John Darling – Take 3

This was the first John Darling Sunday to appear in the papers. It wasn’t the first  I wrote or my first choice. The strip that I wanted for the first one was the Tom Armstrong’s version of my pitch Sunday featuring Kiss, one of the hottest bands going at that moment. I thought it would make a distinctive and dramatic splash on the nation’s comics pages and would follow a week of dailies featuring Kiss. At the last minute, the syndicate decided that they wanted the strip to begin on a Sunday, so I fell back on the way I had opened Funky and wrote a piece introducing all of the characters. It tapped into the Funky karma which Tom A added to by creating a logo with John Darling’s face in it as I had done in Funky from the beginning. I appreciated that nice thought and, in the end, we had a pretty good strip to kick things off.