My History in Comics, Part 5 – Charlton, Jack Bunny, and “Rocket Rabbit!”

 

One reason I had gravitated away from superheroes and toward funny animals was because comic shop owner Dennis Budd pushed me in that direction, turning me into a fellow fan of Carl Barks by loaning me a huge number of classic Barks comics. But another reason was that in the 1970s, Gold Key Comics (an imprint of Western Publishing) was the only comic book company soliciting contributions in the Writer’s Market book and in various writer’s magazines. Gold Key specialized in publishing licensed funny animal characters. 

While still in college I was trying to come up with samples to send to Gold Key. I had in mind that I would spend a few weeks, or a few months at most, coming up with samples to put into my “Gold Key portfolio.” I figured I would get in at Gold Key, spend a few years there learning the tricks of the trade, then move on to DC Comics and do the superhero comics I had loved so much as a kid.

The first impression is always the strongest impression, so I did not want to approach Gold Key until I had a knock-out portfolio of samples to present to them. Coming up with impressive samples was taking more time and effort than I had expected. Also, I wanted to include at least one long story with the samples, to let them know I could write as well as draw, so I didn’t get stuck simply illustrating other people’s scripts. Coming up with stories longer than a page or two was proving to be a challenge.

I took time off from working on my Gold Key portfolio during the last several months of 1979 to do “Super Santa!” for Dennis Budd’s Surf City Comics & Stories. In January of 1980 I was ready to go back to working on samples of such characters as Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, and Daffy Duck, among others. Then I heard on the news on the radio or on television that Western Publishing was discontinuing their Gold Key line of comic books.

My effort to get into the comic book industry had hit smack into a brick wall. All that time and effort spent on samples for an opportunity that no longer existed. It was quite a setback.

So what to do next? At the time I thought of independent comics as glorified fanzines, so I did not even consider that route. I was fixated on doing 4-color mainstream work. I tried contacting DC and Marvel, but could not break out of their unsolicited submission slush piles.

Then the Charlton Bullseye experiment came along. Wikipedia explains the experiment this way: 

According to the 1980 press release for the series, an artist showed up at the Charlton offices and offered to work for them for free in hopes of accumulating enough credits to get a job with one of the two leading comics publishers. Charlton Bullseye was based around this concept; contributors to the series were paid only in contributor copies, all original art was returned to the artists after publication, and contributors would hold the copyrights to any original characters they introduced.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlton_Bullseye_(comics)  

The experiment was announced in more than one fanzine/newszine. In the first announcement nothing was said about anything other than superheroes and many, such as Jim Engel, assumed that humorists and funny animal artists need not apply.

However, I contacted Charlton anyway, sending them a copy of “Super Santa!” and a two-page letter making a pitch for funny animals and kid comics, arguing that with Gold Key out of the picture there was now a void in the comics market place that needed to be filled. 

I don't know what sort of pitches Tim Fuller and Arn Saba made, or what sort of samples they sent, but it worked. Charlton decided to make the second issue of the Bullseye comic book a funny animal issue. And I got a letter dated October 6, 1980, asking me, on the basis of “Super Santa!”, to send them an 8-pager. But the letter also stated, NO DUCKS!

I was sent some Charlton bristol board, which was slightly larger than Marvel bristol board, and had pre-printed margins in black rather than blue. Charlton could be different with the paper size because they owned their own printing press, and probably still used the same setup for photographing originals that they used back when original art was even larger. Marvel and DC however, were both having things printed by Sparta, which had evidently settled on 10” x 15” art on 11” by 17” bristol board.

But I used my own bristol board anyway, so there would never be any question as to who owned the original art.

As for the NO DUCKS! edict, that meant Waldo Waddler and Wacko Waddler were out of consideration.

Fortunately I had a non-duck character design on hand. About a year or two previous I had read a biography of Walt Disney and became interested in the story of how his studio had come up with a highly successful character, Oswald Rabbit, which was then stolen from Disney by an unscrupulous distributor. The loss of Oswald, and most of his animators, to that distributor led Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks to come up with Mickey Mouse as a substitute for Oswald. The distributor himself subsequently lost ownership of Oswald, and the character eventually ended up as part of the Walter Lantz stable of characters.

As an exercise in character design, I started speculating on how Oswald might have evolved at Disney over the decades had Disney not lost the character. That speculation became the initial starting point for the character I presented to Charlton. I fiddled with the visual design some more, just to make sure it was my own character I was submitting to Charlton and not Oswald. The name I gave the character, Jack Bunny, was derived from the term “jack rabbit.” And I whipped up a model sheet, dated October 9, 1980. So I must have gotten Charlton’s October 6th letter within 3 days, and did the model sheet immediately.

 

 As for Jack’s personality, it was basically my own. I had Jack feel, think, say, and do what I myself might feel, think, say, or do if I myself were put in the circumstances I put Jack into. 

I had written the story and was started on the art when I wrote back to Charlton on October 15th. I wrote the story panel by panel, one panel at a time. I started with what I thought of at the time as a “springboard opening,” patterned after the sort of opening panels Carl Barks used in most of his ten-pagers. Today I would call such an opening panel simply an instance of using narrative as an opening hook. When I did that first panel, I had no idea what would happen next in the story.

 

I wrote panel-to-panel to the bottom of the first page, being careful to get some sort of story situation going by the bottom of the page. Having a rocket sled in the story was just one of many possibilities I considered while doing the first page. 

Then I skipped from the first page to the last page. I wanted a rousing, high-energy finish with a gag ending. So I prioritized that over whatever I might come up with in the middle.

 

I then alternated between working forward from the first page, panel-to-panel, and backward from the last page, panel-to-panel, until the two narrative streams met somewhere in the middle of the story. And I reported to Charlton in a letter mailed October 15th that I had finished scripting and was in the process of doing the art.

 

While in the midst of working on Rocket Rabbit, I did a little promotional piece and mailed it to Cat Yronwode to put in her Fit to Print column in the Buyer’s Guide. As a courtesy I also sent a copy of that promotional art to Charlton with a letter dated November 8th. I was slightly surprised to see that promotional piece included in the Charlton Bullseye #1 alongside panels by Tim Fuller and Arn Saba, as it was designed for Cat’s Fit to Print column. But I was delighted to see that promotional piece in color.

 

I got “Rocket Rabbit!” done and the artwork into the mail by the end of December. The Charlton Bullseye #2 was printed quickly, and I got my 50 contributor’s copies probably in April. 

Charlton wanted me to do more Jack Bunny stories, and I was going to. The follow-up story would have been an airplane race in which Jack Bunny would meet stunt pilot Bonnie Rabbit. However, my parents and others were criticizing me for doing work for a professional company and not being paid any money for the work, which killed my enthusiasm for Charlton. And I couldn’t do the creative work without the necessary enthusiasm.

What did I do next? In the next post in this series we will take a look at the story, “Surfin’ Neanderthals!”