What’s that?  You wanna see more comics? You need your Harold and Jimmy and WonderBrat fix????

Boy, do I have a site for you!

http://www.gocomics.com/mighty-wonderbrat

You can even have comics sent to your email weekly!  Just click on the link below the strip and follow the steps.

Thanks to all of my loyal fans… Hamstertails ends, but WonderBrat continues!

Thanks for reading!  See you there!

GarE

Okay… back to the new stuff!

I had a couple of those dreams recently where I had to take a test but hadn’t been to class all year… I even had a follow-up dream where I told somebody about the dream I’d just had where I was in school and didn’t go to class all year!  That’s how realistic that first dream was.  Anywho, those dreams inspired this strip.

And, for a last little peek down Memory Lane (for now, anyway), I chose yet another of my personal favorites from the Daily Kent Stater.  Me and my good buddies John and Ralph used to like to go to local ballparks and hit softballs to each other every now and then.  The batter would toss them to himself and (theoretically, anyway) hit it to the other two, who were waiting in the outfield.  I had a bit of a penchant for whiffing, though, thus the inspiration for this strip (and this one as well).

I enjoyed the big buildup of this strip, the reverence they show toward the first hit of the season, and how it all goes down the toilet when Harold swings and misses.  And Jimmy’s mocking clap at the end, as well.  I received many of them from my friends throughout the years… and I really did look forward to spring every year when things finally warmed and dried up enough for me to be able to go outside and play (and still do, actually!)

On a side note, check out how big Harold’s schnozz is compared to Jimmy’s!  (That’s his nose, for those of you not as familiar with fuddy-duddy terms as me…)

As we continue our trip down WonderBrat Memory Lane, the Daily Kent Stater years, this is another one of my favorites from that era.  I think maybe it’s because there’s an element of surprise at the end… we don’t really know for sure exactly what’s doing all the whooshing and looping until we see WonderBrat lying dazed at the bottom of the tree… and the fact that he was silly enough to buy into the idea of “night-vision sunglasses” was kinda funny to me too…

I seem to recall this one being a personal favorite of my brother Wally’s… although whether or not he remembers that is another story!  It is kinda funny to imagine a superhero being concussed and glass-embedded, lying on a hillside, as a result of trying to change in a phone booth, though, I do have to admit…  it kinda hearkens back to my previous strip about phone booths, too….

Another personal favorite of mine from the Daily Kent Stater days… for those of you who aren’t from northeast Ohio, Superhost was a local TV show; he showed Three Stooges shorts and Godzilla movies on Saturday afternoons. I likely never would have found those treasures had Superhost not introduced me to them…. although some would argue I would have been better off if he hadn’t!

They’d be wrong, of course…

Sorry for the white streaks running through the middle of some of these strips… the strips have been sitting in an old scrapbook for years, and there’s a glare from the plastic cover over them, but they’re so old, I’m afraid to take off the plastic cover, lest I rip the strips….

Oh, well… kind of adds a homey touch, wouldn’tcha say?

This is a WonderBrat strip from my college newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater.  It’s the exact same strip as Hamster Tails, really, just with a little more emphasis on WonderBrat.  This strip is one of my personal favorites.  I was trying to explain how Harold became WonderBrat, which you’ll notice is a little bit different from how I explained it in Hamster Tails (http://hamstertails.com/comic/wonderbrat-begins-1/).  One of the nice things about drawing comic strips, though, is that you can change the story as many times as you want – especially when the comics run 20 years apart!

Take a trip back in time with me, if you will… to the days when a boy’s fancy turned to the funny pages, and he wanted to be a syndicated cartoonist more than anything else in the whole world…

Not so much different from now, really!  Except that the boy grew up.  Physically, anyway.

I am taking a short break from making new Hamster Tails strips for a few weeks, and I thought it might be nice to show you some of my old ‘toons from the vault that most of you have never seen before.

This was my very first published work.  In my hometown newspaper, the Kent-Ravenna Record Courier, they ran a feature once a week called the Mini Page.  I think it appeared in lots of papers all around the country, and may still, for all I know.  But you could send drawings in to the Mini Page, and, if selected, they would run in your local paper.

So… I drew a picture of WonderBrat and the gang, and lo and behold, they printed it for all of the Kent/Ravenna, Ohio area to see.

One of the fun things about this drawing that I like to point out is that it ran on the same day that my brother Mike came home to visit us from California, so he got to enjoy the fact that the whole world (well, our little corner of it, anyway) knew that he was secretly the crime-fighter Zitman.

Luckily, he had a good sense of humor about it.  He must have, because I’m still alive to tell you about it.

Enjoy!  Next week, we’ll explore some strips from WonderBrat’s days in the Daily Kent Stater!