Phone photo 1960

Giles C. Quimby

1871-1948

Montesano, Washington

Quimby was credited as the man who killed John Tornow, "The Wild Man of the Wynochee"

My rendition of Wild John appeared in Cartooning Washington.

Larry of McCleary and Other Characters

1st edition, February 1989, 47 copies, grey cover, enlarged digest size.

2nd edition, April 1989, published by Eastern Grays Harbor Historical Society, McCleary Museum, 60 copies, grey cover, enlarged digest size.

1st Danger Room Reprint Edition, July 2005, 5 copies, blue cover, enlarged digest size.

In the late 1980s I tried my hand at a comic strip in our regional weekly, The East County News. I wanted to create a strip with a local appeal, capturing some of the quirks that made eastern Grays Harbor County a bit, er, different that the rest of western Washington.

The strip continued for another 10 months after this collection was published. The remainders were assembled in an issue of Retreads, I think. We'll see when we get there.

From reading the strips you would correctly conclude I had become a new parent in this period of time. 1988 to be exact.

Trivia:

Page 4, strip 1: This was also reprinted in Cartooning Washington.

Page 4, strip 3: I also used this line in Write-In Morty the Dog for Mayor!

Page 6, strip 2: Olympia, the Legislative Building, and the hills in the background where McCleary sits.

Page 7, strip 2: Elma, 7 miles away from McCleary, used to have annual festival honoring the lowly slug. For some strange reason it never really took off. Shelton, of course, is a town full of roughnecks and buffoons, not like genteel McCleary at all.

Page 13, strip 13: Yelm is near Olympia and home to J.Z. Knight, a mystic who has apparently become wealthy channeling the spirit of "Ramtha," a warrior from long ago. From the film clips I've seen, I suspect she grabbed the idea from the Hitchcock film Family Plot, as she does a pretty good Barbara Harris imitation.

Page 16, panel 1: I originally used this line in one of my comix from the 1970s, but I can't remember which one right now.

Page 17, panel 2: Our Shetlands did this to our trailer when I was growing up on the farm.

Page 18, panel 1: You have to see the slugs around here to believe them.

Page 20: We have two nuclear power cooling towers standing tall and ugly in this region. They have never been used (Thank God!) and remain standing today as monuments to the folly of man. This story has the unfortunate acronym of WPPSS.

Larry of McCleary

Cartooning Washington

This was an illustrated history of Washington State political cartoons and cartoonists published in the same year of the Evergreen State's centennial-- 1989.

Lots of big names in here: Brian Basset, Paul Fung, Steve Greenberg, Walt Crowley, David Horsey, Mike Lukovich, Bob McCausland, Shaw McCutcheon, Alan Pratt, Milt Priggee.

And of course Ray Collins from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a comic artist who once met with me for an hour of his busy day in 1977, looked over the portfolio of a nobody young man and gave me many valuable pointers such as any good cartoonist needs to study poetry. He was also delightfully irreverent of authority-- putting this into practice by being the number one cartoonist to expose the craziness of Gov. Dixy Lee Ray.

My work slipped into this book by accident, and I think I was included as sort the token little rural weekly guy with a different day job since I'm definitely not in the same league as the professionals listed above. Apparently someone connected with this book, perhaps it was Maury Forman who called me up, used a printshop in Oly that I frequented. The printers mentioned my work to him, and the next thing you know I'm in this book.

As for this particular strip, Grays Harbor County continues to be solidly Democrat, but in this last election the Dems lost one, perhaps two countywide seats-- the first time since the 1950s!

In McCleary there used to be this joke: The ballot counter is tallying the votes, "Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Republican! The sonofabitch voted twice!"

The Democrats here aren't like the liberal Dems on the I-5 Roman Road through Seattle-Tacoma-Oly. Out here they are old time good ol' boys in the not-so-admirable sense. Frankly, I'm glad to see them finally lose a seat or two. Usually they run unopposed.

Wild John refers to local legend Wild John Tornow, the Wild Man of the Wynochee.

I'll be running my East County Comix strip in this blog eventually.