Unfortunately the latest Family Pants’ batch of comic strips have been turned down again! But each rejection has been kinder. It almost seems I was rejected because of faulty timing rather than smelling up the in-box of some editor.
Mrs. Lago of the Washington Post Writer’s Syndicate even gave me a short critique to be less illustrative as tiny comics are unforgiving to detail. I guess I got too carried away with the detail.
Two left to go, King Features and United Media!
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And another NO! Half way there…
Of the three rejects so far, I like Creator’s rejection the best.
They even had nice hand written addressing on the envelope:
Yet another NO! But they have a nicer looking form letter…
4 more to go!
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…!)
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…
It’s that time again for another comic strip syndication submission! Family Pants started as a comic strip, then evolved into an animated short series (technically an animated comic strip) then eventually grew into a full blown DVD! Now, after the incredible amount of work of making the DVD, I’m back to my first love, comic strips.
This go around, I’m combining what I learned making longer animated content, the continuing story line, with the small venue of the comic strip.
Traditionally, comic strips were part of a long continuing story line. It promoted reader loyalty. for if you wanted to know what happened to Flash Gordon, you’d better buy and read the newspaper publishing him! Comics long ago had a depth and complexity to them that readers could sink their teeth into. Big glorious artwork and deep rich story lines… even for the ridiculously silly strips!
Working at King Features, I was lucky to raid their “morgue” files during my lunch hours and pour over Popeye strips from the thirties. I only knew Popeye from Famous Studios’ cartoons, which I admired for nice animation, but was bored stiff by the story lines. E. C. Segar’s work, which the cartoons were based on, was amazing! Funny, exciting and even adventurous! Even more amazing was the fact that this really old stuff, aside from the occasional politically incorrect gag, seemed so contemporary!
I’ve submitted Family Pants a few times to the syndicates but never as a continuity strip. This is my next experiment.
But what happened to comic strip continuity?
It seems to me that the comic strip pages shrunk, not only in size but also importance. Most people I know joke, “Does anyone even READ those things anymore?” upon hearing my love for comic strips. Why did they shrink anyway? It’s like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did they shrink, then lose importance? Were they losing popularity and shrunk by newspaper editors as a result?
Working at King Features, hearing things in the hallway, and just simply thinking about it, I’ve come up with two possibilities:
1) The most popular conspiracy theory is that newspaper editors looking for extra revenue, shrank the comics page to make room for extra space they could sell to advertisers. Why spend money on comics, when they could make money on ad space?
2) A less aggressive idea is that simply newspaper editors cannot cut any strip without a mountain of letters from readers. Think of it, you can’t have just “Garfield” and “Doonesbury”, without “Beetle Bailey” and “Blondie”. You need ALL of them. The only way to get all of it in there is to half their size.
With less space to work, artists and writers cannot create engaging stories. There’s no room for detailed artwork or even interesting dialog. You’ll be lucky to have enough room for a one liner and stick figure artwork. With THAT kind of material, it’s no wonder people stopped reading comic strips. Not to mention the plethora of sexier media out there to paw at our attention.
So in a few weeks I’ll re-vamp my website at my attempt at a continuity strip, with lots of silly humorous stuff like man-nibbles, man fighting bears and general pandemonium.
In writing Family Pants stories, I’m deeply inspired by Seinfeld and Wylie E. Coyote.
Watching Seinfeld one night I had an epiphany. While most people babble Seinfeld is the show about “nothing” I’ve found it to be in fact, about something. It could have been called “Little New York” or the “Small Big Apple”, where 4 characters depart on seemingly totally different ventures and somehow collide and entangle with each other. (Even Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm also deftly links completely different happenings.)
These ensuing complications is not as much of a Seinfeld characteristic as much as comedy 101. I believe Seinfeld’s success was not the gimmick “show about nothing”, the backwards episode or the one about the masturbation contest, but because it simply created basic comedy better than most. As it happens, ensuing complications combined with outrageous silliness is the formula of Road Runner and Wylie E. Coyote cartoons!
So in the latest Family Pants comic strip submission, “The Masked Moo-Moo Menace or the Recycling Reprobates” I tried as skillfully as I could, to connect white noise experiments, bears, rotting meat, COP reality shows and gangland violence to hopefully an interesting and funny outcome.
Hope you dig it when I post it.
