Suburban Fairy Tales

Coming up with the name of a comic strip isn’t necessarily an easy process.  You want your title to be something different than what’s already out there, and you also want it to be memorable.  But most importantly, you want to make sure that you pick a name that will allow your strip to grow and change.

I’ve made the mistake of limiting the growth of my comic strip in the past with Crunchy.  Crunchy originally followed the adventures of a pet turtle of the same name.  As the strip went on, however, Crunchy the Turtle was featured less and less.  Soon the strip started to focus more on the neighborhood kids and Crunchy the Turtle went from the strip’s star character to a recurring character.  After I ended Crunchy I made a mental note that the title of my future comic strip series would leave them more open for evolution.

Shortly after Crunchy ended I came up with the concept for Suburban Fairy Tales.  I had originally thought that Fairy Tale High School would be a good name, but then I thought… what if I don’t want them to be in high school anymore?  What if in ten years I wanted my characters to go to college or even beyond?  As a comic strip writer, you never know where your mind will be in five, ten, or twenty years from now. Suburban Fairy Tales sums up the concept that my strip is about Fairy tales characters living in a suburban community.  There’s plenty of room for growth and change in that title.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is a great example of what a comic strip title should be.  I know he hated the name and Lil’ Folks would have definitely been better, but the point I’m trying to make is that the name Peanuts didn’t handcuff the strip to its original premise and characters.  If Schulz had titled his comic strip The Adventures of Charlie Brown, Shermy, and Patty he would have been forced to use those three characters for the next 50 years.  But Shermy and Patty eventually disappeared from the strip and the Peanuts of the 1950s is a completely different strip from Peanuts of the 1990s.  Peanuts was allowed to grow and evolve because the name didn’t hold it back.

So when coming up with the name of a comic strip, keeping your title open is advice you may want to consider.  Because what you’re writing about when you’re 15 isn’t necessarily the same thing you want to be writing about when you’re 30.

Drawing a comic strip is a thoughtful process.  Most of the time I sit down for an hour or so and sketch a whole bunch of ideas into my sketchbook — whatever comes to mind, good or bad.  Then the following day I’ll go back to my sketchbook and re-read my ideas.  Sometimes the ideas are really great and they go right into the comic strip.  Other times the ideas are so-so, but have potential, so I attempt to re-write them to make them better.  Other times the ideas are simply awful and I put a big X through them.

Sitting down to write these ideas is a pretty straightforward process, but sometimes an idea comes to me out of the blue.  That’s when I have scramble to write it down somewhere because I know that in two minutes I’ll be distracted by something else and forget the idea entirely.

One example of an idea popping up is when I was sitting at my booth at NY Comic Con.  I was drawing sketches for fans who purchased a copy of my book.  Most of the sketches were characters in simple poses, but one sketch featuring Red Riding Hood spawned an idea that I thought would be great for the actual comic strip.  So I made sure to snap a picture of that sketch before I gave it away so I could remember it for later use in Suburban Fairy Tales.

Below is the original sketch idea from NY Comic Con.  The other photos are each step I take in drawing a strip — from pencils to the final product.  The final completed strip was posted on October 28, 2011.

Fans at NY Comic Con really seemed to dig the price point of $10 for the newest Suburban Fairy Tales book, This Little Piggy Gets Even.  The $10 price was quite a bargain considering the online price for the book has always been $13.

Unfortunately there were some people who passed by the Suburban Fairy Tales booth at NY Comic Con and didn’t really discover the comic strip until they got home and read one of those little postcards we were handing out.  So naturally they were bummed that they missed out on picking up the book for the cheaper convention price.  Well I’m here to tell everyone not to worry, because effective immediately This Little Piggy Gets Even is now $9.95!  This price drop is only on Amazon for now, but will soon hit other booksellers such as Barnes & Noble and Buy.com.

Click here to buy This Little Piggy Gets Even for $9.95 from Amazon now!