The Dr. Funk Adult Coloring Book

Dr. Funk, An Adult Coloring Book, was a collaboration between friends and unabashedly pro-legalization of marijuana propaganda. That said, and in that writing these blurbs for my website sometimes has a confessional feel, let me say plainly that I only tried grass twice as a kid. I was actually pretty stuffy on the subject. In high school I didn’t seek stoners to hang out with, at least not for that reason, and I wasn’t anything resembling a pothead. That all started in college, nearly half-way through.

So it was late in my youth, shortly after college, that I sat myself down with pen and paper in my Hell’s Kitchen squat and got ridiculously high, in one of my earliest cognizant experiments with drawing & sculpting & etc. while in an altered state. From this session came a new version of a juvenile doodle, Dr. Funk, as well as a few other colorful odds-and-ends. Dr. Funk had been my own imaginary rock band in the mold of Spinal Tap; their modest triumphs decorated the margins of some of my high school notebooks. Dr. Funk was a musician dude, and so was the new Dr. Funk, but he was of a shaggier, more hippied-out variety.

The drawing was used as the first image of the Dr. Funk character to appear in the strip, a background poster of a guitar-playing rocker which by some supernatural or metaphysical means pops out of the picture before the startled eyes of the two main protagonists and transforms into a three-dimensional being. This introduction of the character Dr. Funk into the storyline seemed perfect, as Dr. Funk the imaginary aging rocker literally jumps through the rabbit hole and into the form of Dr. Funk the superhero nature spirit of the adult coloring book reborn.

There wouldn’t be a Dr. Funk Adult Coloring Book, of course, without Chris West. We were partners in the venture. We laughingly transformed the vision of what my cartoon had been into what our cartoon became, a Jonny Appleseed of pot, a mystical comic book being with a PO Box in Rockefeller Center Station. From the moment I shared the drawing with Chris he helped inspire the idea of Dr. Funk and nurture it. The two central characters, a pair of affable freaks named Ahab and Jungster, were meant as less-than-flattering caricatures of ourselves. We wrote and laid out the scripts together; I drew* the artwork, Chris penned the lettering. Tim Vega did us the honor of supplying an excellent logo. Laura Crandall contributed two wonderful single-frame, full page cartoons.

Other main characters of the comic included Senator Dudley Pureheart, a, hypocritical, anti-drug, scandalous boozer; T.H. Caldwell, both the token black guy and the token voice of reason, presenting more intelligent arguments in favor of marijuana legalization; Lillypads, a hippie chick amalgam and devoted plutonic pal of Ahab and Jungster; and Captain Beaurocrat, a giant Shazam doppelganger, but a villain in the tradition of comic book superhero foes, doomed to battle against and be defeated by our very own Dr. Funk. After all, we reasoned, how can a plant be illegal, how can a government cease the promulgation of seeds, of nature herself, through legislation, and if every pothead planted his seeds in public squares and parks, wouldn’t the landscape become hemptastic?

Whenever we created a new strip, we’d print a fresh issue, simply padding the old comic with the new strip, as well as usually layering additional details onto existing material. We never produced an entirely new issue; we simply constructed an ever lengthier one, which never found a proper conclusion, as the great culminating battle between Dr. Funk and Captain Beaurocrat never actually came to print. As for calling Dr. Funk “An Adult Coloring Book”, it basically was. The subject matter may have been sophomoric, but it was still meant for the young adult. And as it was printed on 11“x17” paper using black and white copy machines, why not encourage people to color it in by calling it a coloring book instead of a comic book?

From about 1989-1991 Chris and I (especially me) freely and happily handed Dr. Funk out at pot parades, in Sheep’s Meadow, at Wetlands and many Blues Traveler and Spin Doctors shows (references to Blues Traveler occur in both the scripts and the art) as well as at other equally receptive venues. We appeared once on WBAI together early one morning to talk about Rainbow Family gatherings and Dr. Funk on Dave Nolan’s wonderful old radio show, Dead Air, not long before we ran out of steam on the project altogether.

But as Dr. Funk was collaboration, one other key early player cannot go unmentioned. Much as there wouldn’t be a Dr. Funk Adult Coloring Book without Chris, neither would there have been without the cartooning wizardry of Brian McCormack*. At our hounding (especially mine), he fashioned the two central characters, Jungster and Ahab, as caricatures of Chris and me. He designed the characters T.H. Caldwell and Lillypads as well, and laid down our initial ideas with a lightning speed I couldn’t match then, now or ever. Without his jumpstart and templates, I’m doubtful we would have gotten as far. While some strips, especially later, are wholly my own art, all of the material owes Brian a great deal of credit for his influence, and some of it for the lines which came from his hand. Mindful of this, I’ve limited my selections herein to that which was either exclusively drawn by my hand, including much of the unfinished strips, the Senator Dudley Pureheart strips and the cover, or to material which had been layered enough by my hand over Brian’s layout to stake claim, such as the crack heads, with this disclaimer. And some of it I’ve left out because it was simply crap.