While going through a 'scavenger hunt' in my own cluttered condo, I came across some older art pieces of mine, which I thought I'd share with you for the next few days...

The following is one of the earliest comic gags I'd drawn, before developing the knack of illustrating characters (human, animal, and anthropomorphic)...

Back in the 1970s, I used to draw cartoon gags for The Pioneer (the newspaper of C.W. Post College in Greenvale, NY), which mostly involved graphic imagery of altered corporate logos - such as the time a rash of shoplifting crimes occurred at a PathMark supermarket near the campus. I drew a cartoon about an alternate logo for the store's sign, assuming that they ought to change their name to 'SnatchMark'!

Years later, I saw a few cartoon gags by a young artist named Robert Leighton in "SAM" (the bi-monthly movie program of The Mini-Cinema, a repertory movie house in Uniondale, NY). I submitted one movie-related cartoon gag of my own (spoofing a political icon of the 'Watergate Era'), which not only got published in "SAM", but resulted in the movie-booking agency (Florin-Creative film Services, Inc.) to hire me as their resident mechanical artist - for both the Mini's program and their daily newspaper ads in New York Newsday. Not only that, but Newsday regular Stan Isaacs published my cartoon in his column (for all of NYC and Long Island to see) on April 2, 1976.

For what it's worth, this cartoon was (at the time) the largest exposure of my artistic talents (over a full generation before the Internet became the norm)!

And, BTW, Robert Leighton went on to bigger and better things himself. Among his credits were a series of puzzle-related cartoons (or is that cartoon-related puzzles?) for GAMES Magazine.