Friday, December 28, 2007

The Creepertins are Coming

This is a partial preview of the Creepertins strip I'll be doing Starting in January. It'll be one new strip every month in the Delaware County times, a free give-away paper that is published here in Delaware county, right outside of Philly. My buddy Scott Neely is head art honcho at the paper and got the publisher to agree to run a page of comic strips, so he got Jamar Nicholas (Leon protector of the Playground) and me to do a monthly strip along with his strip about his pooch, Alfie.

The first Creepertins art was just a doodle of some weird kid characters I did for a fun, next time I drew them was a short five page story for the Philly Cartoonist Society's anthology they published out in 2005. I suppose like most cartoonists I have always had on my wish list the desire to take a shot at doing a newspaper strip, traditionally the Holy Grail for a cartoonist. If you did a strip, you were officially "big Time." i really enjoy the art and craft of what I call "Pure cartooning," which is something that is in rare supply today in the funnies.

So while this strip runs but once a month it is giving me an opportunity to develope these characters further and I will see where this leads, who knows, I might even ttry pitching them at the syndicates or run a daily strip on-line.

3 comments:

SNeelyArt said...

Actually, it's Delaware County Magazine, not Times... :)
Scott

Bobby Timony said...

Mike,

Can you elaborate a bit on what "Pure Cartooning" means to you? Which comics do you think are good examples of that?

Mike Manley said...

Hmmm. Pure cartooning I guess mean the more exagerated cartoon or comic strip, cartoons like Calvin, Pogo, etc. The more humorus type as well. I mean John Buscema was a cartoonist but a cartoonist/illustrator, Kirby was clearly a cartoonist.

In comic books it's mostly Superjock stuff, and anything funny is a piriah, looked down upon. It's a negative--but only within the baby-men shops, in the broader world humor is the most popular type of cartooning.