Yeah, didn’t I mention that I mentioned that I was starting a new strip? I do believe I sort of sneakily alluded to it earlier when I said that Crankshaft was no longer appearing in Funky. Doug Marlette may have had some good ideas, but I had one of my own as well. Along with creating two strips, traveling the country giving talks, putting together books, and doing art for posters and cereal boxes, I had quietly been working on a new strip in my spare time. Remember in the introduction to the previous volume in this series where I described how I had received a release from News America Syndicate for a strip called Crankshaft? I was free to take Crankshaft to the marketplace, and I was now making plans to do just that. Ed Crankshaft had been getting a terrific response as a new character in Funky, but I was now keeping him out of Funky so I could use that new material for a submission package to send to other syndicates. There were a lot of good practical reasons for attempting this, especially given what I described earlier, but my primary motivation was so I could finally own Crankshaft and all of the other characters that would flow from it. The desire to own my own characters had been burning inside me from the moment I read my first syndicate contract, and recent events were stoking that fire to a major conflagration. I wasn’t going to be signing any more contracts that took my characters away from me
From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume Six
