New Comic Strips

A couple of the big syndicates are releasing a new crop of comic strips. United is offering Secret Asian Man, and Universal is launching Cul de Sac .

Secret Asian Man is obviously trying to fill an ethic niche, while Cul de Sac looks like a well-drawn and well-written strip about kids. I like Richard Thompson's work and the sample strips I've seen.

Here's the question: How many cartoonists have been told by the syndicates that a new strip about kids, however well done, is impossible to sell in today's market because of existing kid/family strips? (Tiger, Baby Blues, PreTeena, Agnes, Hi & Lois, Big Nate, FoxTrot, Curtis, Marvin, Heart of the City, On the Fast Track, to name a few.)

Interestingly enough, Universal just launched Lio last year -- a kids' strip with a twist, but still a kids' strip. King greenlighted The Pajama Diaries, a family strip, a year or so ago as well. Dog Eat Doug combines babies and animals, and Cow and Boy offers kids and bovines. So, apparently, you CAN sell a strip about kids and families. This makes perfect sense, as everyone was a kid or has kids or knows kids. It's the same with family strips: everyone has a family, so it's easy to identify with the subject matter.

The moral of the story is this: Don't listen to the syndicates. Do what inspires YOU. If it's kids, or pets, or families or aliens, do it. There's always room for good comics, regardless of the subject matter.

Thoughts?

Question of the Day

So what's dirtier: Giant-Sized Man-Thing or Essential Man-Thing?

Just asking.

A Paucity of Posts

I've been posting so infrequently, A Nickel's Worth is starting to resemble Steve Gerber's blog (without the medical discussions). Steve's an excellent comic book writer, and you should all buy his upcoming work on Dr. Fate, news of which is here.

To digress a bit about Mr. Gerber, I enjoyed his work as a wee lad on such titles as Marvel's Man-Thing, The Defenders, and Howard the Duck. I picked up the entire run of the early 1970s Man-Thing several months ago on ebay and have been slowly working my way through them. The stories are excellent: quirky, funny, and incredibly subversive for a 1973 comic book. There are even crazed Vietnam vets, fer crying out loud. I have the Essential Howard the Duck, which I plan to read as soon as I finish the Man-Thing books. (A postscript: You've heard the joke, haven't you? What's the dirtiest Marvel comic book title? Answer: Giant-Size Man-Thing.)

Anyway, back to business. Why have I not been posting? Well, a lot of reasons, I guess. Mainly I've been busy. Lots of ch-ch-ch-changes coming up, most of which I can't say anything about for a couple of months. It's mostly good news, with a rather big helping of disappointment...you'll see what I mean later. (Cryptic enough for ya?)

I've been working a lot lately -- comics, greeting cards, t-shirt slogans. Some of my witty one-liners are currently being featured on shirts from the What On Earth catalog. Check 'em out here and here!

It's summer and my kids are home from school, so we've been hanging out a bit. My boys and I have watched Terminator 2 on cable about three times (I'd already see it about 10 times before that). It's a great action movie that's infinitely watchable. It may not be Citizen Kane, but damn, it sure is fun. Great chase scenes, great action scenes, silly plot, but great direction. Like Road Warrior, another "guy's movie" that I can watch multiple times, it's a great ride.

What else? We saw Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was very good. Some might complain about the film (Jessica Alba is too young, we never see Galactus, etc.), but I thought it captured the spirit of the comic book well and absolutely nailed the Surfer character. Unlike most recent superhero films, it wasn't non-stop CGI fighting. The action was well staged and had a sense of drama and gravity.

I also rented Ghost Rider, which, although it had excellent effects, was quite a disappointment. Nicolas Cage is way too old for the role and turned in a bizarre, campy performance that really hobbled the film. The story itself left me uninvolved, and Peter Fonda was amazingly bland as the devil. How can the devil be bland?

Catching Up

I've neglected my blog lately. No good excuse, really, although I have been busy (not superhumanly Jerry King or Glenn McCoy busy, but busy nonetheless).

I traveled to Ohio this past weekend to speak at a school library about children's books (I've authored a few over the years). I did a presentation with the very talented illustrator/cartoonist, Steve Harpster. Steve has illustrated several of my books, and we've also collaborated on a few projects that we hope one day to publish.

Check out Steve's most excellent work here.

Let's see...I also spoke at my son's middle school Career Day a couple of weeks ago, worked up 18 samples for yet another new comic strip proposal, and tallied up the rejections from my last two syndicate submissions (not HIS & HERS, but a couple of projects on which I collaborated). One project was rejected outright by all syndicates; the other may live on in some form at King. Who knows? Probably not. But we're still "talking."

Working on these various projects – books, comics —made me think about how tough working with people on various projects can be. Collaboration is not an easy thing. It involves cooperation, compromise, and, unless you find the perfect partner, concessions.

I must admit to having mixed emotions about teaming up with an artist or writer. It’s rare to find the likes of Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman or Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman -- a team that meshes seamlessly and produces work of such singular vision. Most of us aren’t as blessed.

Cartooning is, by and large, a solitary pursuit. I'm not sure if that's because we cartoonists like to follow our own "vision," or if it's because we're just hopelessly anti-social. Maybe a bit of both.

Any thoughts? Do you like to collaborate? To work alone?

I'll be back soon with more news.

