Due to his deadline with Nancy, we were unable to complete the interview in one day.  However, Guy was gracious enough to call me back to finish our interview (read part 1 here).  We continued our discussions on the comic strip world, self-syndication, and on web comic strips.  Also, there is a GREAT story of Guy's meeting with one of the most famous children's authors in the world!  "EXCELLENT!"

AstroNerdBoy:  What steps did you take in self-syndicating Mudpie?  How difficult was that?

Guy Gilchrist:  It is a very difficult process.  I get a lot of letters from people all the time saying, "I've been turned down by everybody and I believe in my feature.  I want to self-syndicate and I know you are in 100 papers and are experienced with it.  Could you tell me how to do it?"  I'll only tell people how to do it if they are really, sincerely interested and are really, really committed.   It is extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do it yourself and to try to run with the big boys. 

Basically, being self-syndicated has a stigma to it.  A lot of newspapers, especially big newspapers won't even look at your work because they figure that the syndicates weed out all of the stuff that isn't strong enough.  So they put you at the bottom of the pile.  Even if you are fairly well known, there is still a bit of that stigma. 

The easiest way to do it if you want to get started is to find a paper or two or three in your area were you've got a leg up because you are a resident.  See if they will start publishing your work, say for $5 a week or whatever it is and start building a list and work out from there.  Find a list of as many newspapers as you can, first in your city, then in your county, then in adjacent counties, and them move around your state.  Try to create a base of 15-20 papers that are running your feature.  The nice thing that will happen while you are doing that is you'll start to get a feel for the job.  You'll start to realize that there is art and there is the business of art.  You have to sell your feature and you can't be thin-skinned.  You'll have to be the sales person, the promotions person, and you are going to have to talk to the editors about your feature like what it is -- a product.  Little by little, you'll gain some confidence as a promotions person and as a sales person.

If you want to get real ambitious, then what I suggest is that you buy yourself a computer program where you can keep addresses of everybody that you contact and a history of everybody you contact.  This way, you will be able to shoot out mailings to people on a monthly basis showing them what they've got and you can make them special offers and that sort of thing.  We have an old, old program called "ACT! 2".  It is a very old program for the MAC that we have here but it is a fantastic program!  You can get that.  There are probably 5000 people that we've contacted over the years -- different clients between weekly, alternative, religious, college, and daily papers in America and Canada.  All we have to do with the software is type in a few key words and "boom", it shows when you last contacted them, what they had to say, and their whole history.

Editor's Note:  The current version is ACT! 6.0 which has just been released for Windows.  You can get the regular version here or the upgrade version here.

The other thing that's a major investment but very important is Editor and Publisher magazine.  You can go online or call them.  They sell (either CD-ROM or the cheaper version in book form) a "phone book" of every newspaper with all of their info in every state (for daily and weekly newspapers).  It costs between $400 and $500 for the books and I don't know how much for the CD-ROM.  You can get that and then really do some research on the newspapers that you want to get into before you call them up cold. 

Again, self-syndication is a very difficult thing.  If you are not being a cartoonist full time, you are working a full time job.  You are going to have to find ways to promote, call, and market your feature during the business day while drawing your feature at night.  So you are looking at taking on a lot.  I will say that the reward for all of your hard work is tremendous in that you are putting out a feature that's from your heart, that's something you want to say, and you are making it happen.  Then you can do what I did.  After I sold Mudpie to 100 papers, I went and signed with Copley News Service  and they sell it around the world.  And I know that Mark Parisi, who does Off the Mark, just signed with United.  Mark was self-syndicated with Off the Mark and he was in over 100 papers; he was in more papers than me.  He'd been doing it for 15 years but now he's built it up enough that a syndicate is interested. 

ANB:  You do three comic strips, right?

Guy:  Right.

ANB:  How are you able to handle three comic strips?  There are cartoonists who struggle just doing one.

Guy:  Well you know, there is that saying that God doesn't put anything into your life that you can't handle.  That certainly is true.  Many years ago when I did Muppets with my brother Brad, I also did a strip for a year called The Rock Channel for the old Des Moines Register Syndicate with my brother Brad and Greg Walker (son of Mort Walker).  So I was used to doing more than one strip as I'd done two strips for a while.  One thing is that I've been drawing Nancy for quite some time.  My brother Brad now writes it.  I write very little of it.  I do fill in material and make suggestions but mostly I'm the editor.  So drawing Nancy and editing the material and working with Brad on it makes it a little bit easier because I'm not writing for three strips.  I'm only writing for two. 

