Nixon hailed as a national hero

I don't remember the publication date of this one in my college paper, but the Tiananmen Square uprising was in 1989 and the opera "Nixon in China" ran on Broadway 1983-87. All I know is that whatever the news item was that inspired this was an excuse for me to draw Nixon.

Reagan earns an Oscar

Wolfe Tone

When I was a freshman in college I wanted to be more "edgy." I felt like my style in high school was too clean and Mort Walker-ish (Beetle Baily) so I came up with a coyote who wore a leather jacket and camouflage fatigues and listened to the Ramones. This was my "underground" cartoonist period.

But ever the pseudo-intellectual, I named him after an obscure eighteenth century Irish political philosopher, Theobald Wolfe Tone. I was also really into my Irish heritage at that time- U2, especially. This was a bad choice because right away people thought he was a wolf, not a coyote and they thought he was named after 80's rapper Tone Loc. Since I was drawing editorial cartoons rather than a strip with story lines and character development, he really wound up just being a distraction.