March 27th, 2014

Examples from way, way, way back in the archives

by John Hambrock

Several years ago I had the great honor of having my road to syndication story printed in several issues of John Read’s amazing “Stay Tooned” Magazine. In it, I shared examples of some of my first cartoon strips. I remember like yesterday creating these first comic strips. The year was 1991, and I created them very early in the morning in my basement studio. I used to put in a full day at my Chicago agency, come home and spend a few hours with my young son, and then head off to my basement studio and work until 2-3 a.m. Cartooning was a new found passion for me, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I had no idea where it was going to lead me, but at that point it really didn’t matter. Eventually, those late nights, coupled with the stress of my job, would catch up to me. I wound up getting mononucleosis, which put me out of commission for over 3 weeks. I did recover, and have since learned to temper my late night enthusiasm a little.

In these first strips, you can see I was just learning out how to use the tools I had chosen. These were done with a series if Rapidographs. 5-6 years later I chose to try a brush and a bottle of ink, my current tools of choice.

Anne and I worked together on this animal strip, which we aptly called “Second Nature”. It did generate some interest with the syndicates, but we ultimately stopped creating it after 2 years. I’ll share some of the early strips I created after Second Nature in my next post.