This comic strip is the last of my recent finds from the 1980s. It’s a large-format comic from December 1982 and it features a rarity in the world of Louie & Bruce. It shows the guys in class at their local community college.
I hope you enjoyed this run of rarities from the past.
This is it!
This is the 1982 Louie & Bruce strip showing the day when the boys lost the sawmill—their place of employment for over a year (in actual human years; time runs wibbly-wobbly-whacky in cartoon worlds).
Writing and drawing large, multi-panel strips were fun because of the room they allowed for storytelling, which was good practice for me to sharpen my writing skills—especially writing dialogue.
Unfortunately, newspapers only ran multi-panel strips on Sundays; the rest of the week was reserved for shorter strips. You could call them the “Flash Fiction” strips of the comic world. My story strips were a hard sell to local newspapers, and a harder sell to syndication outfits.
Meanwhile, back at my little studio, I drew another multi-panel strip after this one, which featured the boys at their community college. I’ll include that one in my next post.
Until then, peace and love!
It’s August 1982 and the boys find out that the owner of the sawmill is selling and moving to Florida. Life for Louie and Bruce is changing. Oh my!
But this strip never made it to publication. None of the large format strips that I drew in 1982 did. I turned to 3- and 4-panel strips that year, which put this little gem in a drawer and then lost over the years until recently when I found some old boxes in my basement.
Two more large panel strips are coming, as soon as I digitize them and clean them up.
I hope this comic strip manages a chuckle or two, despite the jab at Florida at the end.
Until my next post, peace and love everybody. And for my readers who still follow my blog, I am still busy getting my Vree Erickson books back into publication with Amazon. More on that later this year.
I spent January away from WordPress while I worked on some art and writing projects. Since retirement from my 9-to-5 job, I’ve been busy planning to republish my books at Amazon and setting up a workspace so I can paint again.
Last week, I found more Louie and Bruce comic strips. Two were heavily damaged from age because I didn’t draw them on archival paper. They were test runs of ideas and were never published. But they were always a part of the Louie and Bruce storyline.
So, I cleaned them up on my computer with barely any difficulty. The first one, which is from January 1982, is today’s featured post. It shows our friend Louie having a dream. The figures (except Louie) in the dream are out of focus. I illustrated those characters by using broad strokes to minimize detail. They are secondary people in Louie’s life during his first year as a student at his community college. He dreams of being someone important to them, perhaps a desire to overcome his insecurities.
The other characters were based on models from a fashion catalog. By the way, plaid shirts and blouses were popular apparel for women in the early 1980s. And a lot of “tough guys” wore sleeveless shirts.
I’ll probably post the rest of my finds in the days to come, but I don’t want to take too much time away from my projects. Until then, peace and love.
Steve Campbell 