Photo couresy of United MediaYou might remember an earlier posting in which the Kansas City Star was eliminating two pages from their Sunday comics thereby dropping a couple of comic features. Despite the dramatic shake-up, they did pick up on Brevity by writer Guy Endore-Kaiser and artist Rodd Perry. The Star has interviewed the two and the duo tell how “Brevity” was started.
I walked into Guy’s office one day and found these sort of like chicken-scratch scrawls with jokes on them, and I thought they were hilarious,” Perry said. “I offered to draw one for him, and I did and it was funny and we kept doing it.”
After about a year of posting their quirky words-and-pictures creations on the Internet, they had enough samples to begin sending submissions to newspaper comic syndicates, not really expecting anything to happen.
“And then a week later we got a call from (Jake Morrissey) the editor for ‘The Far Side’ and ‘Calvin and Hobbes,’ this kind of legendary guy,” Endore-Kaiser said. “So all of a sudden it was like a serious thing, and we were really going to do this. It was sort of very out of left field and not well-planned.”