Heavy Metal Blunder

I took my 14-year-old son and a couple of his buddies to a concert last night: The "No Fear" tour, featuring the bands He is Legend, Chimaira, DragonForce, and Killswitch Engage.

Now, being 45, I'd never heard of any of these groups. They don't play Killswitch Engage on the light jazz station I usually listen to in the car.

I was originally planning to drop my son and his friends at the concert hall and hang out at a Starbucks for a few hours, but it seemed a little irresponsible, so I purchased a ticket for myself and we made the trek to Indy to see the show.

Now, I'm not ignorant when it comes to music. In fact, I pride myself on being fairly knowledgeable about rock and roll and pretty eclectic in my musical tastes. I like some hard rock, some country, jazz, even some hip hop. But the stuff I heard at the Murat Theater Wednesday night, with the exception of DragonForce (the band my son and his friends really wanted to see) was just grinding, repetitive, monotonous garbage.

Watching Killswitch Engage and Chimaira pound and shriek and rasp through their songs, I thought "this is what serial killers must listen to when they're dismembering their victims and making lampshades out of their skin." It was truly disturbing, yet mind-numbing, sonic swill.

A few highlights of the show:

• My son being denied entry because of the plastic studs on his fake leather gloves (he had to run back to the car and ditch the offending items)
• DragonForce lead singer spitting four bottles of water at the indoor crowd. (Eww)
• Several very wasted young men being escorted by security from the theater
• One very wasted young lady being escorted by security from the men's restroom
• Paying $2.00 for a 50-cent bag of potato chips and $3.00 for a can of Sprite

The funniest (and oddest) sight at the show was a young man standing by the sound board in the middle of the room. Seated in front of him were two women, who took turns performing the songs in sign language for him as the bands played. The women were reading the lyrics from printouts placed on music stands and signing accordingly. Since it was impossible to make out the words to any of the songs being sung, I wished that I understood sign language, too. Maybe I would've known what the *@#! the bands were singing.

As it was, the only lyrics I could make out during the entire evening were "I Hate Everyone," which the frontman from Chimaira kept repeating over and over and over. Standing in the Egyptian Room of the Murat Theater, being assaulted by an endless wave of awful noise for four hours, I had to agree.

Correction

Apparently, Keith Richards was joking when he said he snorted his father's ashes along with a little "blow." But, hey, it's Keith Richards. Sounded plausible, right?

Writing

How do cartoonists develop material for new comic strips? That's a question with as many answers as there are cartoonists.

Lee Nordling, former syndicate editor and a comic strip writer himself suggested this recently on the Toon Talk message board:

"So, here's A process--not THE process--for developing a strip. I suspect it'll work for some but not for all. If you want to try it, change the stuff you know isn't for you. For example, people who write best in the evenings and not the mornings should probably change the timeframe for #1.

1) Every morning, before the daily chores of life have started to shove your creative process/thinking aside, write at least one week's worth of strips, daily and Sunday. Get them to the point where you're happy with them.

2) The next morning, write another week's worth of strips, daily and Sunday, then review what you wrote the previous day and edit accordingly. Take out the ones you're not happy with...but ignore the ones you wrote this day.

3) Continue this for at least three weeks. (Are you doing the math? Ignore it if you are; it's the quality that counts, not the quantity).

4) As you get up each morning and write a week's worth of strips, review what you've written and start to fashion your sample. Theoretically, you've culled out the weakest gags. Here, you'll realize you may need more defining gags for characters or relationships.

Filling these holes will be a new task, and, in repeating the process of writing every morning, you'll have many to cull from to fill those holes well.

Notice I didn't suggest you draw any of these gags.For me/this exercise, the point is to learn to become your own editor, to learn to cull cull cull from gags that aren't good enough (yet) to draw."

I tried this method on one of the strips I'm developing. I didn't get a week of strips written each day, but I did churn out a surprising amount of material: nearly 60 strips in six days. Not all of them are usable, of course, but most are solid, a few are really good, and even the bad ones are good idea starters.

How do others work? Anyone want to offer a different method?

Mortal Thoughts

This has been a weird few weeks.

There have been three strange and unexpected deaths in my little corner of the world lately. I'm not as death-obsessed as Woody Allen, but I must admit I think about the subject probably more than I should. And these recent losses don't help.

How do we deal with death? We can ignore it, deny it, run from it, or try to make peace with it.

Or we can do what Keith Richards, that indestructible icon of excess, did.

"I snorted my father,” Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME. “He was cremated, and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said, adding that “it went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

Richards' father died in 2002 at age 84.

Like I said, a weird few weeks.

G.I. Joe Hair

Went in for a haircut Friday and, for some unknown reason, decided to go really short. I ended up looking like a G.I. Joe Talking Commander-- just needed the scar. (I had one of these figures, and the whole G.I. Joe Adventure Team, back in the early 70s.)

Syndicate Roulette Update: Universal Press

I just heard from the editor at Universal. He sent me a nice email and we discussed HIS & HERS. He offered some very insightful feedback (for which I'm very grateful), but he's passing on the strip. I have two other submissions out right now. We'll see how those fare.

United Media
Universal Press -- email from editor: NO
Creators Syndicate -- form letter: NO
Washington Post Writers Group
Tribune Media -- form letter: NO
King Features -- call from editor: NO