My History in Comics, Part 4 – Wacko Waddler

 

One of the first pieces I did for Dennis Budd’s Surf City Comics & Stories was a Wacko Waddler half-pager (“Here's Another April Fools' Day Gag”). I can't lay my hands on the issue of Surf City that it appeared in, but I was able to locate the original art and a scan of it is at the top of this post.

While visiting Dennis Budd and his wife Sandra at their home one time, I mentioned I was having difficulty inventing my own characters. Sandy suggested, “Why don't you base a character on yourself?” That kind of threw me. How do you base a character on yourself? Then I got the wild idea of basing a character not on myself, but on someone else's perception of me.

Somehow Dennis had gotten the idea that I was a practical joker (although I’m not). So I decided to invent a character that was a practical joker. Also, Dennis thought I had ridiculously short hair. It was the 1970s; some guys had hair to their shoulders, yet I had the same conservative haircut I have today. So I put stubble on the character's head. Also, I mentioned to Dennis one time that I was more comfortable with the 1950s when I was a kid than I was with the 1960s or 1970s. Dennis replied that he thought I was a throwback to the 1940s. So I gave the character wingtip shoes and put him in 1940s-style over-sized high-waisted pants with cuffs. As for the name, I borrowed part of the name from an earlier experimental character I had called Waldo Waddler. I named this new character Wacko Waddler.

I don't think I used Wacko Waddler for any stories in Surf City, but I did use him in a couple of one-pagers that appeared in the Buyer's Guide for Comics Fandom. Both of the one-pagers were the equivalent of two-page comic book stories, due to the tabloid size of the TBG.

 

The first Wacko Waddler one-pager appeared in TBG #388 in 1981. This excerpt is of the first panels, or half of the story. Although Wacko does not appear in this excerpt, he does appear in the remainder of the story.

As for the second Wacko Waddler one-pager, I do not remember which issue of the TBG it appeared in, and cannot lay my hands on my copy of that issue at the moment. The scan I made of it is from a photocopy I made from a physical copy of the TBG some time later. But it probably appeared within several issues of the first one-pager, perhaps the following month. Note that I had Wacko driving the same car I drove at the time, a 1970 Karmann Ghia, a car that is currently rusting away in my garage.

At the time of original publication I included my mailing address at the bottom of those two Wacko Waddler one-pagers, which brought me a lot of fan mail from readers of the TBG.

The main reason I did not do any additional Wacko Waddler one-pagers is that an unusual opportunity came up. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss Charlton, Jack Bunny, and “Rocket Rabbit!”