When submitting ideas to newspaper syndicates you must demonstrate that you are able to take on the formidable task of drawing a daily and Sunday strip and being consistently funny. This means that your presentation must consist of a batch of finished strips as well as idea sketches, it involves a lot of time and effort.
I almost made it with Cap'n Lighthead. I can't recall which syndicate it was but they were quite interested, but finally decided against it. The Detroit Free Press did run a story and a few of these strips in their Sunday magazine.
I had high hopes for The Lives and Loves of LARRY LIVELY. This was a semi-realistic strip about a young adventurer. I was teaching at the time and patterned the character after two of my students. This would have been a fun strip to do. In the above strip Larry decides to quit his mundane job so he can travel the world and visit exotic places. I'm not sure how he expected to finance his fantasy, but in comic strips one doesn't worry about those things.
Interlude was a kind of a crazy strip without a main character which probably doomed it from the start. I used many different subjects and characters throughout in this strip.
Hotshot Hartford was a fun character, he was a smartass character and had many crazy escapades with interesting ladies. That's my lovely wife Jeanne in the above segment.
Today I am amazed that I managed to produce all of these comic strip presentations in 1968 as I was teaching full time as well as working at Al Hutt's art studio in Detroit and also had reps both in New York and Chicago. The teaching schedule was a full day on Wednesday and the others were half days and amazingly in four years I only missed one day because of a deadline. It was a very busy time for me, working day and night as the ad business was really active at that time.
If and when I find more of my comic strip submissions they will be posted.
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