I consider myself a gag writer, cartoonist, director and animator. My skills are really a creative with the power to write, conceptualize and bring stories to life. Cartoon characters make for inexpensive actors that don’t bitch about having their own trailer while they are on the set.

I started my career as a syndicated single panel cartoonist with Tribune Media Services in Chicago. After 45 newspapers and a 5 year run, I traded newsprint for the digital world. I now combine my 2-D cartooning skills with gag writing and animation. Currently I’m developing several shows with Curious Pictures and has had development contracts with all of the major studios. My time is divided between Fortune 500 client work, show development and creating animation shorts for the festival circuit.

Long after quitting my one-panel comic strip called, “ick” (see above), I decided to submit another comic just for the grins of it.  The traditional comic strip market was (is) so broken that I thought it would be funny to submit them the worst and most unmarketable product I could think of.  The world of Marmadukes and Garfield readers would spit out their cereal.  To me, it’s funny and sad that a huge gap has developed between the average content for newsprint compared to the content for TV.  Newsprint — (at least half of the comics page) has adopted this inability to rotate talent.  Mostly due to the fact that there’s a handful of competing syndicates that don’t want to drop a cartoon.  They live in fear that the space their comic occupied will be up for grabs again.  And nobody puts as much stock in the comics they’re about to sell compared to the comics they’ve already sold.  Just a fact of life.  The editors that should have been dropping outdated comics, didn’t want to field negative mail from the diligent and faithful readers that had nothing but time to complain (I’m looking at you, Grandpa).

I regress from a ramble of useless cartoon knowledge of yester-year.  Damn, I feel old.  Anyway, I was going to submit some comics to the syndicates as a joke (see below).  I set up a variety of “too-blue-for-newsprint” scenarios and drew them like I had a head injury.  Undeniably funny but destined for a rejection letter.  One comic turned into 25 pretty easily and the hobby of gag writing for an unmarketable product became a pretty fun experiment in viral content creation.  The gags were original but idea was inspired by Don Hertzfeldt’s work about a submission to the advertising world called “rejected.”    I submitted “Be More funny” to MAD magazine.  They loved it but we couldn’t work out a deal to run them in multiple issues, which was more important to me than the money.  To me the more you read, the more you were convinced that somebody was writing them in a particular tone and with a variety of set-ups.  Maybe I’ll animate them?  In the meantime, they’re soon to become a web-comic for the easily amused.

Then I went as far as making a fake merchandising opportunity.  I really need a hobby.

… and finally, this is what the actual submission looked like ….