Bill and Buster: The Early 6-Panels: Part 1

When I first started doing gag strips with the Bill and Buster characters, they were 6-panel "Sunday Format" comics. Many were loosely based on my personal observations of college and the weird and unusual things that happened to me and my friends there. They're not the most polished-looking comics, but they were good for something: I saved nearly all of them over my 4-year college tenure and eventually scanned, colored and printed them into a booklet for the William Woods University Senior Class Art Show in 2006. I've since started going back and cleaning them up even more. I hate pulling a George Lucas on something that's fine as it is, but straightening up the ones with hand-drawn panels and replacing hand-written dialogue with digital type simply looks better. Here are a few VERY early 6-panels, some original, some "remastered":

This gag was probably the first of the bunch, from 2003. It was meant as an editorial for the college newspaper, and judging by the roughness of it, I don't blame them for not picking it up. At the time, every toilet paper dispenser on our small campus was terrible. They were all the same...this little metal box with a rickety roller and sandpaper-like tissue that would either come out in a flood or in single sheets. I think they've been replaced now.


Here's a sort of "Tex Avery" style joke from early 2004:


My college friends and I loved to cook outside on the grill on Sunday afternoons. On One such afternoon we had some unwanted guests...a relentless bunch of yellow jackets. We'd shoo one away or swat it, and another would show up, bigger and more annoying than the last. The monster that stung me inspired me to draw this:



More to come!