Today's post focuses on an item pulled from my 'cartoon archives'.
Ever since I was a kid, I've had a propensity toward cartooning and graphic arts. My mom was a local Colorado Springs artist specializing in watercolor and oil paintings depicting mountain landscapes and historic Colorado buildings, so I received some basic training from her in the finer points of perspective, color, and lighting/shadowing that I was able to apply to cartoon work.
This particular piece is a printed program from a 1982 Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet event. The cover art is my own.
The central figure is my caricature rendition of the then-resident editorial cartoonist for the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper, Chuck Asay.
Mr. Asay was the guest speaker at the event, doing a "chalk-talk", drawing cartoon illustrations about how the government works.
The other gentleman in caricature at top right of my program cover illustration is the Scout troop leader, Steve Connett, an electrical engineer at Ampex Corporation, where we both worked.
The rest of the cover cartoon is populated by the host of young scouts themselves, engaged in all manner of chaotic activity.
My wife and I were also guests at the banquet, where Mr. Asay chose me as the caricaturized central figure in one of his cartoon pages. Unfortunately, I no longer have this 'historic' drawing.
One item of note in the above cartoon: the Cub Scout appearing just below Chuck Asay's ear and pencil has a bewildered look on his face and is asking "Wha' happened?"
This is a subtle nod to Chuck. I recall that most of his political cartoons published in the newspapers usually included a minor character in the background posing the same question. It was a sort of trademark. I like to think that it was Mr. Asay's way of acknowledging the fact that much of the American public is often quite clueless....
