I have been an amateur cartoonist ever since I was a child

but for far too long, I thought that I could be an Artist and that did nothing but complicate matters.

It didn't help, that I was very slow to realize, that it was the cartoony aspects of comic book art, that really grabbed my attention and not the allure of the photorealistic artists like Neal Adams.

I still have a lot of Neal Adams' comic books, they have been a part of my collection for over forty years but I rarely, if ever look at them, these days.  Which is just a little bit sad, really because there was a time when they lit a fire inside of me!

These days, I am more impressed by people like Paul Grist, Chris Samnee and a local, Toronto artist, Tonci Zonjic, who signs his drawings "TOZO".

So, without further ado, I present a few of my amateur efforts, in the hope that someone, somewhere, finds something interesting in them.

I wear my influences on my sleeve and when I was 16 years old, I fell in love with the work of Vaughn Bode... it still shows!

This is an attempt to create a character sheet, that would help me to stop, continuously, noodling around with concepts that have been bubbling away inside of my head, for too many years.

Finally, these are a couple of "slice of life" moments in the lives of a couple of the characters.  They are also investigations of effective composition, as it pertains to cartooning.

I would like to think, that my love of the artwork of Wallace Wood and his light touch style of humour, is also evident, if only a tiny bit.

Grand Ma Moses, the primitive style painter, who only began "painting in earnest" at the age of 78, shows that it it is never too late to pursue a dream.

Mine is a pretty small one.

I just want to put together a cartoon story, that will, at the very least, not embarrass me to put my name on it.

Who knows, maybe it will actually happen but until then, I will continue to do my best, to learn from the cartoonists that I admire by dissecting their work.