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I blame it all on auto insurance. Some time during the late 1990’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 Pop’s 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 it’s 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.