Poncho and Sammy

By Jim Wright

Successful comic strip artist Ridley Dunham, bored by the predictability of his characters, Poncho the cat and Sammy the dog, finds it difficult to come up with new situations for them until he introduces Odin the Rottweiler, who thunders into the nice, clean, middle class neighborhood and reduces it to a war torn Third World slum. Former enemies Poncho and Sammy unite to drive Odin away.
Ridley’s fans are stunned by the alarming turn of events. Within weeks, newspapers are canceling Poncho and Sammy. Mitzi Steiner, his agent, implores him to write Odin out of the strip and go back to the lovable cat and dog that everyone expects before he’s out of business for good.
Meanwhile, Poncho and Sammy is upsetting other people, all of whom seem to read into Ridley’s new drawings a world view that fits whatever their particular agenda happens to be. When the editors of Mercenary magazine start running the strip, declaring Ridley’s alliance with their extreme right wing views, and talk radio host Max Rhodes endorses the magazine’s decision, militia group member Harry Schmidt, dismisses their claims. After a heated argument with members of his unit, Harry, with abused wife Holly in tow, decides to track down Ridley Dunham and expose him for the ignorant coward he undoubtedly is.
At the same time, FBI Special Agent Tom Sorkowski suspects that classified information is being passed through the drawings to unknown and possibly hostile recipients. His investigation leads him to a trio of men in San Francisco whose recent activities and purchases raise alarm. When they are joined by a man and woman from Idaho, he begins to realize that the situation may be more serious than he thought.
With all the hoopla surrounding Poncho and Sammy, Mitzi is swamped with requests for interviews with Ridley. She sets up a press conference so that, once and for all, Ridley may put them all at ease by telling them that his characters are simply a cat and a dog and that’s all they’ve ever been. On his way to the conference, however, Ridley’s car gets stolen and he misses the event. An apologetic Mitzi reschedules.
Arriving in San Francisco, Harry calls his old friend Marty Ernst, unaware of a plot being hatched by Marty and two other men to wreak havoc on the American public. Harry learns about the rescheduled press conference on the evening news and decides that is when and where he will abduct Ridley Dunham. In order to pull it off, however, he has no choice but to depend on Holly, an unwilling participant at best, to do the driving.
Acting on a hunch, Sorkowski arrives at the rescheduled press conference just as Harry makes his move on Dunham and a female companion. Unfortunately, he is unable to prevent the abduction from taking place. He does, however, have a strong idea where Dunham is being taken and alerts agents already staking out the Ernst house.
As expected, Harry arrives at the house with Dunham and goes inside. When agents hear a shot from within, they break down the door to find Holly holding a gun on her husband, with Dunham and his friend tied up nearby. They also find a bomb big enough to bring down a skyscraper or, as it happens, The Golden Gate Bridge.
As a result of the abduction and the attention it garners, Poncho and Sammy shoots back up the popularity charts. When Ridley, who all along has agonized over what to say that will satisfy the press, finally makes it to a third press conference, he surprises everyone, not the least of whom is Mitzi, by announcing his intention to stop drawing Poncho and Sammy.
Harry, who survives being shot by his wife, is in jail when the final installment of Poncho and Sammy is published in the Sunday Comics. He is outraged by its content and even more so by the fact that, as if by some sort of conspiracy among the inmates, the comic strip is placed all over the mess hall, making it impossible for him to avoid. He swears it’s not over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Wright
• Release date: Dec 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310051098

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Poncho and Sammy

Jim Wright

Copyright Jim Wright 2013

Published at Smashwords

Cover illustration by Alison King

For Neal

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Chapter 1

Ridley Dunham had been staring at the surface of his drafting table for over an hour. Before him, tacked to the unfinished cherry melamine top, was a blank piece of paper. In his hand was the pencil he used to sketch Poncho and Sammy before filling the drawings in with a black ink pen. He’d made up his mind that he wasn’t going to move until he came up with something, but his resolve was weakening. Lifting his head, he stretched and looked around his office for a moment. On the walls were all of his triumphs and failures since Poncho and Sammy had first appeared in his college newspaper. It had been a wild ride so far.

