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!”

My History in Comics, Part 3 – Surf City and Super Santa

House ad on back cover of Surf City Comics & Stories vol. 2, no.3, 1979

 Around the start of my last year in college a lawyer named Dennis Budd opened a comic shop on the edge of the SMSU campus. He would later go on to become a judge in the Traffic Court in Springfield Missouri. He was married to another lawyer, Sandra Skinner, who would later go on to teach law classes at one of the many colleges in Springfield. 

Dennis was a Carl Barks fan who named his comic shop Duckburg Books & Comics. He told me he patterned his shop after the Rock Bottom comic shop in Columbia Missouri, and that he opened his own shop in Springfield as an experiment to gain some experience in running a business. 

I showed Dennis some of my work and he started pushing me towards doing funny animal work, as he thought I would be wasting my life doing superhero stories. He started loaning me rare, valuable Barks comics from his extensive personal collection. This was back in the late 1970s when the Barks stories, for the most part, still had not been reprinted. And he did turn me into a Barks fan. 

Dennis did cartooning as a hobby, and then started publishing as a hobby. He started a fanzine he named Surf City Comics & Stories. It was an 8-and-a-half by 11 magazine he had printed up at some quick-print litho shop there in Springfield that usually printed things like sale flyers for businesses. Dennis would have maybe a hundred or so copies printed up of each issue. He and his wife Sandy folded the sheets of paper themselves and used a long-reach stapler to staple the issues together. 

I don't recall whether he asked me to contribute to Surf City, or if I asked to contribute to it. But either way it was inevitable that I would be contributing to it. At the time I felt as if I was doing him a favor by contributing to it, but in reality he was doing me the favor. Surf City got me to doing stories that were longer than a single page. And later, it was one of the Surf City stories that got me the opportunity to do a story for Charlton.

 

The sample I sent to Charlton was the Surf City story “Super Santa!”, which appeared in Surf City Comics & Stories vol. 2, no. 3, 1979. The story featured Chuck Duck, a character created by Dennis, that he named after Chuck Berry. I drew the character more like a duck character of my own, Waldo Waddler, than like Dennis’ Chuck Duck, and gave the character a hairstyle that more closely resembled Dennis’ hairstyle than the hair he put on his Chuck Duck. I did the story under my Mr. Mystery Artist pseudonym. I wrote it one panel at a time, panel by panel, not knowing what would come next as I wrote. Then I drew, lettered, and inked it panel by panel, one panel at a time.

 

I was still doing fanzine art on cheap student art paper. I found that if I inked with a technical drafting pen (such as Rapidograph, Staedtler Marsmatic 700, and Reform Refograph drafting pens) it was just barely possible to ink on that paper without the paper buckling and the ink bleeding and feathering. Hence, that unique inking style that Cat Yronwode would call “Armstrong's quirky inking style” in her TBG “Fit to Print” column.

 

 

The story was basically an extended dream sequence, ten pages long, filled with references to Carl Barks and superhero comics. I did “Super Santa!” at the pace of about a panel a day, starting in September 1979. By December 1979 I had it all penciled and lettered, but had only inked it to the end of page seven. It was a Christmas story, and it was nearly Christmas. So I took the pages to Dennis and suggested he print just the first seven pages. The way I had written the story, panel-to-panel, it could easily have ended on page seven. The only reason I had continued to page ten was that I wanted to do a ten-pager as so many of Carl Barks' stories had been ten-pagers. But I was getting sick and tired of the story after spending three or four months on it and told Dennis I would be happy to let him ink the last three pages. Dennis seemed eager to do the inking of those last three pages, and I think he did a good job.

 

The story was later reprinted in the Fantagraphics comic book Critters #11, 1987. The print quality of the Critters reprint was far superior to the murky quick-print version in Surf City. However, the scans of the story in this blog post are from the original Surf City version. 

So Spider-Ham was not my first experience with a funny animal superhero.

The next post in this series will be about the creation of a comic book character inspired by myself, sort of--and yet not me at all. My History in Comics part 4 will take a look at Wacko Waddler.