Before BOHICA: Comics From the Wayback Era (Patreon)

As mentioned, I had the character of "Joe Rock" from my earliest days in the Army. You can even see some similarity to the character above on the right, and the character that would eventually become "Douglas Dawg", even though he wasn't named at this point. 

My old comics from the 1-12th Infantry Battalion, in the late 1980's, were only shared within the Company and were very topical to that experience. We got a new company commander to replace our previous one, and the previous guy's first name was "Damien"-- like the evil kid in the scary movie of the same name. So we ritualistically "buried the demon" during a downrange exercise, even finding a piece of sandstone to carve a crude headstone. We used logs with boots on them to stick out one end, and fashioned another as a wooden stake to stick in about where the heart would be on a real corpse. 

Downrange humor is its own thing. And, yes, I managed to use the "grave undertaking" joke again decades later in the regular "BOHICA Blues" comics. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

I also had a female character named "MP Sharilee". I chose to make a Military Police character because, at the time, that was the closest females could come to being in Combat Arms (and of course, MPs aren't technically combat arms, but combat service support. But the point is, that was as close as it got for them). I did this not because I had any interest in MPs (beyond the fact that there can be some odd humor with them) but because I wanted to have an occasional female character to "balance out" the otherwise all-male cast, but, I had no experience writing any of the "office jobs" that most females in the Army went into. My only life experience to that point had been school and a few months in a retail sales position, then Basic Training. So any female character I wrote would have to be as close to my combat arms experience as I could get away with. 

More of these old comics to come.