To his left, in a gilded frame that his then-girlfriend had bought for him, hung his first published strip. It showed Poncho the cat sipping a bowl of milk, his dark face an oasis of contentment. The next frame showed a paw coming in from the side. It was poised just above the cat’s head. One might have thought it was going to come down on Poncho’s head, but instead, in the next frame, it came down on the rim of the bowl, sending the bowl and the milk spinning into the air. The last frame showed Poncho stewing with a bowl on his head and milk all over him, while Sammy the dog rubbed his belly and laughed. It wasn’t very funny. In fact, it was banal, but that was the strip that started it all.

Ridley smiled a little at the memory. The comic strip Poncho and Sammy had been born one beer-sloshed night seven years ago in his Stanford dorm room, as parties raged all around him. And the only reason he hadn’t been partying as well was that he had to have something to turn in to his professor the next morning.

Ridley had been drawing Poncho and Sammy for years, mostly as doodles on his notebooks while his teachers lectured. Except for the occasional girl who thought the characters were cute, nobody had ever paid much attention to his little drawings. It was only because he was starting to panic that he took his cartoon characters and put them into a crudely drawn four-paneled comic strip and submitted it. He got an F on the assignment, but the editor of The Stanford Daily saw it and offered to run it.

Poncho and Sammy began as space filler but had been from the beginning, despite the ribbing he got from his classmates about its blatant commercialism and lack of substance, more popular than anyone expected it to be. After it had run for a couple of semesters, and a few other school papers picked it up, it came to the attention of Mitzi Steiner, a cantankerous but successful literary agent. On his behalf, she’d talked the editors of The San Francisco Chronicle into picking it up for a trial run of four weeks. It was big news around the campus, making the front page of the school paper that week. The headline read: Poncho and Sammy Go Downtown.

Mitzi didn’t stop there. She shopped it around to other newspapers across the country and, one by one, they began to run Poncho and Sammy. As it picked up steam, more papers signed up and soon hundreds were running the comic strip. Then The London Times picked it up. Then it was Le Monde in Paris. After that, it seemed, every newspaper in the world wanted Poncho and Sammy. Ridley couldn’t believe it. In the space of just a few years, he’d gone from borrowing beer money to owning a bar. He’d been a guest on every major talk show in America and had recently done his first European promotional tour.

At first, he loved it all. His office wall was quickly filled with his many accolades. He was treated like a celebrity wherever he went. The paparazzi began showing up in droves whenever he made an appearance. Women he never dreamed he had a shot at threw themselves at him. Not long ago, he’d been amused to find that he was the subject of a series of exposés in The National Enquirer, complete with unflattering photos of him throwing up outside of a bar in Atlanta while on an earlier tour. Someone had recently told him that his name was a clue in the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle a few weeks back.

It was highly unusual for a literary agent to represent a comic strip, but such was the demand for Ridley’s lovable characters that Mitzi was able to bypass the syndicates that handle most comic strips and deal with the newspapers directly. This allowed Ridley to retain sole ownership of his creation, and guaranteed him a higher percentage of the royalties. Mitzi had also retained the merchandizing rights. Licensed images of Poncho and Sammy adorned everything from coffee cups to cereal boxes to children’s pajamas, and all the proceeds came directly to her office. Poncho and Sammy had made them both quite wealthy.

So when had drawing it become such an effort? It never used to be. It used to be fun, like he was getting away with something. But now, in spite of a looming deadline, it had taken Ridley the majority of the afternoon to drag himself into his office and start working. And in spite of the couple of rounds of Sierra Nevada pale ale he’d knocked back at the bar down the street, to grease the gears a little, nothing was forthcoming.

From the bathroom basin he could hear the steady drip, drip, drip of the leaky faucet he’d been meaning to fix. It seemed odd that it should be so audible now when it had never bothered him before. He tried to ignore it, but couldn’t. It just got louder. He should fix it now. Maybe then he could work. He started to get up but stopped. He could not put it off any longer. The comic strip was due and he was out of excuses. His palms were beginning to sweat. He wiped them on his jeans as his toes curled tightly around the wooden braces of the stool he sat upon.

Picking up his pencil, he ran his hand through his thick brown hair and sketched the first frame: Poncho the cat hides in a clump of bushes, snickering to himself, as Sammy the dog comes bounding down the sidewalk. Off to the side, Big Joe, the hated bulldog, dozes in his doghouse.

