So ol’ acquaintance Marc Lutz pops up on my radar again, this time on an island in South Alaska.
To be sure we have never met and Marc doesn’t know me from Adam, but I’ve followed his career for a few decades now.
Journalist Marc Lutz gets a job with a newspaper and then convinces them to publish his comic strips. This began with The Stockton (Calif) Record where his cartooning career debuted with Can Hed Comix.
My first real cartooning gig came when I landed a freelance column for The Record. (Funny side-note: I was shopping my comic strip around at the time during the mid-’90s to local papers, looking for someone to take on my work. The Manteca Bulletin was interested, but unsure if they could add a strip. A certain Lodi publisher, who shall remain nameless, wanted to change too much about my strip, and I said, “No, thanks.)
Anyway, what was meant to be an “issues” column in the Record’s “Manteca!” section became a humor column when the editors realized I had to poke fun at everything. My comic strip “Can Hed Comix” started appearing every other Sunday, next to my column. That went on for about a year, before the paper cut “the fluff.” Guess what my work was deemed.
That was around 1994 to 1995. Then he took his cartooning just a tad north where I found him in The Lodi Sentinel with Ducks in Lodi which came about around 2004.
At sometime Marc became a runner and in 2014 he combined his running and journalism and cartooning into an illustrated column called The Wretched Mile.
Cartooning is my first passion. I’ve been drawing far longer than running. So it may come as no surprise that I’ve been trying to combine my two passions for some time. It occurred to me that I had to jump right in, just like I have to do when I have cartoonist’s block. It is with pure glee that I introduce my latest comic strip which will appear here (hopefully weekly), The Wretched Mile.
I don’t know if The Wretched Mile ever appeared in print.
In 2018 Marc ended up at The Calaveras Enterprise.
Last year Marc gave up the perpetually drought-stricken Big Valley for the green of Wrangell Island. It took less than a year for the cartoon bug to hit, and so on June 1, 2022 Ritter’s River by Marc Lutz debuted in The Wrangell Sentinel.
The second strip (June 8, 2022):
all comic strips © Marc Lutz
If you’re a regular reader who peruses the pages of the Sentinel each week, and if you’re not a humorless sourpuss who avoids the comics, you’ve no doubt seen “Ritter’s River,” which debuted last week
The comic strip is something that’s been in development since I joined the Sentinel last year. I’ve created many comic strips over the years and one of the hardest parts is coming up with character names.
This is where you, dear reader, come in.
In today’s strip, you’ll notice the main character, Ritter, who is a rat, with his best friend, a squat little raven with an attitude. I have no idea…
Ritter’s River
by Marc Lutz
June 1, 2022 –
weekly strip
The Wrangell Sentinel