This time – special guest blogger Bob Kronlage writes about
his long running comic strip “Kozmo of the Cosmos”. Now you can get all the
strips in one swell foop – er one fell swoop in “Kozmology; Kozmo of the
Cosmos” at Amazon.com !
Here’s Bob;
“January of
2007, was the first time in my life I wasn’t living with a vague feeling of
depression. I’d assumed that that ever present ennui was just the normal way
adults felt. All my life, all I’d ever wanted to do was to be a cartoonist.
Yet, how does one actually get published? How does one actually make an
audience aware of his existence? My humble little goal seemed surprisingly
unattainable. It was in that frosty dawn of the year 2007, that the obvious
finally occurred to me – there must be some place on the internet where I can
publish a comic strip. After about five minutes of internet research, I found a
place to publish my (at that time, not – even – conceived) strip.
I felt
emotionally refreshed. I was happy. What had been that ongoing, irrational
feeling of vague depression was out of my life forever! Turns out I didn’t even
care how big or (more realistically) small my audience might be. I learned from
my immediate contentedness that all I needed was to get my stuff out there, in
a place where someone (anyone!) could potentially see it.
Like all
creative people, (especially writers, I think) I’ve got lots and lots of vague
concepts circling around in my brain for potential later use. I always liked a
very cute Peter Sellers 78 rpm record called ‘Jakka
and the Flying Saucers (An Interplanetary Fairy Tale)’, about a little boy
astronaut. I thought it would make a great
soundtrack to a charming kids’ cartoon. Also, I always loved the
Spaceman Spiff adventures in “Calvin and Hobbes”, but was always disappointed
when it returned to humdrum reality. I liked it so much, I didn’t want it
contextualized within the strip’s reality. Why couldn’t Spiff always be a spaceman in his own strip –
in his own universe?
Prior to my
little revelation in 2007, I had only done comic book stories. I’d always
assumed that creating a comic strip was way too complicated for me to
accomplish. How does one create a cast of about seven characters who can all
interact, basically playing and replaying endless variations on a handful of
jokes that fit their inter-relationships? (ie; Lucy always pulls the football
away from Charlie Brown. It perfectly reflects their relationship. Schulz came
up with the endless variations of Lucy’s punchlines – frivolous statements that even she
knew didn’t really justify her
deceitful behavior.
I decided to
tackle the problem by writing out as many jokes (good, bad, or awful) as I
could, solely to come up with enough of a sampling to decipher absolutely the
most basic, underlying relationships jokes are built on. Let’s call the
straight man ‘A’, let’s call the guy who says the punchline ‘B’. I decided
there were two basic types of punch-lines; 1) ‘B’ delivers the punchline,
revealing he is stupid, or naïve. 2) ‘A’ delivers the straight line, implying
he is confident he is smarter than ‘B’. ‘B’ delivers the punchline, showing his
application of common sense has naturally outsmarted ‘A’s’
intellectualism.
From that
assessment, I conceived three basic characters; 1) the naïve guy, 2) the
average guy with common sense, & 3) the intellectual guy. I named the naïve
guy Riley Plunkett, and the intellectual guy Fate Morris. (The 1920s hillbilly
band Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers featured musicians named Riley Puckett
and Fate Noris.) I decided the average guy with common sense would have the
most appeal, so he would be the lead character. I liked the name Cosmo, and it
is almost ‘cosmos’, the word used for all that stuff in space, so it seemed a
perfect fit. Also, I liked the respelling ‘Kozmo’, to make it more original,
and maybe more unique & therefore more successful in an internet search.
I had some
old comic book characters I’d designed, called ‘Peachy Keene & Boffo
Bunny’. I thought Peachy had an appealing design, so I just put him in a spacesuit and voila! Kozmo had a
physiognomy. I quickly designed Riley & Fate in the same style.
This is a
comic strip, so it has to have a dog. My pragmatic view of animals dictated
that he would NOT be a fantasy character a la Snoopy, but a relatively
realistic, peeing, pooping, shedding, mindlessly destructive, barking all
night, fixed-at-the-vet, dog. Due to this lack of outstanding attributes, he is
facetiously named Gid the Wonder Dog. Yet, attributing fantasy qualities to
cartoon characters is ultimately unavoidable. Gid and his canine friends walk
around on their two hind legs. Fantastically, he and his dog friends are
actually capable of speech. Subtly, they never speak in the presence of humans.
Through the
years, I’ve learned from my mother that if you want something to be popular
with women, you have to have a female character. In my experience, if a little
boy and girl are arguing, and the girl can’t win the argument intellectually,
(although girls usually can) she can still make the little boy feel he has
failed, owing to her superior attitude alone. Of course, the boys and girls who
act like they hate each other most, really like each other most. Thanks to
these truisms, the strips between Kozmo and Peg practically wrote themselves.
It’s
surprising how the conscious mind can be utterly ignorant of what the creative
mind is doing. I had a mental block about designing Peg. At the time, I was
dating a cute woman from Ecuador. For fun, I decided I would try to draw a
picture of her in the style of my Kozmo characters. I drew her with an
appropriately sexy, adult woman’s body. Finally, my conscious mind stopped
being utterly clueless. I retraced her head on another sheet of paper, drew a
scrawny little-girl body under it, and I had the perfect design for Peg. I had
designed a little girl who obviously looks like she will grow up to be a great
looking woman. Her looks seemed to at least be one factor to justify her sense
of superiority. Of course, when no one else is present, she still shows she
ultimately feels rejected anyway – human spirit being the fragile thing that it
is.
Of course, a
strip set in outer space requires space aliens. The personalities of my space
aliens are pretty much stolen from The Simpsons great aliens Kang and Kodos – a
perfect pair of pompous buffoons. Applied to my aliens, that pompous buffoonery
makes them the perfect targets for Kozmos’ devastating wise cracks.
I think the
smartest thing I did when creating Kozmo, was that I gave myself an entire year
to work on it before I published the first strip. For the next five years or
so, I wrote down every remotely amusing thing I could think of, all translated
into joke form. It was surprising how easily the jokes could be made to apply
to the characters. Soon, I had hundreds of jokes to choose from. For purposes
of the strip’s longevity, I tried to reject as few jokes as possible. I would
usually draw five strips in a day. I would normally go through the joke list,
picking two I thought were excellent, two I thought were good and one a thought
was poor, but probably had some redeeming value that made it too good to throw
out.
I started publishing the strips on the
internet January 1st, 2008. In June, a horrible flood partially
destroyed my home. My joke list and my Kozmo comic strips were all OK. All the
other art I’d created in my life was destroyed. (No big loss, believe me.) Yet,
my general sense of depression never came back. My comics were on the internet,
being viewed by dozens of people. I was happy.”
If you’d like to sample some more ‘Kozmo’ strips, they will
start appearing once again on the U-Click website in the Comics Sherpa section.
More importantly, all 660 (or so) Kozmo strips are now
available in a lavish 228 page book, “KOZMOLOGY; The Complete Kozmo of the
Cosmos” available for a paltry 15 bucks (for now) at AMAZON.com. YIPPEE!
