This week's "new" strip on Gocomics is actually a very old strip. It originally ran in 1991, my second year producing The City and just after I began syndicating it to weekly papers outside my Cleveland home base, The Cleveland Edition.
I thought it was lost.
Back in the day, after it appeared in the late lamented LA Reader, a t-shirt company in LA wanted to license it for a shirt design. Gave me the big sell that they were making shirts for some big catalogs popular at the time. This was the first time this happened to me and, with visions of massive royalty checks dancing in my head, I agreed. This was well before the intertubes (or decent flatbed scanners, for that matter), so I sent them the original art so they could make the design. Never heard from them again. No shirts, no checks and the fuckers stole my original!
But I recently found a xerox copy. I cleaned it up and added some color. Came out real nice. Turns out last week I was totally fucked when deadline loomed. Nothing. Total blank. I attempted a couple ideas and they were awful. So I posted this strip instead, just for fun.
And damned if I didn't hear from some fans on Twitter and Facebook who said "Hey! I've seen that one before!" Twenty-two years ago???? And I was in maybe four papers at the time! Holy crap, that's SOME memory! I forgot about this one and I wrote the damn thing. That's very flattering, that a strip would stick with fans for so long, but Jeezus!
