Small Potatoes

As I've probably mentioned here previously, my favourite branch of the cartooning game has always been comic strips. Of course, the subjects and formats a 'toonist is invited to deal with, almost always dictate the form of humorous illustration to be used. Only rarely does the scope of op/ed work (in which most of my contracted stuff fell) lend itself to the sequential panel method of humorous comment. In their pure form, comic strips were usually free-lanced to publishers as a stand-alone feature. At least, that was my experience during the 'print' era.

Early in the 1980's the editor of a fortnightly national computer news-paper/magazine approached me to author a comic strip, in his words...  'to lighten the tone of the IT jargon-filled organ a little'. Naturally, I jumped at the chance. Despite ZERO experience or familiarity with IT (this was around the time the first Apple desk-top was being launched) I almost immediately had to dream up a story-line which would sustain a feature based on the computer industry for a reasonable period of time. What evolved was Rare-Bits which, after a stuttering start, went on to run for about10 years before it finally died with the whole mast-head itself. More on that saga in the future.

Well into the electronic publishing era (c2004) a second chance at strip work occurred when Travelweek, in which my op/ed cartoons and travel industry 'nabob' caricatures had been appearing since the late 1970s, was undergoing a make-over. Instead of my usual single panel cartoon comment, I suggested we could do a 'sunday' type comic strip which could perhaps explore the humour inherent within the travel industry more adequately than the extant vehicle. My mate, the editor (who had been in charge since I started as a contributor) agreed ... and Small Potatoes was born,

Below is the 'trailer' published the edition before SP proper got aired for the first time in April 2004, plus another example from later in that year. Also, there are a couple from 2005. Interestingly, the 'sand-castle' one was initially rejected because the ed. thought it a little too close to the tsunami event itself

. Can't remember if it was published later ... but, no matter, I was paid anyway.