Web Comic: “Half Halbert” (Pt. 1 of 13: Background and Cover)

Quite a while back, I tried my hand at writing and illustrating comics. At the time, my efforts yielded a pair of very short works, “McWidgie and Friends” and “To Do.” Recently, however, I found myself between projects and was reading Michael Eury’s wonderful study of camp-age superheroes, Hero-A-Go-Go, when the (radioactive?) comics bug bit me again.

This time around, I’ve written a twelve-page story called “Half Halbert.” The story behind the story is that I was involved in an email discussion with my colleague Hal Halbert when another colleague typed “Half” instead of “Hal” in her salutation. The rest, as they say, is history…

McWidgie and Friends

Every now and then I think about how cool it would be to write and draw comic books for a living or to do an ongoing online comic series like Terry LaBan’s Muktuk Wolfsbreath:Hardboiled Shaman, Jeffrey Wells and Shaenon Garrity’s Skin Horse, or G. Martinez Cabrera’s Ostenspieler and the Book of Faces. But then I spend a whole day working on something simple like the following one-page strip, McWidgie and Friends, and realize how much work a full-blown comic book would entail!

I actually tried to make McWidgie and Friends available through an online print service, but they sent me an email shortly thereafter stating that the strip violated copyright and trademark laws because of the resemblance of its characters to a pair of well-known hamburger hucksters — and so they took the comic offline. Personally, I have to say that I have no idea what they’re talking about, so I’ll have to let you be the judge…

Okay, so maybe there’s a passing resemblance between my characters and a couple of others you may have seen on television. And, sure, maybe I think it would be really funny in a mischievous-but-not-entirely-destructive Project Mayhem sort of way if people everywhere downloaded this image, had it printed on post cards, and started handing it out at various fast food locations throughout the world. But that doesn’t mean I advocate breaking copyright law. Just bending it a little.