Time-wise, it is hard to find the time.  The Mudpie strip is daily and Sunday and so is Nancy.  Now I'm also doing Your Angels Speak which is a lot more illustrative.  It is a full color painting each week with a thought for meditation.  I do one a week and it takes me a day and a half to do that feature.  I really have to be pretty productive and stay on a schedule.  My week goes something like this:  Monday and Tuesday, I do a week's worth of Nancy.  Hopefully I get the Sunday strip done as well.  Wednesday and Thursday, I try to do all of my Mudpie dailies.  They take me a little longer to do.  On Friday, I do the Mudpie Sunday, which is always a poem, a Mudpie strip, and some interactive stuff for the kids.  So there's quite a bit involved in the Sunday strip.  That really only leaves the weekend for writing and doing Angels. 

If I take speaking engagements (which I do a lot of, and I talk to a lot of kids at schools which I've been doing for many years), then it throws everything into a spin.  I've then got to pick up time here or there or I get behind.  So it is a little tough to do all of the stuff that I do, but I guess I'm a decent juggler.  The hardest part of it all is maintaining the correct thought process, the art style, and the gag style of each of the three features. 

There is a fourth feature I do called Screams for DBR Media.  That used to be a online feature for quite a few years, so they've just picked up all of the stuff that was running online.  So I haven't had to deal with that one.  It's just a one-panel a week anyway.  I'm constantly going, "Gee, do I love this this much?"

ANB:  (Laughter)  It sounds like you don't get time off for a vacation or anything.

Guy:  I do.  I just took a week off with the family to a lake in New Hampshire.  The whole family climbed Mt. Washington which was pretty intense.  So I was able to take the time off.  I have an assistant, Scott Lincoln, who assists me with background on Nancy.  I had him in every day instead of just a couple of days and we just plowed through the stuff.  Honestly, if I didn't have the time off to spend with my family, then what am I doing this for? 

ANB:  Exactly.  I've always wondered how cartoonist manage to get time off.  I see that you've basically just got to work way ahead to buy yourself that time off.

Guy:  Yep.

ANB:  Which cartoonist inspired you when you were first starting out? 

Guy:  Well, as a kid, my influences were varied. I loved Walt Kelley (Pogo).  His stuff just popped out to me as a kid and I copied him over and over and over again.  The animator Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy) was a huge deal to me as a kid.  I came from a not so well off family; we didn't have a lot.  But, one of the things I remember when I was over at my grandmother's house, sometimes after school at around four o'clock, they used to have a half-hour Woody Woodpecker show -- The Walter Lantz Show.  Just like Walt Disney did on The Wonderful World of Disney, Walter Lantz would come out and introduce the cartoons and he'd show you how the animated cartoon was done.  I used to think he was just talking to me and explaining it.  So I learned that it took like a million people in Hollywood, California to make one of these cartoons.  You did get to see people drawing it and coloring it in.   I dreamed that someday I could do that. 

We lived in a really old house from the Revolutionary War times and there was this old barn which we used as a garage.  Up in the rafters, there were piles and piles and piles of old newspapers dating back to the turn of the century.  In there were tons of comic sections.  Even though they were so old and moldy (they'd all melded together so that the colors had run together), the entire history of comics was there.  I looked at everything and I found out that Doctor Seuss had done a comic strip for a year or two for King Features back in the 30's. (Editor's Note:  The strip was called HEJJI and was done in 1935.)  He was a big hero to me.  Another one of my dreams was, "Gee, could I ever be an author of books and do comic strips like Doctor Seuss did?"  Well, all of it wound up coming true. 

When I was eight years old, I went on a field trip with my school to a college somewhere around Hartford (CT).  They had a celebration of children's literature and there were all of these famous authors and illustrators there.  I knew none of them because my parents couldn'y buy me many books.  I had a few Golden Books, a couple of Doctor Seuss books, and some comic books.  I didn't know any of them, but I was thrilled to death looking at all of the paintings and everything.  At the end of the day, a guy came out who I did know.  He wasn't supposed to be there but his parents lived in Springfield, so he was visiting his parents.  It was Doctor Seuss -- Ted Geisel! 

