The Adventures of Zeke Zendo

Grandpa Grows a Mountain

Taxicab!

Walnuts

The Adventures of Zeke Zendo was originally designed in 1999 as a try-out for a weekly newspaper comic strip, which is why there seems to be a punchline every fourth panel. It remained half-finished until recently, when I decided to end the story at the halfway point, and rearrange the daily strips into comic book format.

(Incidently, the mention of the teepee was a set-up for another gag. Zeke was going to exclaim to Slats' friend that the teepee must have been in his family for generations. The friend would then explain that he bought it last week at Sears; the fictional Mushroom Turtles, like the real New Jersey tribes, were not nomadic and never used teepees.)

Grandpa Grows a Mountain and Taxicab were written and drawn in 1980. Grandpa was the result of me seeing how fast I could write, draw, ink, and letter a strip. (As I recall, it took around two hours.) The taxicab in Taxicab was one illustration, Xeroxed and pasted onto some panels drawn from life in the Bronx in 1977.

Walnuts is the only comic strip that I ever got paid to draw. The original story was written by a young marketing fellow in a computer company where I worked as a technical illustrator. It was called The Adventures of Davy Base, and was designed to be some sort of advertising vehicle for one of our machines. When it was finished, upper management put the kibosh on it. ("A comic book??!!")

I stripped out all the dialog and decided to "write" a new story with a lot of references to other comic strips and comic books. I also reveal the true identity of that little red-haired girl that a certain young boy was always pining after.

If you go here, you can download a free comic book as a PDF. It contains all the strips above, plus Cotillion Squared #14 - "Mushroom Turtles", and Cotillion Squared #10 - "The Four-Color Dahlia".