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Sat 2024-11-02 12:03 EST
Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to be a cartoonist, and have a comic strip in the newspaper. I drew a lot when I was young, and took art classes to get better, though by the end of high school my artistic abilities were a bit lacking. While I always told anyone who asked what I wanted to be when I grew up that I wanted to be a cartoonist, there wasn't a whole lot of work done to really develop an actual comic strip. I knew the process and the industry well enough to break in, but I hadn't made any real moves in that direction. I remember when I was 16 or so my mother asked me, "So do you REALLY want to be a cartoonist?" The question confused me at the time, but I imagine it was asked because it still seemed like just an idea, and not an actual goal with a plan. I had done a lot of doodling, but not a lot that was coherent, as a comic.
I served a full time mission for my church after I graduated. One day I was telling one of my fellow missionaries about my plan to become a cartoonist, and that I felt I wasn't that good at art at the time. I was expecting to learn a lot more in college, and get started ona comic strip either after or during college. The other missionary said that it didn't really matter how good at art I was, I could just draw whatever and submit it to newspaper syndicates anyway. In fact, I could just draw geometric shapes and have them be the characters, so it would be easy to draw. We came up with who the characters were and what shapes they would be, and their personalities. He also said it should be called something completely unrelated to the actual strip, the way "Peanuts" is. So we came up with the name "Fingernails." I don't know if he was serious about wanting me to actually submit the strip, but I filed it away in the back of my mind as a possible idea.
After I returned from my mission and started college, I had begun thinking about starting a strip after the first year. I remembered what we had talked about and decided to actually go ahead and do it. I drew up a character sheet, and a whole month of dailies, made photocopies of them, and sent them off. I received a collection of very nice rejection letters. I don't know if I still have them, but looking back, it's not a surprise that I received them. Because the strip was just bad.
It revolved around 3 main characters: a cube, a cone, and a sphere. The cube was what you might call a square (ha), a nerdy type who always had a necktie plastered to his front. The sphere was a jock, dumby type. And the cone was a girl, whose cone top was curved back somewhat to resemble a ponytail (yes, her personality was "girl"). All of the jokes revolved around the fact that they were shapes. It was very gimmicky. Also, it just wasn't funny. A couple years ago I looked back at all of them, to see if they were any good, because at the time I was very confident that these were good jokes. Out of 30 there were 2 that I thought were even passably humorous.
So, after that, I realized newspapers were slowly dying and instead of trying to get in the newspaper I should just make a webcomic. Which I did. I came up with an entirely different set of characters and some actually good jokes and made a strip called "The Bird Feeder." It's good, for real. But the fact that I thought Fingernails was actually good enough to be in newspapers is still funny to me. So I made a t-shirt with the logo on it.
Fingernails was published on 2024-11-02