He talked for five minutes.  What he said that day, I've told to probably 100,000 children over the 20-something years I've talked to kids. He came out and he said something along the lines of, "Has anybody ever told you that if you have a dream, and you dream that dream hard enough and long enough that that dream can come true?"  I nodded my head along with all of the other kids there.  Then he says, "That's baloney!  That's total baloney.  If you dream the dream and you lie in bed and just dream about it, nothing is ever going to happen.  But if you get up off your rump and go do something, then you can be anything you want.  So, what do you want to be?"  That was about all he said as he only talked for about five minutes.  I went home and was thinking, "I want to be you!"  So I just kept drawing and drawing and drawing and I would make up stories.  I realized that Doctor Seuss wrote in rhyme, so I would try to write in a song -- the Chuck Berry stuff and The Beatles stuff that I heard on the radio;  I would try to write that way.  I think Ted was a huge influence on me!  Obviously as I've written 42 children's books and I have all of these strips that I do. 

So eventually I got around to doing a lot of the things that Ted did.  As a matter of fact, before my very first book ever came out (which was a Mudpie book -- a non-comic strip children's book) done, I was with Jim Henson doing the Muppets and I had been through every publisher in New York City.  I mean every publisher over five years trying to get my book published and no one would take it.  I was shocked because there I was in People magazine and Time magazine and US magazine, having suddenly become famous for doing somebody else's feature -- somebody else's characters that were so popular at the time, but with my own characters I couldn't get arrested. 

So I got Ted's address and then I mailed my Mudpie books to him.  I was told by somebody who knew Ted, "Don't do that.  Ted doesn't want to look at that stuff.  He's a really busy guy and isn't going to want to look at your stuff."  I wrote to Ted and said, "Everybody tells me I stink.  Everybody tells me my work is to cartoony.  Everybody tells me it will never sell.  If you tell me it won't sell, I'll quit because you are the best there is.  I know you had a hard time too at first.  So, what should I do?  And please, don't be kind!  I'm a grown-up and I've got a good gig anyway." 

A week or so later, he sent me back a drawing that he did of the Cat in the Hat.  The Cat in the Hat had a big word balloon coming out of his mouth saying, "All cats love Mudpie."   He also sent me an autographed picture that said, "Keep on going."  Funny, after three or four months, a promotional publisher (as we used to call them in those days) contacted me.  They are those publishers that you used to see the books for a dollar on the floor at Woolworth's or K-Mart or something.  They'd have $3.99 on the book cover, then $1.50 over that.  I signed with a publisher like that.  My first four books (all Mudpie books) after a few years sold five million copies.  Then all of the sudden, Warner Books, Random House, Golden, and everybody that had told me my work was to cartoony and would never sell liked it.  It was amazing how much better I got after five million copies! 

One of the persons that was most influential to me was Mort Walker.  Besides being one of my heroes, I got to know Mort and he is a close friend of mine now.  As a kid around 18 or 19 years old, I used to go to the Museum of Cartoon Art that was first in Greenwhich (CT), then in Port Chester, NY.  My very first job, I worked for Weekly Reader as they were right here in Connecticut.  They gave me a job drawing comic books.  I drew comic books of funny animal characters.  Every once in a while, the people at the museum would book me to come down and talk to kids and give kids drawing lessons on Sundays.  They always wanted to have a resident cartoonist there on Sundays to get families to come.  Sometimes, the famous cartoonist would not be able to make it and so they would call people who lived in the state to come and fill in.  I filled in quite a few times and Mort knew my work that way.  So one day when he was playing golf with Bill Yates (Professor Phumble, the small society, Redeye) who was the comics editor at King at the time.  Bill was telling Mort that they'd tried out 200 cartoonist to do the new Muppets strip but Jim Henson had turned down every one.  So Mort said, "There is this kid who draws funny animals for Weekly Reader.  Muppets are animals, right?  Why don't you call him?"  So Bill called me and eventually I got that job doing the Muppets and that was my huge break. 

