“Midlife Thesis”: Here Are 25 Of My Funniest Single-Panel Cartoons

At the age of 15, I was finally ready to publish a book of my cartoons for all the world to see, but I couldn’t afford to print a book. It was way too expensive for my meager salary as a newspaper delivery boy. So, the local printers convinced me that a calendar would be the cheap way to go. It would be much more affordable to print, as there would only be 12 cartoons (one for each month) plus a cover image. So, that is what I did. Alas, I was finally a real cartoonist! I printed the calendar, and the local newspaper wrote an article about it.

As for marketing my project, I did what any newspaper delivery boy would do: I sold it door-to-door along my paper route! I quickly found out that it was not going to be easy to make a living selling calendars door-to-door once a year. After all, I had made more income from my paper route sales than my calendar sales. That’s when I picked up a guitar and started down the path of being a musician. Another highly lucrative career choice.

Since then, I’ve spent years on the road to various levels of success playing music and entertaining audiences, but somewhere in the back of my mind, the cartoons were still yearning to get out. Once I hit 40 years old, instead of having the sort of midlife crisis that yields fancy sports cars, changing my appearance to look younger and hipper, and dating 20-year-olds, I decided that I was going to draw cartoons again! Hence, “Midlife Thesis” was born. It’s not the craziest midlife crisis, but I feel it’s the right one for me.

So, I’m back at it. I draw cartoons in my spare time, and I am anxious to share them in any way that I can. The cartoons draw inspiration from no particular subject other than what pops into my head on any given day and have no hidden or obvious agenda other than to be amusing. I just want to make people smile.

I find drawing and cartooning really therapeutic in a sense, and it's a great way to unwind and decompress after a long day. I enjoy working traditionally whenever possible, but due to time constraints, I find myself working digitally most of the time. However, I almost always sketch them with pencil and paper while working out my layout and ideas, scanning them into my computer, and doing the digital inking and coloring on my iPad in Procreate. Something about using a physical piece of paper and pencil tends to make the sketching process feel more creative to me. However, inking and coloring digitally is fantastic and super versatile if changes are needed down the road.