Looking back on these pictures today I find myself with mixed feelings about them. First I find my sense of humor has changed over the years... some of these cartoons are just plain stupid. Others look like I just bit the idea from the Far Side or some movie. A couple are just offensive enough that I feel bad for having created them. But hey, I was a 17 year old kid just looking to kill time. I'm not saying that I'm the reigning champ of sensitivity today, but at least now I know why some of these things are bad.
Ultimately I regard these cartoons very fondly. Some are pretty poor and make me really cringe, both in terms of writing, and artistic quality. But some of them are pretty damn good. Of course, those gems are tremendously outnumbered by embarassingly stupid and badly drawn cartoons. But hey, there are highly successful webcomics out there being run by people who are neither funny, nor artisticly competant. At least I don't have any delusions about my skills as either an artist or a humorist!
Technical Notes In 1995 I scanned in a batch of a dozen or so cartoons that I drew in high school. This was the first real content on my homepage, which at the time was hosted at the CompSci cluster at Hope College. In fact, I basically learned to write HTML creating this page! These pictures were scanned in using a 100 DPI handheld scanner. I had to splice each 8.5x10" picture back together after scanning it in 2 parts! Originally I planned to scan a few cartoons every week until I got the whole archive online. But since it took a half hour or more for each cartoon to be digitized and be properly sewn back together, it just never happened.
In 2004 I got a shiny new flat bed scanner and scanned in all 136 of my cartoons in a matter of an afternoon. Hopefully I'll upload the entire collection over the course of the next few months. This time I mean it!
If you're interested in some of my other artistic projects over the years, you can find most of them online all over CmdrTaco.net. Some of my favorites include Hamster Havoc and Duckpins, a pair of minute long computer animated shorts I created during my freshmen and sophomore years of college. You might also enjoy my my photography homework taken during my senior year.
Last Warning! As I mentioned above, what follows is an extremely mixed bag. A couple cartoons out of the hundred or so are quite offensive. Probably 2/3rds of these cartoons are badly drawn. At least half of them will be a complete waste of time to download. But there are a few in there which I can hold up today with pride and say "I did that. Not bad for a punk kid."
Uploading status: 27 of 136 uploaded. On to the Cartoons!