So I owe Mort Walker everything.  He's been a tremendous friend, not just to me, but there are literally dozens of people in this business that have similar stories and Mort Walker is the punch line.  He is the accelerator in all of it.  He's been not only one of the greatest cartoonists ever and one of the most published cartoonists ever, but also I don't think that cartooning has ever had a greater friend than Mort.

ANB:  Do you have a favorite, current, syndicated comic strip that you like to read?

Guy:  The thing I look forward to every Sunday is Prince Valiant.  I love Prince Valiant.  John Cullen Murphy is a close friend and he's just an incredible talent.  Once Jack is done with that strip, I don't think that the likes of Prince Valiant will ever come again.  Pat Brady (Rose Is Rose) is great.  He's a friend of mine and we're big fans of each other.  We constantly compliment each other --  it's disgusting!  I just think that Pat is the best AND he's one of the nicest guys in comics as well. 

You know, it's funny.  I have a lot of favorite people so I think that certainly colors the strips that I like.  I like Soup to Nutz, Rick Stromoski's strip.  Rick and I play golf together all the time and I think he's hysterical.  Of course most of his jokes are way to blue too ever get in syndication.  He's got to clean it up all the time for daily consumption.  (laughter)

ANB:  What do you mean by "way to blue"?

Guy:  (more laughter)  He's just out there!  He gets "R" rated but he's so funny.  I think one of the greatest cartoonist working today is Dave Coverly.  Dave does Speed Bump.  Look at Speed Bump sometime.  It is meticulously drawn; it's beautifully drawn every single day.  He does great detail.  It's detail that he wants to do to enhance it.  He's a super, super artist.  And again, he's a great, great guy.

I don't really read the paper every day.  Most of us don't believe it or not.  The major thing is that you look at other people's strips, you know the punch line already.  We write gags for a living.  I enjoy looking at the art.  When I'm on vacation, I'll look at all of the strips.  One of the great things is when you work for United, they mail books out of proof sheets of every strip that they carry.  You get them every week.  So when I have a spare minute, I will go flipping through all of the United stuff and check it out.  Boy, there are so many good guys.  Darby Conley (Get Fuzzy) is good. 

The thing that bums me out the most is that the adventure strips are going away.  In the Mudpie daily, I do an old fashioned, Disney-esque adventure strip, like the ones where Mickey would always get into trouble.  That's sort of what happens with Mudpie, his guardian angel mouse, and his girlfriend.  Right now, they are in the underground and they just met a mole who looks exactly like Bob Dylan.  I think there is a war a brewing but I'm not sure as I only write this stuff a couple of weeks ahead. 

So it is kind of a bummer that most of the adventure strips are going away.  Me being an illustrator first and foremost, the people I've always admired are the people that could draw so much better than me.  So many of those guys, if they were around today, wouldn't be in comics.  That's what's so sad.  Milton Caniff...how's he going to do Terry and the Pirates or Steve Canyon now?  People are always saying, "Prince Valiant is not what it used to be."  Guess what?  If you gave Jack a full page like Hal Foster had, you'd see something!  It is a shame.  Didn't Will Eisner say something like, "Doing a daily comic strip is like trying to put a full-piece orchestra in a sardine can."  And he's so correct.  It is really difficult when you are trying to tell stories and trying to create an ambiance.  Any of the guys that can do it, I'm so enamored of.

ANB:  That brings me from the syndicated world to the web world.  Have you ever heard of a web comic strip called Sluggy Freelance?

Guy:  Oh yeah.  My Mudpie books are with Plan 9 (Publishing) and they carry Sluggy.  I think it is their best seller. 

ANB:  Yes.  I mention Sluggy because Pete Abrams does the adventure strips.  One of his recent adventures went on for nine months!  You mentioned Mickey Mouse earlier and in The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, there is a long Mickey Mouse adventure from 1935 and it was great!

Guy:  Well, the Pogo stories used to go on forever.  And then, when you get into the real action/adventure like Steve Canyon and Dick Tracy, those stories just go on and on.  The problem is when you go from web to syndicated, the newspaper editors don't want anything that's going to go on nine months.  There are editors that when I first started Mudpie, I used to jump between the gag-a-day thing and domestic storylines until I created the Angel Mouse character so they could go off on these adventures in time and space and all sorts of things.  The longer the story, the more involved the story, the more new characters they met, the more of a Wizard of Oz journey it was, the more the fans liked it and the more I enjoyed writing it.  It is much easier to write a free-flowing, long story where I know the beginning, I know some of the things that happen in the middle, and I know the ending.  Then what's going to happen in between is anybody's guess.  But the syndicate people that buy the strips won't buy those. 

