Friday, June 8, 2012

Cartoonists in a Nutshell

Way back in the Dark Ages, 1977 to be precise, when I was a freshman at Hofstra University, a magazine called Nutshell published an article entitled "What Doonesbury Hath Wrought." It had profiles of seven talented college newspaper cartoonists, and predicted bright futures for each of them.

I saved that article for the past 35 years. It's time to take another look at it.

I recognized two names immediately: syndicated editorial cartoonist Kevin Kallauger, aka KAL, (whose name was misspelled in the article) and author/illustrator/cartoonist Bob Staake. The other five, I had to look up online.

Steve Blevins is now the "Owner, President, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer" at Saxdragon Studios in the Washington, DC area.

Paul Duginski is a graphic journalist for the Los Angeles Times.

Mark Mayerson has been working as a television animator, writer, director, and producer, and teaches animation at Sheridan College in Ontario.

Mark Segelman (whose name also seems to have been misspelled) went in a completely different direction. He's a practicing attorney in San Francisco,CA, though he appears to continue to cartoon as a hobby. He also plays the ukelele. (By the way, Mark's musical pun cracks me up every time I look at it. What can I say? I have a weakness for wordplay.)

I haven't found anything online about Erika Farley (assuming that her name wasn't misspelled) of Emerson College. She might even have a different name now. If you know Erika (or if you are Erika, and found this page while googling yourself) please use the comment link below to send us an update.








2 comments:

  1. I just found this post. (Apparently I don't Google myself as often as I should.) It's fascinating to me that you saved that issue of Nutshell for all this time and then took the trouble to track down those of us who were featured in the "Doonesbury" article. And thanks for the nice words about the comic strip of mine that Nutshell published. It was a decent seller as a greeting card back in the 1980s. For the past several years, I've been occasionally designing other greeting cards, mostly for the December holidays. If you let me know how, I'll send you some. - Mark Segelman

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  2. "Fascinating." That's a nice way of saying "obsessive." ("Hi, my name is Bob, and I'm a Googleholic.") I've kept a folder of cartoon-related items since way back when, and most of them will make it to this blog eventually.

    It's great to make your acquaintance, Mark, and I'm glad to see that you're still into cartooning. All posts to this blog have to be approved by me before they appear online, so if you make another post containing your e-mail address, I'll kill it instead of publishing it, and send you a private message with my contact information.

    Maybe I'll even introduce you to my brother-in-law. He collects ukeleles.

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