Pagans

Pagans was one of my several attempts to get a comic strip syndicated. Set in mythical Athens, the strip revolves around a faun, Pook, two nymphs, Dorcas and Chloe, and a cat, Hodgkins. I deliberately set out to make a fable strip along the lines of Walt Kelly's Pogo, and I'm still happy with the results.

Most of the humor in he strip came from strong character contrasts. The good-natured Pook was desperately in love with the cynical nymph Dorcas. Dorcas, in turn, was opposed with the vain nymph Chloe. Sitting in the middle of it all was the conservative and reverential Hodgkins, who was continually baffled by the immortal characters who saw being among the ranks of the divine as just a job.

The strip was rejected by King Features, though I did get back a personal note from the editor elaborating what he liked and disliked about the work, although he ultimately thought there wasn't a market for it. As rejections go, I've had worse.

Southern Intellectuals on the Prowl

Southern Intellectuals on the Prwol ran in the College of Charleston student newspaper my final semester in school. I had just read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and was intrigued by his ideas about how space and time were represented by comic panels. The strip was wildly experimental, and I filled every panel with layers of visual narrative in addition to the main story line.

The strip usually concerns the pointless observations of two nameless characters as the wander through an expressionist take on the jewel in the tiara of the South Carolina coast, although occasionally I would abandon even those pretenses of continuity. That the characters hardly ever said anything intellectual was part of joke. As one friend of mine put it "They're intellectuals? Oh, I thought they were nerds!"

Miscellaneous Comics

I'm including some random comic work I've done over the years here, either random one-off pieces or particularly amusing but unfinished work I pulled from my sketchbooks.

A brief note for any of you interested in tracing the development of this work, if you actually exist. There are a few strips here featuring a character called Dorcas McGillicutty and her sidekick The Amazing Rat. The Amazing Rat is not actually a rat, he just happens to be called The Amazing Rat, for reasons which even I never fully understood. This pairing of a tall, befuddled male character and a short, cynical female character grew out of Southern Intellectuals on the Prowl. Dorcas McGillicuty would later develp immortality and become the nymph Dorcas in Pagans where, for all I know, she lives happily to this day.