The phone rang, echoing down the hall from the living room. He hadn’t heard a peep out of it all day, but now, when he’d finally forced something out, someone had to call and shatter his concentration. He ignored it, but that didn’t change the probability that it would take another hour or more to come up with the second frame.

After the fourth ring, the message machine turned on. Leave a message, it said. He heard the beep and a man began to speak. It was his old friend Frank Mueller inviting him to a party he was throwing in a month to celebrate his third successful year as manager of the Bucket O’Nails.

Frank was famous for his parties. When Ridley had bought the Bucket O’Nails, after his accountant had mentioned something about how, win or lose, it would be a good investment, only one person came to mind as manager. He’d actually expected Frank to run it into the ground, but after a couple of false starts, he’d managed to turn a tidy profit. Who knew that he would take the job seriously? What turned it around was the realization that if he turned it into a sports bar, it would be the only one within a radius of several blocks. Everyone in the neighborhood could drop in, watch a game or an event with their friends and neighbors, get drunk and walk home, thus avoiding the dreaded DUI. It was a great idea. Frank had certainly found his calling. If Frank was throwing a party—

Ridley was drifting. Anything to keep from doing the work, he thought, returning his gaze to the frame he’d just completed and trying to keep his eyes from glazing over.

Gathering his resolve, Ridley drew the second frame: Poncho leaps out at the unsuspecting Sammy, who reacts by jumping into Big Joe’s yard. Big Joe looks up with a question mark over his head. The long shot of the frame shows it all happening at once: Poncho leaping out, little Sammy jumping into Big Joe’s territory, which is demarcated by a well-trod trench in the lawn around his doghouse (determined by the length of his chain) and Big Joe’s sleepy-eyed response.

Ridley already knew what was going to happen, just as all of his readers would. It was always the same. Always. And people just ate it up. Poncho and Sammy was an international hit because cats and dogs are the same all over the world, and because, other than the occasional Yipe! or Eek! he never put words in their mouths. Cats and dogs can’t talk, he’d once told an interviewer, but don’t think that they don’t get ideas. That had been his original premise: that one can see their minds working as they go about their business, and that their ideas do not always take the high road.

The phone rang again. Somewhere along the line, things had changed. In the past, if he was working, a phone call would have barely registered, but now it sounded like a fire alarm. This time it was a recorded message asking for a donation to Friends of Mistreated Animals. Years ago, he’d donated ten dollars and they’d been after him ever since. He’d called them twice and asked them to stop calling and both times they promised they would, but they never did. Maybe he could threaten legal action. No. They wouldn’t even flinch. And even if they did, there were still the two-dozen other non-profit organizations that hit him up on a regular basis, groups he’d never heard of, who’d probably gotten his information from FOMA.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to go out and unplug the phone. What would be the odds then, he wondered, of a couple of Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons knocking on his door?

He was straying again. He shook his head and forced his mind back to the drawings he’d finished. A vision of a shepherd with an unruly flock entered his mind, but he quickly drove it away.

He drew the third frame: Big Joe lunges at Sammy, thinking that, finally, he’s going to get that smart aleck little pup. But as Big Joe makes his move, Sammy’s legs spin like wheels, spitting up dirt. He easily gets out of reach just as the chain tightens around the bulldog’s neck and yanks him back at the last second.

The last frame was never a surprise. Whether it was Big Joe, or Roscoe the Crow, or Moze the dogcatcher, or Billy the neighborhood brat, or Angie the purebred Afghan who was as dumb as she was pretty, or any of a dozen other characters that entered the scene from time to time, Poncho and Sammy always shared a good belly laugh at someone else’s expense. But on this fine day in September, with the sun shining, and the sound of children playing merrily, and the traffic honking outside his window, Ridley Dunham paused. He looked up at the photo on the wall before him, the one of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld, and asked, What if, just for once, Big Joe’s chain broke?

He started drawing a picture of Poncho and Sammy, side-by-side, their eyes the size of pancakes, Poncho’s ears pressed back, Sammy’s straight up in the air, with a giant exclamation point over each of them.

This will never fly, he said. He gripped his pencil tightly, fighting his gut feeling. He stared at the frame, the fear clearly visible in his subjects’ eyes, knowing that his readers would be stunned. Full of doubt, he shook his head. Then, in a flash, it all became clear to him. Yes! he shrieked. He started drawing the first frame of the next strip.

