The Rise and Fall of Morty the Dog

1st edition, 1987, Seattle, Washington : Starhead Comix, 200 copies. white gloss cover, regular digest size.

2nd edition, 1992, Ocean Shores, Washington : Starhead Comix, white cover, regular digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, August 2005, McCleary, Washington : [The Fool on the Hill]. 5 copies (4 red, 1 blue), regular digest size.

When Michael Dowers published the 2nd edition he gave the outside covers a bit of red and changed the content of the inside and outside back cover. I must've drawn "Famous Taxi Scene" sometime between 1987 and 1992.

Hey, here's an eyeball joke I posted on OlyBlog last month. Apparently only pupils of puns get this one:

I know this rich guy named Arthur. He has a morbid fear of going blind. So he buys eyeballs to keep in stock at the eye bank just in case. He has so much money he can afford to hire a group of people just to take care of his stored eyeballs. They have a special room only they can enter, and on the door it says: "Arthur Eyes Personnel Only"

Charlie Campbell, Evergroove's Overlooked Cartoonist

The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is known as being an early venue for many fine cartoonists, and whenever the topic comes up the usual list of illustrious names are recited.

But there is one name I have never heard in that lineup. It should be.

Charlie Campbell.

Yesterday I sorted through a bunch of old issues of The Cooper Point Journal, Evergroove's campus newspaper, and caught up on the Fall 1979 to Spring 1986 material. I graduated in 1979 and returned there to work for a couple years, starting in mid-1986. So reading these papers sort of filled the gaps for me. Yeah, I know, 30 years too late. So I'm slow. So what?

Campbell's single panel cartoons, which appeared in the CPJ in 1984, struck me as a delightful cross between two other cartoonists I admire, James Thurber and John Callahan.

With the help of private dick Arnie Wormwood, I tracked down Campbell to his Portland, Oregon based commercial music and sound design business and Charlie graciously allowed me to scan and post some examples of his 1984 CPJ work.

Morty the Dog in the Shadow of the Rainbow

This was a reprint of Starhead Presents # 1 (1986). Starhead published this one in 1992 under a new title, called it "second edition," and released it as a regular digest size book. The color cover was mounted and the inside covers were blank. The full wraparound color cover of the original was absent here. One of the more unusual physical specimens in the world of comix.

1st Danger Room Reprint edition, July 2005, 5 copies, green cover. In this one I included the original Starhead Presents # 1 info on the inside front cover, and note about the history of the comic on the inside back cover.

The Life and Times of Morty the Dog / The Lives and Deaths of Morty the Dog

Consisting of reprints, some of them going back to a decade, Michael Dowers assembled this comic in 1992 under the Starhead Comix banner. He gathered this material from several different titles.

It was a 2-in-1 book, one of those flip-over reverse deals with two covers.

A bit of trivia:

I'm pretty sure I did not draw the logo for the Lives & Deaths cover.

The page with Morty continually dialing and being answered with a recorded message seems incomplete. But I can't quite place where the original appeared in order to look it up.

The skiis with ice cubes panel: I had a roommate in college who did this.