Comic strips and memories The Comics Editor is feeling introspective as he sits in the fading light out back of our What's Hot! Barn, Bar Taqueria, his feet up on an old ammo crate next to the chimenea. He looks like an aged veteran mercenary from the Spanish Civil War as he fiddles with an old Knights of Columbus sword.
We are battling sleep as we listen to him recall the strips and panels that have paraded through his pages down the years. He ticks them off on ink-stained fingers, reloading every time he gets through 10 digits to tick off a new set: "Dondi, Henry, Steve Roper, Mary Worth, Eb Flo, Little Lulu, Gasoline Alley, Terry the Pirates, Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant. "Nancy, Li'l Abner, Blondie, Priscilla's Pop, Bringing Up Father, Barney Google Snuffy Smith, Tumbleweeds, the Wizard of Id, the Jackson Twins.
Every one of them, he's not afraid to tell you, are ones he introduced. "And every one of them incurred the wrath and ire of the readers," he says sadly, the cozy introspection collapsing into self-pity. "Whigs and Tories alike rose up in a rare moment of detente when we brought out Pogo," he says.
"I still have a note from Ted Roosevelt on Bull Moose stationery griping about I forget which, either the Katzenjammer Kids or Joe Palooka." The Comics Editor snaps out of his sad little waltz across memory's dance floor and is suddenly all business. He opens his attache case and slides the next two new strips across the tiled bar counter.
They are the latest of the 13 new comics that will debut in the Press-Telegram on Monday in the also-new entertainment section LA.com. The first of the pair is one that we like a lot, and we don't hand out compliments easily.
We're hardly an apologist for the Comics Editor. We've bickered plenty over the years, the Comics Editor and we have. Believe us.
It's called The Humble Stumble and it's about Joe Humble, a single father trying his darndest to raise his young (but getting older rapidly) daughter Molly, while searching for the woman of his dreams. Molly loves her dad and hopes he meets Ms. Right as well, though, till that glorious day, she enjoys the undivided attention.
The talent behind The Humble Stumble is Roy Schneider, who prepared himself for this moment by reading stacks of Peanuts and Dennis the Menace paperbacks as a child, then moving along to Mad Magazine's Don Martin and the mag's marginal doodlings of Sergio Aragones, then, into his college years, studying the works of undergrounders Gilbert Sheldon and R. Crumb, before returning to the joys of daily cartooning with Bill Watterson's Calvin Hobbes. "You like it?
" says the Comics Editor, brightening. "Well, I happen to like this one" and he opens the dossier containing the data and samples of what strikes us as a sort of collegiate style of strip, in a sports-bar kind of way, called Girls Sports. "It's not about girls in sports, it's about girls and sports, those being the two chief areas of interest for the male characters in the strip, Bradley and Marshall,," explains the Comics Editor, fully aware of the fact that we hate it when he explains strips to us.
The strip's main distaff characters are Joann, Bradley's loyal and medium-maintenance girlfriend, and the ever-elusive Dream Woman. Girls Sports was born when best friends Justin Borus and Andrew Feinstein spent their junior year in college studying (though not in the classic sense) in Denmark, where they captured their real-life dating adventures in comic form to distribute to other students. Back in the States, the pair continued publishing Girls Sports, which now appears in more than 200 newspapers, including more than 75 college and university publications.
Tim Grobaty can be reached at tgrobaty@yahoo.com or (562) 499-1256.
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