Are you fuckin’ crazy? Mitzi paced impatiently before him, flinging her arms about and spilling coffee everywhere. What were you thinking, for Chrissakes? She was fifty-one, but looked ten years older, the result of thirty-plus years of chain smoking, Cup-a-Soups, and a lack of physical activity. Her hairstyle hadn’t changed in twenty years and her skin was pale and taut across her prominent cheekbones. She was five-foot-four but couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Nevertheless, she was a formidable presence.

Ridley shrank into his chair. Mitzi, I—

I don’t want to hear it, she said. I just want you to tell me that by Monday the dogcatcher is going to come along and drag this Odin off, we’re never going to see him again, and everything is going back to normal. What were you thinking, for Chrissakes?

He hated it when Mitzi got like this. She was difficult enough to deal with in her normal state of semi-permanent impatience with the ineptness of everyone around her, but when she went into one of her tirades, it was nearly impossible to get a word in. He could only wait until it blew over.

It was just an idea that I liked, he said.

Well, it wasn’t a very good one, was it?

The reaction to his recent series of strips had been immediate and overwhelming. In the space of three weeks, he’d gone from the most beloved comic strip artist in the world (well, maybe the second—after all, who could top Peanuts?) to the most hated. From around the globe there had been an outcry of shock and vitriol as well as a number of cancellations. And all because he’d introduced Odin the Rottweiler, who, in the first frame of the next strip, attacked Big Joe just as he was about to rip Sammy apart. The fourth frame of that strip, true to form, had Poncho’s and Sammy’s reaction, but it was not laughter. Four huge trembling eyes peered from under a porch as Odin left Big Joe in a heap and went about his business of terrorizing the neighborhood.

The next strip showed: 1) Odin lumbering down the sidewalk, 2) all the other neighborhood animals scattering, 3) Odin flinging a tricycle out of his way with his teeth, and 4) Poncho, Sammy and Big Joe in a huddle.

Look, Mitzi said, lighting her fourth cigarette in fifteen minutes, "if you want to write about Third World countries and revolutions and intrigue and government plots and all that shit, and don’t tell me I’m wrong about that, go ahead, but do it somewhere else. And use a fucking nom de plume, for Chrissakes. Write a novel if you need to, but don’t fuck with Poncho and Sammy. Ridley, please, listen to me. People don’t want to see them become desperadoes. They want them to be funny, like they’ve always been. Don’t fuck with success."

Oh, you’re just worried about your fifteen percent becoming smaller with every cancellation, he said.

That’s not fair, Ridley, said Mitzi. But even if it were true, it also means that your cut is getting smaller. I have other clients, but if you’re not careful, you’re going to be out of work real soon.

I’ll be all right.

Look, she said, absently picking up a stack of mail and glancing at it, maybe you just need a rest. You’ve been going at this for seven years straight. We can rerun some of your earlier stuff. Take a month off. Take two. Go to Thailand. You’re always talking about Thailand. Go there, for Chrissakes. She threw the mail onto her desktop. The envelopes splayed out like a deck of cards. Clear your head. Do whatever you need to do, but don’t fuck this up.

I’m not fucking it up.

You’re not? Forty-six cancellations this week? Some kid’s mother in Poughkeepsie wrote a letter to the editor saying that Odin made her little girl cry. Ridley, you made a little girl cry!

She’ll survive.

That’s not the point and you know it. What if Snoopy had suddenly got rabies and started attacking Charlie Brown and Lucy and Linus?

Ridley shrugged. "Peanuts would’ve been a lot more interesting."

"Peanuts would’ve been dead. And I guarantee you that if you don’t get Odin out of there, pronto, Poncho and Sammy will be dead in a month."

Maybe that’s what needs to happen. Ridley shook his head. Mitzi, I know what you’re saying. We have a goldmine here as long as I keep doing the same exact thing.

So what’s wrong with doing the same exact thing? It’s what ninety-nine percent of the world’s population does every fucking day: the same exact thing. They all know that if they keep doing the same exact thing that they always do, they’ll most likely be all right. It may be boring, but they all deal with it because they know it’s better than starving.

Well, I won’t be starving, Mitzi.

She raised her fists in the air and shook them in frustration. How can you be such an idiot?

Mitzi was right, but Ridley couldn’t stop what he’d started. He was developing an ongoing plot, with sudden twists, and rising tension, and character development. It was fun to