year after we started this stuff. Grelich, on the left is modeled after me (I’m nothing like this) and was called that because my creative partner in all this could never really pronounce my last name. In the middle is Iggy, the nickname of my said partner. See the FTD hat? Hilarious. And then, there is Dennis, the aforementioned dolphin in a space suit. I don’t know why..
The premise? They are floral delivery guys who are actually terrorists. Not exactly PC, but in our current reality, this might as well be about unicorns and rainbows. Of course, it’s all tongue in cheek and stupid and they didn’t really have a cause or an ideology. They just wanted to muck things up a bit.
So, as you can see, these were done in my sketchbook. Hardly the polished gems that you have come to know from me. You know, with cartoons.
We were clever. Long before Home Alone 2: Lost in New York where Buzz counts down his reasons for why Kevin deserves his fate, we misnumbered and mispronounced our numbers. So there.
As you can see, they just blow things/people up just because. These are bad. As I said, bear with me. Even the art gets a little better.
The quality of these sketches sure seems to wane by the end of the second parts. Pure laziness. Oh, and there’s a couple of slogans that describe our strip. “We Do It Our Way.” Apparently a rip-off from Burger King and “FTD… Florists, Tough and Dirty.” That one was good.
It really doesn’t matter much that some of the wording is unreadable. Really, it doesn’t.
The above was a complete rip-off from a Barry Windsor-Smith issue of Marvel Fanfare where the Thing from the Fantastic Four does something very familiar with his own alarm clocks. Shameful. But, we were completely original with the dolphin in a space suit in the shower. All us.
Ok, I wanted to do all of these in this post, just to get them out of the way, but I’m getting a message from Substack to cut it short. I don’t know if I should be insulted, or not. Anyways, more of this nonsense to come. Maybe next week. Please don’t unsubscribe…. Tell your friends.