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Comic strip artists sharing the limelight in recent issues of the Humboldt Beacon on page B8 include two highly creative and witty men who share their talents with readers of the paper every week. Steve Krueger began with the Beacon about a year ago and lives in Menasha, Wis. Supplying his Moose Lake strip to us in color, Krueger's characters are bad dressers, live off of barbecues and engage in accidental word play.

Artist Jeffrey Hawley of Vashon, Wash., joined the Beacon just last week with his black and white strip called Logjam. Hawley's central character is an unlikely one -- a wise-cracking redwood tree. Another strip the Beacon carried a few months back was Nature Boy, penned by Kyle Collins of Santa Maria, Calif. The artist retired the stick figure strip while he's at work developing a new one.

Asking what got Steve Krueger into cartooning, he explained that it all started out as a dare. “I was designing T-shirts at the time and a friend bet me I couldn't start a cartoon strip and get published. Twenty-one publications later, he still hasn't paid up!”

According to Krueger, Moose Lake was originally called “Red Neck Tech” until he decided that it wasn't a politically correct name. Other than the Beacon, Moose Lake now appears in 12 newspapers and 9 magazines.

Asking Krueger how he gets ideas for the strip, he said he wish he knew.

”It could be something someone says or I could be walking along and an idea just pops into my head. I run all cartoons past my wife, and if it makes her roll her eyes I know it's a winner. If all she does is groan I go with it anyways,” he said.

The new strip on the block is Logjam which features a zaney redwood tree as the main subject. Artist Jeffrey Hawley explained his introduction to comic strip art this way: “When you have an ability to draw, and others encourage you, when you have a love of writing and humor of all kinds, when your earliest heroes include people like Walt Kelly, Walt Disney, Don Martin, Will Elder, Chuck Jones, Charlie Schulz, and George Herriman, and on top of all that you have a natural tendency to behave like an idiot, then the handwriting is on the wall -- you have to be a cartoonist.”

Hawley explained that the seeds of Logjam were planted in the 1980s, but it took a while to fully develop. “I still think of it as a tender little sprout that's got a lot of growing to do.”

Logjam appears in Hawley's hometown newspaper, on his website, and in the newsletter of Cartoonists Northwest, an organization based in Seattle. “The coolest thing, the rarest thing, is when a fully-formed Logjam gag arrives unannounced like a gift from above,” Hawley explained. “It's tempting to believe a divine muse blew it up my nose, but my ideas are often the result of 'thinking,' of making connections between the flotsam and jetsam of scrawls, sketches and other gibberish that I'm always jotting down in my notebooks. It's a fun process, and I hope readers will get as much enjoyment reading Logjam as I do in creating it.”

submitted photos

1. Logjam artist, Jeffrey Hawley.

2. Moose Lake artist, Steve Krueger.