Comic Thoughts

Welcome , you’re reading this post, hopefully because you often follow my other posts here, or it might be your first time to come upon a post in this Cartooning Trek. I write these posts as part of my own personal “journal” related to my cartooning and other art thoughts.

Historical Comic Thoughts

I started BugPudding, a comic, in July 2009 and it is still in progress in 2025, so far 16 years. The comic used to have its own dedicated domain and website, but I recently closed it down in March 2025. It became too expensive to justify; and it was difficult trying to maintain a non-working WordPress Comic theme and comic plug-in called WebComic. It was a personal choice. I currently post the BugPudding comics on both Instagram and on Facebook. I hope you will enjoy and follow them there. Recently, on this artist’s journal site, I have added a place for my BugPudding comic, but not as a website replacement, just as a reminder to myself that it is still currently continuing to be created. I try to update current strips every MW&F.

In 2009, I decided to go mostly digital using a Wacom Cintiq drawing display and Adobe Illustrator drawing software on an Apple Mac computer. The choice was not cheap (compared to using pencil, ink and paper) but I felt that it would significantly help me with the workload and to allow me to accomplish more with my time and energy.

I am not trying to compare digital to traditional cartooning, I enjoy them both. These journal posts are primarily oriented to refreshing my skills doing traditional cartooning for my own personal enjoyment. It’s an ongoing project, and hopefully you will find that interesting.

I decided , this morning , to write down some historical thoughts about my BugPudding comic, and how it was originally created. Why ? No particular reason, except that I wanted to remind myself here in my journal. You can read on – or skip it and just enjoy looking at the pictures or – just click-off. That’s the beauty of stuff online.

My first BugPudding characters were actually a group of house plants. Dalton Greens, the little guy, was originally created in 1980 along with Doc and Fern, but it took me until 2009 to re-start the BugPudding comic. These house plants originally were going to populate a comic about a radio station, K-DRT on TallGrassRadio. The idea was that the voices on the radio weren’t humans but rather plants and the humor was based around how they interacted with the radio’s human listeners. Interesting idea, but I decided it was much too limited for a long term comic strip. Also, remember that in the 1980’s there was no such thing as “online” websites or webcomics. So the only publishing for a comic then was newspapers and that was almost impossible to break-in.

I later decided to create my BugPudding comic, and my thought was to put together a theatrical troupe of characters, that I would create, who would play in various roles in adventures stories, mostly parodies. A parody is an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect: the adventures are a parody of horror, mystery, science fiction or other movies or stories.

The early heroes for BugPudding were Splunker, the worm, Bentley, the snail, and Monroe, the turtle. As a teenager in the 1960’s, I wanted to be a cartoonist like Walt Kelly (Pogo) and the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons. The comics title BugPudding comes from my two main “bug” characters, Agile Bug and Fatz Bug. BugPudding, by definition, is what happens when a bug smashes into a speeding automobile and ends up on your windshield.

Overtime, I have created around fifty characters. I developed their general characteristics and personalities so that they could be cast, like actors, in roles for stories. [ Current Cast of Characters ] Sometimes they are heroes; sometimes they are villains; and sometimes they are just supporting cast members. You might notice, that when I decided to create the comic digitally, I came up with the idea to draw the individual characters in different “ink” colors. It made the characters more personal. I once tried to make some traditional “character collection” cards to hand out at some comic conventions, but I can tell you that creating actual multi-colored inked characters will drive you a bit nuts having to use all those different colored ink bottles. It is easy on digital software but not in the traditional physical world.

An interesting idea, but not really practical traditionally. In 2025, I could try this again using today’s (Pilot, Kuretake, or other) various colored “brush pens” that come from Japan. It beats using different colored inks in bottles and a dip pen.

Here is a example of an early 2011 digital BugPudding comic strip

And the final digital strip

It’s time to stop this historical refreshing and let me get back to my practicing traditional drawing and inking. Starting off with my favorite confused squirrel.