Local Spotlight: Bob Cochran

For Old Orchard Beach resident Bob Cochran, coffee always pairs well with cartoons.

Cochran, 68, is a bit of a coffee aficionado, and can tell you his favorite coffee drink at numerous coffee shops. At Café 64 on Old Orchard Street in downtown Old Orchard Beach, his favorite is the Salty Seal – a latte with honey, vanilla and sea salt. And if he’s sipping on a Salty Seal you can bet he’s got a pen in hand sketching on a Canson Bristol smooth sketch pad.

The Canson Bristol smooth sketch pad “photographs well and has a nice finish,” he said, though he’s been known to make do with a napkin if the sketch pad has been left at home.

One of his caffeine-fueled napkin sketches, a fresh take on the seagull and French fry trope, gained so much popularity among customers that Café 64 owner Gabe Kidd had it printed on a t-shirt.

A comic by Bob Cochran that was later printed on a t-shirt. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAFE 64 INSTAGRAM

The t-shirt has sold out, but fans of Cochran’s work can now purchase his new book, “It Came from 2,000 Lattes! A Thoroughly Caffeinated Cartoon Odyssey.” The limited-edition, spiral-bound book is a collection of Cochran’s cartoons and is available exclusively at Café 64 for $15.

The one-panel comics featured in the book were all written at Café 64. Kidd, his friend Grahm Kwasnick, and Cochran looked through the stack of comics the café had compiled and chose their favorites.

“They were keeping them in a folder almost four-inches thick,” said Cochran.

Kwasnick cleaned up the pages and scanned them and put them together in a portfolio binder between plastic sleeves.

BOB Cochran's comic book is on sale exclusively at Cafe 64 in Old Orchard Beach. PHOTO BY LIZ GOTTHELF

The home-grown publishing effort was a bit of déjà vu for Cochran.

“It was really like going back to 1975,” he said.

That was when he self-published his first book - an underground comic book that was a high school parody poking fun of a chemistry teacher.

The book Cochran wrote in high school was stapled looseleaf paper. When his classmates read it and wanted their own copy, he created duplicates by transferring the images with carbon paper.

“To this day, I still have a heavy-handed drawing style from using carbon paper to copy things,” he said.

Coffee and cartoons have been mainstays in Cochran’s life, since he was in his teens and early twenties living in his home state of Pennsylvania.

“I liked to hang out at the local Mr. Donut and write cartoons on napkins to pass time,” he said.

He did taper off cartooning for a while, but picked it back up in August 2024, when he was laid off from a job and had some free time to fill.

“I’ve been putting one out a day since August 2024. Most of them were drawn right here,” he said from his seat at his favorite table in Café 64.

Cochran is mostly self-taught, but he did get some pointers from Pen Schumacher, an artist who worked on the Archie comic strip. He was introduced to Schumacher by a friend, after a chance meeting on a bus.

While he created strip-form comics when he was younger, Cochran now does primarily one-panel, gag cartoons. Inspiration comes from many places. On a recent trip to Newburyport, he saw a whale watch excursion and got the idea of a whale emerging from the sea with binoculars. An empty creamer decanter at a coffee shop once had him musing about a tiny cow inside providing milk.

Cochran has also had comics published in an Austrian music magazine and a music industry newsletter.

Saco Bay News Publisher Liz Gotthelf can be reached at newsdesk@sacobaynews.com.