Most of these cartoons were done in the early to mid '80s. For a few years before and during college I managed to peddle cartoons for a little extra income (but mostly for fun, many remain unpublished). It's interesting what some folks like and some don't. It was very difficult to predict what would be successful and what wouldn't.
All of the 'toons below were drawn by me, although some were done for Ron Rich after he came up with the gags. Ron and I collaborated for several years, particularly for the 'Single Lane' strip we did for Single Scene newspaper. For a long time the Single Lane strip showed Ron and I as joint contributors, although many of the gags were mine, including "In the Drafting Lab" which is included below.
Many of these, and a large number of others, were published in the late '70s and early '80s in an interesting little rag called 'Black Hills Monthly Magazine' (BHMM). The magazine was published in Rapid City, SD, for the Black Hills area. It was, I thought, a nice alternative to the established papers in the region. It always struggled and towards the end I was giving them my cartoons when they couldn't afford to pay me any more. This was one of those adventures with a very interesting collection of dedicated people trying to pull off a dream that just doesn't seem to want to fly. I was sad to see it go out of business.
These cartoons are copyrighted 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, by Eric Jacobsen. No unauthorized use or reproduction without my permission. Thanx.
(Sorry, but ya gotta do that...)
Recently I managed to recover some clippings of cartoons for which I'd lost the originals. My scanner can't quite get the faded newsprint to scan well in B&W mode, so the following are greyscale and larger files than the rest.
At the Bank was conceived, sketched, and inked in about five minutes as an afterthought while I was on my way out the door to show some new stuff to BHMM. It looks like it was drawn in a hurry, and I thought the gag was rather droll, anyway. BHMM printed it and this cartoon generated far and above more reader reaction than anything else I'd had printed. For some reason people loved this one, and I even had a few bank tellers go out of their way to let me know how much they liked it. Since I'd lost the original I was quite delighted when these clippings from BHMM turned up.
A lot of people like to do pencil sketches in their idle time, and I have one (of many) that, for whatever reason, intrigues me. Just for grins, I include it here just so you can have something else to kill time with. It is a portrait of Leonid Brezhnev that I did from a photograph in a magazine. I think the tree was there first, so I did Leonid around it.
