(Thought we were done with “My Life in Comics,” did you? Well, think again!)
We all have forgotten chapters in our lives and this is one of mine. Sometimes they’re merely lost to the mists of time and memory, other times they’re right there, just in front of you, every single day. This chapter falls into the latter category.
I have a shelf of “workbooks” in my bedroom. I made these books when I was creating my self-published comic book series, Innocent Bystander, in the 1990s. They contain all my production stuff, plus ancillary material about the books, like reviews, ads, etc. When it was obvious to me that IB wasn’t going to take off and make me a millionaire, I toyed with the idea of taking one of my most popular issues—#4, the one starring my cats, Stan and Ollie—and making it into an extended book. That book was originally called Fuzzheads, because, somewhere in the dim past I remembered a movie where a woman repeatedly bellowed at the top of her lungs, “FUZZHEAD!!!”, trying to get a pet that had run away to come home. I guess that word just stuck with me.
A cover sheet I made for Tails of Two Kitties; the original outline, totaling 122 pages; and some initial conversations with “my agent.”
Eventually that one-word title became the more punny Tails of Two Kitties (not sure why, other than I might have been going through a Charles Dickens phase; that would explain the closet-full of Victorian clothing I own) and I somehow attracted an actual literary agent. I really don’t recall how all of this happened, other than it was 1998, I had just quit my job as a news graphic designer at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, PA and was at a crossroads as to what to do next. Next eventually became moving to San Diego, CA and starting over, but in September of ’98—almost exactly 25 years ago now—moving was just a thought rattling around my very empty head, one that very quickly got stuck in there and refused to be dislodged until I actually moved, something I’m eternally grateful for.
TM & © B. Kliban
Where the agent came from, I don’t remember, but I do know I wanted to do a book like B. Kliban Cats, at least in size and format, an oblong paperback with black and white illustrations. God knows I could never create something with the charm or staying power of B. Kliban, but hey … you have to start somewhere, right? I might have found an agent in a Writers’ Digest book or asked a friend—of which I had only one at the time—in the publishing industry (this being before my San Diego Comic-Con job, where I met tons of folk from that line of work). Her name was … well, let’s just call her Elizabeth, and she was interested in the beginning, probably until she showed my work to her superiors and they said NO!, because she ghosted me faster than a bad first date on which she got stuck paying the check while I climbed out the men’s room window and disappeared into the night.
The cover and splash page to my “Have Yourself A Stan and Ollie Christmas!” story from Geeksville #3, published in 1999, which featured art reformatted from Tails of Two Kitties.
I never finished the book, but I did do some significant work on it. I had the whole thing outlined (see above) and a lot of it written, with about a third of it totally drawn and lettered. Most of that work has never been seen by anyone, and hey, it’s about cats, and this IS the internet which has a long and rich feline history, so it’s a perfect match, right? I did reformat the first chapter into a story for the third issue of Geeksville, the book Rich Koslowski and I self-published until Image Comics signed us up and I lost all interest in working on it (read more about that here). I also considered reformatting all three chapters of the book that I had completed and publishing it as “An Innocent Bystander Special” called (you guessed it!) Fuzzheads, but life intervened and I didn’t have a spare $3000 to drop on publishing yet another comic book (I had already done six issues of Innocent Bystander and one trade paperback collection). My plans to move from Pittsburgh to San Diego had finalized, and the rest as they say is … dot-dot-dot … and I’m still here, 25 years later, the longest amount of time I’ve lived in any one place.
Over the next month I’m going to share with you (lucky you!) Tails of Two Kitties, or at least the chapters I completed. This week it’s the early art and the introduction of my cats, Stan and Ollie, plus some other ancillary pages, including four black and white “picture pages” I created for the Fuzzheads special. I enjoyed looking over this forgotten chapter in my life and I hope you do, too.
Here’s the introductory pages from the book. Click on the images to see them larger on your screen.
Here are the cover, photo pages, and back cover for the Fuzzheads special.
Stan and Ollie are long gone, sad to say, but never forgotten. As it turns out, I’m allergic to cats, and I think having them for over 15 years was a testament to my love for them. Pets take up such a large part of our lives and leave such a huge space when they leave us. Look at this work as my lasting tribute to two small, furry fuzzheads who meant the world to me.
Next week: Chapter One: This Is How We Met.
Click here to read all the other parts of “My Life in Comics.”
@innocent-bystander.com 