Back in 1998, we, the members of the Labor of Love Artist’s Collective who were active at the time, were trying to figure out creative ways to make some money. The first version of Glyph, the magazine, had collapsed. LoL was taking in graphic design jobs but most of us were more interested in doing comics than in doing more graphic design.

(Word of warning – it’s not a great idea to run a creative business – in our case, graphic design – that you don’t have a lot in interest in to pay for another business – publishing comics – that you have a lot interest in. It’s not that we did bad work for our design customers. We didn’t. We put our all into it. It’s just that there wasn’t a lot of satisfaction in the design work for those of us who didn’t aspire to be designers. Once Labor of Love quit publishing and moved to straight design those who were interested in design really flourished.)

One of the writers proposed that he and I put together some comic strip samples and see if we could sell a strip to the syndicates. If we didn’t sell the strip we could always publish it ourselves somewhere.

I’ve always admired good humor comic strip writing. I don’t think well in three or four panel gags. The writer was pretty good at it. His idea for the strip was nothing really innovative – Put Upon Dad, Screwy Mother, Crazy Kid and Goofy Pet – but he knew how to pace a joke and he was fun to work with. I’m looking for the strip samples I drew but in the meantime I’ve got some character samples to show.

This is the Crazy Kid. She was somewhat calvinesque in her character, living more in her imagination than reality. I’m sure we must have named the characters but, at the moment, I can’t remember what those names were.