Recalling Louie and Bruce, Part 3

For this third installment of Recalling Louie and Bruce, we’re looking at some of my favorite high school comic strips and characters I drew way back when dinosaurs still roamed the planet. The first character was Howard Klutz who was prone to all sorts of mishaps in a strip I called The Klutz. Poor Howard had large feet that tripped him up a lot, so there were plenty of tripping hazards in his short lifetime that lasted my ninth-grade year.

---

The Burgess Bros. came next during tenth grade and lasted through my junior year. Bernie Burgess was a brainiac inventor whose inventions caused crazy adventures that took place in many of my school notebooks and on many unattended chalkboards at my school. His brother Carl Burgess was a Navy recruiter stationed in the city they lived in, which I simply called Big City. (Hey, I was 15.) Carl’s girlfriend Fifi was a French girl from Montreal, Canada who said “oui” and “s’il vous plaît” a lot and had a passion for watching the Expos play baseball on TV.

A feature on the TV cartoon show George of the Jungle was Super Chicken. Super Cluck was my rendition of that, and he lasted all my tenth-grade year. He was also a klutzy version of Big Bird from TVs Sesame Street, and he was a member of the Harkem Glove Trompers basketball team, though he rarely played because he hated wearing gloves and was busy fighting crime. He used to wear a cape but almost hanged himself when he leaped from a rooftop while chasing the bad guy Evil McWeasel, causing him to get away that day.

The Bullpen was a comic strip about a baseball pitching coach named Coach. I drew it during my junior and senior years. Coach coached a group of wild and crazy pitchers for the Barnyard Bed Slats, a farm team for the New City Bed Slats whose name came from the saying: “He couldn’t hit that pitch with a bed slat.”

I drew Adventures of Moses in my senior year, a strip that featured a high school cross country and track star named Moses who was a health nut and an all-American clean-cut kid, and his nemesis Flash’t who was a faster runner but didn’t take care of himself—he liked smoking cigarettes and pounding down beers before running events. For obvious reasons, a G-rated version of this strip ran in my high school newspaper.

An idea for a strip during high school was The Neighbor which made it into one of my sketchbooks before I scrapped the idea. I did, however, use it as an art assignment. The guy wearing the chef apron became John in my later Louie and Bruce cartoons.

---

All these comic strips led to the characters and personalities in Louie and Bruce. Leroy, who appears below, was basically Howard Klutz with a new name (and smaller feet). His nemesis was Bull, a truck driver who smoked cigars and was always on a tight schedule. And you-know-who made him always late leaving the sawmill with his deliveries.

---

The big monthly strip “Louie’s Problems” for October 1981 below is divided by two jokes. I remember this type of setup was featured in all the Sunday comics at the time. Some newspapers cut down the three-row comics to two rows, so cartoonists would feature a throwaway gag in the first row of their strip in case it was cut down, as I did in my comic strip here. The four-panel gag is an old joke that’s been around forever.

The second and third rows feature the story, in which Louie laments to Frank about life at home with his family’s pets. This is the sort of gag I remember from watching “variety hour” television, which was a modernization of vaudeville.

I love classic jokes.

---

Thanks for joining me for another look back at Louie and Bruce and a glimpse at my high school days.

Until next time, may peace, love, and laughter be with you, always.

Steve, 1/31/2025

---

This post “Recalling Louie and Bruce, Part 3” copyright © 2025 Steven Leo Campbell at stevecampbellcreations.com – All rights reserved.

---