Way back around 1975 I fell under the evil influences of cartoonist Vaughn Bodé and animator Ralph Bakshi; the result was this character, Wheels Snowfloat, perennial back-marker and auto-racing upper-echelon wannabe. Though he was never intended to be me, he ended up evolving into my alter ego when I began doing the cartoon for the Maple Leaf Rally Club's newsletter On Route.
   I've scrounged as much of this material as I could find, from my own files and the club's archives. I apologise for the quality; while I was with MLRC, they used a Gestetner press to produce the newsletter, which resulted in... well, let's call it indifferent image quality. (The quality of the actual artwork is something I don't have an excuse for yet.)
   Also, be aware that this stuff was intended for a captive audience; so you probably won't get three quarters of the jokes.

   Why is this here?
   Because lately I've been motivated to take up cartooning again. And while that intention has been stalled somewhat by my lack of anything interesting to write about, I thought it would still be of interest to potential future readers to see my early work.
   So there.

All of it is copyright 1980, 1981, 1982, 1989 by Ron "I don't compete any more because I'm night-blind" Orr, if it matters.

Click on each individual panel to get the whole page

The first public appearance of Wheels, in a probably-fictional story written for the April 1, 1980 issue of On Route.

Under the cartoon story is the real-life tale of my first experience in the co-driver's seat of a rally car, at the 1980 H.I.S. (Happiness is Sunrise) Rally in Pennsylvania. Believe it or not, I actually won a club award for this one, for best article of the year, and punished for it by being made co-editor the year after.

This one is about our first effort as a team, entering the 1981 Ontario Winter Rally. Everyone in the story is real, too, and the only incident we left out was the business with the cat and the toilet paper.

After actually trying to do service out of a Ford Fiesta (once), we decided to buy a service vehicle. Being short of material that month, the story ended up in On Route as a two-page cartoon.

Funny story...   I was all set to do something really good for the May 1981 Black Bear rally. I'd even done the first page for the story... and then the event was postponed until September. At the event itself, I... well, I sucked, like a five thousand horsepower vacuum cleaner. Missed intersections, wonky odometer, off-rhythm driving, and I crashed out big-time on the third stage.   So the first page is the story that was never told, and the other two (the ones to the right) are what I wrote for On Route after the dust had settled.

Our last event for 1981 was the famous Rally of the Tall Pines. Interesting mix of ice, snow and bare road that year.   One interesting note, which didn't make it into the cartoon: I'd forgotten to take the tape deck out of the car before the start, so we spent some re-seed time listening to J.S. Bach, deep in the forests north of Bancroft, Ont.

In 1982 the British Empire Motorsports Club revived a classic event: the Canadian Winter Rally, a tough all-night navigational event that once drew competitors from all over the world. Apparently I didn't learn from my experiences with Dave Paisley at the H.I.S. because I decided to navigate for him again in this event.   In the same car, too.

The next-to-last last 'public' appearance of Wheels was in this print done for a printmaking class at Sheridan College in 1983.

The very last Wheels Snowfloat, to date anyway, done as part of a cartooning course I took in 1989. This cartoon reduces Wheels to the essentials, redesigns him a bit, and uses as a title the one I'd originally meant to use way back in 1975. And yes, there's a bit of colour here because I wanted to experiment with a Letraset ink-spray system. The original artwork's colour's a bit better than you can see here. Trust me.