Here is little look at my recently re-designed newspaper strip, 'King Monkey', a doomed-to-fail attempt at newspaper syndication. You never know, though, I could strike it lucky. You need a bit of blind hope to be a a cartoonist. The problem for me is that there have been some terrible strips picked up for syndication in the recent past so I am clearly no judge of the qualities that a strip should have, which I always thought was to be funny, original and have good characters. The strip goes out three times a week on comicssherpa.com and is about two monkeys who work for a deranged, megalomaniac king. The stars of the strip are a green monkey who is a rectangle shape and is stupid. A blue sausage-shaped monkey who is even more stupid and the red king who is the stupidest of all. They don't have names, why should they? There's also other monkeys that appear from time to time, including the Monkey Pope!
Read this teaser from the current storyline and if you like it click on the link on the right to read a whole lot more (about 50 episodes so far). If you think it's good, get other people to read it and send me some feedback!
Thursday, August 7, 2008
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5 comments:
I've read your strip a few times before -- when you're drawing a daily strip it's easy to lose track of other strips, tunnel vision being what it is -- and I loved it the first time, and I still love it. Your jokes are off the wall, over the wall, and far past the wall and over the horizon.
If you don't syndicate this, you could plant your flag as a web comic supported by the inevitable army of monkey fans.
Mark Heath!
Thank you so much! It's great to get such a compliment completely out of the blue from someone who's work I really like. I read Spot the Frog all the time, and it's such a shame that it's ended. Have you got another strip in the pipeline?
If I have another strip, it's down the pipeline and around the bend. Right now I'm catching my wind and enjoying the break from the weekly deadline.
Have you shown your strip to the syndicates, earned feedback? I'd give serious thought to a web-only comic (I know it's online now, of course, but I mean online with its own website, lots of interactivity for fans, aggressive sharing of links.) It seems to me that the sky's the limit with online strips, while print syndication is a hard race over increasingly rough pavement. Better to swing through the trees.
Yup, there are many Monkey fans out there, and the Olympics will boost interest in all things monkey I think. Plus its a good strip that has broad appeal. I'm sure good things will happen - at some point.
My plan is to keep doing them and see where it goes. I've only done 50 or so and I think I need 100 at the very least to select a syndication submission from.
I have been thinking of putting it on it's own website, it might happen soon if I can get round to it.
And thanks for the feedback, Rod. Much appreciated.
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