A long-time Candorville reader posted this under today’s strip on GoComics: “If Candorville morphs into Rudy Park, I’m done. I’ve always loved reading Candorville & never been a fan of RP.”
Well, here’s my response, and it’ll explain as well as I can why Rudy Park characters are now appearing in Candorville, and why the Rudy Park feature on GoComics has gone into permanent reruns (beginning with 2010, when it was still written by “Theron Heir”).
The backstory
About a year ago, I published a week of Candorville strips where Lemont was suffering (and ignoring) all the symptoms of a heart attack.
What I didn’t mention until right now was that I wrote and drew those strips in the middle of the night lying flat on my back, and when I emailed them to my syndicate, I thought those might be the last cartoons I would ever be around to draw.
The backstory’s backstory
I had just moved my wife and two small kids across the state and bought a house. Being a homeowner was a dream I thought I’d never fulfill, until a few serendipitous freelance gigs suddenly left me with just enough for a down payment. I’d fought through an arduous 3-month-long escrow, which closed at literally the last minute (The realtor showed up with our keys just as the moving truck was pulling up to the house, and if the deal had fallen through, we’d have been homeless, with all our possessions dumped on the lawn of a house we didn’t own).
The house needed a lot of unexpected repairs, so before long I’d spent the rest of my life savings and was hustling side gigs while I wasn’t working on my two strips, my editorial cartoons, and my New Yorker submissions. I was sleeping an average of 2-3 hours per day, and some days going 48 hours without any sleep at all, to get all my work done.
Back to the Backstory
Meanwhile, because of a bureaucratic mixup sparked by the birth of my second child, we’d lost our health insurance months earlier and hadn’t been able to get it back (which is what convinced me Medicare for All is necessary, but that’s another story). So here I was, suffering all the symptoms of a heart attack, and I was faced with a choice: go to the hospital and lose our home to medical bills…. or stay home and risk dying (in which case my wife and kids would be financially secure thanks to my life insurance).
I chose to stay home. And I drew a week of comics I thought might be my farewell.
Obviously, I woke up the next morning. I couldn’t get out of bed, but I was alive. I took my little boy on a long and very slow (and difficult) bike ride later that day to celebrate not being dead, and decided something would have to change.
Something Changed
I’ve merged the two strips because I’m not 29 anymore and if I keep working 18-19 hour days five times per week, I will *die*, and probably very soon. I would also like to see my wife and two small kids for more than just one hour a day at bedtime before heading back to my studio to proceed with my demise.
So when my syndicate realized the two strips shared NO print clients, and considering I’d long since established that they existed in the same universe, we both decided it would be best for my health and longevity if I simply merged the strips.
I started foreshadowing this and setting the stage for the merger a year before it finally happened. And in honor of Lemont, I began doing that in the geekiest way possible. I followed that weeks later with a month-long storyline featuring characters from both strips, which was a lot of fun to create.
The Merger and Patreon Patrons
I’ve now cut my workday down to about 14 hours (which is a bit better, but still dangerous), thanks to the merger and to the support of readers who’ve decided to become patrons through Patreon. ****The following is my pitch for that, so feel free to skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to hear about it: If more readers decide to become patrons, I could cut those hours down even further by cutting down on the freelance work I do on the side. I’d appreciate it and you’d receive every new Candorville and editorial cartoon book I create, and you’d also have access to my activity stream where I post animations, and occasional sketches and caricatures.****
So every few weeks (but not too often), you’re all going to see the Rudy Park gang going about their business in Candorville. If you’re a fan of one strip but you really don’t like the other, and you’re going to *leave* over that, that’s unfortunate. I wish it wouldn’t happen. I wish you’d be as excited to see how the Rudy cast learns to fit into life in the big city as I am about shaking things up.
But if you’d rather just leave, I could live with that better than I could live with a return of what almost happened to me a year ago.
If you’re not going anywhere, thank you for being a long-time reader, and be assured the Candorville characters will continue to be the major players in the strip. “Candorville” will never be gentrified.