Zombie Boy

In the fall of 1977, I approached my home town newspaper, The Milton Press Gazette, about the possibility of publishing a comic strip. For a year or so I had been creating editorial illustrations for them and I was pleasantly surprised when they gave me the opportunity for my first comic strip to see print.

 

McTavish premiered on December 8, 1977 and it ran for a few months. McTavish is a broken tooth walrus with a wife and a young son and a group of arctic pals, including a polar bear, and an annoying group of Kittiwakes. The jokes came courtesy of one of my father’s ventriloquist joke books (he was a ventriloquist for many years), so they were about as corny as they get.

Here are several McTavish strips that I clipped from the newspaper (the originals are long gone). Don’t be too harsh on my teenaged cartooning skills!