With A Little Help From My Friends
Whatever uncertainties I had in the mid-'70s about my comic strip's "hipness," I felt Barefootz would have been denied its fair shot if no solo Barefootz comic ever appeared. (Early strips featuring the Barefootz gang had appeared in anthology comic books along with other artists' work.) Filling up such a solo comic would be so problem, since quite a few Barefootz pages were already finished and awaiting publication when the Supreme Court delivered its blow to the comix marketplace. But Denis Kitchen could no longer afford to put out so chancey an item as an all-Cruse comic, however much he enjoyed the material personally.

Then Jerry Lanning, a Birmingham lawyer with whom I had attended high school, took an interest in my career and offered to draw up the papers for a limited partnership under whose legal umbrella investors could chip in money for a Barefootz comic book's printing costs in return for a cut of my royalties once the book started selling. Denis said that if I could raise money in that fashion to pay my comic's printing bills, Kitchen Sink would handle its production and distribution while giving me a larger-than-normal royalty on sales.

The idea was practical because in 1975 the cost of printing a black-and-white comic on newsprint wasn't all that astronomical. I began hitting up my friends for "venture capital." Many chipped in their hundred-buck shares far more cheerfully than I had dared hope, to my eternal gratitude. Thus was born Woofnwarp Productions, the limited partnership that made Barefootz Funnies #1 possible.

I'm proud to say that every one of my partners-in-publishing eventually came a way with a profit of more than three dollars!!!