When
I was a kid, I wanted to be a cartoonist. So I wrote and drew a comic strip
about my dog, Pokey (1978-1992). Just recently a box of personal items was
recovered from the last house I had lived in. It was full of scrapbooks,
photos, and tons of drawings including many of the Pokey the Puppy™ comics.
Now, when I say many, I mean a lot – hundreds of
strips, random drawings of Pokey™ and other characters, and even full comic books like Pokey™ Goes to Ocracoke, Pokey™
Goes to Egypt, and a unfinished western one that has no title. I had forgotten
about most of this stuff.
Like any aspiring cartoonist, I dreamed of
getting my comics into the newspaper. Well, one of the strips did make print,
but not the funny pages (click on image to get a larger look):
You can click on image to get a larger look, but here's a bigger image of the strip:
So yeah, the strip appeared in a Pet of the Week feature in the Chapel Hill Newspaper.
Some people may say that Pokey™ was a
Snoopy knock-off. Those people would be right. Snoopy indeed was the model for
the character, despite the fact she was based on my dog. Hey, I was a kid and
influence of Peanuts was huge.
I’ve decided that, starting tomorrow, to share
the comics, one strip or page of one of the comic books every weekday until I
run out. Some are sketchy and unfinished so I’m going to clean up and ink in some so they’ll be more readable (revisionism?). But I'm going to leave the grammatical errors intact to keep their integrity (or something like that).
So I hope you’ll join me on this trip down
memory lane and get to know this sometimes very crudely drawn puppy and her
outlook on life (not really). I'll leave you with this (apparently I wanted Pokey™ to be a rock star).
You see? The sunglasses and all does look a bit like Snoopy’s Joe Cool persona. Original I was not. Still, some of the strips make attempts for Pokey to grow beyond that. Stay tuned to see how.
More later...
More later...
