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Rummaging Through My Drawers: 50 Years of Self-Portraits and Cartoonist Life Stories

Lately I’ve been haunting my own past, rummaging through drawers stuffed with self-portraits that stretch back 50 years—from a wide-eyed 19-year-old college kid in 1976 to the bearded, battle-scarred cartoonist I became, dodging hackers, raising a family, and even fielding endless questions about my long-gone Trump-era beard. I’ve got way too many of these staring back at me! This one is from 1976, when I was a student at Santa Barbara City College—pencil on beloved Graphix Duoshade paper (which I still miss). Yep, that’s exactly what I looked like. And yes, that’s how we all dressed in the ’70s.

France Cartoons is collecting self portraits of cartoonists, which has me rummaging through my drawers. This is me from Trump’s first term when I had a white beard. People are still asking me “What happened to the beard?” Trump hasn’t changed, though.

This self-portrait is me with my daughter, Susie, 28 years ago, in a comic I did that ran for about a year in the weekly “TV Times” magazine in the UK and a similar national TV guide type magazine in Australia. Notice the old TV, and old land-line phone, and young Susie. (This was years before the beard.)

 

I drew this self portrait after we had a big hacker attack that erased our servers, and we could identify that the attack came from China. I can still feel their breath on my neck.

Here’s another old self-portrait. This one is from back when I had a beard and I got my marijuana license. Now marijuana is everywhere and you don’t need a license (in California). That’s progress, I suppose. This ran as a full page in our local Santa Barbara Independent and it features my wife, Peg and son, Buster.

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My Exhibition in Belgium

I’ll be having an exhibition of my work in Ville de Virton, Belgium. If you’ll be around – come and meet me! The exhibition opening is May 18th at 6:30pm at the Caves de l’Hotel de Ville de Virton.

I’m a guest of the excellent Festival International de la Caricature de la BD du Dessin de Press et d’Humour in Rouvroy-Virton Belgium, near Luxembourg, May 19, 20 and 21. I’ll be sitting around doing drawings for folks and I’ll probably give a couple of lectures. This festival is organized by France-Cartoons, the association of French cartoonists that I got to know from the editorial cartoonists Salon in St Just le Martel, so it is my old buddies I travel to hang with. It is cool, and it looks like they have a Trump theme this year! heir poster is funny.