First attempts at drawing cartoons

I am trying my hand at cartoon characters to see if I can illustrate my own little books. It won't be fancy, but my goal is for the pictures to be better than the Bob Books (whose illustrations are rather awful). So I've done a lot of online tutorials in using the drawing program of my choice, and some on cartooning. And I've spent a lot of time saying, "Nope. It looks terrible" and putting it away, coming back the next day and saying, "Well, maybe if I just fiddle with this line using the skills I just learned...."

I illustrated 35 books in level 0 and the first 5 books in level 1 using public domain clip art. But I'm at a point where I need to start telling stories. I did a lot of editing pictures on the first 40 books and learned a lot about how people put things together. Now I'm just trying to learn how to make pictures from scratch.

So here's my first attempt at a person:

I can see things I can fix (like the lines being not the same weight, and the clothes being a little boxy still, and his hand being on backwards--oops!), but I'm encouraged. I might just learn this new skill after all!