Tribune Media Syndicate Responds!

Unfortunately with a no!

There are 6 newspaper syndicates out there and Tribune Media is one of them.  The others are:

1) King Features, the oldest of the bunch
2) United Media, most famous syndicating “Peanuts”
3) Universal Press, which syndicated “Calvin & Hobbes”
4) Washington Post Writers Group, currently syndicating Bloom County’s spin off, “Opus”
5) Creator’s Syndicate, who gained muscle when Johnny Hart signed on.

I’ve mailed comic strip submissions to all of these since the mid 80’s and loads more who no longer exist.   For anyone who wondered what a rejection letter from a comic strip syndicate  looks like, here’s Tribune Media’s response to a recent Family Pants submission:

I wish it was a positive response, but at least rejection letters from comic strip syndicates puts you in good company.  “Peanuts” was rejected by every syndicate save one, back when there were a bunch more syndicates out there.  Jim Davis of “Garfield” said he could paper a wall with his rejection letters, and “Superman” was rejected so many times, the creators decided to ditch newspapers altogether and publish as one of them new-fangled comic books.

I’ll post the other 5 responses when I get them.  (Hopefully some good news…!)

Strip Website Launched!

I finally finished the re-vamped Family Pants website. I hoped to finish it Jan. 1, but hey, April Fools Day is as good as any other day. (Actually, I can’t think of anything more fitting for Frank Mueller…)

It still has the same cartoon and animation links, which can be accessed through the “Everything Else” button, but now the focus of the site is on comic strips.

The site is just an empty SWF shell, which reads the date, then picks the correct strip to show. This way, I could just dump 50 strips into a folder and let the SWF update itself everyday. If you roll over the strip a menu pops up where you can select to see previous strips, start at the beginning of the story, or advance strips, but not past today’s date. For that, you gotta come back tomorrow! Eventually, when I get more stories finished, I’ll insert a button that can view the previous story in it’s entirety, so the site always has a complete story up there.

Details of my idea of what comic strips can be can be read in my previous posts, Plot Complexity vs Character Complexity, Comic Strips and Shrinkage, and Ensuing Complications in the Pants.

Hope you like it…