Captain Bly

“Captain Bly was a comic strip I created Sept 1992 for The Maneater, the student-run newspaper of the University of Missouri-Columbia. It was based on a mix of Robert Bly men’s group teachings, which were popular in the late 80s-early 90s asking men to get in touch with both their wild side and their emotions through mythology and drumming and meeting in the forests, and a book about polar bears I picked up in the discount bin of a music/bookstore. I’d not tried to create a comic strip before, and so my early strips were pretty crude. But I got better. The strip, Captain Bly, ran in the Maneater from 1992-1996, when I graduated with my MA in English.

Those 4 years doing the strip I got to be in a big room with the staff of The Maneater, many of whom would go on to work at major publications like the NYT, and a whole bevy of cartoonists. It was a great time to be a cartoonist.

The strip centered on a bunch of male polar bears trying out the philosophies of Robert Bly to see if they could “bond” by doing things together. Polar bears are known for being pretty solitary in the Arctic. So I took this group of polar bears led by a father bear named Papa John (no relation to the Pizza guy) and his cub Emile (named after the french philosophy book, Emile, or Treatise on Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Heady stuff! LOL. You will forgive the young literature major in me. ) You’d think the strip was super philosophical. It wasn’t. It was mainly a comment on current society. It’s real influence was Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County. And it actually secretly tried to speak to me about being gay—-but I didn’t know I was gay at the time. It was me working out a lot of stuff without me even knowing it. Isn’t that the typical function of art—- it reveals us, it heals us (or can), and it touches others.

I enjoyed the “short story” at the beginning of the Essential Calvin and Hobbes : A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury (Bill Watterson, 1988). So, I tried my hand at doing something similar when I published my own book in 1994-1995, Captain Bly. “Fathers and Suns” is something I wrote and drew after I’d been drawing the comic for two years.

In 1994 or 1995, I took a class, Comic Strip I, with Robert Stack, one of the prominent underground cartoonist of the 60s, and he told me I had too much WHITE everywhere. Polar bears in the snow doesn’t make for an interesting comic visually—-so this story is one of the first times I attempt to put more black into the drawings. I took the follow up class, Comic Strip II with him as well. I loved those classes. Mostly we just brought our strips in and pinned them to a wall for critique.

Robert Stack also noted that I am wordy as hell. LOL. And I’m afraid this is because I’m a short story writer/novelist…. And so it took a lot for me to learn —- and the strips got better and less wordy in 1995-1996. However, this story is lots of words! But it was fun to design.

What you can really see here is my love of the design of the page—- and what I’m trying to do visually. Composition. It could still use a LOT more variations of grey and black. But I was getting better.

Below that you will find “one-offs” comic strips and then I start a run of comics in my last semester from Jan 1996 to May 1997 where I tap into something weird and deep in myself, and let Emile and Sid experience it for me. “The Honorary Polar Bear Society” contain better drawn comics by far and more meaningful in the end. The series had a nice ending to it, for me.

Forgive all the 80s and 90s references. And a contest where you have to pause all the VCR tapes at exactly the right moment is very 90s. LOL.

Anyway, here is a good sampling of my work from this time, and my growth as a comic strip artist. It took about 2.5 hours every Monday and Thursday night to come up with and draw and ink the comic strip and then we’d reduce them down to size on the copier and turn them in to the Maneater before we left that night. I drew my comic strips about 18 inches wide and maybe 6 inches tall— I forget the specifics! But I drew them huge! Which is why I sometimes got fooled into thinking I had room enough for lots of words!