JCU Sunday Funnies #1

Or should that be "Sunday Funny"?

Welcome to a new weekly feature on The JediCole Universe!  Sunday Funnies is just a header really to invoke the full color comic strips in Sunday newspapers (back when there were more of them).  And back in those days, a good 20 years or more back, I was informed by my dad that the Oak Cliff Tribune was looking for a recurring comic.  Not really being someone who was ever happy with my own art I decided to give it a go none the less.  I had been the staff cartoonist for my high school paper for two years after all, even winning some awards for my work.

But I was certainly not going to count on being able to deliver on a weekly basis without a good backlog of work at my disposal.  So it was that I gave myself a month or two to hammer out at least 15 to 20 weeks of cartoons that would tide me over during inevitable creative droughts.  Even after I had managed that aspect, I was, in the end, a victim of my own self-doubt on my ability to deliver the art consistantly.  And so the whole grand scheme went by the way side.  Concepts never went past rough sketches or just notes and very little ever made it to the original art stage.  Since I had never contacted the newspaper I felt I was off the hook from the whole project.

But I never really was, in all actuality.  Over the years an idea here or there would inspire more and I would pick up the concept anew.  Granted I had no outlet for the work if I ever got it to that stage, but I could not stop coming up with the comics, all of which were of the one panel The Far Side variety.  And being a person who uses every part of the concept, I kept all of my sketches, notes, and other materials filed away for future reference.  The years passed and all of that which might have been was archived with my mountanous "life's papers" until this year.  This was the year I began to work with my good friend Bobby Blakey, an acomplished cartoonist, on a project of two that he had floating around in the background of his creative life.  While collaborating on his project in the capacity of writer it occured to me that he would be the ideal illustrator for my comic strip ideas.

And so it is that the combination of my concepts and Bobby's art, with the addition of a title that Mrs. JediCole had created for another abandoned project, became the weekly comic you will find here every Sunday until I run out of ideas, Bobby runs out of patience with doing all the hard work, or my ideas and the backlog of pre-drawn material dry up.  For now, look for a new installment of You Are Here every week, exclusively at The JediCole Universe!  Oh, and on my Facebook page, too.  This series will feature most if not all of the concepts that began two decades ago as well as some brand new ones that have sprung to mind only since this project started a few weeks ago.  The first installment is from a brand new concept that, literally, got this whole thing off the ground.

Special thanks to Bobby Blakey for making this possible.  He takes my written concepts, crude sketches, and other cues and turns them into something that is nothing short of amazing!  Check back next week to see what else rattled out of the Ever-Ticking Brain of JediCole!  Starting next Sunday (April 21) there will no longer be an lengthy intro for this feature, just one really fun cartoon!  Want to see Bobby Blakey's art and his own humor?  Check out six years worth of his strip "Last Stop" right here!