I’ve been a fan of comic strips for as long as I can remember. When I was a boy the newspaper was still widely read and delivered daily. The comics section took up two entire pages of real estate during the week in black and white ink and four pages on Sunday in color.
My favorites were Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts (the granddaddy of all modern strips), Andy Capp, and who could forget the brilliance of The Far Side?
Through the years, the characters in these strips became like old friends that millions of people would visit once a day and check in on. Reading them, whether they made you laugh or made you think, somehow made the day seem complete.
I loved to draw as much as I loved to write as a child, maybe even more. Being able to combine the two skills into one activity was like a dream come true. I created a few primitive comic strips as a child. One of those strips called, “Snibbly”, I drew and developed for many years.
The Snibbly strip never went anywhere, well, because I was about ten years old when I started it. Also, looking back on it years later, you could tell it was created by a ten year old. It was practice though. Being the introvert that I was when I was young I couldn’t imagine a better career. I could draw at home, not have to go out into the scary world, and get paid lots of money. It was a triple-win in my ten year old mind.
Fast forward to the mid-nineties. I was in my 20’s and had just moved halfway across the country and landed a corporate job that paid the bills but I just knew it wouldn’t hold my interest for long. Feeling desperate for a creative outlet, I decided to start another strip called As Good As It Gets?
As Good As It Got
I somehow mustered the confidence to pitch the idea to a regional newspaper that had been regularly publishing my poetry. No one was more surprised than I was when they agreed to run it!
I’ll never forget the excitement I felt.
It seemed like my dream of becoming a syndicated cartoonist was getting started. Each month it was a great creative challenge to figure out what the strip would be about and then distill that idea into one single panel, with just a few lines and some words.
The one-panel strip ran in that monthly newspaper that circulated in Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin for a little over two years (1997-1999).
Unfortunately, As Good As It Gets? was never picked up by any other newspapers and the demands of my day job became too great for me to keep devoting the time to it. The Edge newspaper ran the very last strip in the autumn of 1999.
Every few years I run across some of my old comics and I get the bug again. As we were cleaning out a storage locker I found the six strips I’m sharing here recently and started wondering if there was a place for a comic strip here on Hive.
I mean, do people even read comics anymore?
Here's another question for you...
What did you do in your former life?
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Poetry should move us, it should change us, it should glitch our brains, shift our moods to another frequency. Poetry should evoke feelings of melancholy, whimsy, it should remind us what it feels like to be in love, or cause us to think about something in a completely different way. I view poetry, and all art really, as a temporary and fragile bridge between our world and a more pure and refined one. This is a world we could bring into creation if enough of us believed in it. This book is ephemera, destined to end up forgotten, lingering on some dusty shelf or tucked away in a dark attic. Yet the words, they will live on in memory. I hope these words become a part of you, bubble up into your memory when you least expect them to and make you feel a little more alive.
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