A young comic with animal magnetism

Darby CONLEY’S “Get Fuzzy” is an anomaly among comic strips. It appears in 400 papers (including the Los Angeles Times), which makes it a modest success, yet collections of it appear regularly on bestseller lists. The first compilation, “The Dog Is Not a Toy,” stayed on Amazon.com’s top 100 sellers list for six consecutive weeks; “Blueprint for Disaster” reached No. 5 on the New York Times’ advice, how-to and miscellaneous bestseller list. The most recent collection, “Bucky Katt’s Big Book of Fun,” has sold more than 80,000 copies in two months.

In “Get Fuzzy,” Conley breathes new life into the pet strip, a genre that dates to at least 1910, when George Herriman added a secondary “tail piece” about a nutty cat to “The Family Upstairs” -- an addition that later became “Krazy Kat.” But in recent years, the pet strip has grown threadbare -- mostly recycled gags about animals outrageous. Conley’s witty, fresh take on pet life is expressed through Bucky, the self-centered Siamese cat, and Satchel, the naive Labrador/Shar-Pei mix, who are roommates for long-suffering advertising writer Rob Wilco.

Bucky and Satchel talk, watch TV and go to restaurants with Rob; Bucky cites “Mittens v. State of Michigan” as a precedent in an argument. But they remain animals who don’t really understand the human world. Rob tries to explain to Satchel that there is no “magic cupboard” that produces “Jerky Nibbles” and other treats -- he puts the food on the shelves. Bucky comments, “Sure you do, Robbo, just like the big, bad ‘government’ puts water in the faucets, eh?”

Any cat owner (and Conley is one of them) will recognize Bucky’s habit of dashing around the apartment at midnight, yelling, “Whoop, whoop, whoop, hubba, hubba.” He delights in tormenting Rob and Satchel, and greets his dinner with “Tuna, tuna, tuna, gimme, gimme, gimme!” When Rob complains it’s bad form to bite the hand that feeds you, Bucky points out that he bit Rob’s left hand; the food dish was in his right.

Satchel’s gentle, credulous nature was inspired by a dog Conley had as a boy in Tennessee. “Patch would bark at a knock on the door; she saw that as her duty,” he says. “But as soon as you got in the house, she was all over you. We used to joke that if a burglar got in, she’d love on him.” Satchel misses many of the jokes -- Bucky describes him as “dimmer than a one-star restaurant” -- but displays flashes of offbeat intelligence. When Bucky complains that a friend’s baby was “all ‘dada’ this and ‘dada’ that,” Satchel comments, “Wow, that’s amazing ... do all babies know so much about nihilistic art?”

As owner, parent figure and paymaster, Rob serves as straight man to his recalcitrant charges. He mirrors Conley’s taste for guitarist Leo Kottke, writer Douglas Adams, Harry Potter, NPR and rugby. Conley played rugby at Amherst but had to quit after suffering six broken ribs; he notes that the skinny Rob would “get snapped” if he tried to play. In one Sunday strip, Rob looks at pictures of Bucky at 8 weeks and sighs, “He was so cute as a kitten ... what the *@#% happened?” Satchel answers, “I think we may be, um, ‘enablers.’ ”

Growing up on comics

Rob may not understand how he got where he is, but for Conley, cartooning was a logical choice for a profession. “Comic strips were an important influence when I was young,” he explains by phone from his current home in Boston.

“My sister says I learned to read from ‘Peanuts’ books so I could find out what Snoopy was doing,” says Conley, 34. “When I was a little older, the ‘Tintin’ books became a big thing for me; then around ninth grade, I discovered ‘The Far Side.’ For my college and high school papers, I did one-panel comics that were ‘Far Side’ rip-offs. After college, I submitted [them] to the syndicates. An editor suggested I do something more along the lines of ‘Get Fuzzy’ after some of those submissions.”

In 1996, Conley began sketching the characters who would develop into Bucky, Satchel and Rob. The strip was syndicated in 1999 and won the National Cartoonists’ Society Award for Best Newspaper Strip in 2003. Conley found the name for his strip accidentally. “My brother is a musician, and for a long time he was in a band called the Fuzzy Sprouts in Athens, Ga.,” he recalls. “I drew a concert poster for them with the dog and cat characters I’d created maybe a month earlier. I wrote at the top, ‘Life’s too short to be cool: Get Fuzzy!’ That seemed like a better name for my feature than the one I was working with -- which I don’t even remember -- and it stuck.”

Conley feels that the writing in the strip developed more quickly than the artwork. He used a long episode in which Rob lost his hair (Bucky had put hair remover in the shampoo bottle) to redesign the character, discarding his glasses and changing his hair as it grew back.

“I realized that not only were his glasses obscuring his eyes, but that his little helmet of hair was concealing his eyebrows, which are a huge part of facial expressions. It was really cramping his emotional range,” Conley says. “When I was working on the characters, I tried to come up with something that would be mine, but I’d remember certain shapes from ‘Tintin,’ like a skinny forearm ending in a nice big hand. [Cartoon creator] Herge really influenced Rob’s design.”

Although “Get Fuzzy” is usually a domestic comedy, Conley did some unusually sensitive strips in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, which are reprinted in “Big Book of Fun.”

“The weeks after Sept. 11 were just crushing to anything humorous,” he says. “The only way I could think of to handle the situation was to involve the guys who laid their lives on the line doing their duty. You can offer a tribute in a comic strip, but overtly political statements seem out of place.”

Conley takes pride in his book sales, especially at a time when comic strips are perceived as being in a slump. The standard print run of a comic strip collection is 30,000 copies; a collection of “Dilbert,” which appears in 1,900 newspapers, has a printing of 100,000. The initial printing of “Big Book of Fun” was 150,000 copies. Conley has sold more than 650,000 books and 240,000 calendars.

“I think book sales indicate how well people like a strip. It’s very difficult for a newspaper to pick up a strip, because it usually means they have to drop another one,” he concludes. “A strip may be in 1,800 newspapers, but if it doesn’t sell any books, it’s not a good strip. I try to draw the characters very three-dimensionally, with all the wrinkles in their clothing.... The strips should be something readers can look at more than once.”