Groovitude

By Darby Conley

Debuting in 1999, Get Fuzzy has rocketed to the top of the charts. Get Fuzzy has become a hit cartoon with its bitingly funny portrait of single life with pets.

And why not? The laughs come fast and furious. Get Fuzzy features Rob Wilco, a single, mild-mannered advertising executive who's the so-called guardian of Bucky and Satchel, anthropomorphic scamps that still live by their animal instincts. Bucky, a temperamental cat who carries a boom box and goes on spending sprees, definitely calls the shots in this eclectic household, while Satchel is a kindly canine with a sensitive soul who tries to remain neutral, even though he bears the brunt of his feline companion's mischief.

Between the three of them, the Wilco household faces a whole host of trials and tribulations that classify them as family. Satchel wants his boundaries respected. Bucky refuses to eat vegetables but insists on snarfing up Rob's plants. Rob tries to meet women, but his pets continually subvert his efforts. In every frame, Get Fuzzy depicts the hilarious war between the species, giving the animals an equal footing in hilarious one-upmanship.

Get Fuzzy is the comic strip for everyone who loves their pets with an attitude. That said, Groovitude is Get Fuzzy at its finest.

Contains cartoons from The Dog Is Not a Toy and Fuzzy Logic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449425838

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Preface

Comic strips take a surprisingly long time to go from the conceptual stage to development with a syndicate to where they actually appear in newspapers. The first sketches I did of the characters that would later become Bucky, Satchel, and Rob were done in 1996. I signed a development contract in 1998, and the strip finally made it in to papers in 1999.

Now, there are two kinds of cartoonists in the world today—those who started out by ripping off The Far Side and those who won’t admit that they’ve ever ripped off The Far Side, probably because they’re still doing it (some people rip off Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County, of course, but they all started by ripping off The Far Side). The first step to doing your own thing, though, is admitting your problem, which I think I did. Get Fuzzy was the first comic strip that I ever attempted, and the prospect of recurring characters and story lines forced me to do something different from the kind of Far Side rip-offs that I’d been doing, which is a good thing.

I found that making a strip (which is different from a single panel cartoon, in that you usually have a regular cast of characters and settings and plots and a bunch of other stuff that comes with inventing a world) wasn’t the most natural thing for me, though. The natural thing to do when you’re an amateur cartoonist is to just think of a joke and do a little drawing that illustrates the joke. The notion that you need to focus on a few characters and give them personalities and wardrobes and relationships seemed very forced and artificial to me. Coming up with characters is a nerve-racking experience, as any cartoonist will tell you. If your comic is successful, you have to be prepared to draw the same characters for fifteen or twenty years, and that’s a bit intimidating.

Given that fact, I knew that I’d need to draw talking animals to hold my interest for that long. I get bored of people, but I never get bored of animals. Especially the talking ones. As I’d only ever had a dog, and she had been my best friend, I thought I’d want to make the main character a dog. So I started doodling dogs. Sketching dogs, that is. Anyway, my dog Patch was