WALLY'S GREATEST HITS!

A selection of 25 Wally cartoons from The Canyon Courier 1995 - 2004

I started drawing my Wally cartoon for The Courier in 1995 when I was also doing their editorial cartoon, "Lookout World", a collaboration with my assistant, Christopher Smith. I'm really grateful to Tony Messinger, the editor of The Courier in the 1990s, for having such an incredible lack of aesthetic standards so as to actually print my early work!

Wow! Here's the first incarnation of Wally in black and white. One of the main reasons I wanted to do this cartoon was to get some real experience drawing a in black and white.

In 1994, Wally was an occasional feature in Bill Husted's column in The Rocky Mountain News. Bill called me the week Jerry died and asked if I had something on Jerry that he could run in the paper the next week. After about a day of listening to Grateful Dead CDs, I came up with this cartoon. Click here to see the article.

So if you don't understand this one, here's the story. In John Waters cult classic film, "Pink Flamingos", a transvestite actress named "Divine" eats dog poop. While I'm a huge fan of John Waters' later movies, I've heard that this movie is one to avoid.

The inspiration for this cartoon came from our local TV news that kept running numerous stories on the importance of breast self-exams for women. I wondered, "Hey! Why don't the guys get equal treatment?" I was really impressed when the editor of The Courier chose to run a cartoon with a dog with its nose between its legs.

In Denver, Colorado there is this really odd theme restaurant called "Casa Bonita". It features really cool fantasy architecture with indoor waterfalls, caves and cliff divers. It's a great place to take your kids but the only problem is that the food is terrible. This cartoon was a real milestone in drawing for me.

I've always had a gut-level aversion to football because of the way the players dance around after a touchdown, the way they affectionately pat each other on the butt, and the number of serious neck and back injuries one sees if one watches a lot of football. It's a totally perverse sport, in my opinion!

The week that Princess Diana died was also the week that my dear grandma Mava died at the age of ninety-eight. That got me thinking about the way we view death in our society. The pop culture obsession with Diana was absurd from my perspective. Meanwhile, my daughters were playing with their Giga Pets. Remember Giga Pets?

My daughters' first grade teacher was a real fan of the "Clifford the Big Red Dog" books. I used to take this cartoon for "show and tell" when I did an art appreciation class for fifth and sixth graders. I think most people wonder who cleans up after Clifford when they read those books.

Someday Wallyware will end up in a folk art museum somewhere and they will need to have all kinds of annotations to explain cartoons like this! If you don't understand this cartoon go to: www.blairwitch.com.

Call me sick, but this is one of my all-time favorite Wally cartoons. It was inspired by a story that Kyle, my assitant at the time, told me. He had a friend who made the mistake of taking LSD and going to see the creepy cult documentary, "Faces of Death". Yikes! I took this idea and pushed it a little bit further. There's something wonderfully poetic about the wording on this one.

One of the great things about doing a cartoon for a small local newspaper that doesn't pay you to do the cartoon is that you can do whatever you want because they don't pay you. For this one, I took my two least favorite cartoons, "Family Circus" and "Pluggers" and put them together to make this odd mutant hybrid.

Here's an original thought about parsley! Ideas like this are always a joy to come up with because you wonder if anyone else in the world has ever had such a thought.

If you're a potter, you will totally understand this one. Paul Soldner is the Pablo Picasso of clay and he has a studio up in Aspen. I created this cartoon in honor of the NCECA conference in Denver in 2000. I drew about a dozen of these on pots and they sold out immediately in the two galleries that carried them. I realize now that I probably could have sold hundreds of them! The other great design I did was "Wally and Pete Voulkos" blow off NCECA and get drunk at Casa Bonita"

This cartoon was thought up and drawn really quickly and I like the way it makes its point.

The first time the Bush twins got busted, I said, "Give them a break! Everyone makes mistakes when they are young." The second time they got busted I was totally appalled. Those selfish little vipers must really hate their parents. The mixing board on this cartoon is a copy of a really cool plate Christopher Smith and I made back in 1994.

This one started out as a doodle of Wally's face close-up. I was once again facing my weekly deadline without any good ideas. The concept hit me in a flash (like Wally's super-powers!) and forty-five minutes later, the cartoon was done.

After September 11th, my cartoons got a lot more political and oftentimes they were way too pointed and preachy. This is clearly one of the best of that period and I still like the way it looks. I listened to an entire Britney Spears CD while I was drawing it and I'm dumbfounded as to why she sells so many CDs.

I had a lot of fun drawing Marilyn Manson on this one. I'm still wondering what Britney does with the lyric, "But he can't be a man because he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me".

Howard Finster is one of my all-time heroes in the art world. It was a real joy to draw this cartoon to celebrate his passing on to the next world. The initials in the clouds refer to other geniuses in heaven (Leonardo da Vinci, Frank Zappa, etc.)

Quite possibly a perfect Wally cartoon here because it combines corporate greed, animal rights, violent death and nudity. The nudists look better uncensored and this design is available on pots at Spirals Gallery in La Jolla, near the famed Black's Beach.

Gee... if I had a dollar for every Grateful Dead joke I've done, I could buy a new Grateful Dead CD on iTunes!

This is another of my favorite political cartoons of the post 9/11 era. We are witnessing the creation of "democracy at gunpoint".

Those of us who adore the song, "Rock and Roll McDonalds" were saddened by the passing of the great Wesley Willis. This guy's life story will make a great movie some day.

2003 and 2004 were a time when I was starting to get really burnt-out with the process of doing a cartoon every week. This one happened when I was griping to my kids about having to come up with another idea and I said, "I'd really rather make some banana bread". So Robin and Monica took up the slack and I made my bread. It's a good recipe, by the way.

I think this might be the very last cartoon I did for the Courier before I was fired by the new editor in 2004. He fired me by email, by the way. How tacky is that?!!

All of these cartoons are under copywrite and may not be used without proper consent by the artist. If you wish to use any of these cartoons for whatever purpose, you must first negotiate a contract with the Tom Edwards. You may contact Tom at: Tom@wallyware.biz

Visit the Wally's main website at: www.wallyware.biz