Classic Comics: Original "Joe Rock" (Patreon)

Way, way, waaayyyy back when I was but a young'un, I did a series of cartoons for my Active Duty army unit. These are crude and rough and show a very, very early style to my art, a style that stuck with me through most of my junior high school years and into high school and early adulthood. The  style seems (to me) to be a mash-up of "Garfield" and "Doonesbury", in which I found very simple, easy to emulate lines in "Garfield" and at the time, "Doonesbury" was seen as a "serious" comic, as in a cartoon that had something to say and was regarded as an art form as opposed to "just a cartoon". 

Still, I think that you can see the obvious evolution of my design and style in these early comics, and a direct lineage can be traced.

My comics suffered from being "too busy" and too dark, and of course my writing is barely legible enough to qualify as such. I also had a bit of "same-face-itis" in that I had maybe two or three basic faces and I just changed hair color and added a mustache to make them look different. I feel like I have only recently begun to shake away from that, to be honest.

A lot of my comics reflected actual events that took place, so of course without that context the comic is essentially meaningless. Still, there's just enough obvious humor to make this work, if clumsily. 

The most important thing to note is how much old Joe Rock still looks like modern Joe Rock, and --check it out!-- there's Sergeant Dawg, almost exactly as he appears to this day! I had forgotten how long that character has remained with me, pretty much unchanged. I honestly cannot recall ever meeting or working with anyone like him, but I recognize aspects of a lot of different NCO's I worked with as a fresh-faced kid. This would make him one of my oldest recognizable characters,  after Kelly G. Brannon the CIA spy and Joe Rock himself. 

Anyhow, an old fried of mine from back in the day had found a bunch of my old comics in his possession somehow and he tracked me down and mailed them to me, so I will share some of these as part of the "Classic Comics" collection. This first batch will be made publicly available, but the rest will be at the "Sergeant" level and up, like the rest of the "Classic Comics". Hopefully people will be intrigued enough to join at the Sergeant level and see more of these "blasts from the past".