Would-Be Cartoonists Usually Draw a Blank in Art and Idea Areas

Every art has its stories of unrecognized genius. Why not comic strips? Since thousands of ideas for comic strips are submitted each year and the syndicates accept only a few, some real gems must get overlooked in the shuffle. Newspaper audiences could be missing better strips than they get to see.

The assumption seemed logical but proved completely wrong, as I discovered when I reviewed a month’s submissions to a syndicate that allowed me to examine the submissions.

The review proved both depressing and instructive: I never realized there were so many ways to draw a comic strip badly. After carefully studying the first dozen or so submissions, I realized that most of them fell into a few distinct categories.

There were the would-be cartoonists who couldn’t draw beyond an elementary-school level. Many of their strips were photocopies of ballpoint pen scrawls on typing paper; it would be impossible to reproduce them in a newspaper, even if they were good. Not far behind were the strips that made no sense at all, except to their creators.

If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, Jim Davis must be the most flattered cartoonist in the country. A lot of the submissions were nothing more than “Garfield” disguised as some other animal--dog, rat, gerbil, parrot, goldfish, rabbit, cockroach, etc. The late Walt Kelly runs second in the rip-off sweepstakes: Many of the more skillful artists tried to copy the elegant brushwork lines of “Pogo.” None succeeded.

Another major category is the “cute” strip. Some aspiring cartoonists seem to think that if they make their work cutesy enough, readers will overlook an utter lack of humor.

Out of several dozen samples, one struck me as original and funny: “Waggles,” a satire on the obnoxious-pet strip, featuring a “disastrously cute” but thoroughly nasty dog. When I checked with the artist, who goes by the nom de plume of Irving Schmaltz, he told me “Waggles” has been rejected by eight syndicates.