Charles Boyce

Charles Boyce( 1949 - ), creator of Compu-Toon, is a master of looking at his own foibles and creating laughter out of the impending disaster. Compu-Toon is laugh therapy for all generations! Boyce’s artfully drawn panel offers an insightful look at the influences of technology on initial computer illiterates.

Compu-toon started out as a panel about people and technology and the humor that comes from the relationship. Now with everything evolved around a push-button world...what we do and say is all of a computeristic nature. Those moments will be captured and presented in a way that will tickle your mother board.

Finding the humorous and decidedly human side of technology is the primary focus of artist Charles Boyce whose work will be exhibited through Feb. 28 at the Barrington Area Library.

Boyce, a Barrington resident since 2002, is the creator of "Compu-toon," an often hilarious single panel cartoon. The show, entitled "cARToon Exhibit," can be found in the Barrington Area Arts Council's Gallery at the library and offers access to nearly 80 cartoons, both framed and in albums, as well as a selection of Boyce's pen-and-ink and acrylic paintings. » Click to enlarge image Simon, a recurring character in the comic strip "Compu-toon," also is the alter ego of the comic's creator, Charles Boyce. The single-panel comic strip shows humorous and human interactions with technology.

The inspiration for "Compu-toon" came about when Boyce was up to his neck in working with technology, he said. From 1994-2000, "Compu-toon" ran weekly in the Chicago Tribune's business section. For the past three years, Boyce, who took an early retirement, has been producing daily panels on the Internet for Universal Press Syndicate including a color panel for Sunday. "I prefer to be where I am now than in print," Boyce said.

Hi-tech humor

Described as "laugh therapy for the PC generation," recent "Compu-toon" examples include an older woman who tries to listen to her first text message on her cell phone, a man who tries to best a U.S.- made lie detector by thinking in a foreign language and the hazards of forgetting one's pin number at a bank's ATM.

"I came at you with the humanistic approach. So if you don't what a computer is about you still get the jokes," said Boyce, whose on-line panels are archived at www.gocomics.com/compu-toon.

One classic "Compu-toon," originally published eight years ago and recently reposted, features the ill-fated attempt of a Mexican aerialist brother act to go wireless.

Born in Olive Branch, Miss. and raised in Memphis, Tenn., Boyce was known to his high school teachers as a doodler.

"All the teachers remember me as a kid who drew on his homework," he said.

Art history

Prior to serving in the U.S. Navy from 1968 to 1973, he attended the Memphis Academy of Art.

While serving as a lithographer stationed in the print shop on the USS Cascade AD-16, an attendant destroyer that patrolled the Mediterranean Sea during the Vietnam War, he created his first comic strip for the USS Cascader, the ship's newspaper.

"I did editorial cartoons and a comic strip called 'Pudgy and JB,' about two sailors. I was a big fan of Bill Mauldin and his World War II characters Willie and Joe," said Boyce.

The budding artist moved to Chicago in 1974 and attended the Chicago Academy of Art and the University of Illinois at Chicago where he studied animation and cinematography.

In 1979 Boyce completed and exhibited a series of 17 pieces in Memphis known as the "Blues Arrangement Exhibit." Examples from that installation to be found in the Barrington Area Library include "Ducks 1" and "Ducks 2," inspired by the famous ducks who come down to the lobby every day at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Other examples are a portrait of blues singer Leadbelly and a man playing a harmonica.

"Growing up in Memphis, I know some of the famous local people and these are views of what the blues may have been or could have been," Boyce said.

While his first attempts to market his ideas for comic strips like "Winslow, the Bald Eagle" failed to fly, his perseverance has paid off with the success of "Compu-toon" which remains dedicated to people who "go through life working up against or for or with technology and the challenges they face."