The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee: Lab Notes

I spent a year or so noodling around on another strip idea after deciding to retire Second Nature. This new strip had a grandfather named Bill, a father named Steven, and a son named Everett, all living together under one roof. The characters were based loosely on my own father and son. I called it “Bill.”

There were many flaws with this strip from the start. One problem was that I was not able to let the characters take on a life of their own. I was almost as if “Bill” was a cartoon strip about my life. This style of introspective humor did not work for me. The writing felt forced, and the loose drawing style was an experiment in brush and ink. I like to refer to this time as my “early mess” period. I was clearly in a state of transition.

I wound up sending a submission to every major syndicate, and, predictably, eight weeks later I had a nice fresh new batch of rejection letters to add to my growing collection.

While I consider “Bill” one of my greatest comic failures, I was able to eventually turn the 3 characters into Orville, Don and Edison. It would, however, take me 6 years to accomplish this.

I let go of Bill fairly easily, and began to think about other strip ideas. The thought of using the boy Everett in a strip had crossed my mind. Occasionally, a vague image of him would creep into my imagination. but I could never get a clear picture of who he might turn out to be.

Then, one day in 1999, I was at a neighbor’s house looking through an entire library of books that he was selling, and I found a biography of Thomas Edison. I read it cover to cover in just a week or so. It dawned on me soon after that I could take Everett, change his name to Edison, pour into him my love of science and math, and have a character that I could really have fun with. And that’s exactly what I set out to do.

Next: My first Edison strips, and another important call from Jay Kennedy

We received our Stay Tooned Magazine, Issue #2 in the mail yesterday. Once I started into it, I couldn’t put it down! For anyone interested in a behind the scenes look at cartoonists, their work, or just about anything relating to the world of cartooning, this is a great read. Kudos to Publisher and Editor John Read!

To subscribe, go to www.staytoonedmagazine.com.

I ran these 2 strips last February and March. This past year, Anne and I have anxiously watched the increasing mood swings of Wall Street and wondered when the crisis that is now upon us would come. I think we all saw it coming.

King Features Editor Brendan Burford kindly agreed to forward this to the Houston Chronicle.

Visit www.redcross.org to make a donation.

Many readers responded to my request in today’s strip for innovative new ideas and inventions to feature in a weeklong Edison Lee series in January. Thank you to all who responded! I have until November 15th to review and select which ideas to use, so keep sending them in! If I use yours, you’ll receive full credit in the strip.

This Monday, September 15th, we’ll be running a strip asking readers to send us their innovative ideas or inventions. The field is wide open, and can cover anything from energy to healthcare to finance to food… you name it. We’ll choose 6 and create a daily strip around each idea, giving credit to the inventor. The series will run for one week in January. This is a great opportunity for innovative thinkers to share their ideas with lots of folks. So send ‘em on in to john@edisonlee.net, and submit as many ideas as you’d like. Who knows, you may have some revolutionary new idea waiting to be discovered.

Continue to check out The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee in your local newspaper, or at www.dailyink.com.

On September 25th, I will be giving a talk to Carthage College’s Fine Arts, Graphic Arts, and Science students about being a syndicated cartoonist, the rapid changes being made in the online and newspaper comics industry, and my cartoon work in advertising. The program starts at 4:00 p.m., and will take place in the Carthage College Fine Art’s Building, Kenosha, Wisconsin.

In an earlier Lab Notes I talked about our first comic strip effort “Second Nature,” our long series of rejections from the syndicates, and Anne’s idea to start a Second Nature direct mail distribution campaign.

The year was 1992, so using the internet to reach a broad audience was not an option. Heck, the only computer we had in the house was an Apple 2E with a broken space bar. So, after compiling a mailing list of a few dozen interested subscribers, (which we kept on one of those giant, black “floppy” disc things you now see in museums) we sent out the premier issue of our Free Second Nature Newsletter.

Newsletter cover

Inside page 2

Inside page 3

Back cover

The response was overwhelmingly positive. Over the course of a year, we sent out several dozen free bi-monthly postcards. We even offered Second Nature t-shirts to anyone who could add 5 new subscribers to our mailing list.Consequently, the list wound up growing to several hundred. At this point handling the mailings was becoming time consuming and costly.

Postcard front

Postcard back

So, we decided once again to try Second Nature with the syndicates.

The syndicate submission guidelines clearly state to send 8.5” x 11” copies of about 30 samples, and include a self addressed stamped envelope. Unimpressed with these rudimentary guidelines, I decided to really impress them by creating a 12” x 18” x 2” presentation box, complete with color graphics, internal compartments containing the b&w and color laser copies of the strips, a detailed character illustration with descriptions on one of the inside flaps, and a hinged, heavy lid held closed with velcro. The boxes (1 to each major syndicate) were designed to be self mailers, complete with postage, so it could be mailed back to us. If anyone was going to get their attention now, we were.

After a month or so of waiting eagerly for a response, they started showing up on our doorstep, complete with rejection letters. After another few weeks, we had received all of the boxes except the one we had sent to King Features. Perhaps Jay Kennedy was impressed with our marketing skills and was considering syndicating the strip. (Looking back, I see what a quantum leap in logic this was.) I think we waited another long month before I finally picked up the phone and gave Jay a call. As always, I was able to get right through to him, and after asking about the status of our submission, he kindly requested that I never send him something so large and cumbersome again. It turns out that the size of our presentation was slowing up its progress through the review process. No one knew what to do with it or where to put it. From then on my submissions were strictly b&w photocopies in a manila envelope.

Soon after my conversation with Jay, we decided to call it quits with “Second Nature” and move on to other things.

It would be another 18 months before I had enough material in my head to develop a new strip I called “Bill.” I’ll talk about Bill in my next post on this subject.

While I have always been a big fan of Norm Fueti’s comic strip “Retail,” I have special fondness for this particular daily, which ran on Saturday, August 16th. Thank you, Norm, for including Edison in such a great company of characters.

I strongly suggest you go to normanfeuti.blogspot.com for even more fun.

My family and I just returned from a 10 day, adventure-filled vacation out in Olympic National Park in Washington State. The pressures from my graphics business, as well as the daily grind of writing and producing the strip, were beginning to wear me down, so taking this trip was necessary to rekindle my enthusiasm for my work. We spent the first 3 days camping and hiking with friends through the Olympic National Rain Forest, and yes, it rained almost the entire time we were there. After a day of hiking I was soaked due to my lack of foresight in packing suitable clothing. I should have guessed that “rain forest” meant lots of rain. These rain forests are home to some of the world’s largest fir trees, as well as some of most beautiful waterfalls. Additional days were spent climbing up the 6100 ft. Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Mountains, crawling (sometimes on our stomachs) through miles of cold, dark lava caves near Mt. St. Helens, and feasting on buffalo stew, elk, and some of the best blackberry pie ever made. Ruby Beach on the Pacific was also a big hit with the kids, its islands and large rock formations a climber’s playground. Rounding out the trip was an overnight stay at the Paradise Inn, a national lodge located 5000 ft. up the slopes of Mt. Ranier. It was early July, and the hiking trails here were still covered in snow. To be able to stand on a glacier in 75 degree weather in a polo shirt and shorts was a new experience for me.

So here I am, refreshed and ready to begin my third year of producing The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee.

We packed lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.