Finally we have one of the supporting characters, the Annoying Teenager. Annoying Teenager was one of Put Upon Dad’s students in PUD’s role as a high school teacher. He was probably also a neighbor. Annoying Neighbors had important roles in a lot of comic strips.

I don’t think I’ve had a neighbor I’ve known well enough to be annoyed by in 5 or 6 years. Times change.

Pets are popular elements of comic strips so, of course we had one. The dog wasn’t meant to talk or behave like a human being. He was supposed to go on lively adventures with the Crazy Kid. But you never know how he might have evolved.

Put Upon Dad was, of course, married to a Screwy Mother. That’s been comedy gold since before I Love Lucy. The TV show just helped to solidify the concept. It’s probably not the path I’d have gone if I’d been writing the strip but, as I’ve mentioned, I’m not good at thinking in comic strip gag bits. And the sort of strip I’d have come up with would probably have been unsalable to the comic strip syndicates 🙂

Since the Put Upon Dad was the main character I did few more sketches of him than other characters. I was also trying to keep my art for the strip as simple and easy to produce as possible. That meant simple character designs and bold brushwork in the final art.

The designated main character of a comic strip is not necessarily the one that readers get attached to. If we’d managed to sell the strip and if it had had any kind of run who knows which character would have got the spotlight. With many strips the breakout character is only a minor part of the cast. Sometimes they aren’t even in the original cast. Popeye, Snoopy and Opus were all late blooming stars of their respective strips.

If I’d been the writer I’d have gone with the Crazy Kid as the main protagonist. I have a great fondness for psychotic little girls.

In the beginning at least our protagonist seemed to be the Put Upon Dad. He was the viewpoint character in all the strips I drew.

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.