I blame it all on auto insurance.
Some time during the late 1990s my work as a freelance illustrator
had landed me an assignment with a small insurance company to create
a cartoon. The company wanted a weekly strip, in the local paper, as an
attention grabber for their business. Coming from such a tight-laced industry,
it was a surprisingly freewheeling job.I was told I could create
any characters I wanted and write any type of story. As a further measure
of their mental instability, they didnt require seeing the final
cartoon before it went to print. The strip,
whose only benefit to the company was producing a multitude of new cartoonist
liability policies, ran for a couple of months. That job made me realize
that being a cartoonist was just like being a recovering drunk. You didnt
have to focus on doing three hundred and seventeen daily cartoons and
fourty-eight full color Sundays in the course of a year, you just had
to draw one cartoon, one day at a time (and beg for change). This mystical
revelation started me on a four year, bleary-eyed odyssey into the enigmatic
world of syndicated comics. The first three years of
that period I created three different strips.The first was about a man
and his pet blowfish, another about a theme park full of talking
reptiles and the last about a runaway space
alien adopted by an earth family. Although all three strips were roundly
rejected by the syndicates (the companies that sell cartoons to newspapers),
there was enough positive comments sprinkled throughout those rejections
to give me a small modicum of hope. Always a glutton for punishment I
decided to give it one more "High School Equivalency Test" try. Of course
I had no new ideas, so I started combining side characters from my old
strips and putting fresh titles on them, in hopes that no one would notice.
This brought together a cranky, bitter, old man character,Pop,
with a pony tailed, wild eyed, idealist, Hippy. I teamed them
up as father and son duo with a contentious past and polar opposite views
of the world. The hippie was named Alan Mcklusky an aging baby boomer
fighting retain his '60s sensibilities as he coped with middle age, the
new millennium and his cantankerous father, Eugene, who just moved in.
I named it Hippy and Pop, which seemed to me a good name for
a comic strip and a sugar coated cereal. As luck would have it no
one noticed that these characters were retreads and positive phone
calls came in from three editors (King, Tribune and Creators), with encouraging
written notes arriving from two others. Tribune
offered to put Hippy on their "Comics Edge" web site (which
was a site show casing strips they found had some potential). I was paid
a small fee and the site viewers posted feedback about the strip. This
feedback became very helpful in improving and refining the strip. Creators
wanted me to redraw a number of strips with changes, which they would
then submit to a review committee. Jay Kennedy, at King,
wanted me to draw thirty four new strips with some suggested changes,
including changing the shape of Pops head, which looked too "worm-like".
I spent another six months drawing new strips and talking to all three
editors. In the end Creators and Tribune took a pass but King called with
a development contract. A development contract is a short-term contract
in which you are paid a fee to further develop your strip. At the end
of the contract you could be handed a real syndication deal or walking
papers, depending on how your strip evolves. I did three back flips and
then called a lawyer. It took another four or five months to work out
the details of what percentage of my soul I would give up and what its
licensing fees were worth before the contract was signed. About a week
after it was inked I got a surprising call from Jay Kennedy telling me
they wanted to forego the "development" stage and jump right
to syndication. I was crouched and ready to do another back flip when
he described the timetables and deadlines involved. I had about two and
a half weeks to create three pages of color art and four new Sunday strips
for a sales kit. I had less than a month and a half to write, draw and
edit the final daily strips. The back flip was rescheduled to a later
date. Sales kits are created during every launch for the syndicate salespeople.
They drop these off to the newspapers during their sales calls. The newspaper
editors will look them over and either be mesmerized with laughter and
awe or use them for place mats and table levelers. The schedule for creating
mine was so tight because King had squeezed me into a preset launch date
after dropping a previous artist. With the sales kit being so crucial
to a successful launch I immediately handcuffed myself to the drawing
table and resumed my coffee addiction. Some how the art was completed
on time and I traveled to New York in September to meet with Jay Kennedy
and the other editors and salespeople at King. We discussed the strip,
I got to see the giant office Popeye statue, and we had a great lunch.
I then returned home and they took to the road to sell Hippy and Pop.
As is often true with life, timing is
everything. As fate would have it, our meeting had taken place exactly
a week before September 11th. Fortunately no one at King Features or any
of their family members were directly effected by the attacks but, as
one could imagine, everything else became discombobulated. The sales people
were grounded, the phone lines at King Features couldnt call out
for a couple of weeks and most importantly the newspaper business was
turned on its head. When the sales team was finally able to get
out on the road again an already weak market for selling comic strips
was now ice cold. If editors were even able to focus on something as trivial
as a comic strip at that time they no longer had the budgets to discriminate
with. It may have been one of the worst times to launch a strip in over
a decade. The early returns were not good as only a handful of initial
clients signed on. By the launch date in January the sales were still
light and the economy still gloomy. Fortunately I didnt have time
to fret as I was too immersed in the exciting schedule of a daily syndicated
cartoonist ( translation: no sleep, no social life, no vacations). Most
syndication contracts are formulated with a clause where either party
is free to walk away (from what is otherwise a ten or fifteen year contract)
if for any eight week period sales drop below a predetermined minimum
figure. At the two month mark of Hippy and Pops run it was still
not generating this minimum number. Towards the end of that month the
King sales staff met and assessed the potential for any new sales in the
next few months and decided they had a better chance of unloading shares
of Enron stock to the editors. Shortly there after I got the phone call
announcing Hippy and Pops demise. I was consoled by the fact it
may have set a record of some sort for shortest-lived daily strip in history. As my dream of seeing Hippy and Pop lunch
boxes and "Get Met Life" billboards, with Pop sitting on a dog
house, faded into the Photoshop colored sunset, I decided the least I
could do is post all the strips somewhere for people to see them. I still
think the characters are great and the strips occasionally funny. I believe
they ultimately would have caught on given enough time, exposure and envelopes
of cash slipped into cartoon editors lunch boxes. I apologize that, if
you dont find yourself mesmerized with laughter or awe, you cant
turn this web page into a place matte or table leveler. If you e-mail
me Ill see to it that you are sent a paper towel and a book of matches
to make up for it. Please enjoy poking around these pages
and feel free to e-mail any comments, insults or money regarding the strips
or this site to: hippyandpop@yahoo.com Also check the "The
Latest" section for the news about any future Hippy and Pop projects
(I am looking at other venues for the characters) and the new strip ideas
that I am working on. To see other cartoon and illustration work please
visit: www.oocities.org/murphproductions Congratulations, for making to the end
of this long winded Pete Murphey |