“I definitely do have a warped sense of humor,” says Kevin Michael Williams the Shawangunk Journal’s new cartoonist. And with influences like Robert Crumb and Gary Larsen, one can understand that claim.

Williams hails from Oxford, Ohio, attended Miami College in Ohio and then moved to the North East with sojourns in New York City, New Paltz and most recently Ellenville. For most of his life Williams has played bass guitar in a number of bands. He has a collection of bass guitars in his apartment, including one he made himself. Like many of his generation he says his influences began with the Beatles and the British Invasion groups of the mid-60s.

A crucial year for him was 1970 when he says, “August 16, I moved to New York City and lived for a year with an older brother on Thompson Street in the Village. I also turned back to the bass. In high school I had been playing drums.”

Over the years he played in groups that he calls “classic rock” but also in country bands and blues bands. Along the way he discovered his limits. “I never liked punk music, but I did play at CBGBs.”

He bounced back and forth between college in Ohio and music in New York, with side trips. He says, “I got an offer to play in the Virgin Islands, it was a six-week gig. I stayed a year and a half. It was great.”

And of course, in the islands he played some reggae. Back in the US he continued to play in a number of groups, “I was with Peter May and Mayhem and played Woodstock II.”

Williams moved to New Paltz in 1971 or '72,working with the owners of The Gay Nineties ice cream parlor and restaurant, which later became The Bistro. Music supported by restaurant jobs continued to occupy him through the 1970s. He says, “I’ve played every kind of music. Punk rock and country are not challenging for a bass player. Reggae though, that’s got the bass on the upbeat.”

With the music to the fore in those years he notes, “I wasn’t doing much artwork at that point, but a little later I started to get serious about it.”

However, while he was making a living as a musician he was always drawing. “I started drawing stuff as a little kid. I did Popeye cartoons for myself. I was a fine arts major at Miami College, but I don’t paint. I have always done cartooning and lettering, though at one point I switched to theater for a while.”

His progress led him back to the city, where he established a style that he has retained. “I work in black and white with small areas of color. I get ideas from everything and I just have a little bit of a different take on things from most people.

As to the technique he says, “I do it in pencil, then redo it with a big thick pen and then I xerox it and color it in.”

Williams moved back up to Dutchess County in 2006 and worked for a while at a pub in Wappingers Falls owned by the same owners as The Gay Nineties. Then he got a job in New Paltz at the bar and restaurant that later became Bacchus.

Health issues became a preoccupation in the last decade, largely down to terrible back pain.

“I have a lot of ‘fodder’ from nursing homes now,” he notes slyly.

His residency in Ellenville is a recent development and his cartoons for the Shawangunk Journal will come “from everywhere and everything.” That will include politics, though he adds, “I have never voted, I never really cared that much. I love my country, was almost drafted during Vietnam, but I was too busy with life to worry about politics.”

So, for his cartoons in the paper, expect the weird, the unexpected and the funny side of things.