While I usually reserve this space for catching the indignant saliva that drips from my political fangs, I thought today I'd share some freshly unearthed treasures with you.

A recent housecleaning by my father uncovered a trove of ancient childhood cartoons drawn by me that I thought had long since been lost to the ages. Page after page of cringe worthy MAD magazine spoofs, spaceship battles. theoretical notations on the physics of Pac-Man and the cartoon adventures of my brother and his Lego collection.

Here is an excellent example of my artistic predilections at age 10: a team-up between Pac-Man and Dig Dug. Video game crossovers, especially those featuring absurdist zoomorphic creatures like Pac-Man or Q-Bert, were a favorite genre of mine.





Ah, the Pookas and Fygers. Who were they? Why did those hostile beach balls and subterranean dragons despise Dig Dug so? I picture Dig Dug as a plundering Indiana Jones, drilling into sacred burial chambers and stealing relics left over from Hyperborean Pooka civilizations. In the process, perhaps he upsets a delicate truce between the beach balls and the normally contemplative but easily angered Fygers, leading to a war beneath the earth that could one day engulf us all!

I'm sure most of you picked up on that subtext.

The Hope Diamond of the collection however—which will soon be on display in the Smithsonian—are my original "Shmitty" cartoons, those that are the the direct Neanderthal forebears of Deep Fried!

Shmitty was an unabashed Garfield homage, a sassy yellow cat with a bachelor owner. He enjoyed napping, snacking and, by his mere existence, demonstrating my creative poverty. That I sustained this character long enough to try and build a career off of him will be Jim Davis' final laugh at my expense. I wonder sometimes how many adolescent cartoonists that man has dragged into his wake; men who, in their thirties, find themselves bobbing in the cartoon ocean, wondering why their own lasagna-feasting felines never caught on like his.

Here is the cover to my first foray into self-publishing: Front to Back-a Shmitty Book.





A few of Roadkill's defining characteristics are already present, his yellow fur and one-sided mouth being the most obvious. The egg-like head of this earlier incarnation also at last explains the personal in-joke of this cartoon.

But it is this feline's propensity for shenanigans which shares the most in common with his avatar in this millennium!





Ha ha! He stole dude's car! And dig the non-sequitur ending to the second cartoon. Makes ya think.

Note also the queer name of his owner, the Jon-ish Tom Gridol. I do not know from whence his moniker came except that I was adverse to using surnames that did not originate in my own imagination. This would also explain Shmitty's complete name of Shmitty Carthy. Was I thinking of Paul McCartney maybe? Who knows!





Tom did not, as you may believe, become Beepo. You need look no further than the willing female eating food from his table to know that he has nothing in common with my citizen clown. Tom has been thoroughly wiped from the historical record, a fate he shares with Garfield's own Lyman, Odie's original owner and suspected victim of the Pinochet regime.

These strips were actually cut out of my sketchbook, glued onto small sheets of paper and then assembled treasury style with an oversized cover. This is not far different than the current means by which I prepare my comic book, although I have a Mung houseservant named B'ak to do the gluing now.

I don't think you would benefit from any more of these, as their innocuous jokes about Shmitty winding up in Tom's bath would only lead to puerile blowjob jokes (I offer immunity from my cruel defamations not even to myself).

There may be a lesson here about chasing your dreams, but I'll have to copy it from someone else's notes.

—Jason