Sketched within remarkably
small frames and done totally in pencil, the strips were crude and contained
both off-color language, and sometimes humor that only Wes could understand.
The story was that of a miniature submarine and its crew of ants that sailed
from the creek that ran behind Wes’ house in the farm-town of Freeland,
Michigan to another creek that ran near his old neighborhood on the east
side of Saginaw, Michigan. Interestingly, if you follow a map, it is indeed
possible to connect the two locations by way of water, so long as you can
sail in depths of less than three inches. Once back in Wes’ old neighborhood,
the submarine ants engage in a fictional havoc.
Once Wes began writing his
cartoons, it was like opening a flood gate, and his pencil began producing
a number of off-beat ant adventures as his style began to improve. In
fact, he produced such a large quantity of cartoons that soon even his
own family grew tired of reading them. Eventually, Wes was making cartoons
that would be read by no one but himself! These early works are a bit
painful to read. Wes’ primary fault being a learning dysfunction which
caused him to be “over-phonetically” trained in the first grade. As
a result, he tended to spell nearly every word the way it sounded right
up until he went to college. Of course, being a product of the public
school system, having such an English dysfunction was seen as no obstruction
to his completing high school. By the time Wes was ready to go to college,
he had a scrap book pasted full of cartoons that no one had ever read.
On August 28th, 1977,
Wes stepped onto the campus of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
for the first time. The school was over-flowing with students that year,
and Wes along with several hundred other students had to be housed in
the Royal Scottish Inn, or translated into aviation terms- “the R.S.I.”
which was a motel converted into a dormitory. During that first term
at college, he drew a number of large single-frame cartoons depicting
life at the R.S.I. These cartoons were used to decorate room 182 where
Wes and his two roommates Jeff and “Chuckles” were housed. Soon the
cartoons caught the attention of other R.S.I. residents, and one in
particular, Dan “the man” Karger encouraged the cartoonist to bring
his scrapbook back with him from Michigan after Christmas break so that
the guys could see all of his cartoons. Wes did just that and the book
was passed around the R.S.I. the following spring and gained far more
laughs than the author had expected.
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