Scatter Day Saturday
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Various items from various places with friends Tom Beland and Nazish Jonathan, Wayno and Dan Piraro, and Mark Evanier and Russell Myers.
Checking in with Tom Beland.
Tom Beland got some local notoriety as an editorial cartoonist:
Beland spent worked as a cartoonist, graphic artist and sometimes reporter for the Napa Valley Register from 1989 to 1995, and for the Vallejo Times Herald from 1996 to 1998.
Tom expanded his fan base with critically acclaimed Eisner Award nominated comic books.
Next, Beland conceived the graphic novel “Chicacabra,” [link added] the story of Puerto Rican high school student Isabel Sanchez, who has an evil entity living inside her.
Then Tom went viral:
In 2018, he generated some serious internet buzz with a drawing he did after seeing the Marvel movie “The Black Panther.” His drawing shows two Black children, one boy and one girl, each pointing to a figure on a “Black Panther” movie poster. The caption simply says, “That’s me.”
Dan Taylor at The Santa Rosa Press Democrat catches up with the cartoonist and the possible Chicacabra movie.
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Wayno celebrates.
Wayno, in his last weekly blog post of 2024, makes note of an anniversary his next post will mark:
Next week’s blog entry will mark the opening of my eighth year of creating the daily Bizarro comics. I can scarcely believe it’s already been that long at the job I wanted all my life. I still enjoy making cartoons daily and plan to keep at it for as long as you’ll put up with me.
Wayno, who had contributed fairly regularly to Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, began as the on-going daily cartoonist on January 1, 2018 (above). Also above is Wayno accepting his Divisional Reuben Award this year for Best Newspaper Panel.
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Mark Evanier visits Russell Myers … 50+ Years Ago
So in the seventies, when I took trips — alone or with friends — up to the Santa Barbara area, I’d always visit Dan Spiegle and I’d sometime visit Carl Barks. I’d also sometimes visit the man this fourth part is about, Russell Myers. Russell has been drawing the comic strip Broom-Hilda since April 19, 1970. That’s, as of today, 54 years, eight months and six days. We met via mail (the paper kind, not the e-kind) as pen pals when he was still living in Kansas City. That was where he’d drawn Hallmark greeting cards for a living before the little green witch took him away from all that.
Mark remembers helping Russell write gags for an eventually unreleased comic strip in the early 1970s. That got me thinking of Russell Myers’ Hollybelle Hoopla’s Greeting Cards!! (occasionally misremembered as Honeybelle Hoopla’s Greeting Cards). It had a short run from September 9, 1974 to March 8, 1975. Did Russell revive the concept a couple years later? Mark says Russ would hire a writer and artist to produce the comic and Hollybelle was unsigned for its entire run.
Certainly it wouldn’t be Myers’ Perky and Beanz from the mid-1980s.
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