Once he was subpoenaed to appear in a New York court for a cartoon that seemed to be too critical of a lenient New York judge. Remoteness of his home base is not a barrier to coming up with new ideas that folks all over the country can identify with. His clients mail their newspapers to him and he scans the news stories, features and columns for situations that lend themselves to illustration and comment. These become grist for the McWilliams cartoon mill. Similar things make people laugh, whether they live in Alaska, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Alabama, Iowa, or wherever.
People everywhere seem to have the same type of social problems and situations.
Doodles appears in more than two-thirds of the cartoon panels that bear his name. Creating cartoons in unusual places is nothing new for McWilliams. His characters have originated in such diverse places as the cab of his road-weary pickup truck, a miner's cabin in a Montana ghost town, and even from the sands of Kuwait during the Gulf War. A typical work day for Barry begins with a quiet time between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. Barry is generally at his desk from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.