Toon Team : Tustin, Santa Ana Men Aim for Strip Stardom With Cartoons

He sells cars for a living and appears as a movie and television extra for fun.

But for the past three years, Tustin resident Pete Critelli has been working with Santa Ana artist Fred Treadgold on a pair of comic strips the men hope will land them in the cartooning big leagues.

“Come on Down” pokes fun at the auto sales industry and “26 & Ten” is a playful reference to the alphabet and cardinal numbers, which are used to throw light jabs at people’s foibles and society’s idiosyncrasies.

Critelli and Treadgold have found modest success. USA Today featured one of their “26 & Ten” cartoons in its April 5 issue, and “Come On Down” is a regular feature of the Orange County Dealer, a trade magazine published by the Orange County Automobile Dealers Assn.

Critelli hopes to follow the path of other successful Orange County cartoonists. One of them, Kevin Fagan of Mission Viejo, is the creator of the “Drabble” comic strip, which is carried by 200 newspapers.

In 1991, Fagan published “Dad, I’m an Elvis Impersonator!” (Topper Books; $6.95), a collection of “Drabble” cartoons that were printed in 1989 and 1990.

However, 45-year-old Critelli said he’s not ready to quit his day job just yet. For the past 10 years, he has been fleet manager of Tuttle-Click Automotive in Irvine. Treadgold, 65, retired two years ago after 20 years as a graphic artist for Rockwell International Corp. He lives in a castle-like house in an older section of Northeast Santa Ana.

They work together twice a week for 2 1/2 hours each session, bouncing ideas off each other. Critelli, who has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with emphasis in theater from Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa, said he comes up with at least 90% of the ideas.

Treadgold, who took arts studies at the Arts Institute of Pittsburgh in the 1950s, illustrates those ideas as comic strips. He also uses his computer for basic art and for the typefaces of the “26 & Ten” strip.

The result is a cartoon that Critelli describes as “funny without being nasty or antagonistic.”

“We make a deliberate effort not to go after anybody’s throat,” Critelli said of the strips. “We want someone to laugh, not cry. We want to be positive rather than negative.”

“It’s a thinking man’s cartoon,” said Treadgold, a free-lance cartoonist for the past 30 years. “Some are quick reads, others are more sophisticated. If you ponder it a second, it gets funnier.”

For example, in the “26 & Ten” cartoon picked up by USA Today, a DC-10 was complaining about being called a “jumbo” and “wide body” at a weight counseling session. The strip was intended to poke fun at the airlines’ weight standards for flight attendants.

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Critelli uses his daily experiences with Tuttle-Click customers and salesmen as material for the “Come On Down” strip. One of the characters is Brute Force, a mean-looking, leather jacket-wearing fellow, who can’t say no to his wife. Another is Mort, a hard-driving sales manager.

“We want the reader to say: ‘Hey, it’s silly, but, yeah, it happened to me,’ ” Critelli said.

“It takes an amusing slant to the automobile dealership business,” said Kevin L. Allen, editor of the Orange County Dealer and executive director of the local auto dealers group.

Allen described the cartoons as “very well done, very clever, and they reflect the actual situations in car dealerships.” “Come On Down” was first printed in the April/May issue of the bimonthly magazine, which is distributed free to the association’s 96 members and some non-member car dealers in Orange County. That Critelli is also in the car dealership business gives the cartoon added credibility, Allen said.

Treadgold and Critelli met through a newspaper, which had asked readers to send captions for a cartoon illustrated by Treadgold. Critelli said he was a constant contributor--and winner--so that after a while the newspaper refused to accept his contributions.

Critelli said he developed the idea for the “Come on Down” cartoon about three years ago. Because he is not an artist, he asked Treadgold to collaborate with him. They worked so well together that another project, the “26 & Ten” cartoon, soon followed, Critelli said.

They hope “26 & Ten” will go into syndication, Critelli said. A syndicate--companies that sell comics and newspaper columns to publications nationwide--has shown interest, he said. But before a syndicate will take them as clients, the cartoon must first be published in a large-circulation newspaper, Critelli said.

Most newspapers deal exclusively with syndicates, which are tougher than ever to break into because of intense competition and the sluggish economy, Treadgold said.

The men said they are willing to wait. They have enough material for up to three months of strips. And even if no newspaper buys their cartoons, Critelli said they wouldn’t consider themselves failures.

“The word fail . . . we don’t even consider that,” Critelli said. “We may not be commercially successful, but it’s still worth the try. There’s enough satisfaction in the creative process.”