Evolution: The comics presented in these archive pages comprise roughly half my official output for Blender Kitty. As things went along, Blender Kitty and his sidekick Candy Medicine Bear appeared less while story-type strips appeared more. I never wanted to do a regular comic strip—let alone one with recurring animal characters. Still, I made the most of a creative writing opportunity.
Rejection and Oversensitivity: When I was a teenager, I sent a batch of comics to The New Yorker. I received a short handwritten note that simply read: “Too few comics to critique.” I am not sure why I never followed up on that. I have never handled criticism or rejection well, even when it was less critical than I imagined. Early in the production of Blender Kitty, I sent strips to King Features Syndicate. Here I received a handwritten letter. The writer was also not discouraging, but told me my strip was “too alternative” for syndication, and suggested I approach alternative newsweeklies.
Alternative Newsweeklies: This had already occurred to me as a better fit, but alternative newsweeklies, such as they existed in the 1990s, were unlikely to appreciate my sense of humor. Moreover, they were uniformly unadventurous in their opinions and tastes; and their openmindedness, of which they professed to an immodest degree, was singularly closed-minded. People travel in herds, regardless how much they despair of herds.
Less pointedly, I remember being told by another cartoonist in the Bloomington area that our then alternative newsweekly (which is—like most of the others—now defunct) flatly refused to carry Matt Groening’s Life in Hell, even after the renowned cartoonist and creator of The Simpsons TV show personally called the editor on the phone. Such was the hubris of these magazines!
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