Cartoon

I worked for many years as an advertising art director and Creative Director. But I always liked doing cartoons and would make them up as a side effort. I had submitted many strip concepts to the major syndicates but all I received were rejections so I put them on the shelf for a while. I still had to make a living.  And cartoons became something I did on the side.

In 1988 my son Douglas W. Fortune  went to serve his mission in Tampa Florida. This was a major event in our family because Doug had survived cancer when he was 7 years old and we endured a number of years with all his treatments. But he got a clearance from his doctor as long as it could be stateside. Doug was always determined to serve a mission and would speak about it while undergoing the chemo and radiation treatments.

As an example of his character, one day he went to the hospital for a bone marrow, a spinal tap, chemo and radiation treatment. As he climbed up on the table for the spinal tap the doctor asked “Doug how can you do all this in one day?” And he answered her with “My daddy gave me a blessing”.

So with cancer defeated he went to the Tampa, Florida mission. He began with writing letters home and I would send him a letter a week. He would write of his “adventures” and I would take his story what ever it was, (Doug was an artist and cartoonist too so he saw things from that point of view) being chased by a dog, seeing alligators in back of his apartment or door slams  and I would do a cartoon based oh his latest story I put it in a comic strip format at the bottom of my letters back to him. I did them very quickly and just in Black & White.

I decided to call the strip Elders D & C because my son’s was named Doug and elder ‘D’ was a characterization of him. His first companion’s last name was Carroll. That became the “C” in the title. I never knew what Carroll looked like so I made him up for contrast to the character of Elder ‘D’. No attempt was made to characterize Elder “C”.

Sadly we lost Doug about 16 years ago more of a result of the side effects of the treatment than actually to the cancer. The cartoons sat on the shelf  a number of years. Then in 2011, I saw where Meridian Magazine put out a call for cartoons and I decided to revive the concept and reformat it to fit the web as a tribute to Doug and to see if I could keep it going by coming up with more gags. Five years later I am is still creating the cartoon for Meridian. They appear weekly in Meridian Magazine.

I recently retired and looking at the collection of cartoons I had gathered I now had the time to categorize them and put them on a web site and offer them (for a nominal fee) to friends, parents or anyone who has a favorite missionary could download and either attach or print a hard copy and send it on in their communications with their missionary.

Originally the cartoons are done as a gag for the web magazine but a lot of people use cartoons to empathize or sympathize with a parallel situations in their life.  If a missionary writes about trouble with a dog or having a bike stolen there are cartoons that cover that subject in categories at the site. Hopefully they will serve as a moral booster to the missionary that receives them. All three of my grandsons who have and are serving a mission have received their own personal copies of the cartoons.

I originally focused on a “male missionary team” because of the tribute to Doug but I recognized after getting email requests, that sisters are a big part of the mission effort now and  so with the stories that have come in about the Sisters experiences I have begun adding them to the concept.

In January, I launched a website that offers these cartoons about missionaries. The site is called Eldertoons.com and it is easy to navigate either by image or category. I welcome comments from the Elders or Sisters about their situations, not necessarily gags but the mission world from their perspective that would allow me to create more gags related to their experience.

I can be reached at [email protected]