The quirky world of Down South was created by cartoonist Stephen Enzweiler. Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Enzweiler grew up reading the funny papers, and spent many long afternoons at the local “five and ten” reading comic books, and reading Sunday comics like Lil Abner, Snuffy Smith, B.C, and Peanuts (his favorite of all time).

Growing up, he always seemed to have a pencil in his hand. In grade school and in the town where he lived, he quickly acquired a reputation as an artist, and won many ribbons and honorable mentions at art shows. In high school, he spent most of his time in class doodling and drawing caricatures of his teachers and classmates in his notebooks, thus creating his first real cartoon characters.

His first paying art job was as a cartoonist at Paramount Kings Island Amusement Park after graduating high school. There he learned the basic concepts of rendering caricature and learned what made something funny. He studied the comic pages more closely, too, and began teaching himself how to draw newspaper cartoons, with the aim of someday having his own syndicated strip.

He created his first comic strip later that year, called PATSY, and submitted it to the syndicates. He was told the drawing was good, but the strip wasn’t funny. In the rejection, he had discovered that “funny” was different things to different people. He noticed that the strips that last the test of time are those with characters and attributes that everyday people can relate to in their everyday lives.

After college, he worked on a newspaper writing obituary columns. After a few years, it was apparent they would not make him an editorial cartoonist, and PATSY kept getting rejected by the syndicates. One day, he wrote an obituary for the strip's main character and slipped it into the paper's evening edition, thus ending PATSY'S life. Needing a change of scenery, he quit the paper and joined the Air Force.

In the military community, he discovered a treasure trove of human characters and behavior. The result was WINFIELD, his second strip, which centered around an insecure, self-doubting young boy named Wally Goodhart. In 1987, WINFIELD was picked up by a Nebraska publication called "People, Places, & Things," where it enjoyed a successful three-year publication run.

At the same time, he teamed up with squadron-mate Brent Lavers and began producing a politically incorrect publication called The Crew Dog Gazette. It was published anonymously, and was a kind of underground Mad Magazine that specialized in good-natured lampooning and satire of the military flying community, with Lavers as its skewering editor and Enzweiler as its unhinged cartoonist. The Gazette audience was, in Enzweiler's view, the ultimate proving ground for both editorial and comic strip humor. It was a tough bunch, a sophisticated and discerning community of technical and professional minds who didn't tolerate crude humor, obviousness, or wishy-washiness. The experience ultimately taught him that good writing--not necessarily good drawing--was the more important skill in cartooning.

Enzweiler created three more comic strips for the Gazette: FUNDIMENTALIST JIM, PILOT’S CORNER, and THE SHOE STORE. They appeared in issue after issue from 1988 until 1993, making The Crew Dog Gazette so popular, it was said to have readers in all four military services, including many in the Pentagon and the halls of government. Rumor even had it that during the 1990 Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf got his own copy.

Enzweiler eventually left the military and moved back to his home in Kentucky to pursue a full-time art career. He ran an advertising agency for a time, then taught advertising design and creative writing at The Art Institute of Cincinnati.

In 2004, he began doing work for Y'all Magazine in Oxford, Mississippi as one of their illustrators. In 2006, he created DOWN SOUTH. Its unique commentaries on life, southern culture, and our own human frailties through an extraordinary cast of characters caught the attention of the editors, and in June 2007, it debuted in the magazine. It has been a regular feature ever since.

Enzweiler lives in Kentucky and divides his time between his home and regular trips to Mississippi and the Deep South. In addition to his cartoons, he is an illustrator and writer for Y'all Magazine as well as a short story fiction author; he is currently working on his first novel. Learn more about his writings at StephenEnzweiler.com.