With the flair that anyone who has ever known Julie has come to expect, the youthful entrepreneur from Alabama successfully made the jaded journalists of the Big Apple take note. She was launching a new alternative tabloid called Granny, and did she have a publicity stunt for them!

Granny’s life on the city’s cluttered newsstands was flashy but brief — too brief for all of the Muddlebrow episodes I had at the ready to actually see print. Tucked away amid my batch of orphaned strips was a two-part tale featuring an annoying little girl named Belle who, thanks to an unlikely birth defect, would float helplessly into the sky if not constrained by a string held by some grudgingly dutiful friends. Muddlebrow itself was never revived, but I had trouble turning loose of that particular story-within-a-story.

I decided, roughly a decade thereafter, to see if Belle’s story could be expanded into a satirical picture book. True, its comedy might be a bit black for some sensitive tykes, but that didn’t stop me from thinking that the snarkier branch of America’s youth — the branch that waited breathlessly for each successive issue of Mad magazine — might find my fable amusing. And if the pictures, narration, and dialogue were entertaining enough, some grown-ups might take to it, too.

My enthusiasm was stoked by a cheery book agent from Louisiana who was certain that she would be able to find a suitable publisher for my book. Buoyed by her optimism, I set about creating a newer, bigger fable fueled by the same premise as Muddlebrow’s brief, unpublished version.

In an early draft of the new text, Belle’s name was changed to Phyllis because of the euphony thus lent to my projected book’s title, Phyllis’s Friends. Then I got nervous about gender issues. Were there unconscious overtones of misogyny at play when I chose to hold up a chubby, unlikable female to ridicule? Yikes! (True, the real-life person whose behavior was the model for Felix’s excesses had indeed been both female and chubby, but still…)

To take that touchy issue off the table, Phyllis’s Friends became Felix’s Friends before Phyllis ever got a chance to get drawn. Still euphonious, but less likely to provoke feminist ire.

Below: Belle and Felix. (My title character never made it onto paper during her Phyllis stage.)

At least, magic-working was what I imagined to be happening during the lon-n-n-ng stretch of time that unfolded before I discovered — first from other of her clients and eventually from my own experience — that I had apparently hitched my fortunes to a likable flake who, after many excuses, would cease returning phone calls without offering evidence that my book had actually been viewed by a single editor.

Strung along by an agent wannabe who talked big! Darn! I was no happy camper when I withdrew my book from her custody.

It was a set-back, but Belle’s literary descendant still found a future of sorts several years after the aforementioned fiasco, when I decided to rearrange its pages into a comic-like format for inclusion in Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels, the 1987 St. Martin’s Press collection of my strips and stories that (with a few exceptions, Felix among them) had previously appeared in underground comix and elsewhere.

Below: Felix’s tale reconfigured into a four-pictures-to-a-page, comic-booky version appropiate for a comics collection.

Within a few years the dreaded out-of-print axe fell on Dancin’ Nekkid, thereby ending the public’s access to Felix while Toland Polk was busy agonizing about his sexual identity on my drawing board. Neither the softcover version issued by St. Martin’s Press nor the hardcover, limited-edition twin simultaneously produced by Kitchen Sink Press, have been anywhere near a bookstore shelf since then, and Felix’s Friends has been re-consigned to limbo.

But maybe not forever. I began thinking a short time ago about the tantalizing new options that have arisen within the publishing realm — options that are especially viable when making big money isn’t an author’s prime motivation.

Which brings me to the modest new 64-page trade paperback you see below (a few samples pages of which can be found by visiting my web site’s Felix’s Friends section).

But neither Blue Fairies nor enthusiastic agents have been able to work that magic so far. The "real" publishers at whom I’ve dangled the book in recent years have told me they wouldn’t know how to market it.

But fortunately, these days I can do more than twiddle my thumbs while waiting for Felix’s stars to align. Inexpensive POD (print-on-demand) self-publishing has arrived.

As has my Lulu.com edition of Felix’s Friends. The investment has been trivial (as will be any money made from it, probably), but who cares? Putting out a book just for fun — what a concept!

This is Felix’s tale told in the format I’ve wanted it to have for twenty-five years. Belle and Phyllis would be pleased.

Or not. Taking pleasure in anyone’s enjoyment but their own hasn’t come easily to any of Felix’s successive incarnations.

But I would, on general principles, order comp copies for them from the Lulu Marketplace if my brainchildren existed anywhere outside of my fevered imagination. That being impossible, I’ve ordered one for myself.

Postscript: the New York Granny is not to be confused with Julie’s and my undergraduate project Granny Takes a Trip, about which I’ve blogged before.

At left and below: ancient mini-comics containing Cruse art

Anyway, today’s mini-comic-creating scene is different in many ways from the one Geerdes nurtured. For one thing, there’s no cohesive community of stoned hippie readers eager to consume by the thousands whatever the present generation of outsider cartoonists produces. Still, there’s a similar sense of community among those who, albeit on a smaller scale, insist on bucking the money-grubbing tides to draw on a shoestring whatever off-beat comics they feel like drawing.

And it’s been refreshing, since I moved to New England, to meet a Vermont cartoonist named Colin Tedford, who with Daniel Barlow has founded the Trees & Hills Comic Club, through which he plays a creativity-nurturing role not unlike the one Clay Geerdes played for comix newbies like me several decades ago.

At left: a Very Vicky panel

(1) The just-published May issue of The Commonwealth (a printed manifestation of the multi-faceted, public-affairs-forums-fostering, non-profit Commonwealth Club of California, has arrived sporting the cover art I told you I was working on several weeks ago while juggling home renovations and a death in the family. And there’s an online version of the complete magazine that midwesterners, southerners, and easterners can access should time pressures prevent them from hopping a jet to California to chase down a copy of their own to read.

(2) My cover art for the December 21, 2006 issue of Birmingham Weekly (one of several covers serializing J’Mel Davidson’s "Destroy All Santas") was picked up for inclusion in Comic Art Now, an attractive hardcover book by Dez Skinn (with Tim Pilcher on board as Commissioning Editor) that showcases a dazzling international array of comic book artists. And following fast on the heels of the British edition issued today by iLex Press will be an American edition of the same volume coming later this month from HarperCollins.