#8: Business in the front, party in the back! The "Mullets" story - Part One!

They say write about what you know ... so two idiots came up with a comic strip about two idiots.

There’s an old adage in cartooning which says that you should always write about what you know. So perhaps it is no coincidence that “Mullets,” the daily comic strip that Rick Stromoski and I created in the early 2000s, featured a pair of complete and utter idiots.

Within minutes of meeting Rick for the first time, at the 1996 National Cartoonists Society Reuben Awards Weekend at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, we were both in hysterics, trying to outdo each other in the filthy joke stakes as we downed expensive libations. It was instant rapport and we became the closest of friends. We’d meet up a couple of times a year at NCS functions, but he lived in Connecticut and I was on the other side of the country, in Huntington Beach, California, so we’d also spend hours on the phone, ragging each other unmercifully, indulging in disgraceful speculation and gossip about our peers, trading smutty innuendoes and giggling like schoolboys.

At the time, we were both really busy with multiple projects. Rick’s work in greeting cards, advertising and book illustration had earned him three NCS Division Awards from eleven nominations. His daily comic strip, “Soup To Nutz,” was distributed by NEA.

If anything, I may have been even busier than Rick. My “Pop Culture” entertainment trivia strip – the forerunner to my current “Trivquiz” comic – was running seven days a week in newspapers from Australia to Venezuela. Then there was “Kid City,” which was later rebranded as “Kid Town.” It only runs as a Sunday these days but back then it was six daily panels and a full-color Sunday strip, syndicated to 140 or so newspapers. Besides that there was “The Week in Football,” a full-color soccer feature that was also known as “Futbol Semanal” to readers of Spanish-language newspapers in the U.S., Caribbean and Latin America. Plus the odd illustration commission for clients such as FHM or SIFKids magazines, and occasional sports and entertainment features on everything from the Cricket World Cup to 12-part biography strips on the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, David Beckham and the Spice Girls.

But despite our workloads, somewhere along the line we began talking about doing a project together – if only so we could write the telephone bills off as business expenses!

We’d each thrown a couple of ideas into the pot but nothing had really fired our imaginations. One evening, the idea just hit me and I scribbled down notes on the two main characters, the setting and the premise. The very next morning, I was on the telephone at 6.00 am to Rick and he grasped it immediately. We were both hooting and babbling, the ideas and gags tumbling out as we laughed. Within 20 minutes, my fax machine started whirring … yes, we still used fax machines back in 2003 … and Kevin and Scab came to life. One thing we’d never discussed was who would do what in any collaboration between us. (After all, we are both seasoned writers and cartoonists.) So that fax pretty much defined our roles on “Mullets” – it was obvious that I would write it and Rick would draw it.

We both work very quickly, so within a couple of weeks we had a couple of Sunday strips and three or four weeks of dailies inked and finished. We pitched the idea to Lee Salem at Universal Press Syndicate that summer and he liked it. A few weeks later, having followed up with some more samples, Universal offered us a contract.

It was Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott who coined the line that they each contribute 75% to the comic strip “Zits.” It’s a perfect way of describing the working arrangement between me and Rick.

What would normally happen is that I’d come up with a series of gags and relate them to Rick over the telephone. If I could make him laugh, the gags were in. Rather than type the dialogue out, I’d do thumbnail sketches and either fax or e-mail them to him. He’d take my roughs, tighten up the flow where needed (and edit all my cor-blimey-clean-yer-chimney-guvnor Englishisms) and e-mail the line art back to me. Assuming I agreed with any changes he’d made, either me or my wife, Debs – (she’s the colorist on the syndicated comic “Baby Blues”) – would add the color in Photoshop and upload the finished items to the syndicate.

Sometimes, as in this scene on the roof of Scab’s trailer, Rick would just go with my original concept:

Other times, Rick would take a good gag and make it into a great one, as with this example.

The “Major Tom” line was his immediate response to my original idea and it takes the strip to an entirely new level. That’s the beauty of having two writers collaborating.

Entering into the spirit of our new creation, Rick and I donned mullet wigs to pose for publicity photos.

We were invited to introduce “Mullets” to the Universal sales force in Kansas City prior to the launch of the strip, and did so with a Powerpoint presentation to a packed room of more than 100 people. Foolishly, Rick had left me in sole charge of putting the presentation together … and I couldn’t resist the temptation to have a little fun at his expense.

I doctored a couple of photos to show Lee Salem and other syndicate heads with mullet hairstyles, including CEO Bob Duffy mocked up as a tattooed bad boy, and that got a big laugh from the sales force.

Then I told the assembled throng that, in our younger days, both Rick and I had sported mullets.

“I used to sing in various rock bands, so here’s a pic of me onstage in Manchester with a luxurious mane,” I told the audience, putting this pic of me, looking like the coolest man on the planet, up on the big screen:

“And here’s Rick back in high school when he had his mullet.”

Except it wasn’t a photo of Rick. I had trawled the internet in search of the most awful mullet pic I could find that might, possibly, at a pinch, vaguely resemble a young Rick … and had discovered that little gem.

I glanced over at Rick and he was just speechless, completely aghast. There was an awkward silence in the room but before Rick could respond or protest, I moved quickly along with the presentation, keeping a completely straight face and matter-of-fact air. Now, the beauty of this prank was that I’d left the slide up long enough for the hideousness to register, but not long enough for the audience to actually study it in detail. So at a glance, was it Rick?

I can’t tell you how much joy it gave me when quite a few of the assembled throng approached him after the presentation to gently inquire as to whether that was actually his high school photo. It’s two decades later and I’m actually giggling like an idiot as I’m typing this!

Everyone was excited about the prospects for our new strip so what could possibly go wrong? Plenty … as I’ll explain next time in Part Two!