Abandoned Strips

I've been endeavoring to create my own comic strips since I was a teenager, and there have been many abandoned attempts along the way. Here's a survey of the wreckage.

Contact me at paul.allen@gmail.com

An Illustrated History of My Life as a Cartoonist

My first memories of reading comic strips is the 1983 Garfield Treasury my dad had at his house. Soon after I fell hard for Peanuts, thanks to the 1968 Peanuts Treasury I checked out from my school library, and my mom's collection of old Peanuts paperbacks.

Soon I was collecting Garfield and Heathcliff paperbacks. This led me to The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Foxtrot, Bloom County, etc. My love of comics quickly turned to me wanting to make my own. I remember being able to impress kids at school by drawing Garfield from memory. And I made my own Charlie Brown and Snoopy "book." Soon it became a career goal. I told my Grandpa Boles I would take over from Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson when they retired. He told me their families would probably have something to say about that.

My Grandma Boles, meanwhile, took notice of my love of looking at the comics in their daily newspaper (we didn't get the daily newspaper at home) and began clipping my favorites and mailing them to me.

When I was 12, I discovered Mad Magazine and superhero comic books, and that set me on a whole different path. My goal became to become an editor at Mad or an artist and writer for Marvel, DC, Image, whoever woiuld have me. There's evidence I considered marrying my two comic interests, a single strip I completed, focused on a character that was essentially Darkwing Duck with Robin's costume. Take a look:

But superhero comics were my goal throughout most of high school. I spent hours creating my own superhero universes full of characters. My first published comic strip was The Rookies, a serial about a group of superpowered teens. It appeared in the pages of the Bloomington High School Aegis and ran for about 8 episodes.

My senior year of high school I found myself getting back into comic strips. I became enchanted with Walt Kelly's Pogo. His cartooning was masterful, even if I didn't quite get the gags most of the time. I was so taken I created my own "homage," Wistwood. I never got as far as completing an actual strip, but I had a lot of fun coming up with character designs and names, as you can see:

I had recently rediscovered my childhood love for Dr. Seuss, so the strip shows a clear Geiselian influence in style and substance.

Amazingly, my work was immediately welcomed in the Augustana Observer. Fahrenheit 0 ran for about 10 strips before I began to lose interest. I'm sure I had other ideas for this strip, but I was dissatisfied with how it was turning out. I was always very hard on myself, but I also hadn't taken the time to really define the characters, so I felt no connection to them.

I replaced Fahrenheit 0 with The Other Side, a combination of the kids-in-a-magical-land trope and Calvin and Hobbes. The first strip acknowledged the transition.

I was really starting to define myself by the creative people I admired, and the characters reflected that. There was a bassett hound named Lennon (John), a lizard named Morrison (Jim), a pig named Schulz (Charles), a duck named Watterson (Bill), and a cat named Geisel (Ted). And for some reason, most of the gags involved television.

As with Fahrenheit 0 before it, I lost interest in The Other Side after about a dozen strips. I'm not sure why, but once again I hadn't really defined any of the characters' personalities enough to feel obligated to keep writing about them.

I filled the void with a series of "ads" for the campus radio station in the form of a strip called Where Is WAUG? Created in collaboration with the station's marketing manager, Fred Fortman, the strip followed two Marx Brothers-inspired penguins in their quest to find a home for the station's unimpressive communication tower. Fred threw in lots of campus in-jokes. Here's one about the all-female dorm:

I didn't particularly enjoy working on Where Is WAUG? at the time, but as I look back now I quite like them.

As Where Is WAUG? was in the middle of its run, I came up with a new idea, a one-panel a one-panel absurdist gag comic I called Brain Clouds after Tom Hanks's affliction in the movie Joe Vs. the Volcano. My main influences were The Far Side and James Thurber. I was especially inspired and liberated by the looseness of the latter's style, and adapted it for myself. A smattering of Brain Clouds ran in the spring of my sophomore year, 1996.

My junior year I started yet another new strip, The Usual Delusions. This one concerned a woman who begins to hallucinate manifestations of her personality in the form of a friendly monster and a acerbic pygmy goat. The first strip acknowledged my varied cartooning past at the Observer (for context, 10% Perspective was a one-panel comic by another cartoonist that ran in the paper as well; it focused on making fun of the Greek system on campus).

Unlike my previous two comic strip attempts, The Usual Delusions had the right elements to be an ongoing (nosy neighbors, an unrequited love, a premise with lots of potential directions). It was also my first comic strip that wasn't directly influenced by another cartoonist's work. 

But The Usual Delusions wasn't meant to last. This time, however, it was outside forces that led me to abandon the strip. After both comics had run simultaneously for a couple of weeks, my editor said she preferred Brain Clouds because they were easier to fit into the page layouts. I also found myself much more inspired by the freedom from continuity and creating jokes that were easy to grasp, and Brain Clouds began pouring from my pen. 

So for the rest of my junior year and all of senior year, Brain Clouds were my main cartooning outlet. Even after I graduated and had no "home" for them, I continued to create new Brain Clouds. It was nearly a compulsion, one that took me through the next 10 or so years (For more on Brain Clouds, see yourself to this page.)

In 2007 I moved in with my wife-to-be, Wendy. She rode the bus daily from our duplex in St. Paul to her workplace in downtown Minneapolis and back. I loved hearing her stories about the odd things she saw or overheard on the bus, and I had the idea to turn them into comic strips. I only ended up completing two strips. Here's my favorite:

Circa 2009 I started playing around with the idea of turning Brain Clouds into a comic strip. The concept was that retired characters from various media (a children's cartoon, a sci-fi drama, a fairy tale, a cereal mascot, etc.) live together in a group home and have their insecurities and anxieties attended to by a therapist and a plucky neighbor girl.

I had a lot of fun drawing characters and dreaming up backstories, but I only ever came up with one solid strip from beginning to end (recreated below from a sketch).

Other than Brain Clouds, the only cartooning work I've done in the past 15 years is a series of personal pieces centered on the the Sock Elf and the Laundry Monster, who are comic stand-ins for my wife and I. You can see them and their children, along with the casts of all my other projects, front and center in the piece below.

And that brings us to the present! Below you can find links to pages with more examples of the strips discussed above.