ANB:  Why is that?

Guy:  I don't know.  They feel like it is a hard sell...maybe.  It's this MTV 5-second attention span.  You've got a sound byte mentality.  "Here, read this week of gags.  This strip appeal to single women between the ages of 14 and 21.  Here, this is only for people of Asian decent from 31 on.  Let's look at your demographics."  Everybody is cubbyholed into these things now whereas in the old days (I'm 45 and I'm so old-guard, it is ridiculous 'cause I started in 1980), here was your sales pitch:   "I've got a strip that's a riot.  The art is great and everybody is going to like it."  Or, "Hey, I've got this great thing.  It's about a guy that travels all around the world.  He's got a real babe for a girlfriend and everybody is going to love it.  Check this out."  Comic strips used to be for general audiences -- that most people would like this.  You look at the classic strips, right?  Name a classic strip.  Who is it aimed at?  Everyone!  But nowadays, syndicates buy features based on what they feel they can sell to an editor who's demographics are X, Y, and Z.

ANB:  It sounds just like what television is going through.

Guy:  Exactly.  Well, it's a mirror.  It used to be that comics were a couple of years behind TV.  Now they are probably neck-and-neck.  The space that we have is so limited now that it is harder to tell a story.  The thing with web comics...I love web comics!  Actually Night Lights and Pillow Fights, the Sunday Mudpie, started out as a web comic.  Most of the newspapers that picked up the strip at the beginning went to the website and read it, read the archives, and bought the strip based on the archives.  We had thousands of people that were on our mailing list that we would ask to e-mail or call features editors and say, "This is my favorite strip.  Why aren't you running it in your paper?"  Actually Your Angels Speak was a web comic for five years before we ever sold it to United. 

I love web comics.  One of the things I advise people who are working on a new strip is to put it up on a website somewhere and see if you can even do a daily.  See if you can do it for six months.  Have a message board and get some feedback so you can see if you are doing anything decent -- if people are excited about what you are doing.   This way, you'll be able to work a lot of the kinks out of the strip and the personalities of your characters.  Maybe the character you think of as the star of your strip isn't the star.  After six months of doing the strip on the web, all of the sudden, you are burned out on this guy and somebody who wasn't in the first three weeks turns out to be the most interesting character or fan favorite.  I always suggest people work things out on the web.  You know, the web is wide open and you can do all kinds of stuff.  There's the worst garbage I've ever seen in my entire life out there and there's tremendous stuff out there.  There are a lot of people out there doing fantastic work that is being read by thousands of people every day.  That's the great thing about the web.  It's another thing to make money at it though.  I know the guys at Sluggy do.

ANB:  And he's one of the few.

Guy:  He's one of the very few. 

ANB:  I know you are pressed for time, so I'll close with one final question.  This isn't on the comic strip world but it's going back to Jim Henson.  Do you ever get to see any of the stuff his son puts out like Farscape?

Guy:  Yeah.  I'm always interested in seeing what Brian (Henson) is doing.  Jim was a tremendous influence on me.  Everybody that worked for Jim Henson always tried to please him.  We all knew we were in the presence of...that we were hovering around the orbit of one of the centuries great creative geniuses, an incredibly humble and funny one and shy one.  Working with Jim was one of the greatest blessings God's given me.  I actually learned more from Jim after I left doing Muppets.  We had a lot of talks about fame and creativity and working with people, heading up a large studio -- all sorts of stuff.  Down the line, these were just incredible insights from an incredible guy.  I was interested in the technology before I knew Jim.  I was one of the Muppets biggest fans.  Jim was always so happy to show you the new technology that they were working on for whatever new project they were working on...like Dark Crystal or Labyrinth.   If I miss something, my son Garrett (who's a film major at USC) will tell me, "Hey Dad, Henson Creature Shop did this or that."  So I'll always check it out. 

Thanks Guy!!