Randall Enos has something in common with most cartoonists:
Over the span of my career, every now and then, I would suddenly get the urge to create and sell a syndicated comic strip. This would happen every 5 years or so. Nothing much came of it except for the Chicken Gutz strip which was a National Lampoon strip and the two strips for Playboy which I’ve written about recently.
I would really get that urge to dump the illustration work for a nice steady job of doing a syndicated daily comic strip.
Randall in a recent column showed us and talked about some of his ideas.
But, the one strip that I thought was the most creative of my endeavors was:
“Specks-the smallest cartoon characters in the world”– I used it as a space filler below Chicken Gutz in the Lampoon a few times but I also submitted it to all the syndicates. The only one that responded was King Features. The comics editor said, “Wow, this is different for you, Randy. I like it a lot, but, I don’t know, I think newspaper editors would think we were nuts!”
Randall’s Specks reminded me of another Comic Strip That Never Was – but Actually Was.
From the last half of the 1950s into the first half of the 1960s Chester Gould created a companion strip to his famous Dick Tracy. The strip, The Gravies, appeared only in The Sunday Chicago Tribune. Eventually The Gravies introduced another comic strip called Sawdust.
Sawdust by Chet Jade eventually turned up in Dick Tracy by Chester Gould.
Comics historian Frank M. Young tells the full story of The Gravies/Sawdust.