It's All About...

New H-L comics: creator interviews.

If you're a comics reader, you probably noticed a few little, you know, tweaks to the comics pages. Good-bye, Mary Worth. Sally Forth, I really liked you. Marmaduke, you are a bad dog. Cathy, glad the marriage is working; hope the baby comes by. Gals at Apartment 3-G? ::sigh:: You could've been all Grey's Anatomy, but no...it never worked for you.

So hello Baby Blues, Between Friends, Cul de Sac, F Minus, Mother Goose & Grimm, Mutts, Non Sequitur, Red and Rover and Speed Bump.

Behind the cut, you'll find interviews with the creators of some of our new comics.

Enjoy!

New H-L comics: F Minus

For the next few days, I'll be posting Q&As with the artists of several new comics debuting in the H-L on Monday. Some are quite new to syndication, including this one, F Minus...

Tony Carrillo was an art major, planing on seeing his name on gallery walls, but as a junior at Arizona State University, he set down the paint brushes and tried cartooning for his student paper.

The plan changed when his strip won a contest in 2004, the year he graduated; it earned him a development deal with a syndicate and his full-time job: creator and cartoonist of F Minus.

The cartoon was syndicated in April 2006; the Herald-Leader will begin running the daily panel on Monday. Carrillo still lives in Arizona and continues to rely on people-watching and overheard turns of phrase for inspiration.

His first book, F Minus, was released in September. In its first year of syndication, the comic was nominated for a National Cartoonist Society award for best newspaper panel.

“I met almost everyone on comics page. It was bizarre,” he says. “There are just legends walking around.”

 

Question: How has the comic developed since your earliest strips?
Answer: I think my artwork had gotten better. I'm getting faster at the drawing. The content and style hasn't changed. I knew what I wanted it to be like. You get away with a little more in college.

An interview with the Get Fuzzy creator, Darby Conley.

What Darby Conley can’t understand is why every commercial and advertisement doesn’t include a goofy cat or a mopey dog. “All you have to do is put some ra ndom animal in a commercial and people are transfixed,” he says, with the knowing voice of someone familiar with people’s animal obsessions.

He’s the creator of Get Fuzzy, the winner in the Herald-Leader’s last comics survey and latest addition to the comics pages. (We're doing an even bigger survey now. You can list the ones you love, the ones you hate and the ones you'd like to see added at the online survey, or in the paper.)

Get Fuzzy features, of course, a goofy cat and a mopey dog and their appropriately exasperated owner, a guy just a few felines shy of becoming a crazy cat man. Get Fuzzy appears in 450 newspapers nationwide. Shortly after the strip was syndicated in 1999, Conley would create storylines focused on Rob Wilco and his (human) friends, but the public was adamant in its interest: more of that wicked, snaggle-toothed cat, more of the sweetly naive dog, and less of the rugby-playing dork. “That was a no-go,” Conley says of the human-focused strips. “People didn’t like that. All animals all the time.”

Conley himself has access to five cats, four at his home in Boston and one at his parents’ home nearby. Not that they’re so great at providing inspiration. “Cats are weird little things. Bucky’s at least interactive,” Conley says. “The cats we have sort of look at you disgusted and walk out of the room.”

To a dog, he says, he’s probably pretty OK. But he hasn’t had one since 1992, when the dog he grew up with in Tennessee died. “We’re just now talking about getting one,” Conley says. “It’s a leap, with four cats. We’ve got to pick a cat-friendly dog.”

Click below for the Q&A with Conley.

Get Fuzzy, finally.

After many years of anecdotal evidence that Get Fuzzy was a kind-of-popular comic strip, even among people who weren’t getting it in their daily newspaper, it’s finally a fixture on our comics page

It was the clear winner in a recent poll. The runner-up was less clear -– Mutts and Over the Hedge were almost tied –- so we’re auditioning more strips now. You can vote again in July, when we’ll ask for even more opinions on our current comics.

So let's say you're new to a life of fuzz, and not among the bitter hordes burning the H-L for cutting B.C. and Wizard of Id.

Here’s the rundown: Bucky Katt is a lazy, bullying know-it-all who knows nothing. He is, of course, a cat.

