“Outta Toon” had its debut April 1987 in CCM Magazine. It was my first professional job as a cartoonist and allowed me to essentially become a cartoonist “on the job” in front of a nationwide audience of tens of thousands of readers. At the time, CCM Magazine was known as the Rolling Stone of Christian music, focusing on Contemporary Christian artists and the industry. It covered rock, indie, alternative and gospel mostly with some stories on praise, country and other genres. The magazine has since gone through different ownership and changes in style and focus but last I heard it’s still in existence.

The cartoon strip was created as a satire on Christian music at a time I was a huge Christian music fan. Initially, it centered around two characters, Scott Fawlkerson, a pious, traditional, conservative evangelical Christian and his roommate, Alpha Armageddon, the lead singer of a dubiously talented Christian punk band called The Altar Hunks. In addition to their own spirited debates, the strip gave opportunity to examine how Christian music and the industry navigated through the early years of its tremendous creative and commercial growth. It was, more a less, an on-going love letter to the genre of music that carried me through my college years, twenties and into my early 30s.

“Outta Toon” appeared in CCM Magazine for over ten years and then spent four or five years in The Christian Musician Magazine. I experimented with syndication ideas at one point but could never develop it for a broader audience. The strip ended in the early 2000s.

The following are a few of the later strips which appeared in full color.