BLACK HAWK -- George Blevins has called Colorado’s Front Range his home for over half his life, moving in the early 1980s. He says the time in his adult life before then “hardly seems to count, especially since I’m 85 and I don’t remember all that stuff very well.”

Before Colorado, Blevins grew up in rural Louisiana. As a child, he and his parents lay in bed together every Sunday morning to read The Sunday Funnies from The Sunday Times. Those comics, particularly Pogo, instilled a lifelong passion for Blevins. From then on, all he wanted to do was find opportunities as a cartoonist for comic strips.

After graduating from high school, Blevins talked his father into sending him to Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Walt Disney took over administrative duties from the school’s founder, Nerbert Murphy Chouinard, in the early 1950s after she suffered a stroke.

In 1961, Walt and his brother Roy guided a merger between Chouinard and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, establishing the California Institute of the Arts. The original Chouinard campus continued operating until the new institute’s opening in 1970.

Attending the original Chouinard campus, Blevins hoped to get a job under Walt Disney. Although he never worked with Disney, he fondly and vividly remembers an encounter with him. Walking to class one day, he saw a few people walking in his direction, among them Disney. He froze for a moment, trying to think of something to say when Disney walked by.

However, Disney spoke first. As he passed by Blevins, he told him, “Your shoe’s untied.” Blevins tied his shoe, and by the time he looked up again, the small group had gone. This was Blevins’s only encounter with the legendary name, an encounter he calls his “zen moment with Walt Disney.”

Blevins’ time in Chouinard was short-lived, as he left the campus soon after meeting a group of Freedom Riders. The group took a trip to Jackson, Mississippi, to advocate for integration and protest the designation of bus seating that kept Blacks and whites separate. Upon arrival at their station, a police officer commanded the group to leave, and the group refused.

The group’s case was brought to a state court, which ultimately convicted the group of “breach of the peace.” Sentenced to four months in state prison for their felony charge, all of the members were released after 90 days on appeal bond.

In his account written for The Civil Rights Movement Archive (crmvet.org), Blevins recalls experiencing direct police violence after his release. Staying with two other white men and a Black minister in New Orleans, two sisters invited the group to dinner up the block.

During the dinner, two cops walked into the house and demanded the white men’s draft IDs, deciding they were invalid and hauling the group off as draft evaders.

Once bailed out, Blevins attended a second court appearance for his first charge. Blevins continued to join demonstrations, staying in New Orleans. His father traveled to Mississippi, convinced that Blevins “had been misguided by a bunch of commies.” Blevins traveled to Los Angeles with his father, discussing and advocating for integration with the rest of his family.

On May 29, 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that interstate travel had to be integrated by November 1, essentially outlawing segregation on buses. On his involvement as a Freedom Rider and the ultimate results of the demonstrations, Blevins says, “That was fun and I was real proud of myself.”

In his later years, Blevins moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Hendrix, Illinois. During his time living in Hendrix, he worked in St. Louis, Missouri, just on the other side of the river from him.

Blevins’ wife at the time took a trip to the Colorado Front Range with a friend of hers. When she came back, she enthusiastically told Blevins they had to move there permanently.

Blevins’ wife advocated for a mountain home, uninterested in living directly in Nederland, a town she considered a dump. Blevins, not particularly attached to Hendrix, moved with her to the Front Range.

A few years later, growing disenchanted with the Front Range and connecting with someone else, Blevins’ wife moved out of the state and separated from him, ending Blevins’ third marriage.

Blevins stayed in Colorado, still captivated by the mountains and falling in love with the state. Settling into Colorado’s environment was easy for him, as he loved the weather throughout the year.

Blevins hates hot weather, and he saw Colorado as a welcome contrast to places like his home state of Louisiana. There, “in the winter, we had cold rain and freezing mud,” and in the summer, it was constantly muggy and too hot no matter how many layers he wore.

Blevins embraced the pleasant warmth of Colorado’s summer, at least in his abode at 9,000 feet. He also loved experiencing a winter with actual snow and finds that it’s easier to put on the right amount of layers to keep warm than it is to take off the right amount to cool down.

An aspect of the area that stood out to Blevins was its weekly rural newspaper, The Mountain-Ear, as he felt many similar newspapers contained “mostly ads with filler in between.” Meanwhile, The Mountain-Ear embraced a “strong journalistic ethic” through founder Kay Turnbaugh, whose mother was a journalism teacher.

Blevins thought The Mountain-Ear was an outstanding rural newspaper, and he couldn’t help but notice that it didn’t have a cartoonist. Seeing the potential, he proposed an editorial cartoon to Turnbaugh based on local happenings.

Blevins emphasized he would work for free; he didn’t care about making money, he just wanted to draw comic strips. After reviewing his work, Turnbaugh brought him onto the team on two conditions: his cartoons had to be his original ideas, and he could not work for free.

After working on the editorial cartoons for a while, Blevins proposed expanding to a weekly comic strip. He developed basic guidelines for the comic that became the long-running comic strip Cabin Fever: six panels for ideal joke pacing, a world centered in the mountains where everything can talk, and a lead character based on himself.

Wanting to center the strip in “the boonies” of the Front Range, Blevins spotted a property on the 4th of July Trailhead that he couldn’t afford. He had connected with a woman looking for “a place up in the mountains, away from everybody else,” so he told her about the property on the condition that she sell him a small portion of it.

The woman promised to do so and kept it, so Blevins shared a portion of the property with artist and writer Jane Wodening. The two didn’t form a close connection, but their cordial agreement allowed them both to live in their ideal location, isolated in the mountains.

By the early 1990s, as his primary money-making venture, Blevins worked three days a week driving the bookmobile for the Gilpin County Public Library. The other four days of the week, he worked on cartoons, drawing them in his 4th of July property and bringing the finished product to The Mountain-Ear’s office.

After turning his cartoons in, Blevins slept in the office in a sleeping bag for the next few nights, more convenient for traveling to the library. Once the weekends came around, he went back to his 4th of July property, starting the cycle all over again.

Cabin Fever ran in The Mountain-Ear from 1983 to 2005. Blevins set a rule for himself early on to write each comic: “Just start with the first panel and let it unfold and see where it goes.” He didn’t always stick to the rule, but setting that guideline allowed him to better structure each strip and find a joke’s punchline instead of trying to work around one.

Cabin Fever is Blevins’s primary body of work, but since the strip, he’s written and illustrated two books. In 2013, the Carousel of Happiness launched Mr. Turtle Meets Ms. Ladybug, a story about a grumpy turtle who befriends a social ladybug. Blevins says that with the basic concept and characters in mind, he let the story and his writing flow in such a way that it practically wrote itself.

In 2014, Blevins self-published Milo and Biscuit’s Guide to Evolution, having thoroughly researched the subject to create a simple yet factually accurate representation of evolution for all ages. He published through the company Blurb, as the website allowed him to include as much of the book as he wanted in the preview.

Today, Blevins is semi-retired, still working for the Gilpin County Public Library as the library’s technician. He still lives in the community with his partner, loving the mountains just as much now as he did then.

Finding it a wonderful and eccentric place, Blevins says the town of Nederland has consistently attracted “oddballs,” including himself, lending perfect material for his cartoons. Despite never planning to live in Colorado and arriving in less-than-ideal circumstances, he’s thankful he found the mountains and says,  “Everything worked out just fine.”

To learn more about George Blevins and find his work, be sure to head to his website, georgesefforts.com.