DUNDER BLUNDER

Some 35 years ... <brushes away cobwebs> ... I was of the mind to try and crack the comic strip syndicate nut. This idea is something that only comes to the naive, the young or the crazy. You have a better chance to win the lottery than get syndicated and today it is almost is impossible. There is a certain feelings that there needs to be governmental protection as the newspaper cartoonist are placed on the endangered list. Check out the documentary Stripped on Netflix if you want to explore more. 

So the concept I wanted to explore  was a variation of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. I had a false start and decided to try a throw away. At the time I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with my first group and was reading Dragon magazine. They were running a comics section with only two or three features of any worth. "What's New" and especially David Tampier"s "Wormy"were head and shoulders above the other content.  I tried to kill two birds with one stone. So I came up with Dunder's Dungeon and submitted it to Dragon magazine. 

Their response nearly crushed me. They just didn't say no ... they came up with 10 bullet points on why they didn't like it. Some had value and I took the comments to heart and tried to work it into the other strip. Other comments were pretty mean and made little sense when I compared them to what they were printing. I was confused and hurt. Thank God for having Dad in my life at that point. He calmly asked me to read note #10. 

"We are not presently in the market for a continuing feature. Please feel free to submit single panel cartoons."

The light bulb went off and then I was on a mission to prove myself. I did three single cartoons and sent them in. Same drawing level ... same level of humor. Out of the three, they excepted two, printing one. (Issue #50) I learned a couple of lessons about life and editors thanks to Pop.



Anyway ... I rarely throw anything away. Just ask Yoko. I am at this point interested in exploring motion comics and my mind went to redoing Dunder's Dungeon. As I already had 12 episodes, I figured I could just slap them together. You know, at little editing in Photoshop and it would be done. Easy peasy! But as in all things Morgan, this has turned out to be more involved than I originally thought. Besides figuring out the mechanics I am trying to correct mistakes. Hopefully in the 35 years I've learned something to better the strip.

Or maybe I'm just going to make a whole new set of mistakes.