Satchel Pooch is sweet, dopey and endlessly loyal, even to the wicked, snaggletoothed cat.

Rob Wilco is their helpless owner, a Lowe Tech grad and single guy who dares not bring women back to his fur-covered apartment. He has the incredible, yet unremarked-on, talent for being able to chat with his animals. Good thing they’re a witty bunch.

To truly get fuzzy, check out Groovitude: A Get Fuzzy Treasury. Published in 2002, just three years after the strip was born, it explains how Bucky and Satch have developed into the immature, adult animals they are. Once you’ve gotten through that, check out LoserPalooza, a new treasury of Get Fuzzy cartoons published just last month. Not kidding: hours of entertainment.

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Ponder: How does a Paducah Gap manager become an Internet/fashion phenom?
By being funny and honest and well-dressed and sweetly Kentuckian. William Sledd, a guy from Paducah, was just named one of Yahoo's People of the Web. You might have seen his fashion pointers on YouTube.

picking our new comics!

With the sad and undeniably bizarre deaths of Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, the Herald-Leader will be replacing B.C. and Wizard of Id on the funny pages. (If we have our druthers, a few more changes will be coming soon enough...)

Because we love and respect our comic readers, you get some input. (You're the ones that chose Pickles last time we did this...she said without a smidgen of judgment in her voice.)

We're auditioning six solid, newer strips to fill the holes. Some are hugely popular and running in many other papers. Others, less so. We didn't get too crazy just yet, but again, change is wafting through the air at the H-L.

For the next two weeks, you'll see Agnes and Pooch Cafe.

They'll be followed by Lio and Mutts and finally, Get Fuzzy and Over the Hedge, which we already run on Sundays.

You can vote online or by mail. (Check the features sections for the ballot -- today, it's on page C10.)

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Read: Everything you wanted to know about Legally Blonde.
Rich Copley blogged himself into a frenzy from New York this weekend, watching Lexington gal Laura Bell Bundy take to the pink carpet and the stage. It's a must read, seriously.

Stephan Pastis and Pearls Before Swine

Sorry this post is late: I was busy downing Tolly Ho milkshakes to celebrate my win as Time's Person of the Year. (And pondering the news that Kentucky's Miss USA, Tara Conner, will keep her crown.)
 

Between sips, I talked with Stephan Pastis, creator of  Pearls Before Swine. It's not safe to make any promises about newspapering, but for the new year, here's one. (And that's all you get!)

We'll run his strip  on the daily comics pages starting Jan. 1. FoxTrot will still run on Sundays.

Pastis grew up in southern California, a Los Angeles Times reader obsessed with Peanuts cartoons, and became a UCLA-bred lawyer obsessed with becoming a cartoonist.

In 2002, he syndicated Pearls Before Swine and he became one of them. So much one of them that he frequently plows over that fourth wall and makes fun of the others. Some cartoonists are OK with it. Some...maybe not so much. He's chummy with the creator of Get Fuzzy, friendly with the Baby Blues folks and a fan of panels like Speed Bump and Bizarro.

Although he's in that cartoonist community, he's still a newbie. He hasn't met some of the legends, namely, Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes and Gary Larson of The Far Side. "One's hiding in Ohio, one's hiding in Washington," Pastis says. "They're like the Loch Ness Monster. We think they exist."

He offered some insight on how he got into cartooning, where the fickle business of newspaper cartooning is headed and why he still responds to almost every e-mail he receives from readers.

Question: How did Pearls Before Swine get started?
Answer: In law school, I drew this rat in my notebooks during class. I had drawn since I was a kid, but I never had a regular character. Then I took all the stuff I had done and turned it into a strip, and I turned it in to the syndicates in 1996. They all rejected it. I toned it down with Pig. I think his sweetness tempered the bite of Rat. That seemed to strike something with the syndicate editor.

Q: You were a lawyer at that point?
A: I had been a lawyer for nine years. I just hated being a lawyer. Doing this, I could've saved not only on my law school tuition, but my college tuition. I could've dropped out of high school. You don't need any kind of degree to do this.