Midlife Thesis is a new cartoon series from cartoonist Tod Pronto. It draws inspiration from no particular subject and has no hidden nor obvious agenda, other than to be amusing.
New Cartoons Posted Every Monday & Friday.
Follow on Social Media
Midlife Thesis is a new cartoon series from cartoonist Tod Pronto. It draws inspiration from no particular subject and has no hidden nor obvious agenda, other than to be amusing.
New Cartoons Posted Every Monday & Friday.
Follow on Social Media
That’s me, hard at work cartooning!
My original character “Fussy The Cat” in a Christmas comic strip I did in 1992 at the age of 14.
One of my cartoon murals. Circa 1994. This one was for a local mechanic and it remained intact until around 2008 or so when it was bought by a furniture store and covered up. Maybe it still exists beneath the siding they used to remodel the building?
The cover of my calendar. I could only afford to print 3 colors. Red, Yellow, and Silver. Black & White were free thankfully.
One of the cartoons from the calendar. March 1994.
The newspaper clip that started it all. Look at that bowl cut on my head!
Thank you so much for checking out my cartoons! My name is Tod Pronto and you may know me from my other creative outlet as a singer/songwriter or you may have stumbled here through seeing my cartoons online somewhere. Either way, I couldn’t be happier to have you here.
Being a cartoonist is something I have wanted to do since childhood. I would draw nearly nonstop hoping one day that my cartoons would appear next to Garfield in the newspapers one day. I even created my own cartoon character named “Fussy The Cat” in homage to the great Garfield. Not the most original idea, but hey, I was 10 years old. I didn’t have much life experience to draw from. Come to think of it, my family didn’t even have a cat! I spent most of my time in the art room throughout school drawing and painting - honing my skills to one day be a real artist! I was asked to paint murals around town, became the cartoonist in my high school newsletter and for a brief period drew a weekly comic in our local paper. At the age of 15, I was finally ready to publish a book of my cartoons for all the world to see but I couldn’t afford to print a book. It was way too expensive for my meager salary as a newspaper delivery boy. The local printers convinced me that a calendar would be the way to go. It would be much cheaper to print as it would only be 12 drawings plus a cover. There it was, I was finally a real cartoonist! I printed the calendar, the local newspaper wrote an article about it and I sold it door to door along my paper route. I quickly found out that it was not going to be easy to make a living selling calendars door to door once a year. I had made more income from my paper route alone after all was said and done. That’s when I picked up a guitar and started down the path of being a musician. Another highly lucrative career choice.
Since then I’ve spent years on the road to various levels of success playing music and entertaining audiences but somewhere in the back of my mind the cartoons were still yearning to get out. Once I hit 40 years old, instead of having the sort of midlife crisis that yields fancy sports cars, changing my appearance to look younger and hipper, and dating 20-year-olds… I decided that I was going to draw cartoons again! Hence, “Midlife Thesis” was born. It’s not the craziest midlife crisis but I feel it’s the right one for me.
So, I’m back at it. Drawing cartoons in my spare time and I am anxious to share them in any way that I can. Garfield is still around eating lasagnas and hating Mondays, but newspapers are printing fewer cartoons by the day in the funny pages. Becoming a syndicated cartoonist is a long shot at best…so I created this website and some social media pages in hopes that my cartoons would make their way to people who would enjoy them. Please feel free to share my cartoons with your friends, leave comments and feedback, etc. It’s a labor of love for me and having you stop by to check out my cartoons makes me so happy! Who knows, maybe someday my cartoons will be next to Garfield in the funnies? Let’s just hope that Jim Davis doesn’t retire anytime soon.
Cheers!
~tod
