We persisted with this style long after we were able to draw more advanced stuff. A slightly greater degree of complexity came in the drawing of the other characters in Leroy's family. There was Leroy's mother, Fat Mama:

...his father, Big Daddy:

... and his sister, named "Beth" after our own sister:

At one point I attempted to introduce a sort of Chuck Cunningham character, a doofus older brother.

My collaborator rejected this new character out of hand.

Little Leroy's adventures (which seem now to have gone on for years, though in reality the comic may have endured for only a few months). Were wide-ranging. Picking up on the one- or two-week storylines that three-frame comics like Peanuts sometimes used, we made up a series of adventures, including a very long one in which Leroy is arrested, then tried, convicted and executed for destruction of government property. There were several other Death-of-Leroy storylines, as I recall (most Little Leroy Comics, in fact, ended with one or more of the family members dying violent deaths). This being the seventies, there was also a Christmas special in which Leroy kidnaps Santa's sleigh and offers to sell the Jolly Old Elf to the Arabs (to our complete amazement, this same storyline turned up the following Christmas in the late, unlamented daily comic strip of Howard the Duck).

Mostly, though, the classic Little Leroy plot revolved around family unpleasantness:

The hatchet in the head was a frequent means of disposing of characters. Beth was probably the most frequently killed, although my brother and eye were always on good terms with our sister:

If I had the time and money for a shrink, I'd love to find out what it all meant - the wish fulfillment of seeing our father reduced to a speck, the insectile thorax we used to draw our sister, the stubborn anonymity of the drawing style, the violence against our family members. But little Leroy, like Joe Hergeshiemer, is gone now. After an initial burst of energy, my brother and I broke up, due to creative differences. None of originals remain, and I had considered this comic a closed chapter.

That is, I had considered it a closed chapter until South Park came along. That show, with its strenuous, overly cute naughtiness, lacks all of the old Little Leroy juice, and its popularity suggests people are so starved for truly transgressive cartooning that they will make a cult around any middlebrow flapdoodle that tries to fit the bill. Pioneers that we were, my brother and I saw years before anybody else that figurative art's next logical step was to go back to stick figures. More than twenty years later, South Park is only halfway to where we were in 1975. Little Leroy was also better written than that laff-free fad.

If we bring Little Leroy back, however, I feel we'll need an angle. Right now, I see Little Leroy's determined simplicity adding value to the increasingly dumbed-down New Yorker. Judging by the December cartoon issue, it's a good bet a few of their regulars may be popping off soon. Who better than Little Leroy to take an opening on that exalted roster?