Officer Johnson

UPDATE INTERLUDE: Occasionally I'll post something in between updates like sketches I've been working on or other goodies. For this one, here's a little tickle community history lesson. This is one of the first tickling drawings I ever drew, which was sketched on the back of a lined sheet of paper with a ball point pen. I drew this in the evenings at work while I was employed at a boring retail job. It was the early 90s and I had only recently discovered that a foot and tickling community existed when I stumbled on an ad for The Foot Fraternity in a Bound & Gagged magazine I was nervously perusing in a gay bookstore. I joined a few of the mail-order foot fetish clubs like the Foot Frat and the NFN (National Foot Network) and started corresponding with other tickle guys. For you kids, these were pre-internet zines that had pics, stories and drawings plus personal ads you had to respond to with snail mail letters. Guys would trade materials through the mail, like copies of some of the earliest tickling videos ever made on VHS tape. A few guys found out I was an artist and would ask me to do drawings for them in exchange for other material. I did a handful of drawings like these, then I wound up getting into a relationship and losing touch with a lot of my pen pals. Flash forward years later when the internet really took off and I found myself doing searches for "tickling" on some of the earliest search engines. To my surprise, some of those drawings of mine were showing up here and there, badly scanned in, sometimes even altered. Someone had put text over this one reading "Officer Johnson awakened to find his worst nightmare coming true!". At this point I'd been working as a professional artist for awhile and thought that if my older work was still resonating with people, maybe I should do new ones! I decided I'd start out by trying to improve and color my older work. Of all of my early drawings this is the one that held up the best. There weren't a ton of glaring anatomy issues like with some of the the others. So this is how it all started. I can say I never would have imagined that I'd still be doing tickling drawings all of these years later, but I'm glad people are still enjoying them!